MAGA IS NOT CONSERVATIVE, LIZ IS

 Staunchly democratic Republican Liz Cheney finally said it out loud. If Donald Trump is the 2024 GOP nominee for president, she will abandon the party.

This news has been a long time coming. Unlike some long-time iconic conservatives such as syndicated columnist George Will, who not only abandoned the party when Trump became the candidate in 2016, but also called on his conservative readers to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump was a danger to democracy, Cheney stuck it out for Trump’s entire term. In fact, she voted for Trump’s policies more than ninety percent of the time. But when Trump began undermining constitutional order, Cheney, then the third highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, who had already been finding Trump’s loose and reluctant adherence to the Constitution and to presidential traditions disturbing, voted, along with nine other House Republicans, to impeach the then-president for inciting a bloody insurrection against the United States Congress.

The tenacious Liz Cheney, authentic conservative

Since then, Cheney has become the leading conservative voice against Donald Trump’s authoritarian designs, pointing out, principally, that Trump’s refusal, for the first time in US history, to accept the will of the people and submit to the peaceful transfer of power after unquestionably losing an election is intolerable, illegal and unacceptable. She believes, with every conservative bone in her body, that her party must either ensure that Trump never again holds office, or it will become the vehicle for American democracy’s suicidal demise.

As such, Liz Cheney, more than any other personality in the conservative world, has become the poster-girl for democracy, and the clear voice of reason in an America gone insane. Her role as vice-chair of the January Sixth Investigative Committee, has graphically demonstrated her level of commitment to trying to save the United States from the now ever more obvious advance of authoritarianism, since the current GOP leadership, in a cold-sweat panic born of the virulence of Trump’s slavish MAGA entourage, has chosen to embrace the Trump cult of personality—akin only to the rise of far-right populist dictatorships witnessed historically in pre-1990s Latin America, or to today’s populist far-left authoritarian regimes in such places as Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua—rather than losing their seats in Congress.

Cheney, for her part, has risked everything, placing Nation before party, the common good before personal political ambition and democracy before obedience to the GOP hierarchy, of which she is no longer a part. This last is thanks to her demotion by top House Republican and Trump sycophant Kevin McCarthy, who has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that he will forsake all that is sacred in American democracy and in the “Party of Lincoln” in pursuit of his all-consuming ambition to be the next Speaker of the House.

Of the ten Republicans who dared confront the autocratic nature of the former president and vote with Democrats for his impeachment, the Trump political machine has left only two standing: namely, Washington State’s Fourth District Representative Dan Newhouse, and California’s Twenty-Second District Representative David Valadao.

Valadao was unique in that he was the only one of the ten that Trump and his mob didn’t target. This, despite the fact that he stated his unequivocal view in voting for impeachment that Trump was “without question, a driving force in the catastrophic events” at the Capitol. Perhaps it was a California thing. Despite being The Land of Reagan, California is considered by Trumpster loyalists to be a place of evil bent on imposing its mighty will and sinful liberal ideals on God-fearin’ folk from coast to coast. So maybe they felt there was no point spending good campaign money to primary Valadao in a largely heathen Democrat land where one Republican was as likely (or unlikely) to carry through as another. Who knows?

Newhouse, for his part, managed to survive being primaried by Trump loyalists, largely due to the “top-two style” open primary system by which candidates are picked in Washington State. According to this system, all candidates are listed on the same ballot. The top two vote-getters, regardless of their partisan affiliations, advance to the general election. As a result, in that state the Trump camp’s practice of primarying an incumbent who doesn’t toe the boss’s line is way less effective than elsewhere, because by this method you could even conceivably have two candidates from the same party running against each other in a general election and no candidate at all from the other party. It’s all about who the two top vote-getters are in the primary process, regardless of party affiliation.

Ohio Representative Gonzalez

The first of the GOP’s anti-Trump ten to be undermined was Anthony Gonzalez, who represents my home state of Ohio and my home voting district in Cuyahoga County. Although a young man, Gonzalez is an old-style Republican who actually believes in serving the public, in the tradition of political compromise, and in the nation instead of himself and has proven to be well-viewed across party lines. He was the sort of candidate who appealed to independents and even to some conservative Democrats because of his commonsense, non-reactionary approach to issues. He has, for instance, been a staunch critic of the appointment of millionaire businessman Louis DeJoy to the job of Postmaster General as part of the Trump camp’s attempt to derail mail-in voting in the 2020 General Election. 

After voting for Trump’s impeachment following the January Sixth Capitol Insurrection, Gonzalez was censured by his party for having "betrayed his constituents (and having) relied on emotions rather than the will of his constituents and any credible facts." Trump supported his own former White House aide Max Miller to run in a primary against Gonzalez in 2022, but the Ohio congressman—and much admired former college and pro football player—preempted that decision by announcing that he would not run again. Gonzalez’s unfortunate decision wasn’t based, however, on the primary challenge, but on multiple credible threats against the physical safety of both himself and his family that he has been receiving from anonymous MAGA fanatics who, Gonzalez clearly believes, will stop at nothing to impose Trump on American society, whether he wins in fair elections or not.

