Argentina a National Exorcism

By Pico Iyer.

Day after day on the front pages, night after night on television screens, Argentina is reliving -- and hoping to redeem -- a bloodstained past. Confronting the country are full and grisly accounts of the "dirty war," the years between 1976 and 1981, in which at least 10,000 Argentines either were killed or disappeared as a succession of military governments fought against what they considered to be leftist subversion. Those were years of unbridled terror, of torture, abduction, rape and execution, of victims being dropped from helicopters, of the dreaded night-time knock on the door. One citizen last week recalled how he had won a colonel's admiration by surviving a five- hour torture session; another remembered seeing a presidential press secretary stretched out on a billiard table with electric wires attached to his mouth and toes. Former President Alejandro Lanusse told of how he had once reproached a police officer for failing to report the discovery of a body. "Don't forget, General," the man had responded, "more than 8,000 bodies have been thrown in the river."

For the past month, such testimony has sent a chill through the Tribunales courtroom in Buenos Aires. There, six judges are presiding over a trial in which nine top military leaders, including three former Presidents, are charged with responsibility for a broad sweep of crimes. "There has never been anything like this in Latin America," says Journalist Jacobo Timerman, who himself was imprisoned and tortured. "Imagine -- civilians sitting in judgment on the military."

At the same time, however, President Raul Alfonsin's determination to come to grips with the past has confronted him with a major dilemma: he must honor his commitment to democracy and a citizenry's clamoring for justice by punishing the guilty among the soldiers, yet he cannot afford either to destroy or to alienate the 60,000-strong career military.

Three days after he took office in December 1983, Alfonsin told Argentines that the members of the juntas that ruled during the dirty war would be charged with murder, kidnaping and torture. After nine months of deliberation, however, the Supreme Military Council announced that it found nothing "objectionable" in the juntas' directives. As a result, the cases were moved to the civilian federal appeals court, where Prosecutor Julio Cesar Strassera is detailing 709 representative incidents of transgressions by security forces. Some time before midterm congressional elections in November, the judiciary is expected to hand down stiff sentences against the generals who issued the orders and some of their subordinates, who went beyond the call of duty in following them.

What is not clear is what will happen to 1,200 junior officers accused in specific instances. Alfonsin hopes that civilian courts will deal with them, but Argentine human rights organizations are agitating for a thorough cleansing of the entire military. Says Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who for eight years have staged protests against the disappearance of their relatives: "When my son was taken, five cars came to the house. He was tortured for hours. They are all responsible, and we will fight to the end of our days."

"All this is a very bitter potion for the armed forces," says one Alfonsin aide. "They are not in the position to stage a coup, but they still have a monopoly on arms and they can do a lot of harm." Says Gregorio Klimofsky, a member of a government-appointed panel that assembled evidence against the juntas last year: "If you consider that maybe 90% of the officers participated in one way or another (in the dirty war), it's not hard to imagine what they think. A great number of the younger officers are ultrarightists. Some keep a portrait of Hitler in their barracks."

Already there have been ominous suggestions that right-wing elements will not tolerate too much criticism of the soldiers. In the past month, the offices of two opposition parties have been bombed, and a progovernment radio station was forced off the air by a group of armed men. "There is an ultraright terrorist operation at work," warns Interior Minister Antonio Troccoli. "These threats of instability lead to hysteria." They also dramatize the danger that Alfonsin, while trying to exorcise old demons, may find himself awakening new ones.

With reporting by Gavin Scott/Buenos Aires