A Yankee at Large

ARE GOP HOPEFULS HOPELESS?

2011-05-01T16:57:00.000-07:00

The other day, I read something that lifted my spirits. It was an article by some supposed Republican “think-tanker” (can’t recall his name) who said (complained, in his case) that US President Barack Obama can't possibly lose in the next election, no matter WHO runs against him!

Later, I did some checking (spent a quarter-century as a newsman and old habits die hard) and found out the article in question was a hoax. The guy denies ever having written it, despite the fact that it was all over the Internet under his name.

But I’m guessing it did come from a real think-tank, despite the bogus by-line and is, maybe, the work of some backroom conservative dirty tricks department (you know, the kind that gave us Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Monica Lewinsky’s presidentially sullied dress, among other things) seeking to prepare its constituency for the worst.

I mean, a number of the reasons this bogus article gave for predicting an overwhelming reelection win for the president made a certain amount of sense:

It said that African Americans would vote “blindly” for Obama. “It’s a race thing,” it said. This is, of course, only a truism, not a truth. It’s obvious that a very large number of African Americans will vote for Mr. Obama on the sole basis of color. He is, after all, the first black president in US history. John Kennedy took about half of the Irish vote in the United States just on the basis of his coming from an Irish immigrant family. And he got still more votes because he was Roman Catholic—the first RC president in the country’s predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant political history. It makes sense. But I doubt Mike Steele, for instance, will be red-rovering to the side of his “African American brother” any time soon, even if former fellow Republican icon Colin Powell indeed did. And Herman Cain is hoping to run against him. So, yes, the President will surely get a lot of black votes on the sole strength of the color of his skin, but not anything like all of them. (After all, the president is half white even if not the half that people see, and there are radical segments in his natural constituency who will vote against him for that reason alone if for no other—just as white supremacists would vote against him if he looked white and were half black).

***

It said that college-educated women would vote for Obama. It added that “though they will be offended by this, they swoon at his oratory.” And went on to say that it was “really not more complex than that.” Once again, truism, not truth and much more complex than that. Indeed, many college-educated women will vote for President Obama, but not because they “swoon at his oratory”. They will do so precisely because they are educated and understand that many of the policies the president is trying to put through—in a process that Congress and the Republican conservative wing are making about as easy as pushing a concrete-filled bank vault up the side of Mount Whitney—are good for the United States, socially, ethically, culturally and in terms of the country’s economic and social future. They are also women who have learned enough to know that the United States must consolidate a liberal process that will allow it to draw back from the brink of tyranny on which it teetered during the eight-year corporate junta led by Dick Cheney—seconded by George Dubya Bush, whom Cheney allowed to sit in the driver’s seat and pretend to be in charge, because…well, who the heck would have voted for Dick Cheney? I mean except for the bozo Cheney mistook for a duck and shot, and who apologized when he got out of the hospital for getting in the way and causing the poor VP all that trouble. (In case you hadn’t heard, the guy was behind Cheney at the time of the shooting, so it was like apologizing to Annie Oakley for screwing up one of her trick shots).

***

But that doesn’t mean all college-educated women will vote for Obama. Just ask Ann Coulter and her waspy friends at Fox News. Or Sarah Palin, who managed to patch together a bachelor’s degree in communication/journalism over a five year period in a series of brief stays at University of Hawaii at Hilo, the Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, the North Idaho (community) College at Coeur d’Alene, Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska and the University of Idaho at Moscow—that’s Moscow, Idaho, not the one she can see “from her house”. (Hey, in all fairness, what Palin actually said in her September 11, 2008 interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson —and that comedian Tina Fey picked up on—was, "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska”). Despite her checkered college attendance Palin also won a college scholarship: She got it for being Miss Congeniality (and third runner-up) in the Miss Alaska Beauty Pageant. And she’s certainly not voting for Obama.

***

It said that liberals would vote for Obama, since “he is their great hope.” Well, duh! Probably their greatest hope and America’s greatest hope since John Kennedy, despite the ungodly mess he has inherited and in which he has gotten progressively mired down. But there will be liberals who won’t: the ones who haven’t had the patience to see his policies through to fruition, the ones who expected overnight solutions to essential problems that have been brewing since the Reagan era and that flourished and exploded under the Bush administration’s two terms, and the ones who find he’s too middle of the road for their taste and would like to see someone less ready to seek compromise and congressional consensus.

***

The piece said Democrats would vote for Obama. Geez, ya think?! It added, rather obviously, that “he is the leader of their party and his coattails will carry them to victory nationwide.” Clearly, there are going to be very conservative and very liberal Democrats who are going to wish that they could vote for someone else, and some even might, but most of those probably will just not vote at all, which would be a shame for their party. But, yes, card-carrying Democrats will surely not want to lose the White House four years in (like they did in the Carter era) after sweeping it out of the hands of the Cheney/Bush dynasty (and its continuers) in the last election.

***

The article later claims Hispanics will vote for Obama. Reason: “He is the path to citizenship for those who are illegal and Hispanic leaders recognize the political clout they carry in the Democratic Party.” Well, this is a jingoistic, racist, ignorant thing to say, and if I’m right and this paper has come from an ultra-conservative think-tank, then it just goes to show how out of touch with reality conservative Republicans are regarding this massive minority of nearly 50 million people from across the political spectrum. For one thing, Obama’s immigration policy hasn’t been nearly as liberal as anybody expected, including many of his own co-party leaders. Furthermore, there is no zealot like a converted zealot, and some of the toughest stances I’ve ever heard against illegal aliens have come, precisely, from Hispanics who have gone through proper legal channels, gotten their citizenship and become part of the mainstream North American community. Many of these Hispanics, and many more of their children, who try their best to forget their Hispanic heritage, are as ultra-conservative as any “Anglo” you’d ever want to meet. Particularly so if their families were exiled from communities like Castro’s Cuba, an experience that tends to turn them violently anti-communist and, therefore, way right of liberal. But, yes, many Hispanics will vote for him in gratitude for his defense of civil liberties in openly opposing the kind of police state legislation Arizona has implemented and which some other states have threatened to emulate.

***

The “bogus” story said that Union members would vote “overwhelmingly” for Obama. One can only hope…But in the end, it depends on what “overwhelmingly” means. The fact is that, while his campaigners at Organizing for America immediately showed how anxious they were to give nationwide vent to the union protest movement that took shape in Wisconsin, the administration eventually pulled back a bit from this stance, by making sure everyone knew that the Obama camp saw this as “a grassroots story” rather than a Washington one. And this has placed the president in the midst of a sort of delicate dance (as described by the Huffington Post) with unionists ever since. Nor are workers as enthused as they once were about Obama, since the new jobs he promised are materializing rather more slowly than expected. Still, there’s no denying that the president has a very strong base in labor. And frankly, if you were a union worker and had the choice of voting for Obama or for The Donald, The Huck, The Mitt or Citizen Cain (yet another CEO), what would your choice be?

***

The piece claimed that Big Business would support Obama. Well, yes and no. True, to the utter chagrin of many staunch liberals, it has been on President Obama’s watch that a new rule has come into play, allowing removal of the ceiling on what corporate America can donate to political campaigns, and the president does indeed seem to have an almost carnal relationship with GE and eccentric liberal tycoon George Soros. But from there to thinking that, say, Big Oil, or Big Defense or a lot of other major Big Business segments would ever be anything but conservative Republican is a bit of a reach. Still, perhaps the friends Obama has made in the corporate world will be more than enough to put him over the top in the 2012 campaign.

***

The media, this “spurious” article says, love him. This is a half-truth. Obama had a major honeymoon with the media (well, not Fox News, but, certainly, the serious media) in the beginning of his administration. But he has taken considerable criticism since then, and it’s not like the media as a whole remains “in the tank” for his administration. It is true, however, that the president himself remains something of a rock star. He has charisma. In fact, he and his whole family have charisma and the press loves leaders it can idolize. And come on, admit it, it’s nice having a president that doesn’t make you want to hide you head in a paper bag every time he opens his mouth. Eight years of that was enough already.

***

Finally, the article said that half of all Independents would vote for Obama. Personally, I’m hoping that there’s a greater percentage of intelligent Independents out there. I’m hoping more like 80 percent. But still, according to the story that no one’s claiming, “he doesn't need anywhere near that number because he has all of the groups previously mentioned. The President will win an overwhelming victory in 2012.” All I can say is—as the old Spanish expression goes—may God hear you.

***

Wherever the article came from, you kind of wonder whether there’s not some truth to the notion that the Republicans have seen the future…and they’re not in it. Why? Well, just look at the potential candidates!

I mean, maybe that's why the Republicans are gathering such a list of clowns to run against Obama. As an old rural Argentine saying goes, why waste gunpowder on a buzzard? They're cannon fodder! I mean Gingrich, Huckabee, Palin and The Donald ‘Gump’? Or is it that they really just don't have anybody else? Of course, there's Mitt Romney—wonder what that’s short for, Mittens maybe...like, maybe he was named after George Romney’s favorite cat(?)—who has, at least, an outwardly presidential look. But in some of the latest polls, he's barely tying with Huck Finn...I mean, Mike Huckabee. What does that say about his popularity?

Then there's Cain (maybe they figured that with a little white-out, they could use the leftover posters from the last election). He does have some executive experience: He ran 400 Burger Kings and did such a good job that Pillsbury bumped him up to CEO of Godfather's Pizza. And he's another (though lesser known) Fox News regular, so he's got a foot in the door with the GOP propaganda machine, but so far they're not paying a whole lot of attention to him.

And finally, there’s wild card Sarah Palin. She’s been out making some noise again, so there’s new speculation that she might yet announce her candidacy. She and The Donald have also been courting each other in the media (she talking about his ‘frankness’, he talking about her ‘energy’), so the United States might yet see the horror of a ticket formed by two of the most self-confidently ignorant players in politics. What am I talking about? Here are just a few quotes from the former Alaska governor:

When asked by CBS anchor Katie Couric which newspapers she read regularly, Palin couldn’t think of a single one. Showed how “quick on her feet” she was though, by answering, “All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years.”

Also in that now infamous 2008 interview, Couric was trying to establish why Palin thought she would be qualified to handle foreign policy. Her answer, “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where…where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border.”

But then you think, well, maybe she’s wised up a bit in the past couple of years. Alas…At the end of last year, in a radio interview with Glenn Beck (now, we’re talking Fox News, not CBS, these are people who like Sarah Palin and were trying to keep the questions gentle), when asked how she would handle current hostilities between the two Koreas, she blithely danced onto another foreign policy land mine by saying, “…Obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies.”

Of course, The Donald doesn’t lag far behind in the dumbest quotes department. Asked by ABC News about the possibility of his running for the presidency he talked about, what else, money—campaign money in this case— and said, “I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich. So if I need six hundred million dollars, I can put six hundred million myself. That's a huge advantage…” In a celebrity interview he once said, “All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me—consciously or unconsciously…” This speaks to his general grip (or lack of same) on reality, I think. And how about this The Donald gem: “In life you rely on the past—and that’s called history.” I mean, the guy makes Dubya look like an intellectual.

One thing you can say for Donald ‘Gump’, though: He has keenly honed diplomatic skills. In a radio interview with star radio and TV journalist Larry King, he once asked, “Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.”

Oh, and I almost forgot Christine O'Donnell: She's a declared enemy of masturbation—talk about platform planks(!)—so she's probably lost 99 percent of the male vote (the other one percent is made up of liars) and an estimated 60-70 percent of the female vote before she even gets started! Plus, listen to these gems from Pristine Christine's lips:

"Co-edness is a radical agenda forced on college students."

"We had the ‘60s sexual revolution and now people are dying of AIDS."

"Creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that." (Huh?!)

O'Donnell/Huckabee or Huckabee/O'Donnell, now there's a ticket ya gotta love! When a Bible-thumping Huckabee was once asked if he thought Jesus would support the death penalty, he said “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office…that’s what Jesus would do.” He also said he was “pretty sure there’ll be duck hunting in Heaven and I can’t wait.”(He said it to a gathering of the National Rifle Association). Huckabee, who holds a theology degree, also made clear his understanding of science when he claimed that “Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution. That’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.”

I know, I know, they haven't rolled O’Donnell out yet for 2012, but give them time. Everybody who's ever been a Fox News commentator ends up on the campaign list. Well, except for Bill O'Reilly, because he's an Independent. If you don't believe it, just ask him. That’s why he gets 20 million a year to be the star anchor on a channel whose secret logo is a red elephant.

Moore Matters, Wisconsin Matters

2011-03-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

It was pretty funny last night to see Fox News (Rupert Murdock and Friends) struggling to downplay Michael Moore's surprise appearance in Wisconsin, calling him a clown and insignificant, etc.

So if this Academy Award-winning documentary film director is so insignificant, why was he the main subject of Fox News star (and millionaire hatchet man for the far right propaganda machine) Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points editorial last night?

Simple. Because he matters. Because Wisconsin matters. Because every word Moore breathed is true. Because some people in the United States are finally waking up and smelling the stench emanating from corporate America—from the morbid greed in which American democracy is slowly putrefying and from the rotting corpses that the corporate American machine leaves daily in its wake at home and around the world.

Don't just listen to the edited version of Moore's speech that the big business media are flogging. Read what he really said in full and in context. Here's the whole speech, as delivered at the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, on March 5, 2011 :

“America is not broke.

“Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

“Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

“Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

“And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic -- and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

“I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here's what I learned: Money doesn't grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inverters, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. The schools can't produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs.· That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

“The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It's part of the Big Lie. It's one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can't win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

“The truth is, there's lots of money to go around. LOTS. It's just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn't work, they've got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

“1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart -- because you -- yes, you, too! -- might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don't rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

“2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it's Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin' awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. "Here! Take our money! We don't care. We'll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!"

“The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

“Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It's just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

“So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

“Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois -- whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn't have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn't be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job -- their $19,000 a year job. That's how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he's stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn't have to sleep in his car between shifts at O'Hare airport. That's how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn't be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he's just another slob.

“And that, my friends, is Corporate America's fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement -- a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don't understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. "Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

“‘There's something happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you...?’

“America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America -- because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

“Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together.”

Michael Moore has always shown the ability to break down the complex lies that we are spoon fed daily into simple, mostly awful truths. And he brings those truths to us in the form of straight talk and brilliant satire. What he says makes sense because the truth behind the lie is easy to understand once the extraneous crap is stripped away. That’s what Michael Moore does, cuts the crap, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude.

Facile Solutions on the Road to Tyranny

2011-02-02T05:27:00.000-08:00

This past week, I allowed myself—as I too often do—to get drawn into an informal debate on the Internet, over issues of human and civil rights. This happens to me, I think, because my background includes years of up-close encounters with the arbitrary nature of the kind of “special powers” that lead to rights violations of all kinds and the extent of the so-called “collateral damage” that they cause. The trigger for my apparent incapability to keep my mouth (or laptop) shut, I think, is my utter amazement that supposedly “educated”, otherwise apparently “normal” people can be so completely blind to the fact that if a single person’s civil or human rights are violated by the powers that be, then everyone’s rights are at risk and the principle of equality before the law becomes an entirely moot point. Why? Well, because if a single other person’s rights can be suspended, so can mine—or yours, or those of other people we know and love.

I can’t help thinking that anyone who can’t see that has to be terribly short-sighted. But then, experience, in these cases, is always a good—if singularly cruel—teacher. I recall thirty years ago, during the Argentine military dictatorship known as the Proceso, how bewildering it was for people from so-called “good families” when they suffered the loss of one of their number at the hands of the regime. These were often people who had cheered the Armed Forces government and considered necessary the suspension of constitutional guarantees in order to win “the dirty war on terrorism”. Sadly, they were too confident in their own status as good citizens and good families to think that the arbitrary nature of de facto rule could ever negatively affect their lives. They were, after all, from good families, patriotic families, families with traditional national values. If people were snatched off the street or out of their beds by the military’s hit squads “there must have been a reason.” The military was fighting a “dirty war” precisely to protect people like them. Good people, decent people didn’t disappear, only the bad ones did.

But then, that wasn’t true—not even most of the time. And that, they learned the hard way, was why wiser men than those now in charge, and men more far-seeing than themselves, had come up with the idea of a bill of rights, a set of constitutional guarantees to protect citizens—all citizens— from the arbitrary nature of raw political power.

Here in Argentina, there are fewer and fewer people, thankfully, who will publicly voice support for the actions of the former military dictatorship that rode roughshod over the country from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. I’m not saying there aren’t a number of people out there who wouldn’t give a conspiratorial wink to the now tottering old ex-military chiefs who are, finally, doing prison time for their crimes against humanity, discreetly pat them on the arm and whisper, “Hang in there, General, the ‘silent majority’ is with you!” All I’m saying is that popular standards of political correctness tend to keep them from opening their traps. And although I’m certainly not one to try and infringe on anyone’s right to free speech, I myself, and rights-aware people like me, are grateful for their silence. After all, the fewer times such poisonous, hateful opinions are stated, the better, since advocating hatred and unbridled violence seems to be the path of least resistance for impressionable minds.

And why is that? Well, because hatred and unbridled violence are all about destruction, which looks spectacular, lends itself to sensationalism (as witnessed by modern special effects in the movies), and even sometimes appears to quickly accomplish immediate short-term goals. But the fact is that it has far-reaching negative effects. Its appeal is, clearly, that it takes infinitely less effort to engender than does the building of sound democratic institutions and the development of a society of mutual respect for the rights and obligations of each of its members, much in the way that a wrecking ball or a few well-placed charges of dynamite can bring down an architectural masterpiece in seconds, while the building of it, with sublime style and infinite care, may have taken years or even decades.

In other words, throwing the rulebook out the window is a facile shortcut and, ultimately, the lazy man’s way out. And, as we all know—well, most of us, anyway—indolence and reckless disregard for authentic values never lead to excellence or to anything else worthwhile treasuring. They only lead to destruction, chaos and rubble. For this reason, I almost laughed aloud when one of the people I was ‘debating’ with actually quoted the proverbial quick fix as a valid reason for toppling a democracy in order to “save it”. It was such a patent far-right cliché that it tickled my funny-bone. I mean, what a caricature! He had no problem with how, in 1976, the Argentine Armed Forces had done away with pesky institutions like democratic government, the elected legislature, the bill of rights, unions, the incumbent president and her administration, rule of law, legal security, etc., etc., to say nothing of as many as 30,000 people who were dragged into the de facto monster’s dark cave and never again saw the light of day. The end, he was proud to tell me, justified the means. It was necessary to violate democracy and the Constitution in order to “save” them. And no one was going to tell him any different.

He dubbed “romantic” my opinion to the effect that a stable democracy could only be ensured by practicing it, upholding it, defending it, empowering it, criticizing it, and subordinating all other political or military entities and passing it from one elected administration to another, ad infinitum. And he allowed that “dogmatic liberals” like myself “aren’t bad people” but that we “don’t measure the consequences of our actions” when we demand that abuse of power, gross violation of human and civil rights, and wholesale slaughter be punished. We who demanded that anyone exercising legal authority (be it democratic or de facto) abide by the law and by universally accepted standards of decency were, he seemed to think, at least spoil sports, if not seditious and treacherous dangers to society.

But anyway, although, as I say, fewer and fewer people think this way in Argentina, clearly, you run across coveys of these mostly aging fanatics, with angry defiance in their eye and a bulging vein in their necks, who will tell anyone who will listen that subversion and terrorism can’t be fought within a democratic framework and that the only way to fight this kind of lawlessness is by stepping outside of the law. And you’ll also find a handful of young people among them, who are either from the families of these patriarchal and matriarchal figures or who have been convinced of these ideas on the strength of their desire to fit into the (frequently aristocratic or upwardly mobile) classes where such ideas tend to be prevalent. These are people who would rather have a neat and tidy dictatorship with clear rules (submit or die) and a quiet atmosphere (the peace and quiet of a cemetery) than a messy, boisterous and often rebellious democracy. This is especially true of people who think themselves “owners of the truth” and whose truth has to do with “their kind” being at the top of the food chain.

This is to be expected in a country like Argentina, in which, for more than half a century, from the 1930s to the 1980s the “natural” fuse for political change was not suffrage, but insurrection, carried out by a recalcitrant military, at the behest of the landed aristocracy and their industrial cousins, quite often with the connivance or at least tacit approval of the powerful local Roman Catholic hierarchy, all of whom feared nothing as much as “godless communism” or the Fascist-based populism of Juan Domingo Perón. And often too, with a nod from “the usual suspects” among international power brokers. It is only since 1983 that Argentina has witnessed the consistent passage of political power from one elected administration to another, and even then, with attempts by all but the first and most democratic of these administrations (that of the late President Raúl Alfonsín) to perpetuate themselves in power: Saúl Menem by pushing constitutional reform that would allow presidents to serve two consecutive terms (originally it was a single six-year term), a move that permitted him to serve for an entire decade, and the late President Néstor Kirchner, who sought to pass power back and forth between him and his wife (current President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) indefinitely—a plan rendered moot by his untimely death at 61 last year. And this sort of thing, too, is to be expected due to the country’s natural political immaturity in terms of democratic life, and should tend to work itself out as experience is gained and as a new and ever stronger opposition emerges to temper and compete with the traditional Peronist cult movement with its dwindling populist appeal and the fading Radical Party which, since 1989, has tended to be stronger on political theory and textbook ethics than on practical governance and political savvy.

The “back to the future” advocates of rule at the point of a gun that I locked horns with this past week still—after everything that has happened in Argentina in the past three and a half decades—justified everything from the suspension of the bill of rights to the torturing of prisoners and the summary execution of suspected terrorists and their allegedly subversive supporters. The funniest thing—not ha-ha funny, obviously, because it kind of makes you want to cry—is that people who think this way remain, even today, so mentally divided that if you should ask them what was being defended during Argentina’s military dictatorship, they will tell you, without batting an eyelash, that it was democracy and the Constitution. (Say what?) That’s right, they find no contradiction whatsoever in the fact that, back then, Argentina’s Armed Forces claimed to be defending the nation’s democratic institutions even as they engaged in sedition and insurrection, suspended the country’s US-style Constitution and ruled by decree for the better part of a decade, broadly ignored and violated human and civil rights, rejected or manipulated the authority of the courts, created a mock ‘legislature’ to replace Congress so as to give some semblance of legitimacy to the arbitrary rules they imposed, muzzled the press, murdered outspoken opponents or drove them into exile, banned, censored and blacklisted books, art, music and films that were considered “dangerous” or subversive, institutionalized torture of every kind imaginable as a standard “interrogation technique” and, over the course of their nearly eight-year reign, kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands of the country’s citizens, as well as a number of foreigners considered to be “opponents of the regime”. Many of these “opponents” were no more than school children, many were pregnant mothers whose babies were snatched from their wombs and given in secret adoption to friends of the regime before they themselves were murdered, a few others were business people who wandered into the territories staked out by those in power and many more were just “collateral damage”, people whose names happened to be in the address books of murdered prisoners or fell from the delirious lips of torture victims. Not content with this, the regime also started a war with a major international power (Britain), costing the lives of several thousand combatants on both sides, immersing the country in a sea of shame and remorse and leaving the Treasury in a ruinous state.

Whenever you see something that looks democratic here, please, jump right in!

At all times during this debate—in which I was pretty much the only one writing in favor of democracy and freedom at all costs—I was treated, when not as an evil subversive element, at least as a naïve leftist loon and a useful idiot who was incapable of understanding what had been at stake. So, I sought to inject logic into the conversation by quoting a case of democratic fervor, which I mentioned elsewhere in this blog some time ago and which I still find a highly inspiring anecdote that expresses the view of any true democrat:

In the midst of a democratic Italy’s struggle against the terrorists of the Red Brigades, former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was abducted and murdered by the leftist extremist group. Despite the high profile of Moro’s assassination and the political machinations behind it, government and security officials at the time refused to bend the law to fit their political needs. Italy’s staunch pro-human rights stance remained firm despite the formidable threats posed at the time by the Red Brigades on the one hand and the long-standing Mafia on the other. When it was widely suggested that certain political-profiled prisoners’ feet should be held to the fire in order to expedite the investigation and secure the immediate release of the former prime minister before it was learned that he had been killed, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa—a ranking officer in the Italian Carabinieri and one of the architects of the country’s anti-terrorist policies and enforcement strategies—responded: "Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

Dalla Chiesa himself was murdered along with his wife and driver by the Mafia in 1982. But that didn’t make him any less right about what he said. Although the fight waged by all legal means against the Sicilian Mafia and the Red Brigades brought the assassinations of numerous law enforcement and justice officials, persistent legal action eventually brought the substantial dismantling and stunning debilitation of both movements and the clear strengthening of Italy as both a political power and as a paladin of civilized culture and society.

Alas, my interlocutors were unimpressed. And the saddest cut of all were their cheers and applause for the former Bush administration in the U.S. which, in their eyes (and, I confess, in mine) seemed to have taken lessons from the former Argentine military regime in its holding of prisoners without trial, its use of torture as an interrogation technique, its suspension of civil rights for certain “special” cases, its invasion of the privacy of common citizens “for the sake of national security and a greater good” and its expansion of executive powers “for the protection of democracy”. It irked me that they could throw my own country back in my face as an example of a leader of Western civilization that had come to the conclusion that rules were made to be broken and that some people were “more equal” than others.

As an American and as a witness to the long-term ravages of de facto rule in Argentina, all I could say was “Viva Obama!”