A month after Gonzalez announced that he wouldn’t run again, the much more high-profile Congressman Adam Kinzinger did the same, and for the same reasons. The Illinois Sixteenth District representative became the target of a deluge of death threats from MAGA activists and was subject to hostility from his GOP colleagues in Congress. But the former Iraq War Air Force combat pilot hasn’t allowed that decision—or the death threats—to sway him from his criticism of Trump as a would-be tyrant and a danger to democracy. Like Cheney, he has been active and front-and-center on the January Sixth Investigative Committee, as well as becoming a familiar face on television news shows whenever the subject of Trump’s un-democratic actions has been the subject.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger - not going quietly

One of Cheney’s veteran congressional colleagues who, like her, voted to impeach following January Sixth is Michigan Sixth District Representative Fred Upton. Faced with a Trump-backed primary challenge in the midst of constant death threats, Upton decided to end his thirty-year career in Congress and retire.

Fifty-nine-year-old New York Twenty-Fourth District Representative John Katko made a similar decision after the impeachment vote. He had served four terms in the House following a long career as an attorney.

The other four, including Cheney, who broke ranks and voted to impeach, deciding that Trump’s role in the January Sixth Insurrection was inexcusable and impossible to ignore for the sake of American democracy and constitutionality, were all primaried by the Trump camp and have since lost their seats in Congress as of next year. These include Washington State Third District Representative Jaime Lynn Herrera Beutler, Michigan Third District Representative Peter Meijer—who was only narrowly ousted by Trump-endorsed challenger John Gibbs—South Carolina Seventh District Representative Tim Rice, and, finally, Cheney herself who represented Wyoming At Large.

After a career as a State Department official and Republican presidential campaign strategist, Cheney won her congressional bid in 2016 and has been elected to three consecutive terms since. In her blood red state of Wyoming, her very conservative views and her father’s iconic Republican persona made her a veritable shoo-in for Far West voters. But her vote to impeach Trump and, worse still, her major role in the January Sixth investigation were viewed by the vast majority of far-right Wyoming voters as a betrayal of their trust in her conservatism and loyalty to “their president”.

Former VP Dick Cheney - Liz is fearless

In the lead-up to the Wyoming primary, former vice-president and conservative icon Dick Cheney filmed a TV spot in which, wearing his western Stetson, he looked directly into the camera and said, “In our nation’s two hundred-forty-six-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. Liz is fearless,” he went on. “She never backs down from the fight. There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office, and she will succeed.”

Despite those moving words from her veteran Republican father, Cheney’s Trump-endorsed challenger, Harriet Hageman, trounced her, walking off with sixty-six percent of the votes. Wyoming was clearly the wrong place for Cheney’s democratic fervor, patriotism and loyalty to the Constitution. Her message, though absolutely right for America, was utterly wrong for winning an election in the most MAGA state in the Union.

All of this is particularly disturbing to me because of my background as an opposition newsman during dictatorial rule in Argentina. Listening to the statements of Republicans who have decided not to run following threats to them and their families strikes home in a very real way with me. As do stories from news professionals in the US who have also enumerated the vicious threats made against them for reporting honestly about the dangers facing US democracy.

These mob tactics being employed by the MAGA crowd particularly bring to mind a time shortly after my boss and mentor, Robert Cox, walked out on a twenty-year career at the Buenos Aires paper where we worked. Until then, 1979, he had stoically borne the heavy burden of his editorial decision to oppose dictatorial tyranny, but when death threats were directed at his wife and five children, the die was cast and he decided to submit to self-exile in the United States—that was decades before the Trump regime would seek to make dictatorships popular and to express actual admiration for them.

Cox, the editor who took on tyranny 

Very soon after his departure from the paper and the country, a colleague who was marrying into one of the wealthy families most connected to the crony system supported by the dictatorship was invited to a cocktail party as her fiancé’s date. While bumping shoulders with some of the strongest supporters of the authoritarian regime, she realized the woman talking to her mother-in-law to be was the wife of the top general in charge of Intelligence and, as such, the man directly responsible for the reign of terror that the dictatorship employed to maintain its power. Drawing near, she overheard the woman say, “See how we finally ran Cox out?” and watched her mother-in-law smile with genuine glee and congratulate the other woman.

You can be sure there is some version of this going on in the Trump-usurped GOP as well, as MAGA leaders gleefully watch the remaining true Republicans in the party give up and walk out on what they see as a lost cause, or at least as an environment too toxic for them to remain in. Indeed, in her comments this past week at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Cheney not only said that she would abandon her party if Trump was the candidate, but also opined that the fact that Trump could incite an insurrection and refuse to permit a peaceful transfer of power after losing an election and still have the GOP leadership’s support for the possibility of his running again in 2024 indicated “just how sick” the party is.

Cheney said she would do “whatever it takes” to try and ensure that Trump is not the GOP nominee in the next presidential election. She repeated her pledge to do “everything in her power” to stop Trump’s presidential bid when festival moderator Evan Smith asked if she herself was considering running for president in 2024.

