GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY OF A RECURRENT NIGHTMARE

 

First Junta of the National Reorganization Process (left to right) Massera, Videla, Agosti

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’etat that preceded a nearly eight-year nightmare known as “El Proceso” (National Reorganization Process) in Argentina. This date, March 24^th, 1976, is an important one for me since I, along with my superiors and colleagues at the Buenos Aires Herald lived those times first-hand, and up close and personal.

I’m commemorating this historic anniversary in the best way possible. I’m in Buenos Aires, and attended a special ceremony of the Argentine branch of PEN Club international—an esteemed organization of writers and journalists worldwide—to honor my friend, mentor and former boss, Robert J. Cox. Although none of us at the Herald back in those times would have bet a plug nickel on our chances for getting far into middle age, let alone entertaining any chance of seeing old age, incredibly, Bob is now a very lucid and active ninety-two-year-old, and I’ve reached the ripe old age of seventy-six. No one is more pleasantly surprised than the two of us.

Cox speaking at PEN Buenos Aires

The honor bestowed on Bob Cox at the PEN was for “defense of free expression and human rights.” It is well-deserved. And it wasn’t the first international award that he has received for his courage and professionalism in those dark days. Few newspaper editors in history have risked as much as Bob and the Herald did during that blood military regime.

Recalling that first day of the new regime in particular, my memories are vivid. We had been expecting  a military uprising for several days before it happened. In fact, given Argentina’s history, which for  nearly half a century by that time, had been characterized by pendulum swings between shaky democracies and spontaneous coups, we found it rather amazing that it hadn’t happened sooner, since the country had, quite literally, descended into chaos.

Already for two years by then—coincidentally, my first two years as a newsman at the Herald—the left and right of Peronism, following the death of the movement’s iconic leader, General Juan Domingo Perón, had been busy trying to kill each other off.  Perón had sought to model his last wife, Isabel Martínez, after his late wife, Eva Duarte de Perón—who had been just as iconic as Perón himself and, depending on which side of the political spectrum you came from, was both the most revered and most hated woman in Argentine history. It didn’t take, of course. Isabel was no Eva. Evita was unique and an incredible if short-lived populist firebrand.

José "El Brujo" López Rega

Isabel was utterly incompetent, and even before Perón returned from nearly eighteen years of exile in Spain to once again become the constitutional president of the Argentine Republic, she had fallen under the spell of Perón’s private secretary, José López Rega, a Rasputin-like character known as “El Brujo” (the Sorcerer), who had convinced Isabel that he could imbue her with the living spirit of Eva Perón.

Instead, he merely manipulated Isabel, who had succeeded Perón as president, and, through her, ran the country. This is a totally subjective description, however, since from  an objective viewpoint, Isabel Perón was completely incapable of governing the county, and  what López Rega “ran”, was Argentina into the ground. By the time of the coup, hyperinflation had reached seven hundred percent a year. Prices literally changed by the hour. And seeing the writing on the wall, López Rega had already fled the country eight months before the coup took place.

He would manage to live in hiding abroad for a decade, until his arrest in the United States in 1986 and his extradition to Argentina which, by then, was living under a stable democracy. He would die in prison in Argentina, awaiting trial for his many crimes.

López Rega’s shadow-government was basically a criminal association. He headed up a clandestine paramilitary organization known as the Argentine Anti-Communist alliance, or Triple-A. A retired Federal Police corporal—who would promote himself to police commissioner-general —López Rega had no tools for governing and, instead, surrounded himself (and Isabel) with people who were just as lawless, ineffective and bloodthirsty as he was. The Peronist left and mafia-style Peronist labor unions were vying with him for control of power, as the country was descending into economic and political chaos.  With, as I say, prices changing by the hour, the government of Isabel Perón was constantly signing compulsory monopoly-money-style pay hikes, decreed under Peronist union pressure by both Congress and the Casa Rosada (government house) in a futile attempt to help workers keep pace with rampant inflation. It was, in a word, utter pandemonium.

Meanwhile, it was López Rega’s Triple-A that would initiate what, under the military, would later on be known as Argentina’s Dirty War. By the time that bloodbath was over nearly a decade later, thirty thousand people in Argentina would be “missing” and/or murdered. But López Rega’s brief but ruthless chapter in this history would account for more than six hundred of those disappearances and deaths.

The only reason the last truly Peronist government tottered on for as long as it did was thanks to a maneuver between López Rega and Senate President Italo Luder. Bundling Isabel off to the country in Córdoba Province “for health reasons,” Luder took temporary control of the government and, in one of his first acts, declared a “state of siege”, a modified form of martial law in which, under the terms of Luder’s proclamation, the country’s military was given a free hand to “annihilate subversion.” It was actually a carte blanche to kill or jail everybody the far-right had ever felt like getting rid of.