Néstor, Cristina and the Isabel Connection

2010-10-29T04:52:00.000-07:00

The death of former (and virtual) President Néstor Kirchner this week places Argentina once again at an institutional crossroads. For some time now the parallels between the last government of populist icon Juan Domingo Perón and the fast deteriorating popularity of the musical-chairs administration of Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have been apparent to anyone willing to see them. But this comparison has been conspicuous by its absence from the opinions of most political analysts, in observing the ‘royal Kouple’s’ falling ratings and their desperate attempts to regain control of power.

Caption: Cristina and Néstor Kirchner (Government House photo).

With Kirchner’s sudden death on Wednesday, at the age of 60, however, these parallels have suddenly burst to the forefront of many people’s thinking. And rightly so, considering the vast power that both men wielded and the instant vacuum resulting from their sudden demise. While there are indeed great differences between the situations then and now, I would almost dare suggest that they are more a matter of degree than of nature.

At the time of his death in 1974, Perón was already having trouble controlling rival left and rightwing factions within his political movement. And these rivalries expanded into a war of tit for tat violence when he died and was succeeded by his third wife, María Estela Martínez (better known as ‘Isabel’), who was manipulated by a covey of far rightwing handlers, the most ubiquitous of which was former police corporal and Perón bodyguard, José López Rega, alleged founder of the clandestine Triple-A death squad. The Kirchners too have been facing increasing rebellion and unrest in their party and its circle of influence. In the same way that Perón made use of the Montonero guerrilla movement as a shock force to help clear the way for his return from seventeen years of Spanish exile, Kirchner sought to utilize the piqueteros—a lower class protest movement whose primary methods include prolonged roadblocks and camp-ins—to expand his power base. But just as happened to Perón, this erstwhile alliance backfired on Kirchner when the radical group turned their disruptive and sometimes violent protests against him and his wife. Internal violence among opposing factions is also threatening to boil over now, as then—if, as yet, to a lesser degree—as witnessed by the handgun slaying earlier this month of a twenty-three-year-old leftwing activist in a clash between rival union groups.

The deterioration and self-destruction of Isabel’s government in the two years following her husband’s death is a major chapter in Argentina’s contemporary history and too long and intricate to detail here, but the chaos that this process of decay wrought eventually led to the military coup d’état that took place in March of 1976 and the consequences of which Argentine society is still paying today. It is interesting to note that as the situation worsened and that government’s popularity plummeted, Mrs. Perón’s administration resorted to ever-increasing attacks on the media, opposition politicians, the legislature, the courts and the country’s powerful agricultural sector. These are the very same sectors of society that the Kirchners have been attacking ever since it became clear to them that political power was slipping inexorably through their fingers.

There is a parallel too in the fact that, like the K administration, as Isabel Perón’s popular power base eroded, her government became ever more autocratic, with Isabel acting as a puppet for the interests of her handlers (and Cristina for those of her husband and his close circle of friends) and ruling to an ever increasing extent by executive decree.

In Isabel’s case, however, she was eventually sent away “for a rest”, while Senate leader Italo Luder temporarily took over the presidency and declared the country under ‘state of siege’—a modified form of martial law in which most constitutional rights are suspended and the Executive Branch is provided with almost unlimited power. Abusive use of the state of siege—and abuse of power in general—was precisely what brought the institutional breakdown that followed and was the tool used by the military in order to usurp power “in the name of democracy” from the people’s representatives for most of the next decade.

It can be (and is) argued that nothing like this could happen today, that the Argentine military is now too small, as well as too professional, to ever again contemplate taking over the government in the face of a power vacuum. In an otherwise excellent editorial with which veteran journalist Jorge Lanata began his program (DDT) last Wednesday night on Channel 26, he opined that “no one can cast doubt on institutional continuity” in the Argentina of today. He added that “Argentina will never again have a dictatorship.”

But while Lanata’s statement is very likely true with regard to any sort of military takeover in the wake of Kirchner’s death and the eventual consequences of the power vacuum that this has created in an administration under which separation of powers has clearly been undermined, it seems somewhat politically naïve, in my opinion, to affirm with such assurance that institutional continuity is a given. The fact is that just a decade ago, President Fernando De la Rúa was forced out of his post midway through his term, plunging Argentina into one of the worst institutional crises that it has ever suffered. This was not the result of a military coup, but of an apparently orchestrated and singularly violent civilian uprising. And institutional order was indeed altered, bearing in mind that, following De la Rúa’s fall, the country had no fewer than five presidents over the next year and a half (with at least one serving less than a week).

Another commentator and long-time investigator of the K empire, Luis Majul, has pointed out that at the time of his death, Kirchner was facing the possibility, for the first time since he began his career as mayor of Río Gallegos in 1987, of running for election as president in 2011 and losing. For any normal everyday candidate, this would only signify the agony of defeat, but for Néstor Kirchner, according to Majul, it opened up the possibility of his losing political immunity and being investigated (and very possibly convicted) for alleged illicit activities ranging from misuse of power for personal gain to heading up an illegal association. Majul, who has closely followed the Kirchners’ meteoric rise to the pinnacle of wealth and power, questions why a man who was capable of mounting such extraordinary ambitions would fail to pack a parachute for the day that his career almost inevitably crashed and burned. To me, the answer seems clearly to be that the couple were convinced that they would be able to pass the chains of office back and forth between them for years to come. And more recent polls showing that their popularity is dwindling fast have been the determining factor in their ever more autocratic style of government and the increasingly strong pressure they have brought to bear on their critics, not the least of whom, certainly, has been the CEO of the Clarín news group, Héctor Magnetto. Majul claims that Kirchner was heard among his closest associates to say, on more than one occasion, that if he didn’t put Magnetto in jail first, Magnetto would put him in jail.

Majul quotes “an important ex-minister”, who once, but apparently no longer, formed part of the Kirchner entourage, as saying that the former president and eminence grise behind his wife’s administration had final say on the most minute details of government, from “the price of the dollar to monetary aid for a city councilman in the greater Buenos Aires area.” But according to Majul, the unnamed former official also added that “now Kirchner doesn’t know how to keep himself from being investigated, tried and eventually sentenced, since he never imagined he’d have to face such a situation.”

Lanata observes that, now, “the forbidden word is ‘Isabel’.” This savvy newsman clearly defines the situation that Cristina Kirchner will face once her husband’s funeral rites are over: “An opposition vice president and a divided Peronist Party, one year before elections.” He adds that it is hard to tell on whom the President will be able to depend for any genuine support, pointing out that Planning Minister Julio de Vido is having health issues of his own, that Cabinet Chief Aníbal Fernández is more bark than bite, that Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman has proven more of a political and diplomatic liability than a plus and that the presence of CGT union leader Hugo Moyano is tantamount to having “the enemy within”.

Clearly, Cristina Kirchner is not Isabel Perón—who basically lent her husband’s name to the office of president while doing what she was told to do by those who were really in charge, no matter how disastrous the advice might have been. There are striking differences in the two women's personalities and levels of preparation. Furthermore, Cristina is often defiant and opinionated in her own right, which could work to her advantage in resisting some of the advances of the country’s more nefarious power brokers (like Moyano). But, be that as it may, she has, in the past, demonstrated herself to be patently unyielding to the opinions of really knowledgeable advisors like Martín Redrado whom she forced out of the Central Bank by decree, despite the fact that the policies he set were largely what kept the peso and international reserves stable and kept Argentina from falling victim to the international crisis. In fact, both she and her late husband have systematically removed the soundest of technical personnel from key posts, preferring to replace them with yes-men/women, who will do their bidding, which has been equivalent to doing whatever it takes not to lose their grip on power.

The death of Néstor Kirchner has, however, rendered any plan for continuing to foster a musical-chairs presidential succession between the current president and her spouse, ad infinitum, a moot point. The looming question that remains is, what next?

***************************

NOTE: I'd like to clarify, since several people have made similar comments, that I'm not comparing - as I state in the article - Isabel Perón and Cristina Kirchner in terms of their personalities or their preparation for the post of president. What I'm indeed comparing is a political situation in which extremely powerful men have sought to use their wives as a guarantee of their own continuation in power - Perón had already done so with Evita and wanted to repeat the experience with Isabel (who obviously also wasn't Eva Perón). Kirchner emulated Perón's formula with Cristina - obviously with better fortune in the first case and with a much higher-quality political partner in the second.

That doesn't change the fact, however, that the deaths of both men created, in one case, and will create, in the other, a huge power vacuum. If you look into the statements of people who have worked closely with the successive K administrations, you'll find that Néstor Kirchner has continued to wield enormous power since his wife replaced him in office, to the extent of being practically a co-president and sort of CEO of the empire. And there can be little doubt either that the couple's idea had been to continue to pass power back and forth between them for as long as possible, since few will deny that, had he lived, Kirchner would have been a candidate in the next elections.

The point is that history has shown that power vacuums have a way of getting filled. How they get filled depends on who comes out on top in the political game of King of the Mountain. This is why, after the experience of the orchestrated civilian coup that ended Fernando De la Rúa's government less than a decade ago, it seems to me to be politically naïve to simply assume that institutional continuity will be a given.

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

2010-09-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

The best-laid schemes o' mice

an' men / Gang aft agley
Robert Burns

As Robert Burns has frequently been paraphrased, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Writing is, by far, the most important thing that I do in my life. Or at least it is to me, personally. And although for much of my adult life I have, indeed, kept the lights on and put bread on the table with the written word, it is also true that the most creative kind of writing that I do hasn’t always been what paid the rent. Especially when, like now, I’m involved, whenever time permits, in creative writing projects of my own that take a long time to develop and the future success of which is anything but certain.

But you keep on writing, because that’s what writers do. We can’t help it. We might torture ourselves for years, asking ourselves why we do it. But that won’t stop us. It’ll just make us impossibly neurotic and hell to get along with, until we finally come to terms with the fact that what isn’t worthwhile is not the writing, but asking ourselves the ‘why’ question.

If we writers had no other place to do it, we would write in the dust, on rocks, on the back of our hand, all the way up our arm until we got impossibly lost in our own armpit, or perhaps we’d just write on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, Abe Lincoln-style. Our legacy was bequeathed to us by those first primitives who sketched pictograms of the things they saw on stone overhangs and in caves. They too were different from the others—crazier, the others probably thought, just as they still think now. Those ancient scribes couldn’t help themselves either. They just had to make a ‘written’ statement, communicate what they observed. Others must have shrugged and said, “Why bother? The antelope’s standing right over there, bozo! We see it! What do we need a symbol for?” And our writer ancestors might well have said, “Ah, yes, you see it, friend, but do you see it?”

But I digress. I was talking about plans going awry. My plan, since I started blogging a couple of years ago, has been to get to the place where I’m organized enough to be able to give my readers (whom I thank from the bottom of my heart for their patience and loyalty) a specific day on which each of my three different theme blogs will come out. Say like, Translator’s Handbook every Monday, A Yankee at Large every Wednesday and The Southern Yankee every Friday. Or some other, perhaps less demanding arrangement, but something that readers could count on.

I realize all too well that this is the only way to build a respectably large and loyal readership. Because, in the end, when you decide to write for the public—no matter what you write, be it print, electronic, daily, monthly, quarterly or what have you—you make a tacit commitment to your readers (even if they number no more than a handful) to produce. This said, I also realize that no matter how much I beat myself up over not ‘normalizing relations’ with my readers and providing them with a specific blog on a specific day, thinking that I can may well be a case of operating on the strength of my own vivid imagination.

And here’s where Robert Burns and his mice come in. My failure, so far at least, to be able to make this kind of regular commitment as a blogger has been a matter of survival. I’ve had the extraordinary good luck of having been able to make my living as a wordsmith, in one capacity or another—reporter, editorialist, op-ed writer, feature writer, translator, style editor, etc.—ever since I decided to turn my writing from a hobby into a profession, thirty-six years ago. For two decades, I did this as a staffer and stringer for a variety of magazines and newspapers, while also translating on the side. Admittedly, there was a certain security in this because there was always a paycheck at the end of the month.

Free-lancing is tougher. Whether or not you work (and eat) depends entirely on you. You can decide to take the day off, the week off, the month off. But ultimately, if you don’t circulate, if you don’t promote yourself, if you don’t actively seek out clients and consistently prove your expertise, you’re dead in the water. But having made my living this way for over a decade and a half—actually, more like eighteen years, now that I think about it—I would never want to go back to working for someone else. I sometimes have nightmares where that’s precisely what happens, where I’m back in an office working for somebody else and everything is going wrong, and even though none of it is my fault, I know I’ll be to one who is blamed because I’m in charge. Actually, in real life, that was pretty much how things used to work. So the dreams come as no surprise. However, once I sit bolt upright, wet with sweat and heart pounding, I can always reassure myself that, yes, it was a just a nightmare and, no, that’s not happening again, ever. I’ve been my own man for eighteen years and will continue to be until my shadow sets me free.

But, admittedly, this freedom thing has its ups and downs. One of the downs came recently, in the wake of the worldwide economic crash. Weeks, months went by, with nothing much but the sound of the crickets to accompany me. But for once in my life, I didn’t worry. I spent the time well: writing, reading, what else? And that included trying to turn out better- and better-quality work for my blogs.

Then suddenly, one morning everybody seemed to get up, open the window, look out at the sunshine and say, okay, enough of this depression crap. Let’s get to work! And in a matter of a week, I, all of the sudden, had numerous projects for which to post bids. And one of the two best ones immediately came through: working as part of the research team for an author with whom I had already worked previously as a translator. The job consisted of reading books, lots of books, and reporting on them. I could do the hell out of that job!

But no sooner had I started on that assignment, than the other best option came through: the translation of an important book for a major international publisher. Let me just say that, despite how lackadaisical I might appear, with respect to my blogs at least, I’m a workhorse. From the time I was very young, workaholism has often been one of the vices I have fallen into. And although I no longer have the sustainable energy to make a steady diet of it, I do tend to go on rampaging binges from time to time. These last few months have been one of those times, since I blithely told myself, “I want both of these jobs. Relax, everybody,” I said, “I’ve got this!” And a I did and do have it. And, in fact, have completed one of the jobs—the book translation—and can now take a deep breath and continue, much more serenely, with the other one.

But this is precisely what brings me to my point about best laid plans. Professional that I am, I have been conditioned to believe that whatever I am assigned or contracted to do should take priority over everything else (even including weekends, holidays, normal workdays schedules…literally, everything). This said, what I want you, as my treasured readers, to know is that priority is one thing and importance another. And when I’m writing a blog entry, I don’t figure there is anything more important in the world than making that the best piece of writing I’m capable of at the time. Nor is anyone more on my mind at those times than the reader, whomever he or she might be, and no matter whether my readership numbers one or a thousand and one.

This, by way of explanation—and apology—for my long absence. I’ll try hard to reserve a bigger chunk of myself for both of us in the future.

Tearing Down the Wall

2010-06-29T16:32:00.000-07:00

Caption: US Border fence at Brownsville (Courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

The immigration debate is everywhere. Not just in the United States, where it is focused, but worldwide as well. All eyes are on the country, especially now, with Barak Obama as President, to see if it will remain true to its liberal past of freedom and justice for all, to its immigrant history, to its long struggle to impose respect for universal civil and human rights, to its sense of humanitarianism, to the blood with which it drenched its own soil in order to abolish the enslavement of one race by another and to so many other shining examples of its vocation for often hard-fought, but eventually effective self-criticism and for simply doing the right thing, which, surprisingly enough, is also often the most expedient thing as well.

Quite frankly, after eight long and grueling years in which the administration of George Bush (The Lesser) systematically violated, suspended, ignored and banned rights and principles that had always been considered basic to US-style democracy and decency, a lot of people elsewhere aren’t expecting much of us Americans anymore. Worse still, some Americans even had time during the Bush years to get used to the US thumbing its nose at “corny notions” like multilateral decisions on world security, due process, rule of law and respect for human rights, and started almost finding it ‘cool’ for their leaders to talk like Dirty Harry about such things – about smokin’ out the evildoers and killin’ ‘em – which, in their eyes makes Barak Obama “a wimp”.

But hopefully, the current administration – in spite of a jittery economy, a radically hostile opposition, two wars that are looking more and more like an even longer and more pernicious nightmare than Vietnam, the worst oil disaster in the history of the world and a churlishly impatient public that apparently expected President Obama to soar in like Superman and, with a wave of his hand, fix everything that was not just broken, but utterly demolished, overnight – will find the time and energy to go out of its way toward restoring the battered image of the United States as the intellectual as well as material leader of the Free World.

Like it or not, and whatever your personal stance may be, the immigration debate forms part of this context. It has for some time now, but it recently has been shoved to the forefront as a result of the unilateral decision of Arizona to impose its own rules which – despite all of the skewed logic with which the public is being bombarded by far-right commentators – are tantamount to racial profiling.

Clearly, at this moment in its history, the United States has an immigration problem. And it is, for the most part – though not entirely – an Hispanic problem. Let me hasten to say that what I mean by this is that the main problem is in how the United States will deal with the influx of immigrants from that ‘ethnic’ group (whatever that means, since they hail from highly varied backgrounds), and not that the problem is theirs. The problem is, strictly speaking, a US problem.

An Immigrant Nation

The United States is an immigrant country. While the majority of the US population is made up of whites, it cannot really be said that there is anything like a “typical American”. Unless, of course, you are only speaking of those who have descended from the 53 people who survived out of the 102 passengers who left England in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, bound for Virginia, drifted off course and ended up settling in Massachusetts. If not, then the vast majority of Americans are of immigrant stock and, technically, the first settlers were immigrants as well. The fact is that the only authentically “typical Americans” form less than one percent of the population and are not white, but ‘red’. All the rest of us are the descendants of “intruders” – though I am proud to say that some genuine native blood does flow in my veins, thanks to my great-grandfather, Job Cavinder, who was half American Indian.

Caption: My great-grandfather, Job Cavinder, was half Indian. My Great-Aunt Ruth (standing behind Job) demonstrated clear Native American facial features. Seated with Job is my great-grandmother, Mary Landis, and behind her, my Great-Aunt Edith.

But now, this is where our insistence on placing everybody in neat little pigeonholes gets messy and confusing. My wife, Virginia, for instance, is an Argentine national. She was born in South America and speaks Spanish as her first language. Back in the days when we lived in the United States and she needed a visa, she was pigeonholed by the Federal government as “race: Latino”. (Back then, the Federal government didn’t care about the gender concerns of the Spanish language, so for them, there was no such thing as Latino/Latina: immigrants from “south of the border” were Latino Male and Latino Female). In point of fact, however, Virginia is not latina, or at least not in the American sense of the word, which refers to peoples of Hispanic origin. Both of her grandfathers – Mel and Carlucci - emigrated from their native Italy to Buenos Aires, one from Salerno, the other from near Milan. One of her grandmothers was also of Italian descent – Scoltore – her father having emigrated as a boy to Argentina. Hey! Does that mean Robert De Niro is Latino too? Granted, one of my wife’s grandmothers was of Basque descent. So, yes, that part of her family did indeed come from what in the Roman Empire was referred to as Hispania. “See there! See there!” the racial profilers might shout with glee. “That’s ‘Latino’ blood, then…or Hispanic…or whatever.”

Right, so what am I, then? Somewhere way back, part of my family (the Newlands) came over from Scotland, another part from Germany (the Webers and the Leningers), still another part from Ireland (the Cavinders). My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Henry and the other side of her family were the Hamiltons. So, English, then? But wait: The name Henry, if you check back, is Norman and the Normans were originally Norsemen (Vikings), who settled in France. So, French, then? But then there’s that other part, the British Isles part, what about that? Well, let’s simplify: The British Isles were originally settled by Germanic tribes (Anglo Saxons). And then there’s that other part of my family that’s German and the Norsemen were the originators of the Germanic tribes, Teutonic peoples all. So, okay, if we’re going to racially profile, then I’m Teutonic, right? I mean if I were just now moving to the USA and they wanted to figure out which pigeonhole to place me in, “race: Teutonic”, wouldn’t it be? But wait just a darn minute, now. I get to the States and who do I find there, since…um, forever? My Native American great-grandfather’s maternal family. So what the heck am I doing immigrating, since ‘we Indians’ once owned the place. But then, that racially profiles me too, doesn’t it? Yes, definitely, unquestionably, Teutonic-Celtic-Native American…I think.

We’re All Africa

My point here is that there is no such race as “Latino”. Race is all about skin color – and implicitly profiles people anyway, since there is no race but the human race, with the rest being a matter of complexion and environmental adaptation. Trace us back far enough and, if noted paleontologist Richard Leaky is right, we all started out black, on the plains of Africa. As Shakira puts it, we’re all Africa (waka-waka). This thing of classifying people from ‘south of the border’ as “race: Latino” is just the Federal government’s ‘secret’ code for, “This person speaks Spanish and comes from ‘someplace down there’. Nor should it be an issue in the decision to grant or not grant a visa, since just by placing a race-heading on a visa application, the government is implicitly discriminating by bringing a piece of data into the mix that will permit those making the final decision to decide on the basis of skin color/‘ethnicity’. We are all, then, mixed-race, in a sense…well, except for (if Leaky is right) the purest of African tribes.

The population of Argentina as a whole is a good case in point. Argentina, like the United States, is an immigrant nation, a melting-pot, if you will. Just as in the States the most common ethnic combination is Scots-Irish, English and Germanic, in Argentina, the majority of the population is made up of people of Italian and Spanish origin. Another large segment of the population is made up of people of criollo descent (the mix of Spanish and Amer-Indian bloods). These last are people who would immediately be profiled as “Latinos” because of their dark hair, eyes and complexion, if they were to try to move to the United States. The others would have to speak before their “race” could be determined.

Since Argentina’s history with its natives is much like that of the United States – the Indians were, as in North America, systematically removed, driven out, pushed westward, pursued and slaughtered in order to take their land away and give it to white European settlers – there is only a small pure American Indian population. Most of these people would probably also immediately be considered ‘Latinos’ by US Immigration (and curious police officers in the state of Arizona), since they are dark, speak Spanish and come from “south of the border”. But Argentina also has an eclectic mix of other ethnicities: The country’s quintessential literary figure, Jorge Luis Borges, once quipped: “The Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas and the Argentines from boats.” I have known Anglo-Argentines, German-Argentines, Czech-Argentines, Irish-Argentines, Scottish-Argentines, Welsh-Argentines, African-Argentines, Rumanian-Argentines, French-Argentines, Basque-Argentines, Slovenian-Argentines, Austrian-Argentines, Armenian-Argentines, Syrian-Argentines, Lebanese-Argentines, Russian-Argentines, Greek-Argentines, Turkish-Argentines, Japanese-Argentines, Chinese-Argentines, Korean-Argentines, and so on. I am willing to bet that most of these would be profiled as “race: Latino” because of their nationality and language were they to try to immigrate to the United States – with the exception of the “Orientals” (many of whose families have lived for generations in Argentina) since, despite speaking Spanish and having Latin American passports they don’t “look Latino”.

People who are “tough on immigration” but who don’t want to give the impression of being racist will argue that the problem isn’t immigration as such, but the ‘illegals’. (That they are talking about Hispanics is a given). But at the center of mainstream calls for ever-tougher immigration measures in the United States is a fear not just of undocumented immigrants of Hispanic descent or from so-called ‘Hispanic countries’, but also of the exponential expansion of the Latino community in the United States. This segment of the US population has increased more than four-fold since 1970 and is up 22% since the start of the 21st century. Predictions are that by 2050, nearly one in three Americans will be Hispano-American.

The fear that is motivating demands from the fundamentalist right for the deportation of all Hispanic 'illegals' (this is the height of racial profiling) and radical measures to ensure that no more get into the country has little to do with either the lax immigration policies or the shaky border security that they cite. At its core, the issue is about the mainstream white population’s fear of its eventual loss of supremacy.

Parallels with the Past

I'm old enough to have grown up in the so-called civil rights era. I was reared in a predominately (98%) white Midwestern town where there were no blacks. (I see from the latest Census that this has changed: African Americans now form 0.19% of the town’s population – or approximately 18 people out of a total of 9,474). So I can recall hearing the facile racist arguments of white supremacist fundamentalists who, upon hearing of protest marches, riots and other disturbances taking place all over the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s, as blacks sought to back demands that their civil rights be respected, would snarl, “If they don’t like it here, we can always ship ‘em back to Africa.” In many cases, this suggestion was being made about people whose presence in North America pre-dated the arrival of the Mayflower, since African slave labor was already present in the then-Spanish colony of Florida in the mid-1500s. And Dutch slavers first traded African captives to the pre-Mayflower Virginia settlers in 1607. Historically, then, these African people were more American than the European ones who signed the Mayflower Compact. They just weren’t white Americans.

Nor should we forget that during the country’s long immigration history, the push by rightwing fundamentalists to close the gates to certain types of immigrants is nothing new. Today it’s the “Hispanic problem”. Yesterday it was the “Polish problem”, the “Italian problem”, the “Irish problem”, the “Chinese problem”. And the problem has always been a two-way street: people from countries in political or economic turmoil seeking a new home and new horizons in combination with greedy economic interests only too happy to exploit the cheap, sometimes bordering on slave labor that these mass movements of desperate people could provide.

The fact is that many of those who are the staunchest opponents to Hispanic immigration today are the descendants of people who came in droves to the United States and stayed by any means they could a century and a half ago. To hear these descendants tell it today, their families were welcomed with open arms and were respected and well treated because they knew how to appreciate what America offered them and America knew how to appreciate what they had to offer. It’s a nice story, and perhaps there were some cases like that, but generally speaking it is exactly that – a story. The fact is that every new immigrant group has had to carve a place for itself in American society. Typical of mass movements of any kind, the first ones to arrive have quickly staked their claim, fenced off their territory and then tried to keep any new aliens from coming in and messing up a good thing.