This, to my mind, brings up an interesting point. It is clear that the nefarious influence of MAGA Republicans in the GOP has made it next to impossible to survive politically in that party for true believers in and defenders of democracy like Cheney, Kinzinger, and the other eight in the House who voted to impeach Trump, as well as for people like Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in the Senate, who are managing to hang on to their seats but amid Trump-camp primary challenges and attempts among their peers in Congress to ostracize them.

So how can these true conservatives buck the autocratic MAGA trend and return their party to the values of such icons as Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush, when the MAGA bandwagon is blaring the message that “this isn’t your grandpa’s GOP” and indicating by it that not supporting the authoritarian personality cult surrounding Donald Trump is tantamount to being a traitor to the party and to the country—a message that the new MAGA-Republicanism has in common with every dictatorship that has ever existed worldwide? As I see it, the answer is, they can’t. At least not in this lifetime. The GOP has been hijacked by a neo-fascist crowd that is bent on winning by hook or by crook, that has zero interest in democracy or a two-party system, and that is touting the notion that no idea that comes from anyplace but its own hierarchy is viable or acceptable.

But there is clear evidence that the handful of true supporters of the tenets of American democracy, justice and political tradition that remain active in the party have a following. And Liz Cheney’s courage and true leadership have done much since 2020 to advance that support. I personally know Republicans who are never-Trumpers and were sorrowfully yet patriotically willing to forsake their life-long affiliations to vote against Trump, even if only for a tiny third party candidate with absolutely no chance of winning, while others held their noses and voted for the Democratic candidate simply to make sure that Trump wouldn’t occupy the White House for another four years. These are people who are now discouraged and confused since their conservative democratic ideals are served neither by the current MAGA-Republican leadership nor by the Democrats.

There is also evidence to suggest that Liz Cheney and never-Trump Republican politicians have further garnered potential support among conservative independents and even among some conservative Democrats, as well as among non-MAGA Libertarians. These are all people who are both fed up with the drama of MAGA-Republicanism, with the toxic autocratic image of Donald Trump, and with what they see as ever more liberal trends in the Democratic party.

These people are all hungry for change but see no vehicle for it, when potentially powerful leaders like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney have been definitively sidelined in an off-the-rails GOP. And although they have been systematically whittled down to a handful by the Trump machine in Congress, the roster of valuable current, former and would-be conservative influencers who see Trump as an existential threat to democracy and, indeed, to the Republican Party as such, is actually impressively long and star-studded. You can get an idea of just how impressive from this list:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_opposed_the_Donald_Trump_2020_presidential_campaign

So, what’s missing here? A new vehicle. A new party. A democratic conservative party for true conservatives instead of a party dominated by MAGA autocrats and coup-mongers. Many people are afraid of any modification in America’s traditional—for all intents and purposes but not always in absolute fact—two-party system. But seeing what has happened in the past six years, I have to ask myself if, perhaps, the US two-party system hasn’t effectively run its course, coming dangerously close to a shooting war between two political organizations that are striving more for superiority over each other than for a working democracy, a constructive debate of ideas and policies, the final compromises and balance between which are actually beneficial to the citizens who vote for them.

A strong, authentic and democratic conservative party could go a long way toward bringing party politics back toward serving the people instead of continuing to be a destructively self-serving force by, for and of itself and in detriment to the nation it was meant to serve. Could a new conservative party win the 2024 election? Perhaps—Independent Bernie Sanders’ near-victory in the Democratic Primary in 2016 provides an encouraging example—but probably not. It could, however, make enormous inroads toward isolating and disempowering authoritarian influence in the American right wing. And it could hold out a promise of conservative authenticity that would only strengthen its influence in the future. If the purpose of Liz Cheney and her fellow small-d democratic Republican colleagues and constituents is really to do “everything in their power” to halt the advance of Trump and MAGA-Republicanism, a conservative third party could well head them off at the pass if Trump is a candidate in 2024. And it could continue to be a bright new democratic force to be reckoned with in the future.

The even bigger problem with cults of personality than their own undemocratic origins and selfish goals is that, like all of us, personalities die. They are not larger than life. They are mortal. And personality-isms, therefore, always devolve into some entirely other “ism” once their self-centered leaders succumb to mortality—usually something far worse, even, than their originally undemocratic selves.

The solution to Trump and MAGA’s takeover of the GOP must come from within democratic Republican ranks. A patriotically-founded conservative party could gain force on the strength of its incipient resistance to the advance of authoritarianism and on the strength of its power to split the Republican vote between true conservatives and the MAGA autocracy in the coming election cycles, thus also serving to purge and cleanse the right of its current authoritarian orientation. In short, it could properly and honorably represent genuine conservatism in the United States, while literally saving the life of American democracy.                  

Iron Mothers

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

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

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:

Courting the Herald. (Excerpt from The Truth in Any Language, by Dan Newland, copyright 2009).

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?"