There’s a problem—I mean other than the obvious one—of giving the military free rein to do as it pleases, beyond the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. And that is that in a situation in which an administration rules by force rather than by law, it is the military that outguns everyone else. Inevitably, then, there came a time when the Armed Forces decided to cut out the middleman (or woman, as it were) and take over government themselves. That’s precisely what happened on March 24^th, 1976.

There was word before the coup took place of unusual activity on the military bases surrounding Buenos Aires and near other major cities. Hours before the coup took place, we knew that armored vehicles were rolling toward the Capital.

Cox at the Herald, circa 1976

Funny story. Bob, as editor, had inherited a Government House correspondent who was more of a bureaucrat than a journalist. It didn’t cost much to keep him there and it saved having to send somebody to pick up daily government press releases, which were of little use anyway, except to get the “official story”. The guy’s name was Goyena. He was a descendant of Pedro Goyena, a 19^th-century legal expert, journalist and politician. 

Goyena would come in at the end of his day, say hello to everyone in the newsroom, go to Bob’s office, wish him a good evening and drop off the government handouts. Then he would bid us all goodnight and leave. He was the bearer of the official story and was otherwise clueless about and completely uninterested in what was actually going on in the country.

So, on the night of the coup, Goyena breezes in, looking dapper as always in his three-piece suit. We are all hard at work gathering information, reading cables, taking to contacts, etc. A real hive of frenzied activity as the coup approached.

Just as Goyen is reaching Bob, who is standing in the doorway of his office reading a wire service cable, I ask him to tell me what’s going on at Government House. He turns and answers, “Nothing, chief. Not even a fly is stirring.”

Bob and I both stared at him in disbelief, our mouths hanging open, wondering how a man could sit in the press room at the center of government all day and not have clue what was going on.

Oblivious, Goyena hands Bob the press releases as usual, smiles, bids us all good night, and is gone. Bob and I just stood there looking at each other and shaking our heads. Right after that, I sent a sixty-point banner headline to the shop that read: TANKS ROLL ON BUENOS AIRES.

March 24, 1976, Buenos Aires, Casa Rosada

But I mention this because Goyena’s reaction to the impending coup wasn’t all that atypical. Quite a large segment of the population was content to bury their heads in the sand, and act like nothing was wrong, that it was just business as usual, and no business of theirs. Years later, Cox would write in an editorial that perhaps the hardest job of a good journalist was attempting to tell readers things they didn’t want to hear about subjects they preferred to ignore. It was a brilliant analysis of reality under martial law in Argentina.  And I think it’s an apt analysis of what’s happening in far too large a segment of the population today in my native United States, where authoritarianism is alive and well once more.

When I left the paper well after midnight the night of the coup—I didn’t have a car yet then—there was no public transport and the streets downtown were full of Army trucks  and swarming with armed troops. I had to walk many blocks to find a renegade cab, trying my best to dodge the checkpoints that had been set up. I saw soldiers standing guard over long rows of mostly men who were face-first up against walls, legs back and spread, being patted down and their IDs checked by NCOs and platoon officers. Some of them were unceremoniously loaded up on trucks and driven away. Most of the troops armed with FAL assault rifles were conscripts—nervous, frightened young guys, barely more than boys. It was a dangerous climate, I finally caught a cab with a nervous, suspicious driver, about twenty blocks from the Herald and was able to safely reach my midtown apartment in the wee hours of the morning.  I took an immediately dim view of where this was heading.

This scene and many more from those times have been replaying vividly in my head recently as I’ve watched news footage of federal agents and paramilitary thugs acting with impunity and outside of the law in major opposition cities throughout the US. It is chilling to think that the horror I experienced and reported on in Argentina fifty years ago is today taking place in real time in a country once considered the greatest democracy on earth—my country.

The Herald’s response in the beginning was the same as that of most of the rest of the country, except for the far-left fringe. The lawlessness and bedlam of the Isabel Perón/López Rega regime had been so all-pervasive that having the patriarchal power of the Armed Forces step in and “make things right” seemed like the only quick solution.

Still, Bob Cox in his editorials, and we in the news coverage at the Herald were very careful not to praise the military. We took the attitude that the National Reorganization Process should be just that. That is should basically “take out the trash” and start over with a clean and pluralistic democratic society. We wanted to believe that is was a caretaker regime that would reestablish constitutional order. This would quickly be proven an erroneous assessment.

But I recall that, in one very early editorial—I think the first one after the military arrested members of the Peronist regime and took over—Bob talked about the former government’s having died of its own accord and that now all that was left to do was to remove the corpse. It was a powerful analogy that underscored the very real gravity of the situation.