The Irish (an ethnic group that today forms about 12% of the US population) are a case in point. Although Irishmen had formed part of the original colonies almost from the outset, the huge waves of Irish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century, and especially during the Great Irish Famine of the mid to late 1840s, arrived in the United States destitute and desperate. They, like many unskilled immigrants from the Hispanic community today, took the jobs that no one else wanted – hard, poorly paid jobs involving grueling manual labor. Notably, they were hired at starvation wages – beggars couldn’t be choosers – to do the grunt work in the building of much of America’s rapidly expanding infrastructure. They dug canals, laid rails, built ports and did any other task where picks, shovels, sledges and a strong back were required. They were often exploited and mistreated. During the civil war, the US government also exploited this wave of largely English-speaking immigration, drafting penniless Irishmen, with the promise of US citizenship, directly off the boat into the Army to serve as new cannon fodder in mounting massive offenses against rebel forces in the South.

As Irish workers building the railroads became more consolidated and banded together to try and form unions, they were unceremoniously cast aside for newly arriving Chinese labor that would work for even less pay. The lot of 19th-century Irish immigrants in the United States was so grim that, following the civil war, they considered the wave of recently emancipated former slaves that migrated northward to be a competitive threat and there are reports from those times of blacks being attacked by Irish-immigrant mobs who beat, clubbed and stoned them. Problematic Irish immigration was, then, also a problem of desperate foreigners fitting perfectly into the exploitative designs of greedy business interests – the same problem as today’s, but with a different ethnicity.

Can’t Have It Both Ways

There appears to be a growing tendency among far-right thinkers today to consider the plight of the undocumented Hispanics as being their problem. It is of little importance to such anti-immigration activists how long these undocumented aliens have been inside the United States. If they don’t have the proper papers, these people say, they should be thrown out at once.

Caption: The Border Fence at Tijuana (Courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons)

This stance tends to see ‘illegals’ as lawbreakers who have whimsically and maliciously skulked across the border in flagrant contempt for sovereign US authority, so the ostensible solution is to round them up and send them packing. But to look at it this way is an oversimplification of the facts: the fact, for instance, that although it is illegal for them to be in the United States, certain American employers – traditionally in the agricultural and textile sectors but elsewhere as well – gladly hire them at starvation wages; the fact that lax policies in the past tacitly permitted undocumented workers to stay and make a home (albeit humble) for themselves in the USA despite not having a green card; the fact that precisely because they have family members who have lived legally in the States or have been born there, it ends up being, irrationally, next to impossible for them to get permanent residence visas, and so on and so forth.

Therefore, the problem isn't theirs, at least not completely, but a problem that the United States government must address in some more rational and humanitarian way. As for those who claim that cleaning up the illegal immigration problem will create a new problem for the business activities that use ‘illegals’ as cheap labor, I can only say that, first, my heart absolutely bleeds for those shameless and unscrupulous exploiters, and second, that you can't have it both ways. You can’t hire undocumented workers as dirt-cheap labor and then turn around and not want to see them on the street. Nor can you clamor for the cheap goods and services that their labor provides but then expect them not to have a life beyond the fields or the sweatshop walls. This kind of hypocritical double standard is unethical and immoral and is a mindset that should have gone out with the Civil War and, if not, then at least with the advances fought and won in the civil rights era. Because there can be no kidding ourselves: Although they may be paid, if miserably, for what they do, the exploitation of the undocumented status of ‘illegals’ makes them the modern-day slaves of industrialized white America, and it makes their bosses the supremacist slave-drivers of the 21st century.

‘Tear This Wall Down’

Caption: President John F. Kennedy and his entourage survey the Berlin Wall. "Ich bin ein Berliner," JFK declared.

As I am writing this, an image keeps popping into my head of John F. Kennedy standing before the Berlin Wall and declaring: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I was a boy at the time, but already a thinking, conscious human being and I recall feeling a thrill of excitement and pride at this admirable statesman’s declaration of war on that wall and on the totalitarian mentality on which it was constructed.

Built by the repressive Soviet Bloc in 1961 to separate East and West Germany from one another, the Berlin Wall was the quintessential symbol of the Cold War. But it was also the symbol of the darkest kind of fundamentalism, of an archaic mindset that actually believed that an ideological line could be drawn in the sand and a material wall erected to separate one culture (political in this case) from another, that barbed wire, searchlights and machine guns could keep ideas and advancement from spreading, that harsh repression was a viable way to impose a system or that such repression was sufficient to suppress people’s natural desire for freedom, progress and a better, happier life.

I was a quarter-century older and a politically savvy newsman when an American president again stood before that wall. I was no longer an innocent and had serious issues with this leader, but I still couldn’t help but identify when Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and challenged: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear this wall down.”

Now when I see footage of our border with Mexico, I can’t help asking myself how the same nation that fought so hard, so long and with such sound reason against the ideological more than the material symbol of the Berlin Wall can now be supporting the building of just as horrendous and futile a wall between it and one of its two closest neighbors. A political cartoon is taking shape in my mind that makes me sorry drawing is not one of my strong talents: It shows America’s “Berlin Wall” manned by armed Border Guards along the Río Grande. On the other side of the wall, standing waist deep in water are Mexican immigrants clamoring to come over. On their shoulder stand other immigrants and on their shoulders, still others. A dialog balloon coming from a guard’s mouth says, “We gotta make it taller!” Behind the guards, facing the American side of the wall, wringing their hands, their faces wrenched with fear and worry, are a crowd of white Americans led by Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. A dialog balloon coming from a frightened-looking Beck says “Gosh fellas! I sure as heck hope it holds.” And while all of their eyes are on ‘The Wall’ the tide of change continues with the birth of a million North American Hispanics a year behind their backs.

Caption: A wall of our own, and every bit as futile and odious as the Berlin Wall. (Photo by Omar Bárcena. Courtesy Creative Commons. Public Domain.)

Because this is precisely what’s happening. The point that the anti-immigration (e.g., anti-Hispanic) fundamentalists are too self-obsessed and too obtuse to understand is that building a wall between themselves and the Hispanic world is as idiotic and futile an idea as the Berlin Wall was. While they are desperately seeking to plug the leaks in the illegal immigration dike with their fingers and toes, the inexorable trend toward a changing face (a pan-American face, if you will) for North America continues unabated. There were 9 million Hispanics and North American-born Latinos living in the United States in the 1970s. Today they number over 40 million or about 14 percent of the population. And the current birth rate among the Hispanic community in the United States totals over one million babies per year. This is a trend that isn’t going away no matter how scared fundamentalist white supremacists might be of losing their grip on power.

The worst thing that could happen is that the immigration issue should drive an ever-increasing wedge between the white and Hispanic communities. Should that happen, the future scenario could only be one of increasing tension between the two. The violence, disruptions, riots and bitterness that marked the white versus black integration clashes of the 1950s and ‘60s need to be established as a lesson learned in this respect. The Obama administration has the singular opportunity to take strides toward avoiding this kind of scenario, not by bowing to pressure for a “bigger and better wall”, but by studying creative ways to develop more rational immigration legislation and to take advantage of the extraordinary potential of a multi-racial, multi-cultural America.

Memorial Day 2010 – The War We Were

2010-06-01T05:25:00.000-07:00

CAPTION: Tombstones of the American fallen in Arlington National Cemetery. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Yesterday was Memorial Day in my native United States. The day when we honor those who died fighting in our nation’s wars.

When I was a kid, it was hard to think of it as anything but a holiday – the day after the last day of school, the day we hoped and prayed it would be warm enough for the public swimming pool to open, a day for picnics with the family or when Mom would drive out to the greenhouse to buy some flowers to set out. It was a day of parades with brass bands playing stirring patriotic marches and with middle-aged and old men dressing up like soldiers once more to join uniformed National Guardsmen and other troops in carrying the colors to the Veterans Monument at the Courthouse and then out to the cemetery in tearful remembrance of their fallen brothers.

But for us, as kids, it was just the first exciting small-town event to kick off the wonderful, lazy days of small-town summer.

The problem is that this childhood Memorial Day illusion is only that. And since it appears impossible for the United States to get through a single generation without a war, each generation has its own. And as the realities of those wars end up touching us as a generation and, indeed as individuals, no matter how hard we may try to ignore them, Memorial Day eventually takes on a new and sober meaning.

My grandparents’ generation had World War I, my parents’ generation, World War II. My parents’ younger siblings had to face the Korean War. My generation’s war was Vietnam. The current generation is embroiled in combat on two fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sixty million combatants are estimated to have taken part in the First World War. In the four years that the fighting lasted, 16 million people died and nearly 35 million suffered some form of permanent physical disability. Those figures don’t include the millions who suffered permanent mental or emotional trauma. World War II. Despite the Great War’s have supposedly been the “war to end all wars”, a quarter-century later, we found the world at war again, and this time as many people died (62 million from 55 nations) as combatants that took part in the First War. And there are no accurate figures to calculate the millions upon millions of people injured, disable or mentally traumatized in this second modern instance of wholesale worldwide butchery.

In just the two major conflicts that our current generations have lived through (…or not…), then, approximately 100 million people died. Think about it: That’s more than three times the size of the total population of Argentina or Canada. Imagine every man, woman and child in those countries slaughtered, and pile another twenty-five or thirty million mutilated cadavers on top of those. Imagine one out of every three men, women and children in the United States dead, every two mourning the tragic death of a third. That’s how many people were ground up in the gnashing cogs of just those two world conflicts, not to mention the thousands upon thousand and millions upon millions who died in other “minor” conflicts that many of us have no idea ever took place.

One such “minor conflict” was the Korean War. For many years this war was referred to, especially by the United States, as “a police action.” In the three years that this “police action” lasted, somewhere between, 1.2 and 1.5 million people were killed. (Imagine the city of Cleveland, say, or La Plata, wiped out entirely). The United States alone lost 33,686 combat troops, as well as non-combatant personnel numbering 2,830.

Then there was my generation’s war. Official figures in the Vietnam War place direct American casualties at 58,148 dead and 300,000 wounded. But this doesn’t take into account the thousands upon thousands of conscript soldiers who returned with broken hearts, broken spirits and broken minds to a life of chemical dependencies, chronic depression, severe mental illness, neurological trauma from chemical agents and other conditions that kept them from ever recovering control over their own destinies or caused them to die young from any number of unnatural causes. Just among my immediate circle of acquaintances, I can think of several who died in combat before their 21^st birthdays, one who came home and hanged himself in his garage and another who came home in 1970 and to this day remains incapable of facing life without the dulling effects of severe alcohol and drug abuse (to such an extent that the last I knew of him, he no longer was getting out of bed to drink and “get high”…if you can call it that). People can say that he and all the others should have gotten over it, gotten on with their lives. But that’s like saying a person should “get over” child abuse, rape or other forms of severe victimization.

Yet, nothing compares to the ravages of war. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, in dirty wars such as these – wars like Vietnam, like Afghanistan, like Iraq, wars of attrition against a scarcely identifiable enemy, where the lines between friend and foe are patchy and guerrilla fighters work the no man’s land between uniformed combatants and civilian populations – nothing, no amount of gung-ho training, no amount of psychological readiness, no amount of discipline, can prepare these men and women for what they will see, what they will be ordered to do and what they may well do on their own as a result of the in-combat stress and trauma they suffer. Already, well over a million of today’s American soldiers have had to face this.

Nor do the cold figures that measure the effects on our own troops take into account the tidal wave of suffering left in their wake. Our South Vietnamese allies in that other conflict lost 5 times as many troops as the United States did and their number of wounded was never determined. But more tragic still is the fact that, the number of South Vietnamese dead, including the nearly quarter of a million troops killed, came to an estimated two million (men, women, children) in a country with a total population of just over 5 million. A conservative estimate of deaths among the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese in that war comes to something like 2.8 million, with two million of those also being civilians. Less conservative estimates claim deaths on both sides were more like 7 million, with another two million people being injured or mutilated.

Beyond tragic and into the realm of horrifying are the 7 million tons of explosives that the United States made use of during that war, or the chemical, biological and bacterial agents that Washington liberally rained down on the Vietnamese people in clear violation of the Geneva Convention that Washington has so often cited in criticizing the inhuman behavior of other nations. This was over 3 times the quantity of explosives used in aerial attacks on all sides during World War II.

In Iraq, despite the US military’s frequent boasting about the effectiveness of its technology and the possibility of “surgical bombing” with its joystick-operated, camera-carrying weaponry, in the last estimates I saw, somewhere between 90,000 and 105,000 civilians had died. No matter how much we want to debate the “human shield” theory, there comes a moment when somebody has to punch the button or pull the trigger that murders non-combatant men, women and children. And no matter how professional a soldier may be, only a heartless, mindless mercenary (e.g., a sociopath) could go home and sleep well after doing that. So the vast numbers of returning veterans who now require and will continue to require treatment for not only their physical but also their mental trauma should come as no surprise to anyone.

And with all of the experience that the United States has in the scars that wars leave, it should really be prepared to deal with this phenomenon. But indications are that we have learned little from the tragic experience of Vietnam. Conservative estimates indicate that beyond the tremendously high numbers of mutilated soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US can expect at least (and this is a conservative estimate) half a million veterans of these two latest wars to return suffering from post traumatic stress disorder before the combat ends. And there are also telling indications that not nearly enough of them are getting the help they need. In wars such as these, in which the causes are hazy and the methods questionable, no matter what one’s view of the war itself may be, the post-combat support system is clearly lacking.

The US custom of honoring its fallen on Memorial Day is a noble one. But perhaps we Americans and people everywhere should start looking at war from a different angle.

We need to honor these dead by rejecting, rather than embracing and glorifying war. If we re-read the statistics above, it becomes clear that what we should be looking into is not more effective ways of waging war, but rather, the most effective ways possible of avoiding and preventing it. Perhaps this will mean a revolution in diplomacy or witheringly preemptive multinational action. Anything to keep two sides from dignifying their conflict with false partiotic fervor.

War is not noble, no matter how noble the intentions of those who actually fight the wars may be. Wars are not, as most leaders would have us believe, honorable or winnable in any real sense other than in that of achieving the political and economic ends of those in power. War is hell. War is merely the wholesale slaughter of one people by another for reasons that have little or nothing to do with why we are told we must fight them. And as war becomes more “effective” the number of civilian casualties grows relatively greater all the time, threatening to become exponential.

The best way, then, to honor our war dead, is by seeking to ensure that war becomes the most unthinkable of all means to an end. No society that rejects homicide as a heinous crime should find war logical…and much less, glorious.

Iron Mothers

2010-05-03T04:06:00.000-07:00

This past week, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo celebrated the 33rd anniversary of the first time they defied the Argentine dictatorship known as the National Reorganization Process by gathering in Plaza de Mayo, the main square in the City of Buenos Aires, to protest against the disappearance of their children at the hands of the former military regime.

Caption: The Mothers' white head scarves have become a human rights symbol. Here it is painted on the tiles of Plaza de Mayo - tiles worn by the Mothers' 33 years of resistance marches.

The importance of this group in drawing local and international attention to gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity under the “Process” cannot be overstated. It has clearly and consistently been the most high-profile and active of social institutions in defense of human rights in the country and even to this day, its leaders have refused to relegate to the forgotten past the issue of what happened to the thousands who “disappeared” during nearly eight years of military rule. Nor have they abandoned their struggle to see the perpetrators of that massacre brought to justice, despite legislation like the “full stop” and the “due obedience” laws passed under successive democratic administrations in attempts to assuage the military rebellions that marked the early years of democracy following the fall of the Armed Forces regime.

The Mothers are known worldwide and their cause has been immortalized in books, songs, photographs, documentaries, biographies and feature films. Their emblematic white head scarves bearing the embroidered names of their missing children have become an internationally recognized symbol of persistent resistance to tyranny and of the unflinching bravery of women in defending their families.

Caption: A poster from a documentary film about the Mothers by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Muñoz.

Admittedly, as often happens with grassroots protest movements, aims can become denatured and skewed as these loosely formed groups start to become “established institutions”. And the Mothers, at least in part, have been no strangers to this phenomenon. In fact, this was precisely what would eventually lead to an inevitable schism, which took place in 1986, three years after the country’s return to democracy.

By and large, this controversial politicizing of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo has been taken out of context. The most vocal and radical of the two separate lines within the movement, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Association, has come to be considered, among many people at a local level, the “true face” of the Mothers and has thus served to discredit the movement as a whole. At an international level, most people have no idea that there are two separate lines within the movement, and therefore, she who shouts the loudest is seen as the face and voice of the Mothers. That would be Hebe Bonafini, head of the radicalized, extreme leftist Association, and a woman who has become such a caricature of far-left revolutionary ideals that she has lost all credibility as a serious defender of human rights and of peaceful protest. Although often profiled as a simple woman with an eighth-grade education, Bonafini has shown herself to be a canny developer of contacts and positioning, a skill that, combined with her often incendiary comments, has helped her to maintain a position of predominance, in the eyes of the public, in detriment to the traditional Founding Line of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. This second group advocates peace and non-violence, rule of law and respect for human rights and, paradoxically, it is probably because of the very decency of their endeavors that theirs is the lesser known of the two factions.

The Mothers emerged in April of 1977, a year after the coup that brought the Armed Forces ‘Process’ to power, and in the midst of the bloodbath that followed. At the time, it was not, by any means, a formal organization. It sprang, rather, from the decision of a tiny group of women to band together, in order to draw strength from one another and to find creative ways to draw attention to their plight. All of them were seeking information on the whereabouts of members of their families who had been abducted by paramilitary hit squads for having alleged ties to leftwing terrorism, subsequently falling through the intentional cracks in the “justice” system and simply “disappearing”.

The dozen women who took part in the first quiet protest in Plaza de Mayo were: Azucena Villaflor de Vicenti, Berta Braverman, Haydée García Buelas, Delicia González, Pepa Noia, Mirta Baravalle, Kety Neuhaus, Raquel Arcushin de Caimi and four sisters – María Adela Gard de Antokoletz, Julia Gard, María Mercedes Gard and Cándida Gard. Their original organizer was Azucena Villaflor. In her rounds of different government offices, where no one wanted to talk to her, she started bumping into other women who were also looking for missing family members. She convinced them that they were never going to get anywhere on their own. She said that they needed to band together if anyone were ever to take any notice of them.

They had no real plan for that first protest other than drawing attention to themselves and their call for information about their missing children. So where better to do it than under the noses of the Junta, in Plaza de Mayo, in front of Government House, and across from the Metropolitan Cathedral, headquarters of a Church hierarchy that had thrown in its lot with the military government? Azucena Villaflor’s idea was that if they could get enough women to gather each week in the Plaza, there would come a time when the government could no longer ignore them. That was the strategy, pure and simple. And her immediate goal was to get a meeting with the head of the Junta, Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla.

Nor was that first protest meant to be a “march”. But when Federal policemen standing guard in the square saw the women gathering, they warned the Mothers that they would either have to “circulate” or leave, because under the dictatorial decrees of the military regime the right to public assembly was revoked and they could be arrested for holding a public gathering. And so they started circling the central pyramid in the Plaza, the revered symbol of Argentina’s May 1810 Revolution.

And the next week, they were back again. By simple word of mouth their number had grown and one of the Mothers who was at that second meeting was Hebe de Bonafini from the provincial capital, La Plata, who was to eventually become the firebrand leader of the group. Before long, it had become widely known that the Mothers met every Thursday afternoon from 3:30 until 4:00 in Plaza de Mayo and walked around the May Revolution Pyramid.

The first person to make sure that this was widely known was my boss at the time, British-born newsman Robert J. Cox, editor of the English-language daily, the Buenos Aires Herald. Bob not only wrote about the Mothers (who, in the trans-Atlantic jargon of our paper became known as ‘The Mums’), but also started going as often as he could to the Plaza, to lend his moral support to the women. He encouraged those of us who worked with him to do the same. It was easy enough to do, since it was mostly a matter of just being there. At the time, the women’s gatherings were a great deal like the way migratory birds start flocking together in the autumn. At around 3:30 each Thursday they would enter the Plaza one at a time until a handful of them got together and started walking around the May Revolution monument, and then the others would join in. Most of us younger Herald staffers went from time to time. Some occasionally interviewed the Mothers, or even became friendly with them. Others, like myself, simply went to add strength in numbers to their cause and sat on park benches nearby, watching the movement grow in importance and effect, week after week, and seeing how we could work them into the stories we wrote for the foreign publications we were ‘stringers’ for.

Each week there would be new mothers and wives and brothers and sisters of missing people and each week there would also be new supporters who showed up to look on or to join in the march. Eventually, someone in the movement came up with the idea of the headscarves, first just white, then later with the names of the missing embroidered on them. Some of the Mothers also carried pictures of their missing children or wore images pinned to their blouses or wraps. This set the Mothers apart from the rest of the passers-by in the Plaza, and wherever those easily distinguishable scarves were, a handful of other people also gathered and risked being photographed by government agents that passed themselves off as reporters.

And there were indeed reporters. As the movement grew, so did coverage. And as he had done from the outset with the plight of the ‘disappeared’, Cox sought every opportunity to get the Mothers into the international media. His theory was that the more people around the world who knew about what was going on, the harder it would become for the ‘Process’ to keep grinding lives up in the cogs of its counterterror machine. So whenever international correspondents would pay a courtesy call to him at the Herald, he would ask if they had heard about the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and encourage them to visit the Plaza on Thursday.

By late 1977, the Mothers had managed to draw enough attention to themselves as to have the Junta take notice of them. But not the attention they were clamoring for. On December 10th (International Human Rights Day) the group published an ad listing the names of all of their missing children. That same night, a paramilitary death squad snatched Villaflor from her home in Villa Domínico (Avellaneda). Two other founding Mothers, Esther Careaga and María Eugenia Bianco, were also abducted. The military denied knowledge of their whereabouts. Like their children before them, they had joined the ranks of the ‘disappeared’ – the growing thousands of missing people that a sinister and cynical General Videla would describe by saying: “The missing are just that, missing. Neither alive nor dead. They’re not here. And if they’re not here, they don’t exist.”

Caption: On International Human Rights Day, December 10, 1977, Villaflor and two other Mothers joined the ranks of the 'disappeared'.

That, of course, was a lie. They did indeed exist, in over 300 concentration camps and safe houses around the country. And if they weren’t there, they were dead. But alive or dead, they still existed, every Thursday afternoon in Plaza de Mayo, when the Mothers and their supporters turned out to ensure that the public knew of their existence and to be a reminder to everyone that the same thing could happen to them or to their loved ones, that the greatest threat to the citizens of the country was their very own government. You didn’t have to be an armed terrorist to ‘disappear’. You only had to incur the wrath of the military or any of its powerful friends. Sometimes you didn’t even have to do that. Your name on the lips of a torture victim, your street and telephone numbers in the address book of a detainee were enough to earn you a blindfold and a ride in a government-issue Ford Falcon with no license plates.

Unlike many of the missing, who vanished without a trace, Azucena Villaflor’s fate, and that of the other two mothers who ‘disappeared’ with her, was found out. In 2005, the famed Argentine Anthropology Team (best known for having discovered the long lost body of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia, where he was summarily executed in 1967, thirty years before), on a search mission to find the bodies of Argentina’s ‘disappeared’, discovered three corpses, which they were later able to identify as those of Villaflor, Careaga and Bianco. All three presented the kind of bone fractures consistent with death by falling from a great height. Further investigation has led to the conclusion that they were probably detained at a clandestine torture and holding facility that operated at the Navy Mechanics School on posh Avenida Libertador in Buenos Aires, before then being placed on one of the regime’s so-called “death flights” in which prisoners were drugged, stripped and heaved out of aircraft into the ocean. Early on in the ‘Process’ bodies were also disposed of in the wide River Plate Estuary that separates Argentina from Uruguay, but prevailing currents meant that the corpses kept washing up on the Uruguayan shore and some less scandalous way had to be found to get rid of the mounting number of cadavers. The death flights over the Atlantic were one such solution, as was nocturnal incineration in the city crematorium at the sprawling Chacarita Cemetery.

That same year, at the Mothers’ 25th Annual Resistance March, Azucena Villaflor’s ashes were interred at the foot of the May Pyramid in Plaza de Mayo on her daughter Cecilia’s orders. Cecilia said: “Here is where my mother was born into public life and here is where she must stay forever. She must stay here for everyone.”

In looking back and commemorating the 33rd anniversary of the founding of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, I feel this is the point I want to make: that the founding idea of Azucena Villaflor and the women that joined her on that first march and the idea of the Founding Line of the Mothers never was one of specific political ideologies, of vengeance or of militancy under the flag of any political color. Their cause, and the one that made the Mother’s famous worldwide was that of decency, human rights and rule of law. Each woman to form part of the movement surely has had her own convictions and political bent. Only women of a strong and vibrant nature could have stood up to the years of abuse, arrests, threats and persecution that they had to endure to make their cause known. But just as surely, most of them have adapted or put aside the individual political axes they may have had to grind in order to be of undying service to their greater cause.

Caption: Hebe Bonafini

This has unfortunately not been the case of Hebe Bonafini. While no one can justly question the fearlessness, motivation, energy and strength she has shown in her three decades as a leader in the movement, she can indeed be almost solely blamed for the criticism of which the Mothers as a whole have become the target in the years following the end of the dictatorship. She has consistently alienated even many of those who championed the Mothers previously by being the first to believe in her own bigger-than-life status and believing that it gives her the right to state her own personal beliefs as if they applied to the Mothers as a whole. She has sought to align the Mothers with autocratic leaders like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, merely because they peddle ‘Marxist’ rhetoric while repressing their own people in much the same ways that the ‘Process’ did while supposedly “defending Western and Christian ideals”. She has distanced herself from the movement’s original humanity by publicly stating her satisfaction at hearing about the nine-eleven attack that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York killing thousands of innocent people, implying that it was a just act considering the thousands of civilians killed in successive US incursions into the Middle East. And so, through her, the discourse of the Mothers would appear to the general public to call for an eye for an eye, rather than rule of law and respect for human rights.