Bob and Dan, 2026, fifty years after.

I think perhaps because of his thinking of Economy Minister and “Chicago boy” José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz (Dr. Joe in Herald lexicon) as a serious and internationally respected economist, and of his own friend and attorney Walter Klein, who seconded the minister, as an honest and decent human being, Bob was at first willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to trust that their intentions were honorable.

However, it didn’t take long for Bob to realize that while the head of the Junta, General Jorge Rafael Videla, was disseminating the message that the last thing the military wanted was to rule indefinitely—that they were just there to reestablish constitutional order and make the country safe for democracy again—the new regime was, in fact, simply doubling down on the brutal tactics of the former one. And they were doing so with much greater military efficiency and non-partisan ruthlessness. The Triple A hadn’t disappeared. It had merely been absorbed, placed under “new management”, as well as being vastly expanded under the military regime.

Bob very soon started employing a tactic (almost a ruse) to keep the Herald on a tightrope above the fray. On the one hand, he praised the new regime’s economic initiatives under Minister Martínez de Hoz and Walter Klein as Economic Coordination Secretary. On the other he was sharply critical of continuing clandestine paramilitary activity including an ever-mounting tally of disappearances and murders.

I recall when he first met Videla, only shortly after the coup. I asked Bob what impression he’d had. They were already calling Videla “The Pink Panther” behind his back because of his striking resemblance to the cartoon character. Bob said he reminded him more of a rabbit with its ears laid back so you might want to pet its head. That perception was short-lived, however.

At first Videla tried to get Bob to believe that disappearances, murders and torture being reported to us were simply a big mistake. Videla’s consistent message was, “We give specific orders, but can’t always control how they are carried out.” But no one who had ever been in the military, which both Bob and I had—I in the US Army, and he in the British Navy—could be very easily convinced by that argument.

After the same horrific things not only kept happening but also increased by leaps and bounds, the next time Bob was in a meeting with the general, and Videla reiterated the lies about not being able to control the plainclothes paramilitary’s action, Bob caught the president off guard by responding that in the beginning he was willing to accept that excuse, but that since then, the government had done nothing to rein that sort of behavior in, and, on the contrary, state violence was expanding exponentially. Videla’s excuses, Bob insisted, were no longer valid or believable.

As a result, there began to be a much frostier relationship between the paper and the regime, and Bob’s editorials reflected that. This was true not just of the Army, which was the dominant force, but also of the Navy. I recall once, after Bob wrote an editorial about the increasing role of the Navy in repression, he was summoned to the office of Junta member Admiral Emilio Massera. Bob arrived promptly for the appointment in the early evening, his busiest time of day at the paper. Massera kept him cooling his heels there for more than an hour. When Bob asked the Admiral’s aide to remind Massera that he was waiting, Bob was told to be patient, that admiral knew he was there.

Eventually, Bob made it clear that if the Admiral wasn’t going to see him soon, he would have to leave because he had work to do. After a brief consultation, the aide said the Admiral would see him now. When Bob was ushered into the enormous inner office, Massera was seated at a table with a number of other men, who seemed annoyed at the interruption. With little or no prelude, Massera turned to Bob and said, “I don’t want to appear in your newspaper anymore, Cox. I don’t want you to even mention my name.”

Bob started to protest that since Massera was one of the three most powerful men in the country, that request would be impossible to fulfil. Massera repeated, “not even a mention, Cox.” And Bob was ushered out. Of course, Bob being Bob and the Herald being the Herald, he came back to the paper and immediately wrote an editorial about Massera.

News editor Andrew Graham-Yooll announced he was leaving shortly after the coup. I have a feeling that the disappearance of his friend, novelist Haroldo Conti, was a factor. It was shortly after Conti was snatched—and subsequently murdered—that Andrew got word that he was on a list for execution. Very likely the same task list Conti had been on. He had long been receiving telephone threats and finally decided to take them seriously, packing up his family and moving to London. Andrew would later write that when he told Cox he was leaving, Bob had said, “You can’t! I need you.” But then apologized for having been insensitive to Graham-Yooll’s plight.

Andrew would continue and even intensify his campaign against the regime from Fleet Street. But he would no longer be at the Herald for the duration of the dictatorship. Bob, almost immediately after that, promoted me to a news editor post and had me overseeing both the International Desk (known at the Herald as the “the Night Desk”) and the City Desk, but brought in a Herald alumnus, Andrew McLeod, who had been living in Brazil, to actually run the Night Desk post that I’d been filling since 1974, and take the day-to-day pressure of that job off of me to free me up for local news coverage, where Andrew’s absence had left a gaping hole. It was during this period, from 1976 until Bob’s forced exile toward the end of 1979, that our friendly boss-employee status was transformed into an intensive working relationship and a clearcut friendship.