She has further created an almost ‘carnal’ union between the governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner and the Mothers Association, thus aiding and abetting the almost flagrantly autocratic Kirchners in waving the flag of human rights in the face of the world at large, while, at home, using gang tactics and boss rule to try and muzzle freedom of expression and distract attention from the rampant corruption that has been the hallmark of their reign.

The saddest part of this is not that Bonafini has discredited herself as a true defender of human rights, but that, in the process, she has sullied the reputation of one of the noblest institutions to emerge in Argentina’s recent history.

A Day of Remembrance

2010-03-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 34th anniversary of the coup d'état that ended the government of Argentine President María Estela Martínez ('Isabel') de Perón, on March 24, 1976, and of the start of the nearly eight-year reign of bloody dictatorial horror that followed. This is an excerpt from a book-length work that I am currently writing on my memories of those times, when I was a newsman with the Buenos Aires Herald.

Not Even a Fly

On the eve of the coup that ended Isabel Perón's government and marked the starting point for the bloody 'National Reorganization Process', a little man called Goyena who, officially speaking, was the Herald's 'man in Government House', walked into our already frantic newsroom, said, "Buenas tardes," walked over to where Editor Robert Cox was reading cables as they chattered out of the teletype machine, and in a loud clear voice announced: "Hello, Chief. I just want you to know that not even a fly is stirring."

Caption: The three members of the Argentine military junta that led the coup on March 24, 1976. Lt. General Jorge Rafael Videla (center), Admiral Emilo Massera (left) and Air Force General Orlando Agosti.

A couple of journalists who heard him guffawed. We had known for some time that a coup was in the offing and by that late hour of the eve of the coup, everybody in the media knew that tonight was the night. Cox just turned slowly and looked at the bearer of this news with an expression of something akin to awe on his face. He kept staring at him for a brief moment and the question on his lips was surely, "How in bloody hell can you hang around the Government House newsroom all day and have no idea what's going on?" But he didn't ask it. Always the English gentleman, he took the little envelope full of official press releases Goyena extended to him and said, "Thank you, Goyena. Thank you and good night."

Goyena, with the serenity of a simpleton said, "Good night everyone," and was off for home, mission accomplished.

But his reaction was not a lot different than that of the rest of the country. Since Perón's death, the country had been divided into a them-and-us mentality by which there was the government and its entourage that ruled and the people that did not and the trick was simply to try to avoid becoming a victim of the government. People lived their lives despite the government and sought ways to get around whatever ridiculous new action the State decreed while avoiding the eyes of its thugs that randomly roamed the streets in plate-less Ford Falcon Sprints, four or five to a car, door-to-door goons with sawn-off pump shotguns bristling from the windows. All they needed to change your whole life forever — or to end it — was an excuse and any excuse would do, even looking at them the wrong way. They reminded me of the gang of bandoleros in the western classic "The Magnificent Seven", heavily armed, ignorant scum that terrorized a little Mexican town until the city fathers finally had had enough and scraped up sufficient money to hire seven very scary American gunslingers to settle the score. Except that these guys were terrorizing a whole major city, an entire country, and had a whole government, the police and, yes, even the Army behind them. You weren't going to stop them by hiring Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen and company, no matter how fast they were on the draw. So the trick, as I say, was to avoid them.

Blending In

I had learned my lesson early on, some time before the coup, when I was still quite green. My wife and I had gone to a movie and when we came out of the cinema on stylish Avenida Santa Fe, one of these sinister Ford Falcons, heavy with goons and hardware was coasting slowly along the curb. All of the occupants but the driver were looking toward the crowd coming out of the cinema. The two closest to the curb leered out the front and back passenger windows at the girls in the crowd. I realized that they were 'cruising chicks' more than patrolling the streets. It wasn't as if they really believed they could pick one up on their own merit, but so what? They had the power to pick up whomever they pleased. If they saw a young woman they 'fancied' they could always take her in for 'questioning' and if her male companion protested, he could always end up 'resisting arrest'. At any rate, when I noticed that the two on the curb side of the car were looking my wife up and down while making barely veiled rude gestures and noises, I stopped, turned and stared at them as coldly as I could. I don't know what on earth I was thinking, but I was young, not long out of the U.S. Army, with my head full of fatuous North American ideas about citizen's rights, about the invulnerability of American citizens abroad, about never backing down no matter what the odds, and so I tried to stare the thugs down.

Well, that obviously didn't work. My wife was tugging at my sleeve and warning me in English to move on. "Don't look at them! Come on, let's go!" she hissed. But it was too late. All but the driver were suddenly out of the car, shotguns at port arms or 9-millimeter pistols in hand, hustling me up against a store front.

"Documento!" one of them shouted as they spun me around and muscled me up against the wall face first.

"He doesn't understand anything," Virginia was saying in Spanish. "He's American. He doesn't understand what's going on. He didn't know you were policemen. He's American," she kept saying more than anything else, I think, for the benefit of the little crowd that was gathering on the sidewalk around us, perhaps so that if we got hauled away, someone might call the American Embassy. I don't really know. It all happened very fast and was quite confusing but I didn't have an Argentine permanent residence ID yet and handed them my U.S. passport. It seemed to cool them down somewhat, as did the crowd of witnesses on busy Santa Fe, who were waiting around to see the outcome. After making us stand there for a few minutes several of the plainclothesmen started slowly making their way back to the car. On their way they addressed the bystanders saying, "What are you looking at? Move on! Circulate! Nothing's happening here."

Nothing was ever happening anywhere but things happened every day and when they did, people disappeared or died.

The one who remained, turned me back around and stood toe to toe with me, obviously looking at the full beard I had only recently grown after leaving my job at the hotel, where beards had been strictly forbidden. He got close enough to me that I could smell his sweat and said, menacingly, "If I see you with that beard again, I'll burn it off. Get rid of it or we might mistake you for a guerrilla." He slapped my passport up against my chest. I took it and he turn on his heel and went back to the car, which roared off up the avenue…

The trick, I learned, was to blend in, not to draw attention to yourself. If you did that and remembered the details of what you saw, you could be a good reporter. If you didn't, you could 'disappear'.

Coup d’État

I was reminded of that frightening personal experience on my way home that night in 1976, after I had headlined the March 24 Herald 'Tanks Roll Toward Buenos Aires' and put the paper's coup edition to bed. By the time that I saw the paper off, and hit the street, Isabel Perón had already been arrested and flown away from Government House by helicopter. That had happened at half past midnight, less than an hour before the paper was coming off the press and I left for home with a copy in my briefcase.

Already the downtown streets were firmly in the grasp of the Armed Forces. There were troops and trucks and jeeps on practically every corner. Soldiers in full combat gear, and slung with light automatic weapons were stopping cars and pedestrians and checking their identity papers by the beams of their flashlights. Those who had apparently failed to identify themselves properly were being herded aboard 5-ton trucks fitted with benches in their beds and with their back ends covered by canvas tarps. The Army had also commandeered some city buses that were being loaded with prisoners. In my young mind, it was a scene that was far too reminiscent of the World War II movies I had grown up on, in which the Nazis would raid an entire neighborhood, loading Jews, Gypsies and other 'undesirables' onto trucks similar to these, to drive them off to God-knew-where for extermination.

I was on foot, unable to find any sort of transport to take me home, and while it was an incredible opportunity to observe the movement in the streets in the early moments of the military takeover, I couldn't help also having an intuitive sense of sheer survival that kept urging me to cut and run in panic. The term 'bloodless coup' didn't at all prepare one's mind for the overwhelming military force that was out in the streets and the effect was chilling to say the least. I remember feeling glad that I was wearing a suit and tie and looking as respectable as possible and that I had my identity and permanent residence documents in order. I ended up having to make my way on foot for at least 20 blocks, during which I was stopped and frisked and asked for my papers no fewer than four times, also having to show my Herald ID to back my story about being out in the wee hours because I was a journalist and had just got off work. But I was eventually able to slip onto the side streets and catch a rogue cab that took me the rest of the way to my mid-town neighborhood.

State of Siege

In the frightening days of lawlessness in high places prior to the coup, people liked to console themselves with the thought that it couldn't happen to them. That if the stayed clear of 'politics' they would be safe. (Hence the brilliant line of a character accused of leftist sympathies in a novel by the late Osvaldo Soriano, who lived out the dictatorship, like many other Argentine artists and intellectuals, in exile: "I've never been involved in politics," says Soriano's character. "I've always been a Peronist"). And when someone went missing whose disappearance they couldn't explain, people sought to ease their own minds by, saying: "Well, if they disappeared, they must have been 'into something'." If that was a common attitude in the pre-coup days, it became broadly prevalent after the March 24, 1976 takeover.

The fact was, however, that the process by which people in Argentina 'disappeared' in those days of the 'state of siege' was vicious and almost random. And it turned even more random with the advent of military rule. Long before that time, Cox and (then-Herald news editor Andrew) Graham-Yooll had already begun to keep lists and to receive relatives of the missing at the Herald offices in order to document the cases. They still believed in the courts. And we all continued to cling to Justice as our last hope throughout the nearly eight years that the military dictatorship lasted. The judicial system was indeed flawed, but it was better than nothing and could sometimes be used to the disadvantage of the country's rulers, who were otherwise untouchable.

In order to at least vaguely protect themselves and the newspaper, Bob and Andrew required that the relatives who appeared at the paper to state their missing family members' cases file a writ of habeas corpus with the court before the Herald would publish a line about it. It was a tenuous maneuver at best under the state of siege in which all constitutional guarantees were suspended, but it was a way to at least be able to claim that the case was official and, thus, public knowledge. The Herald could avoid being accused of publishing false reports, since the information was culled from public court records. It didn't matter that, in point of fact, the process worked in reverse. Indeed, sometimes the filing of the habeas corpus functioned as the peg on which our story hung. Furthermore, it was a way of making the State, through the courts, recognize that people were going missing, even if nobody was about to do anything about it. The Herald, then, without really wishing to, became more than just a newspaper. It gradually turned into a kind of ombudsmen for the missing and their families, or at least a sort of 'scorekeeper' in what was to become known as the 'Dirty War'.

Cox never saw it that way, however. I once said something to him about the Herald's being 'a century-old institution'. He winced and said, "The Herald is a newspaper, not an institution. It's our job to report and if we can't do that, we might as well pack it in. But please don't call it an institution, Dan. Every time something gets called an institution, it's because it's already dead."

I stood corrected and on deeper thought, took that as my own credo: Who was the government, any government, to tell me what I could or could not say, if it was the truth? If I was a journalist, a chronicler, a writer, I was duty-bound to tell the truth as I saw it and report what I knew. Otherwise I had best shut up altogether.

Truth, obviously, was in very short supply both before and after the coup. The three-man Junta, made up of Army General Jorge Rafael Videla, Air Force General Orlando Agosti and Admiral Emilio Massera of the Navy, led the country to believe that they were a stopgap. Videla, leader of the strongest force and soon-to-be-president of the country, acted as the official spokesman for the Junta, assuring local and foreign journalists alike that his government was pro-democracy. He said that the situation had been intolerable under Isabel, that democracy had been severely endangered and that the purpose of the Junta was to shore up the country's damaged institutions, repress subversive activities and return power to the people's elected representatives, where it belonged. Considering the dire and dangerous times in which the country had been living prior to the coup, this sounded highly reassuring to practically everyone, and particularly to major local and international businesses. It was precisely what the country needed, big businessmen contended — to get reorganized, to change its faltering image, to get serious and buckle down, to get the trains running on time, so to speak.

Videla himself was, he suggested, a professional soldier and a patriot, a man bound to serve his country in any way he could. And the sooner he could do this job and get back to barracks, the better.

That was, basically, in fact, what Videla told Cox when the Herald editor had a first meeting with him. Bob approached Videla early on about the question of the 'missing'. Seeking to set the tone, Bob suggested that now that there was an organized, pro-democratic government in place, it might well be time to start bringing formal charges against the prisoners the government was taking and giving them a proper trial instead of continuing with this barbaric practice of making them 'disappear', a tactic that was obviously not democratic or even legal in any real sense. Failing this, he suggested, they should surely be released. Furthermore, something had to be done about what had become institutionalized torture as a method of interrogation for even the most circumstantial of detainees. Videla indicated that he was not in agreement with such tactics either. But of course, he claimed, “One gives orders and they are not always carried out in the manner that one might wish.”

Looking back, it was a lame, cynical, repulsive and outlandish answer, but one which, accompanied by assurances that everything possible was being done to remedy the situation, seemed to Cox, in those early days of the 'National Reorganization Process' to be sincere. I recall his telling me, when I asked how Videla had seemed to him, that the general appeared to be a basically decent and rather self-effacing fellow. I remember him describing Videla as somewhat cartoonish, rather like a rabbit that you could almost imagine lowering its ears in submission when you talked nicely to it or stroked its head.

"You know," said Cox, "that they call him the Pink Panther behind his back." And we both laughed about the moniker, because there was something about Videla's small head, thin neck, slicked-back hair and large rectangular moustache that indeed made him resemble that sympathetic cartoon character. Or at least it did until we all got to know him better. From then on, everything about him would start to look sinister and insincere.

It wasn't long before Cox learned to read the 'good cop' image that Videla tried to cultivate as a complete sham. He was clearly a cruel and ruthless dictator and this was not the benign caretaker regime that it had made itself out to be. In a subsequent meeting, feeling duped and angry, Cox told the general so. When el señor presidente started in again on his old saw about how orders were given in one sense and were carried out in another, Bob said that it was simply not an acceptable response anymore. People continued to be torture and killed and others were either being arrested by the score and held without formal charges or they were 'disappearing' altogether. As the visible head of a military government, Videla obviously had control over how the orders were carried out and if he wasn't doing anything about murder, torture and kidnapping, Cox indicated, it was because he bloody-well didn't want to.

Not Even a Mention

Obviously the mood of that meeting deteriorated quickly and from then on, Cox's contacts with the Junta were most frequently limited to the kind of calls newspapers got now and then in which the Editor would be 'invited' to 'have a cup of coffee' with this or that official. These were not social visits but thinly veiled reprimands for publishing items that displeased the country's rulers.

Perhaps the most blatant of these 'invitations' was from Admiral Emilo Massera's office. The Herald's editor was summoned for a time late in the afternoon. After cooling his heels in the waiting room for a very long time, Cox finally became impatient and told the admiral's assistant that he really couldn't wait much longer, since he had a paper to get out. The assistant took the complaint to Massera and returned telling Bob that the admiral would see him now. When Cox was led into the Junta member's sprawling office, he found several other men sitting in front of Massera's desk, evidently in the midst of a meeting. Nicknamed 'Popeye', obviously because he was 'a sailor man', but more because of the stubborn set of his lantern jaw, Massera forewent all niceties and said that he had just wanted to tell Cox personally that he didn't want him ever to mention him in the paper again. I don't think Bob was ever sure exactly what it was the admiral was upset about, but the demand obviously took him aback. He told Massera that it was an impossible request, that as a member of the Junta that was governing the country, his name was bound to come up quite frequently.

"Not even a mention, Cox," the admiral repeated. And then, as if he had just given an order to one of his subordinates, he dismissed Bob, letting him find his own way to the door.

Obviously, after hearing this story from Cox, we did indeed mention Massera's name. Probably quite a lot more than we might have otherwise. As we learned more and more about the Navy's role in the ever-increasing disappearances, it wasn't hard to figure out why this sinister 'Popeye' sought anonymity. There was never a more blatant symbol of the raw and unrepentant repression wrought by 'The Process' than the Navy Mechanics School, better known as the ESMA, an impressive public building on one of the most stylish avenues in the city. There military trucks repeatedly unloaded nameless scores of prisoners who would pass through the ESMA's doors, never to be seen again. It was clear proof that the Junta knew exactly what was going on, despite President Videla's repeated claims of ignorance. And it was proof too that Massera, at least, couldn't have cared less who knew it...as long as they didn't mention it.

A Belated Tribute to Robert Cox

2009-11-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, November 3, the Municipal Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires will honor Robert J. Cox as a Ciudadano Ilustre, which literally means 'renowned citizen' but which would be roughly the equivalent in the United States of being given "the key to the city".The reason that this honor is being granted to Cox - a British-born journalist who worked in Argentina for twenty years and who recently retired as Associate Editor of the Charleston Evening Post (South Carolina), where he was employed for nearly another three decades after being forced to leave Argentine - is in recognition of his work in the field of human rights.

Caption: Robert J. Cox today

The award may be thirty years late in coming, but better late than never. He has been honored in many other ways in the meantime - having been, for instance, a recipient of the Mary Moors Cabot Award for excellence in journalism, having been the Chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), and having also been elected that institution's President.

During the dark years of extremely repressive State counter-terror activities in Argentina, starting under the government of Isabel Perón in 1974 and continuing under the military regime that took power in 1976, Cox spent half a decade, until his decision, under extreme duress, in 1979, to go into exile in the United States, denouncing the kidnapping and disappearance (read: murder) of political prisoners without benefit of due process or civil rights of any kind. Thirty thousand such disappearances occurred in the brief period from 1975 to about 1980.

Cox went a lot further than simply reporting on these almost daily events that included not only kidnappings by paramilitary gangs, but also institutionalized torture, summary executions, the underground "adoption" of missing people's children, and a long list of other aberrant acts that no law-abiding, civilized society could possible tolerate.

Through the newspaper that he edited, the Buenos Aires Herald, he created a virtual "registry" of missing people and of acts of extreme violence perpetrated by a rogue de facto government against its own people, and any foreigner that got into its way. The Herald was singular in its action, giving faces, names, histories and families to those who disappeared, thus preventing each of them from becoming just one more nameless body ground up in the cogs of the State counter-terror machine.

But his work went beyond his role in the newspaper. Cox built strong ties with the foreign press and the diplomatic community, particularly with the US Embassy under the Jimmy Carter Administration, to begin increasing pressure on the military regime so as to force it to modify its barbaric policies and move toward a greater policial and judicial opening, while publishing articles in the press in the United States and Europe to bolster the effects of the Herald's human rights campaign.

And thanks to his efforts, and those of the staff members and friends that accompanied him in his fight, pressure was indeed brought to bear, becoming so great t hat the regime decided that, one way or another, Cox had to go. They tried arresting him, but the international outcry was so swift and powerful in coming that they had to let him go within 24 hours of his detention. And so they began a campaign of threats and terror against him and his family until finally, after his nine-year-old son, Peter, receive a personal letter telling him to get his daddy to leave 'or else', Cox decided it was time to put his family's welfare before his cause, and left.

Caption: A photo of Bob Cox much as he looked when I first met him, on the cover of Dirty Secrets, Dirty War, a book by Bob's son, David Cox, about his father's exile (Published by Charleston Evening Post with Joggle Board Press).

I was privileged during those five years from 1974 to 1979 to work for Robert Cox and to be able to stay on afterwards until the end of the military regime, as news editor and editorialist, seconding editor James Neilson in actively demonstrating that "getting rid of Cox" would not be sufficient to shut the Herald up or even to shut it down.

It was Cox who gave me my first chance to work in journalism and he too who was my mentor. Those five years in which I went from being a starting-level apprentice to being the newspaper's general news editor were my formative years as a journalist and writer, and they were years too in which I was able to count Robert Cox as both my teacher and my friend.

The following is an excerpt from a book-length work in progress that I am currently writing, the working title of which is "The Truth in Any Language". This is the section of the story in which I tell about how Bob Cox and I first met. I want to share it with the readers of my blogs and I heartily welcome your comments:

Armed then as I am today with three decades of experience, hundreds (thousands perhaps) of journalistic assignments under my belt and more rejections, too, than I care to recall, I never would have had the intestinal fortitude to impose my presence on a journalist of the austere eminence of Robert J. Cox. But at a brash 23, with a personal vision of my future laid out neatly in my mind as a sure road to success, I felt back in 1974 that I was owed a chance to prove my worth. And the fact was that the only show in town for an English-language 'wannabe' writer with a hankering for news-related experience was the Buenos Aires Herald.

I had already tried haunting the offices of the correspondents of the big U.S. publications and agencies — Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, AP, UPI, the New York Times and more — but to no avail. All of them either asked about my 'experience' or wanted to know what j-school I had gone to. Ultimately, to a man, they asked me if I had talked to "Bob Cox over at the Herald" yet.

Born in Hull, England, Cox had been recruited to the paper's ranks in 1959 as a copy-editor, but it was not long before his writing ability and news sense moved him up the ladder to news-editor. Founded in 1876, the Herald was one of Argentina's three oldest newspapers. Created as a maritime-oriented paper at a time of all but sovereign British power over Argentina's trade and transport interests, the Herald had gradually decayed, since the days of rekindled nationalist fervor in the 1940s and '50s, to become a rather pokey little rag serving the interests of what was left of an aging and shrinking English-language community.

In Buenos Aires, Cox had met and married his wife, Maude Daverio, a young lady of considerable status in Buenos Aires society, with whom he would have five Argentine children while rising to the post of Editor-in-Chief. Such strong ties to Argentina had already made the Herald his only viable source of full-time news work. Although he would also gain international prestige as an honored stringer for such sacred cows as Newsweek, the BBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times, among others. So it was that, by the time his predecessor, Norman Ingrey, retired in 1970, Cox was pretty much ensconced as a credible, savvy, foreign observer of political and social life in Argentina. His professional presence, in turn, was what kept the paper from sinking further and further into oblivion and dying what, otherwise, could only have been considered a natural death. As natural, surely, as the one the 'old school tie' Anglo-Argentine community was dying as its youth decided that they were less Anglo than Argentine and began wanting to 'mingle with the natives' in what clearly seemed to be shaping up as a post-colonial age.

Cox was aided in this task by the fact that at around this same time, the Charleston Evening Post Publishing Company (Charleston, S.C.) acquired about 60 percent of the Herald, which, since the 1920s, had been an (Anglo)-Argentine family-owned concern. There must surely have been some speculation at the time about why on earth the Charleston group would want a foreign white elephant like the Herald, but if so, it was only among observers who had never met Peter Manigault, then President of that media group and the moneyed son of the family that controlled it. A true Southern gentleman of urbane tastes and education, Manigault was also a bit whimsical. Add that to the fact that he dabbled in Spanish-language studies and loved South America and this was enough to provide him with all the justification he needed to purchase a quaint, colonial-style 'gem' like the Herald even if cynics must surely have asked themselves if it wasn't, perhaps, a tax write-off or something. At any rate, Manigault and Cox were to hit it off almost immediately — since if Manigault was uncommon, Cox was genuinely eccentric. And the friendship would certainly come in handy to Cox in the future when his authority was called into question by one on the local owners of the remaining 40 percent interest.

For now, however, in late 1973, when I first met him, Cox was the clearly over-extended Editor of a paper with plummeting advertising revenues and a shrinking readership. It could barely afford its skeletal staff and the third floor it rented in a shabby office building (that also housed the down-at-heel English Club) in what was then the red-light district near the port. As such, Cox could ill-afford the time or money to make any major changes in the paper itself. The result was a rather quirky, provincial, outdated, ill-proofed little 12 to 16-page tabloid with a wire-copy front and local news page, a few really good columns and stories provided by good-willed, ill-paid contributors and staffers, and an extraordinarily high-quality editorial page that made the rest of the paper look like a mere excuse to have a frame in which to publish it.

And that, in fact, was what it was fast becoming. Not that Cox wouldn't have liked to have professionalized it. He tried as often as he could to impress on his tiny staff the importance of dedication to objectivity and professional care, but he was obviously overworked and just as obviously more a writer than a hands-on editor, so he dedicated more and more time to chronicling the nightmare that was unfolding in Argentina on his editorial page and less and less to trying to extricate the rest of the paper from the malaise of routine mediocrity into which it had slumped and now wallowed.

Anyway, I simply decided one day to call the Herald and ask for an interview and, somewhat to my surprise, was given one for the following evening. When I arrived at 6 p.m., the advertising and administrative employees were bidding each other good night and leaving, as the editorial staffers were just arriving. There was no waiting room to speak of, just a green leather armchair wedged in at the end of the classified ads counter partially blocking the door to the editor's office and just a few feet from two big metal and translucent glass doors that bore a sign reading Editorial Department. I was asked to take a seat and wait. When the last of the clerks and ad reps had said good night and taken the elevator, a very prim, very English-looking woman with whom I had spoken on my arrival shut off all of the lights except for one just over my head and said, "He'll be with you in a moment." And then she added, "Good night," and followed her fellow workers down on the elevator.

I sat there alone for quite a long time with just the buzzing drone of the neon light to keep me company. Eventually, however, the double doors to the editorial department swung open and a pleasant-faced, rotund woman bustled through on her way to the restroom at the end of the hall. When she saw me, she stopped and said, "Hello, I'm Maggie," and extended her hand. I stood, shook it and said, "Hi, I'm Dan Newland."

"Does Bob know you're here?"

"I think so," I said a little dubiously. "He's been told."

"Have you been here long?"

I checked my watch. "About an hour," I said.

She said, "Just a minute," and went back the way she had come, through the editorial department. I could hear the teletypes and manual typewriters chattering away in her wake, before the heavy doors swung shut again behind her and wanted nothing more than to already be in there doing a job I knew I was made for. I sat back down but within an instant after Maggie had gone, the editor's door burst open and through it rushed a man with an almost wild look about him. His brow was furrowed in a look of genuine worry, his white dress shirt was wrinkled and perspired. He wore loafers, I noticed, that were in dire need of a shine and one was split along a seam so that you could see his bright red stocking through it, in sharp contrast to his conservative pinstriped trousers. He was slender and tallish and wore a full beard that was too neglected to be distinguished and his thinning dark-brown hair swirled in erratic tentacles around his head as if he were in the habit of running his fingers through it repeatedly, or had just been in a gale-force wind.

"So sorry, so sorry...must be Dan...Dan, isn't it? Yes...lost track of time, please come in...terribly sorry." he muttered almost under his breath as we shook hands.

His uneasiness was somewhat contagious and I nervously launched into my spiel as soon as we were seated, telling him my life story in five minutes or less: former professional musician, just out of the Army, three years with the Army bands, a little over one in Europe, married to an Argentine, always been a writer, what I want to do with my life, need a chance in journalism, fast learner, hard worker, etc., etc. But my uneasiness was hardly quelled by the surroundings. Cox's office was a truly extraordinary, almost horrifying place. The room was cramped, hardly executive dimensions, perhaps 12 feet by 7 feet, if that. The only light came from the bluish neon ceiling tubes, one of which hummed nerve-rackingly. Every square inch of counter, desk and table space was trembling under mountains of books, papers, magazines, wire copy, radio-photos and files. Stacks of them, piles of them, heaps of them, in no apparent order, almost as if a dump truck had simply avalanched it all into the room. There were heaps of papers on the floor against the wall, a stack on the chair in front of his desk that he cleared away for me to sit down, a mound on top of the radiator by the venetian-blinded window, a veritable landslide on the overstuffed green leather couch along one wall that dominated the tiny office and made Cox at his desk behind chin-high bales of paperwork look rather as if he had been bulldozed into a corner along with a load of wastepaper. The office bore no personal touches, no mementos, no hint of residence or proprietorship, except for the predominant influence of paper of just about every kind. En lieu of wall decorations, too, there was paper: rough drafts, printed articles, syndicated columns, notes, messages, invitation cards, scribbled reminders, underscored phone numbers and names, all scotch-taped to the plaster and all obviously pieces of information that were somehow more important to the editor than the general mounds of miscellaneous data that were heaped all over the rest of the room, and thus deserved a place of privilege on the wall, where he was sure to see them and perhaps recall whatever action it was that they merited. Finally, there was his "workstation", a weighty, battered Olivetti Lexicon manual typewriter. Parts of the machine's housing had been stripped away, obviously so that the user could tinker with it and make it work whenever it decided to pack up on him. It sat atop a ramshackle wooden typing table on wheels that had at one time been a fine piece of office furniture but that now listed in two directions, slightly west and dangerously north, so that it had to be propped against the only tiny piece of empty wall in the room in order to prevent it from simply keeling over and dying, taking the moribund Olivetti with it.

Cox had a polite and humble manner, not at all the kind of hard-nosed, disdainful cynic I had rather expected to meet. He listened patiently to my plea for a chance to "come in on the ground level" and "learn the trade". I added that he wouldn't be sorry, that I wanted to be a writer more than anything on earth and that I would be as dedicated as a monk. But while he was cordial and sympathetic, I noticed that sweat was beading on his brow, that he was almost compulsively scratching both of his forearms beneath the rolled cuffs of his shirt and that he kept glancing furtively over at the piece of letter-size, yellowed newsprint rolled into the Lexicon, where he had obviously been working on something when I arrived. It was calling him even now and he had to get back to it.

"Okay," I said, at last, "I've taken enough of your time. Please just tell me you'll give me a chance and I be on my way."

"Perhaps your could contribute..." he tried.

"No, Mr. Cox..."

"Bob, call me Bob."

"Bob, I want a full-time job. I want to be a newsman. I want to write for a living."

He looked a little pained, shook his head and said, "Look, Dan, this is a slave job. Nothing like what you'd expect. We do a little of everything here. And we all have to do other things outside the Herald. We write for papers abroad to make ends meet. This is very hard...a lot of sacrifice, and frankly, I simply don't have anything for you — for anyone — right now."

"Can I stop by now and then to see if something has opened up?"

He looked doubtful but said, "Yes, of course. Perhaps next time we can have a coffee at the bar around the corner. I'm just a little, uh, busy at the moment and uh..."

That was enough for me. I had his permission to come back. And come back I did — once every week or ten days for several months. Even though he sometimes had trouble restraining his irritation at my simply showing up unannounced, he seemed to admire my persistence. I would camp outside his office door for as long as it took. Sometimes he would say, "Sorry Dan, but I'm just too busy today," and I would smile and say, "No problem, see you in a few days," and leave, only to return as promised. It seemed to make him feel guilty when he rejected me and the next time he would be extra polite and we would have a cup coffee at one of the bars nearby and talk for awhile about journalism and what was going on in Buenos Aires and how Perón's return was affecting the country and about our favorite authors, and so on.

I eventually contributed a couple of very lightweight vignettes to a weekend editorial page section called Saturday Sidelight, where just about anything went, but Cox liked them and assigned me a research article on the quagmire of identity documents, work visas and travel permits invented as bureaucratic stumbling blocks by the government and about which I was accumulating abundant personal experience. But still, no job. This went on for about six months, and although I felt that, to a certain degree, he and I had become friends, I eventually lost hope that Robert Cox was ever going to give me a job. So I quit going to visit him at the Herald, simply resigned myself to having to continue to rent cars for Avis while working on my writing and hoping for the best.

It wasn't three weeks before the phone rang at home one evening and my wife told me with no little excitement in her voice that it was Robert Cox on the line.

"Hello, Bob," I said. "What a surprise!"

"Yes, uh, Dan, uh, just calling to see if you're all right."

"Well, of course I'm all right. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Yes, well, bad times and all, so dangerous for foreigners you know, and you haven't been by lately, I thought perhaps something..." he trailed off.

"Listen, Bob," I said. "I like you well enough, but did you really think I was just dropping by for coffee every week? I want a job in your newspaper. I want to be a journalist. Understand?"

"Uh, yes, well, pop by next Monday then...may have something for you. Cheers."

And there I stood still holding the phone, thinking, "Hey, did I dream this or did I just land a newspaper job?"

The Sonia Factor

2009-08-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

Unless a couple of dozen US senators lose their minds at the last minute and vote against their own conscience, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor will make history today by becoming the first Hispanic Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and only the third woman to ever hold that august office.

Republican “anti-Sonia” hardliners, meanwhile, will have sealed their fate by not only alienating the Hispanic constituency (an ever-burgeoning segment of the public, with the Latin population now numbering over 42 million in the United States), but also by locking themselves into their ever more clear-cut image as knee-jerk reactionary dinosaurs wading deeper all the time into the tar pits of their own prejudices.

Try as they might, opposition senators have been unable to dig up any dirt that will stick to the brilliant 55-year-old jurist’s impeccable image. The only arguments that they have been able to raise in the grueling nomination hearings have been superficial to say the least. Every point of debate made against Judge Sotomayor has appeared subjective, involving issues that have seemed to be merely her word against that of the hardliners. They have accused her on the basis of a handful of rulings in her 17-year career on the Federal bench in which they argued that her decisions have disregarded such things as gun rights – as espoused, it bears saying, by the powerful National Rifle Association, not as stated in the Constitution – property rights and job discrimination claims by white employees. But while the opposing senators have continued to hammer on these issues, Sonia Sotomayor has been able to argue in all cases that her decisions stood on legal precedent, and hardliners have been unable to prove her wrong.

Moreover, the three-quarters of the Republicans in the Senate who are expected to vote against Judge Sotomayor have demonstrated in these hearings that their decision to do so is purely political and has more to do with racial issues and wanting to hurt President Obama than with safeguarding the country’s highest court. This is easy to see if you bear in mind that some of her harshest critics prior to the hearings – such as South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who grilled her mercilessly and hostilely in the hearings – have now declared that they will vote in her favor. Her brilliant performance under fire has obviously been the key to swaying these votes.

Republican Kit Bond of Missouri bluntly chided his fellow party members saying that partisanship had no place in debates over judges, adding that, "There's been no significant finding against her, there's been no public uprising against her…I will support her, I'll be proud for her, the community she represents and the American dream she shows is possible."

All things considered, the entire argument against her confirmation, then, has boiled down to a 2001 speech the judge made in which – in a rhetorical twist which even she has admitted was unfortunate – she said that she hoped a “wise Latina” would be able to make better decisions than a white male. Clearly, this was a statement that, if indeed public, had nothing to do with any decision of her court or with her investiture as an official of the Federal Justice System.

Furthermore, much has been made of this snippet of Judge Sotomayor’s statement, but little indeed of the context. First, the venue: The judge was speaking at the University of California at Berkeley, as a guest speaker for a symposium entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation”. The whole point of the speech within the context of such a specific event was for her to illustrate precisely how her ethnic background affected her as a person, a woman, a professional and a judge. It was a personal and somewhat emotional speech in which she pointed out that while she was an American, born and raised in New York City, she was also an American who liked “morcilla and garbanzos”, whose tastes were not only not like those of white mainstream Americans but also not even like those of Mexican Americans. Rather, they were the tastes of a “niuyorican” [New York Rican] a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, whose education was definitively mainstream, but whose background was specifically Hispanic and even more specifically Puerto Rican, within the melting pot of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic culture like that of the United States.

And then there is the specific context of the controversial phrase within the speech itself. Here’s what she actually said: “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences…our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life…Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case.”

This obviously had a positive spin. What she was saying was that diversity was a good thing – something hardliner fundamentalists disagree with, which is precisely what makes them hardliners and fundamentalists – that people with rich life experiences and a more ample view of society and life might well be better equipped to make insightful and judiciously compassionate decisions than those who had led a relatively sheltered or highly indoctrinated existence. She was not, as Republican hardliners tried to make it sound, saying that she could out-think any white man, just because she was Hispanic.

To be familiar with some 450 Federal Court decisions handed down by her, as the senators were, and pretend that this one statement disqualified her was mean-spirited at best and discriminatory at worst – besides being just plain ludicrous and stupid. So much so, that it belies any claim of objectivity these senators could possibly offer and makes manifest the fact that they simply felt threatened as white males by this “uppity Latina”. Far from making her eat her words, however, they made her point by showing just how obtuse a group of powerful white male elitists could be.

The point is that if Sonia Sotomayor had been an Italian-American or an Irish-American, or a German-American, for instance, this type of issue would never have come up in a confirmation hearing. Yet all three of these other ethnic groups saw other moments in the evolution of American society in which their ethnicity might have been questioned or have precluded them from participation at such levels. The triumph of Judge Sotomayor’s appointment, when it comes, is enhanced by the fact that her ethnic group is one that has still not been fully accepted by the American establishment. Her struggle to win a spot on the Supreme Court bench, then, brings to light underlying racial prejudices that still require treatment in the United States. And her victory will have brought the US a step closer to being a truly open society, in deed and in spirit, rather than merely in the letter of the law.

‘Wise Latina’ Proves Simply Brilliant

2009-07-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Caption: Judge Sonia Sotomayor (Official White House Photo)

Hey, do you hear that? Me either…That’s the sound of Judge Sonia Sotomayor NOT making headlines. Yesterday morning was the first time in days that President Barack Obama’s controversial pick for the Supreme Court – the first nominee for the high court named by a Democrat in 15 years and the first Hispanic appointee in history – wasn’t leading the news schedules.

I have to admit that, at first, I found the silence eerie and a bit disquieting. But then I checked around a little and figured it out: The usually flamboyant jurist, whose blunt comments have openly rankled conservative white Republican senators had handled herself with such admirable restraint as she stood up to grueling interrogation starting on Monday of this week, that by the end of the week she had successfully “underwhelmed” everybody. No longer even a headliner, she appeared to be on a course toward sure approval, no matter how hard far-right holdouts tried to delay the inevitable. In fact, one could say that, by now, if by some Republican-hardliner “miracle” she were not confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, it would be one of the greatest travesties in the history of Senate oversight.

All week long, in the Senate hearings to decide whether or not lawmakers would honor the President’s wish for her to become one of the nine justices charged with the task of making the country’s most difficult legal decisions, Democrats sought to raise a protective net around Judge Sotomayor, while Republican opponents to her appointment attacked her with rabid enthusiasm, gnashing away at her to see if they could get her to show what they had speculated were her “true colors”.

Before the 17-year veteran of the Federal Courts had ever gotten to the confirmation hearings, far-right senators and news commentators had already done their best to characterize her as a hothead, an activist, a reverse-racist, an over-emotional and perhaps even dangerous Latina of far-left persuasions, who decided cases based more on her gut than on the law. By the time Judge Sotomayor settled into the appointee’s seat before the panel of Senate ‘inquisitors’, a number of mainstream Americans were probably a little surprised that she didn’t arrive wearing olive drab fatigues and puffing a Cuban corona.

But the public hearings put that myth to rest immediately – or rather, Judge Sotomayor’s stunning performance before the hearing committee did. If she was any of the things far-right Republicans tried to lead the public to believe she was with their racist, sexist, paranoid gossip, there was never a glimpse of it all week. In fact, she received and answered (or sidestepped answering) all of their accusatory grilling with serenity, logic, grace and eloquence, demonstrating herself to be the well-focused and utterly brilliant jurist and intellectual that she is.

It was surely clear to no few objective observers that the most fervent of her opponents came to the hearings with an at least pre-conceived if not downright prejudiced bias against her. Their line of questioning made that fairly easy to see. For instance, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham saw nothing wrong with reading out a list of anonymous insults – more than criticisms - from alleged jurists who “knew” Sotomayor. Or did the senator just make them up himself? Anybody who has taken Journalism 101 knows that if you’re going to hurl accusations you had better have the sources to back them up. And in a court of law, Graham’s assertions would certainly have been referred to as “unsubstantiated hearsay” designed to bias the jury.

He claimed he knew of people who had called her “nasty”, “a bit of a bully”, a “terror” and “lacking in judicial temperament”. Graham then asked her if she thought she had a “temperament problem”. (This was tantamount to classic loaded questions of the sort of “Is it true that you’re no longer a drunk?”).

But even as insulting and gratuitous as Graham’s line of sophomoric questioning was, you could almost feel the yogini-like ooooooooooommmmmmmm vibrating in the jurist’s chest as, without allowing a flicker of the irritation she must have felt show on her face, she calmly answered, “No, sir, I can only talk about what I know about my relationships...” adding that she was on cordial terms with those she considered her colleagues, and going on to say, “…when I ask lawyers tough questions, it's to give them an opportunity to explain their positions on both sides and to persuade me that they're right.”

Obviously miffed that he couldn’t get a rise out of her, Graham, himself a lawyer, came back at her again saying, apropos of nothing, “I never liked appearing in court before a judge I thought was a bully.” To which Judge Sotomayor said that she did indeed ask attorneys tough questions, but that she did so even-handedly, on both sides of each case.

Prior to the hearings, Graham had been quoted as telling Sotomayor that “unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to be confirmed.” He was apparently trying to provoke just such a ‘meltdown’, but his attempt – clumsy and unsophisticated - was frustrated. In the end, the one who seemed rattled was the senator himself as he churlishly and condescendingly said that perhaps the hearings would provide Judge Sotomayor with “a time for self-reflection”. Nor was it the only time he sought to treat Sotomayor as his inferior. Twice he asked her if she recalled her now famous “wise Latina” remark (which, she had already explained, had been taken out of context and had been meant as a rhetorical device in a debate situation), then calling on her to recite it for the senate panel. When she hedged the second time he said he “had it right here” did she want him to read it? And he proceeded to do so. But to what end, other than harassment and attempted character assassination was anyone’s guess.

Clearly, the only bully in this case was Senator Graham, who seemed to be making a puerile attempt to get back at all those judges of the past that he had just admitted being scared to face in court. And like all bullies, he ended up looking flustered and foolish and decidedly un-gallant when faced with someone of true strength and self-confidence.

Earlier in the week she had also shown this strength when senior Republican committee member and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions badgered her about the same “wise Latina” remark from a 2001 speech she had made and tried to tie this alleged “attitude” to how she would rule in cases with racial implications. She said that it had been a rhetorical device gone awry and indicated that her rulings as a judge were clearly based on the law and not on anything else. The indication was that her record spoke for itself. In further questioning about racial profiling which was also linked to fears of terrorism that have been rampant in the United States ever since the nine-eleven Twin Towers attack, Sotomayor referred to a World War II Supreme Court decision that upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans saying that the decision had been wrong. Considering the obvious parallel with present attempts to combat terrorism, she also explained how current courts could keep from repeating the mistakes of World War II. In conclusion she said: “A judge should never rule from fear. A judge should rule from law and the Constitution.”

By the end of the week Senator Sessions was showing no further interest in blocking Sotomayor’s appointment and even said, “I look forward to you getting that vote before we recess in August.” And Lindsey Graham had gone as far as to say that he “might even vote” for her, stating that her decisions as a judge had been “generally in the mainstream”, an impression echoed by Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

In the end, the conservative Republican committee members’ line of questioning showed that their doubts were obviously more about their own racial bias and unfounded fears than about the judge’s judicial record or her outstanding qualifications as a jurist. And throughout the questioning, Sotomayor consistently managed to underscore the fact that she was precisely what she had had to apologize for being all week long: a “wise Latina” and a brilliant professional, clearly suited to the Supreme Court seat.

Sonia Sotomayor: Does White Make Right?

2009-07-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

Caption: Judge Sonia Sotomayor. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).

US Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has just had a lightning-bolt revelation. Namely, that President Barack Obama’s candidate for the Supreme Court, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is “out of the mainstream”...

I’ll wait a moment for the applause to die down before I go on.

You kind of have to figure that if Senator Sessions is just now noticing this about the New York-born Hispanic judge he either wasn’t listening before or he is just hopelessly obtuse. Well, of course, then there’s the other possibility: that he’s just now bringing it up and saying it on a nationwide news broadcast because he is still hoping against hope to hurt the 55-year-old jurist in the her confirmation hearings that started today, July 13.

One of Judge Sotomayor’s most avid defenders in the Senate, Democrat Patrick Leahy, has sought to show that the scare tactics the Republican opponents to the nomination are using are clearly unwarranted. The Associated Press has quoted him as stating that "…in truth, we do not have to speculate about what kind of a justice she will be because we have seen the kind of judge she has been. She is a judge in which all Americans can have confidence. She has been a judge for all Americans and will be a justice for all Americans…"

Leahy was talking about Sotomayor’s 17-year career as a Federal Judge, an achievement in itself considering that when she rose to the Federal bench she was approximately a decade and a half younger than most jurists are who receive that honor. Leahy stated that her record in the Federal Courts proved that she was “mainstream”.

Senator Leahy is also missing the point, however. Sonia Sotomayor is not mainstream. Not by a long shot. If her nomination makes it through the Senate hearings, she will be only the third woman ever to reach that august post, following the appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 and that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (currently serving) in 1993. She will also be the first Hispanic ever to sit on the Supreme Court bench and only its third minority member in history, sharing this well-deserved honor with Thurgood Marshall (first African American, appointed in 1967) and Clarence Thomas (the only serving black Justice, appointed in 1991). But apart from these obvious differences between Judge Sotomayor and other select jurists who have acceded to the highest court in the land, there is her own personal style to be considered. Sotomayor’s absolutely stunning honesty and audacious directness are what have gotten her into trouble with traditional white male conservative opponents. They question her statements regarding her Latin-ness, about the ability of a “wise Latina” to perhaps make clearer-cut decisions than some white males. And they have strived to connect her straightforward way of talking with her court’s decisions that they have attempted to brand as unfair, when, in fact, if they have erred at all, they have done so on the side of justice for all.

The fact is that what opponents are seeking to pass off as “weaknesses” in the argument for her appointment to the Supreme Court are really among Sonia Sotomayor’s strengths. Saying what the public wants to hear and making judgments according to popular belief rather than being true to oneself and one’s values and making decisions based on sound legal and ethical analysis is not what a Supreme Court justice should be known for, nor should running with the pack.

That Judge Sotomayor is capable of seeing the world from an angle other than that of the head-on mainstream should, in fact, be considered a welcome addition to the Justice system in the United States. Clearly, as a human being, no judge, no matter how lofty a position he or she attains, can see cases without doing so through the filter of their own upbringing, education and ethnic background. While it is their duty to be objective, it is their burden but also their virtue to be able to apply what they know about themselves and their own lives to the decisions they make and the opinions they give. And one would like to think that they are appointed, among other reasons, precisely because of their personal virtues.

The arguments that have been presented against Judge Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court, while dressed up in the guise of judicial issues, have been clearly racist and sexist in their underlying tone. Many mainstream, white, conservative Americans would probably like to continue to think of the Supreme Court as nine gray-headed, grumpy old white men, there to preserve and defend to the death the white Anglo-Saxon Puritan heritage that they would like to perceive as the “real heart and soul” of America. And these people tend to find Sotomayor downright “uppity”. But the truth is that the United States is an immigrant melting pot and that it has been this highly creative life-force that has been responsible for a large proportion of the country’s development and strength, its amazing diversity and its incredible adaptability. Never has this been truer than today, when in just a few short decades, the Hispanic population of the United States has gone from a scant 9 million to more than 45 million today, with projections for as many as 100 million US Hispanics to be living in the country by 2050.

Presuming that Judge Sotomayor should have to “answer for” her ethnicity and gender as an Hispanic woman is unquestionably gender and race-driven. For her opponents to try and pretend that race only enters into the issue in as much as Sonia Sotomayor is viewed as a “racist Latina” is truly hypocritical. Would they permit themselves to be questioned regarding their pride at being of “traditional” white origin or as a result of their making decisions that reflect their own ethnic background? And if not, does their “whiteness” somehow place them in the permanent position of inquisitor rather than respondent?

Fortunately, her approval appears almost assured even if it is highly improbable that she will win the approval rating of her white women predecessors, Sandra Day O’Connor, who received a Senate approval vote of 99 to 0, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who was sworn in after a vote of 96 to 3. In the end, however, the outcome of the vote matters little, as long as it is positive, thus permitting the United States to enjoy the advantage of having a brilliant jurist with a fresh take on major issues sitting on its highest Court.

The Temptations of Torture

2009-05-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

US President Barack Obama has been quite clear as regards his stance on waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”: He considers them torture, plain and simple, and under his presidency, the United States will refuse to condone torture under any circumstances…period.

So why does the debate continue about whether or not the United States government can or cannot apply torture under certain circumstances (in which, far-rightwing commentators and torture proponents would have us believe, the ends justify the means)? Why do reporters from rightwing news media continue to hound President Obama on the subject, as if his answer to torture required justification, as if he were the one who was somehow unethical for defending the non-use of torture? Answer: Because certain officials and advisers of the former administration, who decided that they possessed the power to throw more than two centuries of American ethics regarding the inalienable and universal rights of Man out the window may now have to answer for their unmitigated arrogance and absence of moral character. And the possibility that high-ranking officials (including former presidents of the United States of America) might someday be called upon to be accountable for the questionable decisions they make, scares the daylights out of the far right. Why? Because the far right believes in central power, in some people’s being “more equal” than others, in certain rights only applying to “people like oneself”. And they had long sought a leader that was less interested in doing what was right than in doing “whatever it took”, a leader who thought that he was above the law and the Constitution, a leader who would give in to the temptations of torture, the temptations of lawlessness, the temptations of the “hanging judge” mentality of the Old West, a leader who felt that the “expediency” of vigilante “justice” was preferable to the preservation of the highest ideals of a nation that was once the shining beacon of individual and collective rights and the worldwide defender of democratic rule.

And they found that leader in the person of George W. Bush, who wasn’t averse to giving the “great unread”, movie-culture masses the fantasy they longed for: the one that says, what if there weren’t any rules and you could do whatever you wanted to the “bad guys”? The fantasy that justifies the actions of the “Dirty Harries”, and the “Rambos”, who, from the silver screen, teach the public that there’s a point at which the law no longer works and you have to take justice into your own hands.

Tyranny by Any Other Name

Most of us have that fantasy at one point or another. It is almost natural for us as individuals to have such fantasies and even for us to occasionally be tempted to act them out by getting mad and getting physical. (I myself, in this sense, do not hold myself up as an example, notorious hothead that I am). But in order for civilized society to function properly, the law and its representatives must be coldly, clearly and objectively above such feelings and the system must be devised in such a way as to ensure that officials, including the President – perhaps even especially the President – act not as individuals, but as the worthy representatives of the law, and the keepers of the morals and ethics of the nation. If not, if it becomes the attitude of the Executive that rules are made to be broken, then mob justice will simply run amok and civilization and rule of law will be such in name only, a caricature cited for effect in political rhetoric, because it is the law that is the framework for civilization and if the law and the ethical standards of a people are only applied “when they are convenient”, then they become nothing more than an expression of good intentions. And, in the end, unless they are systematically preserved as inviolable, their application is only as effective as the individual in charge at any given time. So applied (or not), ethical and legal standards eventually cease to exist. They become obsolete and are replaced by the arbitrary decisions of the powers that be.

There is a name for this state of affairs: It is called tyranny. Here, I speak not from a textbook, but from experience, having lived through a decade of this kind of authoritarianism in Argentina back in the mid to late1970s and early ‘80s. Based on that experience – back in the early days of Bush’s war on terrorism, when Guantánamo first became an issue, and when perhaps the greatest living American statesman, Jimmy Carter, was one of the few people speaking out against the holding of political prisoners without trial on the offshore US base – I had an unexpected clash with a friend, an intellectual for whom I have the highest respect, who is as bi-cultural as I myself am – a sort of reverse of my own experience, his having been born in Buenos Aires and then having spent many years living in New York. In the midst of an otherwise friendly phone conversation, I stated my opinion that what was happening in the United States, in view of the special powers the Bush government had granted itself following Nine-Eleven, had clear parallels with what had happened in Argentina (as well as in Chile and Uruguay, for example) in the 1970s.