It was self-affirming that Bob was putting his trust in me. Although, in reality, he had little choice. That became clear to me when he one day said, “Since Andrew is gone, The Telegraph is looking for someone to be their Buenos Aires stringer. I thought of you.”

I accepted, and it was from that point on that I took an ever-increasing role in reporting what was happening in Argentina to the world. And every new free-lance contact I made as a  correspondent was thanks to Bob. Former Herald reporter David Hume, who was leaving Argentina after receiving credible death threats, handed his ABC Radio News string over to me, as well as The London Daily Express for which he had been free-lancing. When McGraw-Hill World News moved their Buenos Aires full-time correspondent Ernie McCrary to Río, Bob and I took over that Buenos Aires string together as well, until Bob found he didn’t have the time for it and left it to me entirely. McGraw-Hill had fifty specialized publications (including Business Week), and I found myself writing regularly for four or five of them that were interested in certain aspects of the regime.

Bob wrote for several very major international publications, and once left me on call for them while he was on vacation in Europe. That was how I ended up covering an important international story for Newsweek, when an Army task unit sought to arrest People’s Revolutionary Army chief Mario Santucho, a move that ended up in a gunbattle in which both the leader of the Army unit and Santucho died. Suddenly, without realizing how it was happening, I’d become the international free-lance correspondent I’d always dreamed of  being, and I had Bob to thank for it. That made me work all the harder to be a good writer and reporter, because I was grateful and didn’t want to let Bob down. He was, in a very real sense, my mentor. And remains so to this day.

Meanwhile, my job at the Herald was ever more demanding, and I found myself leading the same kind of fast-pace life that I’d always observed in Bob and Andrew, playing international correspondent during the day and working at the paper all night, catching a few hours of sleep whenever I could. Despite the tragedy of those dangerous times, it ended up being the most exhilarating chapter of my life, and I’ve never found anything to match it since, in terms of self-fulfillment. We were actually accomplishing something. We were writing a piece of history, day by day, on which no one else was reporting as thoroughly as we were.

Far too many others weren’t lucky enough to make it through that entire period unscathed.  At least a hundred journalists would perish. Many other journalists, academics, actors, writers, artists and intellectuals in general would go missing. And by the end of the first year of the Proceso, Videla’s interior minister, General Albano Harguindeguy, was making it clear that the Proceso was there to stay. The ballot boxes, he said, were well stored, and that’s how they would remain until the military decided it was time to get them out again.

That turned out to be nearly eight years after the coup. And the only that the accelerated the regime’s demise—despite growing popular dissent—was the military’s attempt to remain in power by carried out the military occupation of the Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as La Malvinas. There had been a diplomatic dispute between Argentina and Britain for a century and a half over those South Atlantic islands, and the Proceso reasoned that taking them over militarily would cause Argentines to rally round the flag and give the faltering regime a new lease on life. What they never counted on, oddly enough, was a British military response that would lead to a bloody and tragic ten-week war.

In other words, the Falklands/Malvinas were where the military regime went to die. In a very real sense, the tragedy of that war nevertheless led to a true celebration of democracy following some of the darkest years in Argentina’s history.

Neither dead nor alive...'disappeared'

Throughout the long, dark year of the Proceso,  foreign correspondents, prompted by Cox and the Herald, would ask Videla repeatedly, “What about the missing?” But it would be in answer to a renowned local journalist, José Ignacio “Nacho” López,  that General Videla would, in 1979, finally provide a response to that question that was as cynical as it was chilling, and as definitive as “disappearance” itself. Videla would tell López, “They are an unknown, they have no entity, they are neither alive nor dead. They are ‘disappeared’.”

 The golden anniversary we mark today should be a tribute to the thirty thousand missing and dead. It should be in remembrance of brave human rights activists who struggled and died, of intellectuals murdered because the regime felt ideas posed a threat to its existence, of third world priests, seminarians and nuns executed for the “crime” of serving the poor and destitute. And it should be a tribute as well to my friend and mentor Robert Cox for ensuring that the Herald reported in English what other local media were silencing in Spanish. And a tribute to him as well for inspiring those of us who stayed and carried on the fight for truth for the next three years after he himself was forced into exile.          

In the end, however, this fiftieth anniversary of the Proceso should be a time of reflection for Americans like me, because the similarities to what happened back then are striking within the context of what is happening in the US today, where a two-and-a-half-century democracy, once considered the greatest democracy on earth, is fast-descending into despotism and chaos.

I can truly say that I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends. No day better than today to renew my commitment to telling people my experience, telling them what I have been part of, and what I have lived through, in the hope that they wake up before having to see that same nightmare through to the bitter end.