To my surprise, my friend couldn’t figure out what I was taking about. Well, I explained, suspension of civil and human rights, detention without trial at the disposal of the Executive Branch, military council’s of war instead of proper trials, the use of coercion and mental and physical abuse to elicit confessions, etc., etc. All of those things that the military junta imposed and that, back then, would have been inconceivable in the USA, were now a part of accepted US policy. What the United States is living through, I said, are the early stages of authoritarian rule. My friend found this funny, crazy even. He laughed. Treated me with the condescension reserved for imbeciles and madmen. It wasn’t like that, he insisted. He lived in New York. He knew what he was talking about. I was “misinformed”. It was just these terrorist guys that they were holding, nothing more. It wasn’t as if the whole system were jeopardized.

Frankly, I was shocked that he failed to see the comparison, since he was an expert in political science. Because the very same arguments were used here in Argentina to justify the abuses of power and sidestepping of the law and of the Constitution indulged in by the supposed “defenders of democracy” that stepped in to “save the Republic” in this country in 1976. And at the time, a very broad spectrum of the public agreed that in order to fight terrorism you had to throw the rulebook out the window. But in the end, it would become clear to the majority of Argentines – although the far right here as in the United States, still clings to the idea of the ends justifying the means – that defending democracy and rule of law by suspending them and applying a greater lawlessness to the battle against outlaws was tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bath water. If a single person’s rights were violated, everyone’s rights were violated. Because if it could be done to one today it could be done to all tomorrow.

The arguments applied by the so-called National Reorganization Process in Argentina for methods that were clearly at odds with international standards of decency and respect for human rights and jurisprudence, as well as with the country’s own Constitution and Bill of Rights, were very much like those quoted by the Bush Administration: the existence of aggression by a “non-Western and un-Christian enemy with ties to hostile foreign powers”, the need to fight fire with fire in the kind of “dirty war” waged by lawless terrorists, the “unfortunate reality” of “collateral damage” in confrontations of this kind, the practicality of applying “extraordinary means”, justified by the greater good of saving innocent lives through “expedient preventive action”, the justification of “extraordinary powers” being assumed by the Executive Branch so as to not “tie the hands” of government in the face of a clear and present danger to “the values and way of life of an entire nation”.

But in Argentina, what this led to, in the end, was institutionalized State terror, in which tens of thousands of people were tortured, most of the time simply to “see if they knew anything” rather than based of any proper intelligence, with the “evidence” wrung from non-person prisoners by means of water torture, electric shock, beatings, extreme humiliation, drugs and so on being used to justify the detention and torture of still other thousands, with this in turn leading to the summary executions of as many as 30,000 people still referred to simply as “the missing”.

At this juncture, when the far-right is very vocally accusing President Obama of being soft on terrorism and of endangering the United States by not doing as the Bush Administration did and pretending that the Bill of Rights and the human rights treaties signed, often promoted and once-championed by the US government are non-binding suggestions rather than inviolable statements of principle, it almost seems ironic that one of the main factors in stopping the slaughter in Argentina was then-President Jimmy Carter’s insistence on respect for human rights among all countries that sought friendly ties with Washington. With what face could the United States have judged any other country’s treatment of suspects and prisoners under the Bush Administration? And as a world leader, is this the face that the people of the United States wish the Nation to have: that of a country that condones torture and is not averse to suspending rule of law for the sake of expediency; that of a country that applies one law to certain of its citizens and another to others, or that is exceptionally lawless and cruel in dealing with its prisoners of war, no matter what their nationality may be. And if this is indeed the image we are willing to accept, then, what will be the extent to which we can express outrage when our own citizens are treated with brutality when captured?

A Case in Point

The question is: Can democracy, constitutionality and rule of law escape unscathed from attempts to “work around them”? Once a rule has been broken, is it ever “hard and fast” again? And if not, if every time a single man (in this case, the President of the United States), decides that a situation warrants a constitutional “time-out”, of what use is the law and democracy as our forefathers conceived it? And if the Executive has the power to switch the legal rights of individuals on and off like artificial light and effective darkness, then what is the difference between that and authoritarianism – indeed, between that and tyranny?

Almost as controversial as the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy is the case of the late Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro (b.1916 - d.1978). Moro was a high-profile Italian politician who twice served as the country’s premier (1963-1968 and 1974-1976). On the ever-volatile Italian political scene, he was the country’s longest serving post-war leader and one of the most important figures in the Christian Democracy Party. He was an intellectual and was considered a skilled and patient mediator.

In March of 1978, members of the Red Brigades communist terror organization kidnapped Moro, demanding the release of jailed terrorist leaders in exchange for his freedom. The government took a hard line making, it clear that it refused to deal with terrorists. Despite appeals from Moro’s family that the government save him by any means necessary, the government maintained its position. In view of the government’s refusal to negotiate, the Vatican intervened, with Pope Paul VI calling on the Red Brigades to unconditionally release the former prime minister. When this didn’t work, the Pope offered to take Moro’s place as the terrorists’ hostage if they would agree to the politician’s release. Nothing worked, and after holding Aldo Moro for 54 days, his kidnappers murdered him and left his body in the trunk of a car parked on a street in Rome.

There is now speculation that, despite the fact that the Red Brigades were almost surely involved in the kidnapping and murder, there was collusion with others who stood to gain from his death, including US and other interests in NATO and Moro’s successor and co-party member, Giulio Andreotti. Moro and Andreotti were from different factions of the Christian Democrats. While Andreotti was strongly rumored to have ties to both the CIA and the Italian and US Cosa Nostra and, as such, to be radically anti-communist, Moro, ever the mediator, saw the advantage of bringing members of Italy’s then-influential Communist Party into a coalition government. According to statements attributed to Moro’s widow, the former premier had received such strong warnings not to pursue this idea from U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Nixon Administration) that he had, at the time, become frightened and ill and had considered leaving politics altogether. The ties between Moro’s assassination and Andreotti came up in a trial against the Andreotti years later for the murder of yet another politician and for his alleged Mafia ties. Andreotti was found guilty on a prosecution appeal and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, but the decision was later overturned in a defense appeal, and to this day, the former Prime Minister (now aged 90) sits in the Italian Parliament with the title of Senator for Life.

While interesting and revealing, these facts are not, in themselves, the point. What is germane, however, is that despite the extremely high profile and importance of the Moro abduction and in spite of the political machinations behind it, government and security officials at the time refused to bend the law to fit their political needs. Italy’s staunch pro-human rights stance remained firm despite the formidable threats posed at the time by the Red Brigades on the one hand and the long-standing Mafia on the other. When it was widely suggested that certain political-profiled prisoners’ feet should be put to the coals in order to expedite the investigation and secure the immediate release of the former prime minister, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa – a ranking officer in the Italian Carabinieri and one of the architects of the country’s anti-terrorist policies and enforcement strategies – is quoted as having responded: "Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

But Does It Work?

Torture as an interrogation technique is highly questionable, not only from a moral and ethical standpoint but also with respect to its actual efficacy. Here in Argentina false leads gained through torture were, perhaps, the singlemost cause for the subsequent torture and summary executions of other people who were absolutely innocent of any links with terrorism. Torturing someone beyond all boundaries of human resistance while repeating a question or demand obviously begs an answer – whatever answer pops into his/her head – from the torture victim. In Argentina, it was reportedly not uncommon for interrogators to simply repeat, “I want a name! A name! A name!”, while punctuating each demand for a name with a blow from a nightstick, a kick in the ribs or a punch in the face. After long minutes of mistreatment, prisoners would obviously come up with a name…any name: an rival, a casual acquaintance, their landlord, their boss, any name at all that might stop the abuse.

Or in other words, such unsophisticated techniques often lead to bad intelligence. And experienced intelligence agents and military interrogators in the United States are not unaware of this. There is reason to believe that intelligence professionals may well have been bullied into using the techniques by political officers in the Bush Administration, judging from reports that show that more than a few of them have left little doubt that they find torture an unreliable tool for extracting sound information.

In 2005, the New York Times quoted CIA Inspector General John Helgerwon as saying in a 2004 report that the so-called EITs (advanced interrogation techniques) “appeared to constitute cruel and degrading treatment under the [Geneva] Convention” – an international treaty that the United States has waved in the faces of its enemies in successive wars when these foreign powers have mistreated US captives.

Former CIA officer Bob Baer is reported to have told ABC News that torture made for “bad interogation”. He said: “I mean, you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture’s bad enough.”

Another former CIA officer, Larry Johnson, who also served for a period as Deputy Director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Office wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “What real field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust…than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets.”

ABC and other media have quoted CIA sources as saying that certain presumably crucial information extracted from Libyan-born al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh al Libi through torture ended up being proven false. Al Libi was subjected to the whole battery of progressively harsher “enhanced interrogation techniques” over a two-week period, and finally broke after being waterboarded and left to stand naked overnight in a cold cell, while being periodically hosed down with cold water. The statements he gave under duress where largely the basis for the Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq possessed biochemical weapons and trained al Qaeda members in their use. In other words, his confession was a major plank in the administration’s platform for launching its attack on Iraq. It was later established by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that Al Libi really had no such knowledge and had only told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear – either to purposely mislead them or simply in order to make the torture stop.The DIA said in an official report that the Libyan’s statements were “unreliable”, since he could provide no further details to corroborate his confession resulting from torture.

Justice Where Justice Is Due

President Obama has been criticized for leaving the decision as to whether to try officials who condoned and ordered torture under the Bush Administration to Justice and the Courts.

Hard-line liberals had hoped the President would be an avenging angel, who would swoop down on human rights violators in government and make them pay for undermining North America’s image and substance as a staunch defender of human rights and rule of law. Far-rightwingers wanted him to “show patriotism” by intervening and granting immunity to those who permitted and ordered the use of the torture techniques – which they whimsically refer to as EITs.

But in the end, the criticism in both camps is morally, politically and ethically misplaced, since in the hands of Justice is precisely where that decision must lie, not in those of the Chief of State, if Americans’ rights are to be properly protected and tyranny is to be kept at bay.

Obama and the ‘tea-ed off’ GOP

2009-04-21T05:42:00.000-07:00

For a lot of people abroad who were following the events of last week in the United States on TV, this whole thing about the “tea parties” held around the country must have been baffling. In fact, with what some Americans themselves know about our history in this day and age, in which vast sectors of the population appear to have developed a virulent allergy to books and reading, it was probably just as puzzling an event to many of them as well. The fact is, however, that the original “Boston Tea Party”, was a brief but very major event in American history, since it constituted a catalytic episode in the run-up to the Revolution against British imperialist tyranny.

Caption: "The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor", an 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier.

The ones who know precisely how important that “party” was, however, are the guys in the Republican Party’s dirty-tricks think tank who organized and promoted it. And don’t give me that bull about how it was a spontaneous outpouring of American anti-tax and anti-liberal sentiment, because I’m not buying it. You don’t get the kind of press this protest got – especially on “fair and balance” Fox news (come on, Murdock, gimme a break!) – if it’s a spontaneous grassroots thing, especially not when it all ostensibly came together “overnight”. And particularly not when they bring out the big guns in prime time to rally ‘round the cause.

Fox and (Dubya’s) Friends.

Take “registered independent” (as he reminds us, ad pukeum) Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who “doth protest too much” when anyone accuses him of being a conservative lackey, but who, if he doesn’t already have a GOP elephant tattooed on his chest, should really get one, because he clearly got hit in butt with the White House door when ex-President Bush left office and is ticked off about it. Yes, Bill, we can tell. If not, his night-time “news” commentary show, The O’Reilly Factor, wouldn’t keep on defending the Bush Administration tooth and nail every evening, when it’s so obviously a new day in Washington. I means, geez louise, Bill! Get the heck over it! Dubya’s gone home. He’s through. And unless you’re going to stop toiling every single night with all of the rest of the far-right dinosaurs on your show (like your buddy and arch-conservative pit-bull Newt Gingrich) to prepare the groundwork for the next election four years down the road, then maybe you ought to quit insisting about how “independent” you are or how “fair and balanced” Fox is. How can you expect decent, fair-minded folks not to call you (to paraphrase one of your favorite epithets) a “rightwing loon” when you rant and rave like you do every night against the Obama Administration. Especially when the guy who writes your multi-million-dollar pay check each year (Fox President Roger Ailes) was a media consultant for Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush (the elder) – let’s face it, telling three US Presidents, all from the same party, how to meet the press, seems like a trend – before he was recruited from NBC’s cable division by Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdock to create Fox News.

And then there’s Sean Hannity who follows O’Reilly each night with practically the same format as his – bash everyone left of Adolph Hitler – but in this case, with no apologies for being a frothing-at-the-mouth far-right mad dog. Even the Fox News management seems to have thought that Hannity was too right to be “right” and for 12 years created a parody of fairness by running him alongside “Fox liberal” (and I use the term advisedly) Alan Colmes. Colmes’ job was basically to lose every argument and let Hannity bully and dump on him every night, but still, there was a limit to just how insanely far-right Hannity could get without someone saying, “Hey, wait a minute, Sean, get a grip!”

But even the almost comatosely mild Alan Colmes apparently decided a dozen seasons of playing the “straw man” to Sean Hannity’s ruthless attacks was more than enough and this year left the show, according to him, “to make a greater contribution” to the network. If his personal blog, Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, is anything to go by, Alan’s “greater contribution” isn’t going to scare Hannity in the ratings. Topping yesterday’s items was this lead, and I quote:

“Edgar Mitchell, who flew on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission to the moon, says there is extraterrestrial life, and that it’s being concealed by the United States government, among others.”

The story’s legitimate enough, though not original – it has already been on other TV channels as a human interest feature – but is just the sort of thing that promises to keep Colmes’ “contribution” as zanily “liberal” as possible and keep him or anybody else from undermining the apparent intention of Fox News to destabilize and, if possible, destroy the current administration of the United States.

An exaggeration? Suffice it to say that after cheerleading for the “tea parties” for days on end, Sean Hannity last night interviewed former Vice President Richard Cheney and the clear theme of his questioning was “just how dangerous is Barack Obama to the security of the United States and the world?” Cheney, the most dangerous vice president in history, as current Vice President Joe Biden once referred to him, was only too happy to comply in the orchestrated, nightly character assassination that Fox has sought to carry out since Day One of the Obama Presidency. The virulence of Hannity’s attacks is the kind formerly reserved by rightwing commentators only for figures like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, openly considered enemies of the United States. But it should be remembered that the person he is attacking in this way now is the overwhelmingly elected Chief of State of his own country, and his intention is obvious: to undermine the presidency of the United States of America. If the shoe were on the other foot, and the person under such virulent attack were George W. Bush instead of Barack Obama, both Hannity and O’Reilly would surely be asking their audiences if the perpetrator weren’t, perhaps, a terrorist and deserving of waterboarding to find out whom he is working for.

But, okay, let’s all pretend we don’t know who’s behind the “tea parties” – like many tried to pretend they didn’t know Nixon was behind the Watergate break-in scandal that ended up costing him his presidency – and just agree that whoever organized them, their purpose was to send out a message of rebellion, with a pseudo-patriotic bent.

The Original Festivities.

The original Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, three years before the 13 original New England colonies declared their independence from Britain and engaged the crown in full-scale war. Details are somewhat sketchy as to the event itself, but not so regarding the context. What it boils down to is that friends of the Court who formed part of the British East India Company – a concern that was long at the forefront of British expansionism – lost some of the tax breaks that it had been receiving under former agreements for the tea they brought into England from abroad. The East India Company did not supply tea directly to the American colonies, but sold it at auction in England to tea merchants who then exported it to the colonies, adding their commissions to the cost. However, when the crown imposed its thirst for greater revenues on the East India Company’s tea trade, it was the American colonists who took the hit for the higher costs that the East India monopoly passed on to the tea merchants.

To add insult to injury, the colonists could buy their tea much more cheaply from Dutch traders, for instance, but the East India monopoly began to lose vast sums of money to these traders from other countries. To get around this, the solution arrived at by the British government, with a nod from King George, was the Tea Act of 1773. This law gave the East India Company a full refund of a 25% tax it paid on the tea it imported into England, while permitting the monopoly, for the first time, to export tea directly to the colonies. This allowed it to cut out the cost of middle men and to better compete with Dutch traders. But to further cripple the competition, the only merchants that could handle tea in the colonies were now crown-appointed colonial merchants in major American ports, with any purchases they made elsewhere becoming tantamount to smuggling. The main fly in the ointment, however, was a tax known as the Townshend Tax that was only paid on tea shipped to the colonies. It was a direct imperial tax on the settlers and was considered discriminatory by the colonists. Those who favored the tax in Britain argued that it was used to defray the cost of salaries paid to British officials in the colonies. If the tax were repealed the risk was that payment of colonial officials would eventually become the responsibility of the colonists themselves and the fear was that the imperial officials’ loyalty would eventually lie with the British Americans who paid them, rather than with the crown. So the controversial tax on tea stood.

The colonists of Massachusetts protested that they had a right to only pay taxes levied by their elected colonial representatives – and this was backed by earlier agreements hammered out with the crown – since, in England itself, they were not adequately and directly represented and, therefore, whatever was dictated in this way was basically tyranny. Furthermore, it seemed to them that they were the butt of a cruel irony since the Townshend Tax paid colonial officials whose very job it was to protect the interests of the crown in detriment to those of the colonists themselves.

And they were not alone in their protests. By the time of the uprising in Massachusetts, demonstrators in three other colonies had already managed to prevent British merchant ships from unloading taxed tea in their ports. But the crown had apparently decided to make a stand in Boston Harbor and Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson was under pressure to keep the protest from succeeding in the influential Massachusetts Colony. Despite his subjects’ fervent requests – and, eventually, heated demands, with angry rallies in Boston where protesters numbered in the thousands – that the tea be turned away from the harbor, the governor refused to be a part of the self-styled embargo and the tea landed on Boston’s wharf, backed and enforced by the governorship.

Hutchinson was obviously out of touch with the depth of sentiment among the colonists he governed regarding actions taken by a Parliament on the other side of the ocean in which they had no direct representation and it was his stubborn refusal to listen to reason that led to the direct action taken by a group of what today would probably be called “terrorists” and “leftwing loons” – especially by “conservatives” of the ilk of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and former Speaker of the House Gingrich.

Details of this action, as I say, are sketchy but it seems that somewhere between 30 and 130 men (…um, what shall we call them? Militant activists? Far-left extremists? Freedom fighters? Enemy terrorists? Far-left loons? Patriots? Pinheads? You call it, O’Reilly…), some disguised as Indians to avoid identification, climbed aboard the ships under cover of night, broke open the crates on board and dumped the taxed tea into the waters of the Boston Harbor.

British demands that the rebel colony pay for the damages were rejected, resulting in a British embargo on trade with Massachusetts until reparation was made. It was indeed a controversial point, and even some people who would later be considered major American patriots, such as Benjamin Franklin, thought such a vandalistic act was going too far and that reparation should be made. But the stand-off between the colonies and the crown over this and other increasingly coercive acts on the part of the British government eventually led to the first shots of the Revolution’s being fired just two years later.

Tea Parties Today.

So what does this have to do with last week’s “tea parties” organized and orchestrated across the United States? In point of fact, nothing. Indeed, it is important here – since the GOP has insisted on making the comparison by shamelessly using an act of rebellion against imperialist tyranny with a tax package passed by the elected Congress of the United States in a desperate effort to clean up the ungodly mess that an eight-year Republican administration left behind – to figure out who’s who in this farcical tableau.

What every schoolchild recalls about the Boston Tea Party is that it was about “taxation without representation”. But what no one knows without in-depth study of the event, is that the accent was on representation. The tax was no more than a symbol of imperial tyranny. What the colonists were seeking by refusing to pay the Townshend tax was self-determination and what the British crown was seeking by insisting on imposing it was authoritarian control over its American subjects. The protests of last week that shamelessly sought to link the Obama Administration’s policies to this historical event were about perceived high taxes. That was never the issue in the Boston Tea Party. In fact, with the passage of the Tea Act, certain taxes were repealed and the price of tea in the colonies went down to such a degree that it became competitive with smuggled Dutch tea. The Townshend tax on the colonists was only 3%. So the protest and direct action were not because of taxation as such, but because of the principle involved. What the colonists rejected was London’s tyrannical decision to impose a tax in which they had no say and from which they derived no benefits. What they were opposing was despotic interference in their internal affairs. The tax was merely a symbol of their enslavement to and exploitation by the crown.

Last week’s protest has nothing to do with anything except the GOP’s whining about losing the election last November and being so soundly trounced by Barack Obama. Typically, rather than seeking to cooperate and help find a consensual solution to a grave crisis that is affecting the nation, the ultra-conservative political machine is busy seeking ways of taking advantage of the situation in order to undermine the authority of the Democratic Administration and further deepen the perception of crisis and chaos, with the aim of weakening the president’s position at every turn and ensuring that he will be replaced by a Republican at the end of his four years. It is an attitude that is unworthy and unpatriotic, but, unfortunately, not unexpected in a group of self-interested, far-right radicals who refuse to admit that the problem, like the bailout itself, started with them and that it is now President Obama’s job to try and fix the overwhelming mess they left behind.

Malvinas: Where the ‘Proceso’ Went to Die

2009-04-04T03:57:00.000-07:00

This week marks the 27^th anniversary of the Argentine Armed Forces Government’s pre-emptive takeover of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands on April 2, 1982. The move triggered a 10-week conflict with Britain that cost 649 Argentine and 258 British lives. It was also the beginning of the end for the ‘Proceso’ dictatorship.

Invasion Day – April 2, 1982.

I recall the morning that Buenos Aires and the nation as a whole awoke to find that the Armed Forces had taken over the Malvinas (Falklands) from the British. It was an unseasonably cold and crisp day. Barely the start of South American autumn, but a sharp Patagonian wind had cleared away the clouds, chilled the air and left the sky a deep and limpid blue. It was as if the weather itself were announcing the advent of the series of events that would follow in the freezing climate of the sub-Antarctic islands.

But on that date, in Buenos Aires, it was a gorgeous, clear, cold and sunny day. I walked the streets of downtown to ‘test the waters’ before going in to work. I was general news editor and an editorial writer for the English-language Buenos Aires Herald at the time. Normally, I wouldn’t have been headed for work before mid-afternoon (when you work for a daily, you do the bulk of your actual writing at night, although you’re usually busy, one way or another, all day as well), but considering the top news of the day, I wanted to get an early start.

One of the first signs of reaction I noted was that Harrods, the emblematically English department store was absolutely festooned with sky-blue and white Argentine flags, dozens of them, the larger the better and no vestige of a Union Jack anywhere in sight. Furthermore, the store would, in short order, put out a press release reminding everyone that it had long since been bought out by Italian and other interests.

The large English-speaking and Anglo communities in Argentina had long thought of Harrods as an oasis of English popular culture on the posh Florida pedestrian street in the heart of the city. Opened in 1912, it was the first and only foreign branch ever founded by the famed London emporium, and although it became independent of its English parent store in the late 1940s, until the morning of April 2, 1982, it had remained a British icon in downtown Buenos Aires. Now, suddenly, it was demonstratively, almost ‘euphorically’ Argentine.

And a little further down the street, it would only be a matter of hours before the ever-traditional Franco-Inglesa pharmacy and fine perfume store would scratch the gold-lettered second half of its name off the windows and paint it over on its sign to become merely “the Franco”. Nor would these be the only victims of combined paranoia and anti-Anglo jingoism to suffer modification.

It was a Friday, but from early on, as people started finding out the news, it began to have a holiday feel. Perhaps, a better than holiday feel. People seemed excited but happy, smiling and nodding to each other on the street, stopping to chat about the news. And little by little, people began gravitating toward the main square of the city, Plaza de Mayo, where a spontaneous demonstration was taking shape, under the nervously watchful eyes of Federal Policemen whose number also began to climb as the day went on.

None of this was normal under the iron-handed government of the National Reorganization Process, or ‘Proceso’ as it was known for short. Gatherings had been banned since 1976, following the coup that brought the ‘Proceso’ to power, as was union activity, political parties, and any other kind of cultural group or association that might be construed as threatening to the military government. Of late, the ‘Proceso’ had become even more paranoid than usual. It was losing its grip and it knew it. So its reactions to political demonstrations that, little by little, were again beginning to rear their heads, had become increasingly severe and violent.

But today they were reading the crowds differently. There was no belligerence in those headed for the Plaza. There was only jubilation and rampant national sentiment. They were going there to celebrate, to congratulate the very dictators that had repressed them for seven long years, to thank them for taking back what British colonialism had usurped so long ago from Argentina’s sovereign territory. It was a far cry from the attitude of growing unrest that had been seething just beneath the surface and that, just that week, in the final days of March, had boiled over into unbridled violence.

Spare the Rod...

You can beat a dog to make it obey. Tie it up and beat it hard enough and it’ll cringe every time you draw near and try its best not to displease you in order not to be beaten. For a while, at least. Until it gets accustomed to the pain and violence and decides to bite back. And beating a dog will never make it loyal. It’ll only make it wary, terrified and, ultimately, mean. Show weakness, show the slightest sign of helplessness and you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn on you and tear your throat out. It’s a basic and primitive law of survival. It takes no human (or humane) sentiment into account. It is when all that exists is the power of brute force exercised by one over the position of weakness of another. It’s an almost baseless relationship that only stands on might and abuse, with no love lost between the parties involved and with each wanting what’s worst for the other. It is the tense “peace” and order of a prison, the ever-shaky standoff between life-long prisoner and jailer.

This was the relationship that Argentina’s military came to have with common society in the bad old days of the National Reorganization Process (1976-1983). At first, like a starved and frightened dog, society had cozy up to a new master and licked its hand, hoping for protection from the other one that it had chosen, but that was now starving and abusing it, the one that demanded loyalty and gave abuse in return. But it didn’t take long to find out that the 1976 coup was all about leaping from the skillet into the scorching fires of authoritarian hell.

The Armed Forces government’s top brass swaggered over the human and civil rights of the people like feudal lords, taking and doing whatever they wished and killing off those who stood in their way. The abusive practices of those who served them were as consummately vile as any that might invade your worst nightmares. Beatings with nightsticks and rifle butts, electric cattle prods applied to gums, genitals and other sensitive body parts, and water and suffocation torture of all kinds (wet submarine, dry submarine, waterboarding, etc.) were standard operating procedure to be applied to just about anyone questioned by military and security forces. And here the word anybody meant just that: anybody, at any time and practically at random.

But even worse things were done to the people who fell into the limbo of “the missing”: repeated rapes and beatings, the abuse of pregnant women by inserting electrodes into their bodies and torturing their unborn babies in the womb, bodily mutilation with blowtorches, hanging prisoners by their wrists or thumbs or ankles and beating them with clubs – in short, every kind of atrocious torment that a perverted mind could conjure up – all cowardly, all despicable. And then there were the other abuses and atrocities: extortion of the families of the “missing” in which they gave everything they had worked for to try and save a loved one that they would, nonetheless, never see again; pregnant political prisoners separated from their babies and murdered after giving birth in prison, their babies then being given over to an ad hoc “adoption agency” that provided children to barren friends of the regime; mere high school children jailed, tortured and murdered for protesting a hike in the price of the school bus ticket; truckloads of prisoners taken to remote sites, machine-gunned en masse and their bodies blown up with dynamite; prisoners drugged and pushed from military helicopters to their deaths in the River Plate or in the ocean; business people accused of subversion and jailed, their businesses confiscated and their personal properties snatched because their interests conflicted with those of the despots in power; so-called third-world clerics summarily executed for speaking out, for defending Christian ethics, for calling for an end to the madness, for ministering to the poor.

People were scared. People didn’t talk about what was going on. They pretended not to know. They looked away, as they might look away from a facility for the criminally insane, not wanting to imagine what went on in there, afraid that by looking they might make the madness spill out into the street and grab them, afraid that they themselves might end up “inside”. But although they “didn’t know”, they knew enough to warn their loved ones not to “get into anything”, not to “mess with politics”, not to look authority in the eye, to lower their eyes, to lower their heads, to ‘circulate’.

Breaking Point: The Jimmy Carter Era.

By 1982, the situation could no longer be ignored. With very occasional exceptions, the military had, by then, made just about everybody disappear that they planned to. There was no longer any “enemy” for them to pretend to be fighting. The “subversives” were all dead or gone or crushed beyond being any danger to the regime. The ‘Proceso’ now talked in the past tense about the “dirty war” it had supposedly had to fight in order to “save the Christian and Western world”. But its international image had been so tarnished by then that even the common folk back home could no longer pretend nothing had happened: International organizations were calling for an end to the regime and the advent of democratic elections. Human rights groups targeted the ‘Proceso’ as one of the bloodiest and most abusive regimes in the world. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo had been on major television news programs in the Unites States and Europe, calling for the “return alive” of their missing children and grandchildren. Renowned news columnists and writers had described the atrocities committed and called on their governments to censure the regime.

Four years of the Jimmy Carter Administration (1977-1981) in Washington had also made a major difference. After decades of US policy that took a hands-off approach to “friendly dictators”, President Carter imposed a foreign policy whose key tenet was the protection of human rights through diplomacy. The dichotomy of US foreign policy up to then had always been that while Washington preached democracy, rule of law and the Bill of Rights as basic inalienable human and civil rights at home, it applied a double standard elsewhere, as if to say that North Americans were just a little more human than the people who had to live under the heels of dictators’ boots in rightwing regimes that posed as front men for the US in its war on communism. Never in modern times had a US president emphasized as much as Jimmy Carter did the idea that US foreign policy should reflect the highest human ideals of the United States and Western democracy.

He named staunch human rights activist Patricia Murphy Derian to be his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs and she immediately took on the authoritarian regimes in places like Chile, Paraguay and Argentina, as well as in apartheid-era South Africa and elsewhere. President Carter was criticized by the right for overlooking human rights abuses in Korea, China, Iran and other Eastern countries but his concentration on cleaning up the human rights situation in Latin America and putting these countries on the road to democracy was clearly a question of starting in his own backyard and turning the Americas into a showcase for basic Early American ideals.

The Derian Factor.

Assistant Secretary Derian proved a tenacious defender of that policy and of human rights in general. In the case of Argentina, she called a spade a spade, openly accusing the regime of crimes against humanity and becoming instrumental in setting up an inspection mission that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IHRC) carried out in Argentina under authority from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1979. It was also in that year that she helped secure the release of Jacobo Timerman, owner and publisher of the center-left newspaper, La Opinión, who had been imprisoned and tortured after being falsely accused of helping launder leftwing terrorist extortion money. Her campaign to gain Timerman’s release helped catapult his case to the forefront of international interest and put such intense pressure on the Argentine military that they finally had to let him go. Although the regime showed its displeasure at having to do so by taking over Timerman’s paper, stealing his property and stripping him of his citizenship before letting him leave the country, his release still caused ultra-rightwing factions in the Army to accuse the junta of being soft on terrorism and to stage a military revolt in the interior of the country that was eventually put down, but not without loss of face and power for the leaders of the ‘Proceso’.

Assistant Secretary Derian’s actions so infuriated the Argentine military that they internally declared her their Public Enemy Number One and are even reported to have entertained plans to have her killed. (Not surprising, since this was how they had been handling the opposition of every color up to then, and they were clearly arrogant enough to think they could get away with it).

Weakening the military’s image still further, in 1980 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, an Argentine artist and human rights activist who was tortured and held for 14 months by the ‘Proceso’ before international outcry brought his release.

With Ms. Derian leading the action, President Carter slapped sanctions on Argentina for failing to heed his demands that human rights be respected, alienating the leaders of the ‘Proceso’, but at the same time drawing ever-increasing international media attention to what was going on, and making it impossible for the military to operate with the kind of impunity that they had early on after the coup. Suddenly, the ‘Proceso’ was high-profile and its image was abysmal.

This obviously weakened its position at home as well. You can’t ‘tie your dog up and beat it’ before the eyes of the whole world, because somebody bigger and stronger is almost bound to intervene and stop you – and perhaps hit you with your very own stick. Which was precisely what President Carter did, because one of the sanctions imposed was keeping the Argentine military from getting their hands on US arms if they were going to use them to repress their own people.

Just Call Me Pontius Massera.

Ms. Derian would remain a champion of human rights in Argentina long after she and Mr. Carter were out of office. When the respective military juntas were tried for human rights violations after democracy was restored, the former Assistant Secretary of State went to Buenos Aires to testify against them. One of the most chilling parts of her testimony had to do with a meeting she had with Admiral Emilio Massera to explain the Carter Administration’s policy to him.

Massera was a cynic and a bully. He was also apparently hopelessly obtuse if he thought he could pull the wool over the eyes of such a thorough investigator and such a brilliant intellectual as Patricia Derian. Or perhaps he was simply so arrogant that he thought he could convince her of whatever sort of spurious nonsense he made up.

At any rate, when Assistant Secretary Derian met with him on August 10, 1977 (when the worst human rights violations of the ‘Proceso’ were in full swing) and bluntly told him that Washington was aware of the abuses being perpetrated by the regime and that they would absolutely have a negative impact on relations with the United States if they didn’t stop immediately, Admiral Massera said that the Navy hadn’t tortured anyone. It was the Army and Air Force that did those things, he said.

Ms. Derian was flabbergasted by the denial. She stated that she was in possession of hundreds of reports from people tortured by naval officers. Moreover, she had reports from people within the Argentine Navy itself, as well as from within the Army and the Air Force. Massera again denied all participation, saying that he had made special efforts to keep union leaders safe after the coup and that this was why they were being held aboard a ship anchored off shore. (There were already reports by that time that Light and Power Union Leader Oscar Smith, for example, had been murdered and his body disposed of at the Naval Mechanics School, so the falsehood of his statements was almost laughable, had the cases not been so tragic).

Losing patience, Assistant Secretary Derian said that in one of the reports, she had seen a layout of the very building where she was meeting with Massera, and she added: “It’s possible that, as we speak, someone is being tortured on the floor below us.”

Then, she would be astonished as Massera broke into a broad leering grin, made a histrionic hand-washing gesture and said: “You remember what happened to Pontius Pilot, right?”

Ms. Derian would have to wait nearly three decades to receive the recognition she deserved for hobbling the dictatorship and very likely saving thousands more lives that would otherwise have been taken, but finally, in 2006, she was awarded the Order of the Liberator General San Martín, with the rank of Officer – the highest decoration granted by the Argentine government to foreign officials.

Enter Ronald Reagan.

Be that as it may, by the start of the South Atlantic War, the regime had already gotten chummy with Washington again, thanks to former actor and governor Ronald Reagan’s election win over Mr. Carter in 1981. Mr. Reagan had an old-time rightist approach to foreign policy and almost immediately sent his foreign policy architect, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to let the ‘Proceso’ leaders know that the Jimmy Carter era was stone cold dead and that from now on they would no longer have to fret about pesky human rights investigators out of Washington.

Dr. Kirkpatrick was a fervent anti-communist and the author of what came to be known as the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”, one of the main principles of which was the exact opposite of the Carter policy pinning US support to democratic government and, above all, respect for human rights.

The Kirkpatrick policy advocated Washington’s support of just about any kind of government, including harsh rightwing dictatorships, with the only prerequisite for membership in the Reagan Administration’s group of ‘friends’ being hard-line opposition to all things leftist. The ‘Proceso’ was, obviously, a shoo-in. It had been so tough on reds that it had wiped out every opponent that ever even dared to blush. And the ‘Proceso’ was more than willing to lend support to Reagan’s rightwing Contra guerrillas (freedom fighters as his administration dubbed them) in Central America.

The Kirkpatrick Doctrine had a side that was obviously ‘for general audiences’ who might find supporting perverse dictatorial regimes distasteful. The theory that supposedly made doing this ‘okay’ was that leftist regimes could never be turned toward democracy, whereas ‘allowing’ rightwing dictatorships to ‘help’ Washington in its war on communism would cement ties between them and the US and permit Washington to eventually give them a friendly nudge toward a US-style democratic system.

In theory, it almost sounded plausible, as espoused by the brilliant Dr. Kirkpatrick. But in fact, it didn’t always work. For instance, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, better known as the Shah of Iran, was brought to power as a rightwing dictator through a CIA plot called Operation Ajax that ended the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in the 1950s after his administration nationalized Anglo-US oil interests. Previously a figurehead king within a democratic system, the Shah became an absolute monarch with military backing. Although he protected US interests for three and a half decades and practically became a cult icon in the West, he never showed signs of being ‘nudged toward democracy’. On the contrary, his despotic policies and intolerance of dissent were the direct cause of the Iranian Revolution that brought Islamic extremist clerics to power in the late ‘70s, turning Iran into a bitter and dangerous enemy of the United States.

Nor was the definition of ‘rightwing’ always clear. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, for instance, was an Arab Socialist. And yet, because of his position as a bulwark against Iranian advances in the Middle East, he was seen as ‘a friendly’ by Washington. In addition to the billions upon billions of dollars that the US had already pumped into Iraq prior to the Reagan era, the Reagan Administration alone handed Saddam another 40 billion dollars in loans in the 1980s to help him prosecute his war with Iran – a war in which, according to some estimates, a million lives were lost. And in addition, during that same period, Washington sent Saddam billions in direct aid, basically to prevent him from forming any strong alliances with the Soviet Union. Undoing that diplomatic ‘marriage’ is still costing American lives and billions of dollars in US taxpayer money each year to this day.

The ‘Proceso’ was also seen as having certain strategic value in the war on communism with which the Reagan Administration seemed so thoroughly obsessed. And, according to some sources at the time, the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands played a role in certain US contingency plans.

But even President Reagan and Dr. Kirkpatrick couldn’t give the junta free rein to rekindle its “dirty war” in order to stem growing opposition to its permanence in power. With Jimmy Carter, a new ethical line had been drawn in the Americas and even Ronald Reagan couldn’t ignore it completely if he hoped to remain in office for eight years.

A Union Protest Turns Popular Riot.

Although the Armed Forces obviously already had their invasion of the islands well under way by the end of March, it was still a well-kept secret from the rest of the world, and particularly from the Argentine people, who had been tolerating the perversely repressive ‘Proceso’ for six long and harrowing years. The Carter years and international repudiation for the regime, despite Washington’s newfound love affair with it, had so undermined its image that Argentines were no longer willing to put up with its permanence in power and were clamoring for a political opening. And with the whole world now watching, the tactics the dictatorship had applied back in 1976 had been rendered out of the question.

Just four days before that crisp, sunny April 2^nd, when I had walked the downtown streets of Buenos Aires and watched people spontaneously gathering in Plaza de Mayo to celebrate the Malvinas takeover, I had also been out observing the scene in the heart of the city. And on that day, Tuesday, March 30, 1982, people had also gathered in the center of the capital city, not to celebrate but to protest against the ‘Proceso’.

The protest began as a general strike and mobilization called by the Peronist labor unions grouped in the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). The demonstration was commanded by the CGT’s firebrand leader, Saúl Ubaldini. The strike and mass protest were billed as a call for “peace, bread and jobs”. It was the most serious protest the military regime had had to face in its six years in power and it gravely challenged the dictatorship’s ability to continue to repress the tide of popular support for a return to democracy.

The Interior Ministry had banned the mass protest, claiming that it might have permitted a peaceful protest, but that the CGT had neglected to request the proper permit. The march, the government said, would not be allowed. But Saúl Ubaldini pushed ahead with his plans, claiming that the dictatorship had run its course, undermined by internal contradictions and reaching the point of collapse in the midst of an economic crisis that was starving the nation’s workers.

Emboldened by the CGT’s decision to forge ahead, other civil, political and social organizations joined the march. Despite an intimidating display of police and military power, the protest drew a crowd of some 50,000 workers, students and other young people. And these began to be joined by some of the passersby, who, inspired by the resolve of the marchers, decided that they too had had enough of the dictatorship and that the time had come to start bringing it down.

The regime panicked and ordered the protest crushed. Riot forces armed with tear gas, nightsticks and weapons loaded with rubber bullets, as well as their regulation arms, advanced on the crowds. Many people broke and ran, adding to the confusion, but significant numbers of grimly stubborn protestors stood their ground and clashed head-on with riot police, turning the wooden staves of their protest signs into clubs with which to return the blows they received, lobbing tear gas canisters back at the cops and converting trash dumpsters and cans into makeshift barricades, setting their contents ablaze. Riot-control detachments from the Federal Police Infantry Guard – under Army command since the coup – chased rioters that fled the Plaza down central side streets, using their riot shields to surround themselves and becoming a human battering ram, reminiscent of the Roman army’s tortoise maneuver, so that as the protestors mingled with the passersby on the streets, these too became fair game as the armored platoons ran roughshod over whomever wondered into their path. Office and shop workers took refuge in stores that remained open, but many had already lowered their security curtains to avoid damage. At the center of the protest, however, the direct confrontation continued, as well-organized squads of union and political activists attacked individual mounted police, pulling them from their mounts or even dragging their horses down, jerking the cops from their saddles amidst a barrage of kicks and blows.

And then something started happening that the police and military hadn’t counted on: white-collar workers in the surrounding office buildings started hurling anything they could lay their hands on from the windows and balconies – chucking out wastebaskets, paper weights, phonebooks, staplers, flower pots, anything heavy enough to do some damage – in a bid to injure or intimidate the riot squads and make them retreat.

Clearly, this was no longer a labor union protest, but a spontaneous outpouring of repudiation and hatred for the dictatorial regime. Skirmishes raged on for six hours, as rioters broke for the side streets, thus disbanding the solid police and military front that had been holding firm in the Plaza. When things grew quiet that night, the streets were littered with debris and small fires burned in the makeshift barricades that remained, giving off an eerie flickering glow and lending the usually civilized city a savage, dangerous atmosphere.

Nor was this the only protest: In Rosario, Mar del Plata, Neuquén and other cities in the interior, police and rioters clashed in similar demonstrations. In the Andean city of Mendoza, the protest and clashes between rioters and police ended in the killing of unionist Dalmiro Flores, sparking still further ill-feeling and unrest. Civil disobedience had burst from the box the military had kept it in for more than half a decade, and it clearly wasn’t going to be easy to put it back.

A Common Cause.

On April 2^nd, however, one never could have imagined that all of this had taken place just a few days earlier.

Now the square in front of Government House was teeming with well-wishers. Why such a radical change of mood? Because Argentina’s claim to the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands was an almost universal common cause among the country’s people. It was, in a word, Argentina’s “Alamo”, an issue about which there was no question: The Malvinas were Argentine and the British (who had held the archipelago since 1833), were trespassers there.

The ‘Proceso’ generals and admirals knew that if they could win the Malvinas back, it might well consolidate their political power and line the rest of the country up behind them at a time when the country’s tottering economy was making it increasingly difficult to maintain order. Their certainty of this was clearly bolstered by reassurances provided by Nicanor Costa Méndez, who became the ‘Proceso’ government’s Foreign Minister at the end of 1981. Dr. Costa Méndez was chief advisor to then-President Leopoldo Galtieri, who had taken over the reins from General Roberto Viola in what was basically a palace coup. General Galtieri probably entertained visions of becoming a popular authoritarian president. He retained control of the Army after ousting General Viola instead of naming a new Army chief as the previous ‘Proceso’ presidents had done, began talking about an eventual political opening and permitted limited dissent, all of this quite probably on the advice of Costa Méndez, who was a career diplomat.

General Galtieri gives the high sign to well-wishers on April 2, 1982

In the process of trying to legitimize the regime’s image, they had, of late, been courting international organizations in a bid to generate backing for their call for negotiations to end a century and half of British colonialism in the tiny, remote enclave located less than 300 miles off Argentine shores and, so the government argued, forming part of the nation’s continental shelf.

Dr. Costa Méndez was well-spoken in English and had apparently gained certain respect in both Washington and London. General Galtieri, for his part, seemed to make a hit with the Pentagon crowd. A tall, swaggering, tough-talking, blue-eyed hard drinker with a voice like gravel and a jaw like a lantern, he couldn’t help but remind more than a few military men of George Scott playing General George Patton. Between the two of them, General Galtieri and Dr. Costa Méndez had managed to get a tentative indication from Reagan’s Washington that the US might be willing to support a request from Argentina that Britain start thinking about giving the islands back.

But what now seems utterly delusional on the part of both men is their having convinced each other that the US would remain neutral in the face of an armed invasion of an ostensibly British territory, or that Britain had become such a second-rate power that it would permit a tin-pot South American dictatorship to take over one of its possessions without doing something about it. This seems clear, no matter how enthused Washington might have appeared about the possibility of setting up a US base on the islands once Britain had handed them over. Britain had never considered the Falklands of strategic importance, while the United States, in its Cold War with the Soviets, might well have – and was, in fact, strongly rumored to – as a sort of natural aircraft carrier in the South Atlantic. But neither did London consider negotiations to recognize Argentina’s claim to be a priority, and Dr. Costa Méndez’s British counterpart, Lord Carrington (and his eventual replacement, Francis Pym), made this clear to an increasingly irritated Costa Méndez. Britain probably would, someday, take a look at some kind of joint administration or even a British phase-out. Just not right now.

But the ‘Proceso’ needed it to happen right now, and if it wasn’t going to, they would make it happen. The first truly clear signal from Washington came once the invasion was practically under way, when General Alexander Haig, who was then US Secretary of State, told Galtieri’s government that if a conflict was in the offing, the Reagan Administration would, of course, side with Britain.

Glory and Disgrace.

Wars are almost always about politicians with veiled or not so veiled interests appealing to patriotic fervor in order to convince soldiers and sailors to march and sail off to battle and give their lives for the ‘higher cause of freedom and justice’. The ten-week South Atlantic War was no different. The Argentine military’s ever more tenuous grip on power and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s flagging level of public confidence were a lethal combination that kept either side from laying down their weapons and going back to the negotiating table under UN supervision. What was truly disgraceful about the war is the political subterfuge and petty interests that spawned it, by appealing to the highest sense of patriotism and ethics of the people of both countries.

What also must be separated from the political issues is how the war was prosecuted on the battlefield by both sides in the conflict.

The same Argentine Armed Forces that had repressed and murdered tens of thousand of its own compatriots, managed to take over the islands in a lightning invasion that was orchestrated in such a way as not to spill a drop of British blood. This mission was carried out so well that the only death on April 2 was that of Marine Lt. Commander Pedro Giachino, leader of the detachment under orders to take over the house of the British governor of the islands. He, an aide and a corpsman were cut down by British Royal Marine fire, when he and his men surrounded the governor’s house and ordered those inside to surrender. The corpsman managed to get himself and the two officers patched up but Commander Giachino succumbed to his wounds. The Royal Marines, meanwhile, hopelessly outnumbered, surrendered.

Officers and men on both sides would later have words of praise for each other’s performance. Reports from Britain would discuss the grit of Argentine soldiers in the field who despite being under-armed, under-clothed and underfed, fought hard, inflicted serious casualties on some of the best trained and best equipped troops anywhere. Argentine soldiers, for their part, would recall how they were better treated and cared for by their British captors than they had been by their own commanders, who had sent them to war with defective equipment, scant munitions, poor training and totally deficient rations.

The conditions of surrender were signed in an atmosphere of mutual respect and honor, and it was only when Argentine fighting men returned to the mainland that they would suffer the oblivion of the vanquished.

Surrendered arms on the ground at Port Stanley (Puerto Argentino)

Malvinas: Where the ‘Proceso’ Died.
Be that as it may, the war attained one major achievement: It spelled the beginning of the end for the National Reorganization Process. Gone from Plaza de Mayo were the fawning crowds of April 2, 1982. With the announcement of the mid-June surrender, the angry throngs of March 30 returned to the center of downtown Buenos Aires, pelting police and paramilitary units with rocks, coins, sticks, anything hard enough to draw blood as they clamored to reach the doors of Government House and kick them in. Rioting and skirmishes raged long into the night and fiery barricades flamed into the early morning hours and smoldered there as the sun came up on the wintery morning of Argentina’s discontent.

Galtieri was removed from office just as he had removed Viola, replaced by a junta that named General Reynaldo Bignone to immediately start guiding the country toward a democratic opening and presidential elections.

The war and the ‘Proceso’ were at an end, but the sense of loss and suffering that both wrought in Argentina continues even today, a quarter-century later.

Remembering Dr. Alfonsín

2009-04-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

Dr. Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín, who died yesterday at the age of 82, will very likely be judged more fairly by history, as the major statesman he was, than he has been in his own lifetime. The former president of Argentina has often been more highly criticized for passage of the so-called “Full Stop” Law – putting an end to trials against repressors who kidnapped, tortured and murdered citizens and foreigners alike under the military’s bloody National Reorganization Process – or for leaving office six months early (after what was arguably the most arduous presidency in Argentine history) than he has been praised for taking the former military juntas to trial or for capably putting down an extremist military revolt that threatened to immerse the country in civil war.
In terms of the unrealistic expectations that President Alfonsín’s rise to office generated and the largely unfair criticism that his administration’s term in office ultimately elicited, parallels might well be drawn with the Obama Administration in the United States. In both cases – and making allowances for subtle degrees of ignominy - the voting populations were reacting to eight years of unprecedented abuse of authority, disrespect for human rights, undermined rule of law and hidden yet clearly underlying economic chaos and manipulated stagnation. Like Barack Obama, Raúl Alfonsín’s election victory brought an almost delirious outpouring of popular celebration. Dr. Alfonsín’s December 1983 rise to office produced a spontaneous manifestation of public support that choked the streets of downtown Buenos Aires and the lawn of Plaza de Mayo in front of Government House with cheering crowds estimated at well over a million people. Never before had Argentine politics witnessed such a mass demonstration of political frenzy and celebration – not even in the days three decades before when Juan and Eva Perón harangued the “descamisados” from the balcony of the presidential offices.
For nearly a decade – starting with the reign of terror that began even before the 1976 military coup, provoked by the band of thugs that formed part of the entourage surrounding Isabel Perón when she took office following President Juan Perón’s death in 1974 – Argentines had lived in fear of authority, in fear of politics, in fear of almost anything but going from their homes to their jobs and from their jobs back home. President Alfonsín, very much like President Obama, seemed to represent the blazing beacon at the end of a very dark tunnel. And the brilliance of that light made Dr. Alfonsín – like Mr. Obama – seem just a little bit bigger than life.
Such tall expectations, however, can be a true liability. Colorless leaders in boring times have the advantage of being quickly forgotten and free from blame. Leaders of great promise are subject to close scrutiny and to myriad accusations when what they seek to achieve falls even slightly short of the mark (as witnessed by the campaign of “de-mystification” mounted against President Obama from his first hour in office and the demands that he keep his campaign promises word for word and show instant results after only two months in office).
The newborn democracy that President Alfonsín inherited was, in a sense, a “democracy by permission” from the military. It was semi-transitional in the sense that there was nothing unconditional about the political and judicial power in place at the time. The military had taken steps to ensure that its members would continue to enjoy the impunity they had during their seven-and-a-half-year usurpation of power: General Reynaldo Bignone, the last in the series of dictators at the head of the ‘Proceso’, handed a sweeping general pardon to all military personnel and officers for their part in the massive human rights abuses and murders that took place under the regime.
Considering the earlier half-century of Argentine history, in which elected presidents had been removed from office like barely tolerated pawns by one military coup after another, it was a truly bold move on Dr. Alfonsín’s part to rescind the Bignone pardon and push ahead with the long and highly publicized trial of members of successive ‘Proceso’ juntas. Bolder still was his forming of the National Commission on Missing Persons (CONADEP), the high profile of which he ensured by asking world famous Argentine novelist Ernesto Sábato to head it. The CONADEP did its job swiftly and thoroughly, bringing home the truth about some 30,000 disappearances under the military regime by gathering documentable evidence on as many cases as possible. When Mr. Sábato handed the report to Dr. Alfonsín, 8,900 victims of State terror were no longer stuck forever in the limbo of “the disappeared”. Suddenly, they had names and faces and the details of their abductions, incarcerations and deaths were published in black and white for all the world to see. And people like Lieutenant General Jorge R. Videla – the emblematic first president of the dictatorship – who had cynically stated that the word “missing” said it all, that those who had disappeared simply “didn’t exist”, was now in court, sitting before the special tribunal at a table with the other ‘Proceso’ accused.
Despite the fact that successive military uprisings led by insurrectionist extremists in the middle ranks from lieutenant colonel down would force the president to negotiate an end (albeit temporary) to further court action against the former regime, the trials and sentencing against the general officers of the military juntas stood, in what was an unprecedented victory for national democracy.
And Dr. Alfonsín made other rapid inroads against armed forces domestic dominion, by shifting the concentration of military might away from the Federal Capital and into areas of strategic importance in case of foreign attack, as well as by restricting the economic autonomy of the Armed Forces. One of the major ways in which he did this was to remove the country’s top defense contractor, the powerful Fabricaciones Militares, from Armed Forces control and place it under the administration of the Federal Government. This was a move so unpopular within the military that the Alfonsín Administration was forced to order literally scores of general officers (generals and admirals) into retirement to quell opposition to the action and thus prevent organized resistance.
Despite concessions made in putting down the revolts of the so-called carapintadas (painted-faces) – a relatively reduced group of military rebels who hid their identities by smearing their faces with camouflage grease-paint – President Alfonsín demonstrated outstanding leadership in not only rallying public support from the civilian population, but also by maintaining the backing of the bulk of the Armed Forces, in the face of a situation that could well have sparked civil war and the return of a military faction to dictatorial rule. Even the “Full Stop” on prosecution of military men accused of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity was not an outright ban as such. It limited legal action against several hundred suspected repressors to trials against only those who could be indicted within a 60-day period following passage of the law. Be that as it may, due to the reluctance to testify of many of those who had suffered at the hands of the ‘Proceso’ and considering the plodding pace of the Justice System, a two-month statute of limitations was practically an effective ban and clearly compromised the otherwise stellar return of rule of law in Argentina. But in all fairness to Dr. Alfonsín, and in 20-20 hindsight, at that point in history, his pragmatism on this point is very likely what kept the country from being plunged back into a pending coup mode – and this time led by rightwing extremists who would have made the ‘Proceso’ look like a walk in the park.
Furthermore, his democratically elected successor, opposition Peronist politician, Dr. Carlos Menem, far from rescinding the amnesty, further sealed it, by promoting the so-called “Due Obedience” Law. This law basically stated that the former juntas that had already been tried and convicted were the only officers responsible for the horrendous crimes of the ‘Proceso’ era and that all others were “only obeying orders”. Despite the Nazi-like ‘logic’ behind the tenets of this law and the international precedents for placing no statute of limitations on heinous crimes against humanity, it is only now, a quarter-century after Dr. Alfonsín’s election triumph and nearly two decades after the Menem Administration took over from him, that the ban has been lifted and a handful of aging repressors are finally tottering before the court for indictment and trial.
Despite such setbacks, with the election of President Alfonsín, Argentines breathed a new air of freedom on the streets of the country’s cities. For the first time in decades, citizens could look policemen and military men in the eye and not fear being detained, beaten or tortured on an arbitrary whim. The government went from being the nation’s jailer to being at the service of the people and the law. The courts became independent of Executive “oversight” and people’s civil and human rights were fully and demonstratively respected. Journalists, politicians and the common folk regained their voices and posed their opinions. Dissidence was once again considered a right, and taking a stance almost became a moral and ethical obligation. Artists, writers and intellectuals who had lived in exile – and often in hiding, even abroad – came back by the score, some with pre-adolescent children, or husbands and wives, who had never known their spouses’ or parents’ native land. It was a celebration of freedom and democracy, a national honeymoon with a new destiny. But expectations were blatantly unrealistic and jealous political motivations made them even more so. In the end, President Alfonsín would find himself embattled and berated on all sides, in spite of his having consolidated a new national legacy of democracy, ethics and respect for the individual like no other in recent memory, and having done it all in a mere half-decade.
In point of fact, President Alfonsín’s most powerful enemy – like that of President Barack Obama – was the economy he inherited. And his merciless political opponents, particularly in the Peronist movement, used it to their advantage to undermine his government’s popularity and credibility at every turn, while creating a climate of impending chaos. The chief opposition party made use of its pressure groups, and particularly of the Peronist labor unions grouped under the General Federation of Labor (CGT), to severely hamper the administration. While to his credit, firebrand CGT leader Saúl Ubaldini had previously organized several nationwide general strikes against the military, during President Alfonsín’s administration he promoted no fewer than 13 general stoppages that paralyzed the country.
The economy inherited from the military was in ruins, with the juntas having run up tens of billions of dollars in foreign debt spent on Pharaonic projects and arms for a near war with Chile and an effective conflict with Great Britain – the Falklands (Malvinas) War, the loss of which spelled the beginning of the end for the regime – at a time when international interest rates were on the rise. Although the country was recording modest growth and a better than modest trade surplus, these attributes were ravenously swallowed up by the looming shadow of the burgeoning international debt, which had reached crisis proportions. Already by the end of the military regime, following the South Atlantic War fiasco, the country’s inflation was soaring at around 18% a month. But by Dr. Alfonsín’s second year in office, it had skyrocketed to almost twice that much, breaking world records, and the country’s currency was devalued practically by the hour.
Seeking to counter this and inject new confidence into the economy, the Alfonsín Administration created a new currency, the austral, which was swapped for the old peso argentino at a rate of a thousand pesos to one austral. President Alfonsín tied promotion of the new currency to the similar promotion of a plan to move the Federal Capital from Buenos Aires to Viedma, gateway to Patagonia, seeking to de-concentrate the population in and around the country’s largest city, while sparking a wave of development and settlement in the largely under-populated interior of the country.
Meanwhile, the administration sought renegotiation of the foreign debt and injections of new direct foreign capital investment into the economy. But for the most part, international confidence in Argentina’s economy was shattered and the crisp new austral, that had opened foreign exchange trade at a higher than parity rate against the US dollar was not sufficient (even with imposed product price controls) to stem the tide of rampant inflation at home.
Complicating matters still further, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States and was clearly unfriendly to the Alfonsín Administration. Mr. Reagan had had two years to get to know the military regime and one of his first acts back then was to send word to Buenos Aires to tell the ‘Proceso’ leaders that the Jimmy Carter era, with its human rights priority in foreign diplomacy was over and that the military’s stand against international communism was more important now to Washington than the atrocities the regime had committed against its own citizens. Even when the regime took over the South Atlantic islands and courted war with Britain, the ‘Proceso’ managed to maintain fairly civil relations with Reagan’s Washington. US-Argentine relations became severely strained, however, when the Alfonsín Administration withdrew support for Washington-backed Contra guerrillas that were resisting the leftist Sandinistas that overthrew pro-US dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. The ‘Proceso’, for its part, had been providing the Contras with material support in order to win favor with Washington. The Alfonsín Administration further miffed Reagan by turning down an offer to reinstate US arms sales to Argentina, telling Washington that “arms were not a priority” for the nation’s new democratic government. So it was that the Reagan Administration remained less than receptive to Buenos Aires on principle throughout the rest of President Alfonsín’s term in office.In spite of the lack of solidarity shown by Washington and the flurry of rising criticism over the “Full Stop” Law from formerly staunch allies in the international human rights movement, the Alfonsín Administration managed to start mending fences with Britain and to promote the end of a border dispute in the Beagle Channel with neighboring Chile, as well as scoring numerous other international diplomatic victories and positioning the country as a moral and ethical force in the Americas and the developing world.
But without the economic help and massive investment that the country needed to rise above its economic woes, the moral capital accrued and the democratic legacy constructed by the Alfonsín presidency was doomed to be overshadowed by impending economic and social chaos. Hyperinflation spun out of control, rendering the austral worthless and opposition political shock forces took advantage of the confusion to organize rioting and supermarket looting that thrust the country into a nightmare of disorder and decay. By the end of Dr. Alfonsín’s presidency, most people had forgotten what his election had signified for democracy and what his outstanding leadership had done toward consolidating the republic and ensuring that the ‘Proceso’ was the last of Argentina’s myriad de facto governments.
Today would be an excellent day to recall what Raúl Alfonsín and his presidency signify from a panoramic historical viewpoint and honor him as the great Argentine statesman that he was. Twenty years ago, when Dr. Alfonsín was practically shoved from office in near-disgrace, his former Foreign Minister, Dante Caputo, placed things in historical and political perspective when he admitted that there were still grave economic problems to be resolved in Argentina, but added: ''The fundamental accomplishment of Alfonsín has been to prove that we Argentines – not just the Government – were capable of breaking the vicious cycle [of authoritarian rule] and constructing a democratic country.''

Captions:

Top - President Alfonsín wearing the Presidential sash.
Lower - Crowds jam Plaza de Mayo on Inauguration Day.

March 24, 1976: Welcome to Hell

2009-03-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

Today is a holiday in Argentina. It’s a controversial one. There are people who say the event that prompted it should be forgotten. There are others that say it should be remembered the way the Nazi holocaust is, not by marking a date, but by never ever letting anybody forget what happened, so that it will never be repeated. And there are still others who say that it should be recalled and vindicated as the heroic stand of ‘true patriots’ who put the country to rights when things had gone wrong. Luckily, nowadays, this last opinion is, for the most part, held only by a handful of moribund dinosaurs who are destined to shortly disappear…naturally, mortally, humanly, not as they made so many others ‘disappear’.

Those who favor this holiday, explain that it isn’t a ‘celebration’, but a commemoration, a day of remembrance to mark perhaps the darkest chapter in Argentina’s history, since it was on this date in 1976 that the Argentine armed forces seized control of power and unleashed a bloodbath that put an end to 30,000 lives and directly affected tens of thousands more.
I was a witness to that coup.

How It All Began. On the eve of the coup that ended Isabel Perón's government and marked the starting point for the bloody 'National Reorganization Process', a little man called Goyena - who, officially speaking, was 'our man in Government House' for the Buenos Aires Herald, the English-language daily I worked for, but who was really more of a quasi-government bureaucrat who delivered official press releases to us and carried gossip back to the Information Secretariat - walked into our already frantic newsroom. Addressing the general clamor and clatter of the newsroom he said, "Buenas tardes." Then he walked over to where Managing Editor Robert Cox was reading cables as they chattered out of the teletype machine, and in a loud clear voice, authoritatively said: "Hi, Chief. I just want you to know that not even a fly is stirring."

A couple of journalists who heard him guffawed. We had known for some time that a coup was in the offing and by that late hour on the eve of the rightwing revolution, everybody in the media knew that tonight was the night. Cox just turned slowly and looked at the bearer of this news with an expression of something akin to awe on his face. He kept staring at Goyena for a brief moment and the question on his lips was surely, "How in bloody hell can you hang around the Government House newsroom all day and have no idea what's going on? Or are you just an incredible cynic?" But he didn't ask it. Always the English gentleman, he took the little envelope full of official press releases Goyena extended to him and, with a pained look on his face, said: "Thank you, Goyena. Thank you and good night."

Goyena, with the serenity of a simpleton said, "Good night everyone," and was off for home, mission accomplished.

But his reaction was not a lot different than that of the rest of the country. Since General Juan D. Perón's death, the country had been divided into a them-and-us mentality by which there was the government and its entourage – which, although ostensibly elected, ruled like a band of village tyrants – and the people, who ruled nothing, and the trick was simply to try to avoid becoming a victim of the government. People lived their lives despite the government and sought ways to get around whatever ridiculous new action the State decreed while avoiding the eyes of its thugs that randomly roamed the streets in plate-less Ford Falcon Sprints, four or five to a car, door-to-door goons with sawn-off pump shotguns bristling from the windows. All they needed to change your whole life forever — or to end it — was an excuse and any excuse would do, even looking at them the wrong way. They reminded me of the gang of bandoleros in the western classic "The Magnificent Seven", heavily armed, ignorant scum that terrorized a little Mexican town until the city fathers finally had had enough and scraped up sufficient money to hire seven very scary American gunslingers to settle the score. Except that these guys were terrorizing a whole major city, an entire country, and had a whole government, the police and, yes, even the Army behind them. You weren't going to stop them by hiring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and company, no matter how fast they were on the draw.

A de facto state of siege was in place even before acting President (and Senate leader) Italo Luder made it official in 1975. In the vacuum left by Juan Perón’s death, his widow, ‘Isabel’ (María Estela Martínez de Perón) was a half-hysterical, tragi-comic figurehead, who was being mercilessly manipulated by a band of Peronist trade union hoodlums, in league with a sort of secret society of fundamentalist killers of fascist extraction.

The “wet work” was the province of the government’s eminence grise, former Federal Police Corporal José López Rega, Perón’s long-time bodyguard and confidant, known as “El Brujo” (the warlock), because of his links to Umbanda occultists. As Social Welfare Minister and Private Secretary first to Perón and then to Isabel, he wielded considerable power even in public life – enough, for instance, to name himself comisario general, the highest rank in the Federal Police, over the angry protests of a lot of the real cops. But the power he held behind the scenes was staggeringly greater. When the right wing Iron Guard of Peronism decided to “purify” the ranks of Peronism of “Marxist infiltration”, it was López Rega who eagerly leapt to the task, forming what was to become known as the “Triple-A” (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), a clandestine association of mostly former cops and military men, formed into death squads whose job it was to kill off leftwing leaders and thinkers. But under López Rega’s command, the Triple-A became a lot more: A private army of hit men whose aim was to silence any dissent, no matter where it came from.

So the trick, as I say, was to avoid them.

A Learning Experience. I had learned my lesson early on, a few years before the coup, when I was still quite green. My wife and I had gone to a movie and when we came out of the cinema on stylish Avenida Santa Fe, one of these sinister Ford Falcons, heavy with goons and hardware was coasting slowly along the curb. All of the occupants but the driver were looking toward the crowd coming out of the cinema. The two closest to the curb leered out the front and back passenger windows at the girls in the crowd. I realized that they were 'cruising chicks' more than patrolling the streets. It wasn't as if they really believed they could pick one up on their own merit, but so what? They had the power to pick up whomever they pleased! If they saw a young woman they 'fancied' they could always take her in for 'questioning' and if her male companion protested, he could always end up 'resisting arrest'. At any rate, when I noticed that the two on the curb side of the car were looking my wife up and down while making barely veiled rude gestures and noises, I stopped, turned and stared at them as coldly as I could. I don't know what on earth I was thinking, but I was young, not long out of the U.S. Army, with my head full of North American ideas about citizen's rights, about the invulnerability of American citizens abroad, about never backing down no matter what the odds, and so I tried to stare the thugs down.

Well, that obviously didn't work. My wife was tugging at my sleeve and warning me in English to move on. "Don't look at them! Come on, let's go!" she hissed. But it was too late. All but the driver were suddenly out of the car, shotguns at port arms or 9-millimeter pistols in hand, hustling me up against a store front.

"Documento!" one of them shouted as they spun me around and muscled me up against the wall face first.

"He doesn't understand anything," my wife was saying in Spanish. "He's American. He doesn't understand what's going on. He didn't know you were policemen. He's American," she kept saying, more than anything else, I think, for the benefit of the little crowd that was gathering on the sidewalk around us, perhaps so that if we got hauled away, someone might call the American Embassy. I don't really know. It all happened very fast and was quite confusing but I didn't have an Argentine permanent residence ID yet and handed them my U.S. passport. It seemed to cool them down somewhat, as did the crowd of witnesses on busy Santa Fe, who were waiting around to see the outcome. After making us stand there for a few minutes several of the plainclothesmen started slowly making their way back to the car. On their way they addressed the bystanders saying, "What are you looking at? Move on! Circulate! Nothing's happening here."

Nothing was ever happening anywhere but things happened every day and when they did, people disappeared or died.

The one that remained behind, turned me back around and stood toe to toe with me, obviously looking at the full beard I had only recently grown after leaving my job at a hotel, where beards had been strictly forbidden. He got close enough to me that I could smell his sweat and said, menacingly, "If I see you with that beard again, I'll burn it off. Get rid of it or we might mistake you for a guerrilla." He slapped my passport up against my chest. I took it and he turned on his heel and went back to the car, which roared off up the avenue.

Boots in the Night. I was reminded of that frightening personal experience on my way home that night in 1976, after I had headlined the March 24 Herald 'Tanks Roll Toward Buenos Aires' and put the paper's coup edition to bed. By the time that I saw the paper off, and hit the street, Isabel Perón had already been arrested and flown away from Government House by helicopter. That had happened at half past midnight, less than an hour before the paper was coming off the press and I left for home with a copy in my briefcase.

Already the downtown streets were firmly in the grasp of the Armed Forces. There were troops and trucks and jeeps on practically every corner. Soldiers in full combat gear, and slung with light automatic weapons were stopping cars and pedestrians and checking their identity papers by the beams of their flashlights. Those who had apparently failed to identify themselves properly were being herded aboard 5-ton trucks fitted with benches in their beds and with their backends covered by canvas tarps. The Army had also commandeered some city buses that were being loaded with prisoners. In my young mind, it was a scene that was far too reminiscent of the World War II movies I had grown up on, in which the Nazis would raid an entire neighborhood, loading Jews, Gypsies and other 'undesirables' onto trucks similar to these, to drive them off to God-knew-where for extermination.

I was on foot, unable to find any sort of transport to take me home, and while it was an incredible opportunity to observe the movement in the streets in the early moments of the military takeover, I couldn't help also having an intuitive sense of sheer survival that kept urging me to cut and run in panic. The term 'bloodless coup' didn't at all prepare one's mind for the overwhelming military force that was out in the streets and the effect was chilling to say the least. I remember feeling glad that I was wearing a suit and tie and looking as respectable as possible and that I had my identity and permanent residence documents in order. I ended up having to make my way on foot for at least 20 blocks, during which I was stopped and frisked and asked for my papers no fewer than four times, also having to show my Herald ID to back my story about being out in the wee hours because I was a journalist and had just got off work. But I was eventually able to slip onto the side streets and catch a rogue cab that took me the rest of the way to my mid-town neighborhood.

State of Siege. In the frightening days of lawlessness in high places prior to the coup, people liked to console themselves with the thought that it (abuse of power) couldn't happen to them. That if they stayed clear of 'politics' they would be safe. Hence the brilliant line of a character accused of leftist sympathies in a novel by the late Osvaldo Soriano, who lived out the dictatorship, like many other Argentine artists and intellectuals, in exile: "I've never been involved in politics," says Soriano's character. "I've always been a Peronist!"

When someone went missing whose disappearance they couldn't explain, people sought to ease their own minds by, saying: "Well, if they disappeared, they must have been 'into something'." If that was a common attitude in the pre-coup days, it became broadly prevalent after the March 24, 1976 takeover.

The fact was, however, that the process by which people in Argentina 'disappeared' in those days of the 'state of siege' was vicious and often random. And it turned even more random with the advent of military rule. Long before that time, Herald editors Robert Cox and Andrew Graham-Yooll had already begun to keep lists and to receive relatives of the missing at the paper’s offices in order to document the cases. They still believed in the courts. And we all continued to cling to Justice as our last hope throughout the nearly eight years that the military dictatorship lasted. The judicial system was indeed flawed, but it was better than nothing and could sometimes be used to the disadvantage of the country's rulers, who were otherwise untouchable.

In order to at least vaguely protect themselves and the newspaper, Bob and Andrew required that the relatives who appeared at the paper to state their missing family members' cases file a writ of habeas corpus with the court before the Herald would publish a line about it. It was a tenuous maneuver at best under the state of siege in which all constitutional guarantees were suspended, but it was a way to at least be able to claim that the case was official and, thus, public knowledge. The Herald could avoid being accused of publishing false reports, since the information was culled from public court records. It didn't matter that, in point of fact, the process worked in reverse. Indeed, sometimes the filing of the habeas corpus functioned as the peg on which our story hung. Furthermore, it was a way of making the State, through the courts, recognize that people were going missing, even if nobody was going to do anything about it. The Herald, then, without really wishing to, became more than just a newspaper. It gradually turned into a kind of ombudsman for the missing and their families, or at least a sort of 'scorekeeper' in what was to become known as the 'Dirty War'.

Cox never saw it that way, however. I once said something to him about the Herald's being 'a century-old institution'. He winced and said, "The Herald is a newspaper, not an institution. It's our job to report and if we can't do that, we might as well pack it in. But please don't call it an institution, Dan. Every time something gets called an institution, it's because it's already dead."

I stood corrected and on deeper thought, took that as my own credo: Who was the government, any government, to tell me what I could or could not say, if it was the truth? If I was a journalist, a chronicler, a writer, I was duty-bound to tell the truth as I saw it and report what I knew. Otherwise I had best shut up altogether.

Truth, obviously, was in very short supply both before and after the coup. The three-man Junta, made up of Army General Jorge Rafael Videla, Air Force General Orlando Agosti and Admiral Emilio Massera of the Navy, led the country to believe that they were a stopgap. Videla, leader of the strongest force and soon-to-be-president of the country, acted as the official spokesman for the Junta, assuring local and foreign journalists alike that his government was “pro-democracy”. He said that the situation had been intolerable under Isabel Perón’s chaotic government, that democracy had been severely endangered and that the purpose of the Junta was to shore up the country's damaged institutions, repress subversive activities and return power to the people's elected representatives, where it belonged. Considering the dire and dangerous times in which the country had been living prior to the coup, this sounded highly reassuring to practically everyone, and particularly to major local and international businesses. It was precisely what the country needed, big businessmen contended — to get reorganized, to change its faltering image, to get serious and buckle down, to get the trains running on time, so to speak.

Videla himself was, he suggested, a professional soldier and a patriot, a man bound to serve his country in any way he could. And the sooner he could do this job and get back to barracks, the better.

People believed him. Even Robert Cox believed him, saying upon first meeting him that Videla seemed like “a decent man”. But it was all a lie and Cox’s opinion – and the paper’s – would soon change radically. The military were to remain entrenched in power for the next seven and a half years. In “protecting democracy” (presumably from itself), the National Reorganization Process – El Proceso for short – would create a State terror machine that would grind up the rights of an entire nation in its cogs. The Proceso would be responsible for some 30,000 “disappearances” (read: murders) and torture would become standard operating procedure at every military installation, police precinct and “safe house” in the country. The atrocities and abuses were endless and the stultifying effects of life under the absolute power of a dictatorship that claimed a ‘moral’ as well as political agenda infected every level of society. It would take involving the country in a war with a major world power and promptly losing that confrontation to debilitate the Proceso to a point at which it became untenable for it to remain standing, and democracy was finally restored - but that's another story for another day.

And that’s why this day is commemorated - lest we forget, that no matter how seemingly intolerable and undemocratic a democratically elected administration may seem, democracy can only be corrected by due democratic process. Anything else is tantamount to having the wolf guard the sheep.

…Aaaaaand We’re Back!

2009-03-24T05:36:00.000-07:00

When I did a hitch in the Army almost 40 years ago, we were taught to say, “No excuse, Sir.” Back then it seemed a little stupid to me. I mean, I was 20 and could think of a thousand lame excuses for just about anything I was capable of screwing up. But now, at this stage in my life, it seems like a pretty good rule of thumb: No excuses. So, the best I can do in explaining my recent absence to those of you who have taken the time to read my first efforts at blogging – though not at commentary since I made my living as a newsman and commentator for over two decades – is not make excuses. The fact is that crap happens…life happens – work, personal stuff, things that lead from one day to another, inexorably tying you up with what you have to do instead of what you want to do - and the best laid plans of mice and men end up getting caught in the stampede.

‘Work’, for me, has always been about writing too, just not always what I want to be writing. So ‘want to’ and ‘have to’ aren’t, technically speaking, all that far apart. But in terms of sentiment, of being in a place where I feel warm and fuzzy and truly at home, the distance between one and the other is light-years.

Anyway, I’ve made a promise to myself – and I make it now to you too – that I’m going to try and start doing more ‘want to’, because there comes a time in life when you suddenly realize that the cemeteries are full of indispensable people and that ‘have to’ is really more like ‘ought to’…but maybe just not today and maybe only if it lets you get in a little ‘want to’ along with it. And with me, writing this column is a definite ‘want to’. So like I say, we’re back…and sorry to have walked off without a word to those who have honored me by listening when I’ve had something to say.