III. L A R EVOLUCIÓN F RANCESA Y LA I GLESIA
22. J USTICIA PARA EL PASADO
In the period immediately following the forced disappearances of persons suspected of having links to communism, subversion or terrorism, the relatives (who would become in large part the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) of those who had gone missing (who would become the
desaparecidos) sought to find out the truth of what had happened to them. They demanded to know where their children were being held, whether they were alive or dead, and to know what crimes they were accused of. If they were suspected of having committed a crime, they asked that they be tried and sentenced in a court of law. Otherwise they asked that they be set free. The nuances of this part of the early struggle of the Madres and other human rights groups are clearly discernible in a petition that they published in La Prensa newspaper on 28 September 1977. This advert can still be found today in the archives of the Centre for Socio- Legal Studies, or CELS, in Buenos Aires (Figure 8). Three months later, the Madres issued a second petition, this time in La Nación, to coincide with the International Day of Human Rights (Figure 9). Under the heading “SÓLO PEDIMOS LA VERDAD”1 can be seen listed one-by-one the names and surnames of two hundred and thirty-six of the mothers.2 Above the list of names in the main text of the advertisement the relatives demand to know whether their children are alive or dead, ‘¿Y DÓNDE ESTÁN?’3 And they ask: ‘¿Cuándo se publicarán las listas completes
de DETENIDOS?’ 4 To fund the advertisement, they went door-to-door collecting thousands of small coins and contributions. Liberal leader Ricardo Balbín handed over a derisory cheque which was so small that it was saved for posterity rather than being cashed (Gorini 2006). When La Nación refused to accept the handwritten list of names, Madre de Plaza de Mayo Nora de Cortiñas took it to her husband in the Economic Ministry next door for it to be redacted in print, under the nose of Finance Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz.5 A few days after the publication of this second advert, the early protagonist and inspiration among the mothers Azucena Villaflor de De Vincenti, was herself forcibly disappeared along with eleven others, including two other Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Unbeknown to the others, the bodies of the three Madres washed up on a beach the following week (they had been thrown alive from aeroplanes as part of the death flights). From there they were hastily buried by military personnel in unmarked graves in a nearby cemetery. They would not be identified until these graves were re-exhumed almost twenty years later.
1 “We only ask for the truth” (my translation)
2 If it were the Mothers’ names and not those of the desaparecidos this was only because the newspaper refused to publish the
advert using the latter (Crenzel 2008:122).
3 “And where are they?” (my translation).
4 “When will a complete list of the Detained be published?” (my translation) 5 Interview with Nora de Cortiñas, 27 March 2014.
Figure 8: A copy of the advertisement taken out by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and other human rights groups in
Figure 9: A copy of the advertisement taken out by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in La Nación newspaper on 10 December 1977. Courtesy of CELS.
Examined from the light of today, the advertisements in La Prensa and La Nación are important in many ways. They stand as a testament to the determination of the mothers to find out the truth of what had happened to their missing children, as well as an incipient demand for justice to be carried out according to due process. They also appear to us today as one of the earliest forms of representation of the disappeared – although this was clearly not their purpose at the time – and thus of how the disappeared might be represented in order to prosecute the claims for truth and justice in a certain way. Three things strike me as
compelling in this respect. Firstly, there is an insistence by the relatives to know the truth of what happened to each of the persons who had disappeared, whose mothers’ individual names stand in as proxy for their missing children. Indeed, the idea of creating a list came from their parents’ determination to ensure that none of the people missing would be forgotten.6 The Madres heard rumours that the military was planning to unveil a list of the names of two thousand desaparecidos. De Vincenti was insistent: ‘The names and surnames should be included so that none of the children are missed out from the list’ (Crenzel 2008:120, my translation). Secondly, the Madres enunciate their case in the two adverts on an ethical level. Ulises Gorini (2006) notes perceptibly the difference between these two adverts and another two issued previously by the Liga de Derechos Humanos7 and Familiares.8 The Madres
articulate their demands in a ‘basically moral and humane petition,’ shorn of the overt political slant of the other adverts. In the petitions, they frame the disappearance of their children as an affront to moral and ethical – but not political – norms, and they do not make any reference to any political motivations which they or their children might have had nor to the political context in which both parties found themselves.9 Thirdly, the adverts mark an important shift from an individual to a collective form of activism. Prior to these, if the names and surnames of desaparecidos had appeared in the newspapers then it was because parents had taken out paid advertisements which mentioned only the name of their child. These adverts can also still be found in the CELS’ archive, where they contextualise those published subsequently in La Prensa and La Nación.
I like to think of the missing persons’ posters that pockmarked the city walls in New York or the boulevards in Paris as having in some small way their antecedents in the adverts Argentine parents took out as they sought information about the whereabouts of their missing children. However, as aggregates of individual desaparecidos the advertisements were complex forms of representation. By this point, many mothers had already had enough of other forms of
6 And would thus become what Edkins calls the ‘doubly-disappeared’ (Edkins 2011). 7 Argentine League of Human Rights
8 Relatives, which were usually relatives of Political Prisoners as well as the Detained-disappeared
9 Indeed, the Madres purposefully shied away from any contact with Familiares, fearing that as known communists they would be
denunciation which they considered as bureaucratic. María del Rosario Cerruti recalled how ‘In the Assembly [of Human Rights, or APDH] and in the League [of Human Rights] and Familiares they filled us with little papers; a habeas corpus there, a denunciation there, and everything was very ordered and calm. It was something so strange [to us].’ (Gorini 2006:79). Cerruti preferred to remember her son Fernando as she chose to remember him, as a ‘person-as-such’ (Edkins 2011:14) perhaps, and not in the tyranny of order and categorisation that she saw as being embodied in the ‘papelitos.’ For many of the mothers these ‘little papers’ were even proving futile. When Cerruti went to give her deposition at a police station, she spent an hour telling them ‘who Fernando was, what he did, where he worked’ (Gorini 2006:80). When she returned the next day to sign the deposition it was nowhere to be found. The police had taken her statement before throwing it away.
The struggle to find out what had happened to the disappeared played itself out repeatedly through their proxy ontological materialisation in a list of names. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Familiares presented a joint list of 561 desparecidos to the Argentine “Congress” in October 1977, in what was the first mass mobilisation since the dictatorship began (Gorini 2006).10 Such domestic forms of protest however were largely inconsequential. The military regime locked down the ‘field of representability’ in Argentina by issuing strict controls over what could be published in the national news-frames, just as the United States government would do in its wars with Iraq and Afghanistan (Butler 2006, 2010). As a result, relatives and human rights groups developed international links with non-governmental organisations and foreign governments abroad. With courageous journalists or diplomats including Robert Cox, Jean-Pierre Bousquet, Tex Harris and Patricia Derian acting as conduits,11 and the papelitos of habeas corpus or questionnaires operating as evidence, the APDH12 for example funnelled denunciations of the disappearances up through an emerging international human rights architecture to its nodes in the UN, CIDH,13 the US, French, Italian and Spanish governments and the European Parliament. There, lists of the disappeared were compiled and pressure was exerted by these organisations on the military junta to do something about the plight of the disappeared back home. It was an ingenious feedback loop. When Junta President Jorge Rafael Videla went to Washington to witness the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty in September 1979, for example, he was greeted by US President Jimmy Carter who had a list of the
10 The Argentine Congress did not sit during the dictatorship, but was replaced by the Consejo Asesoramiento Legislativo, or
Legislative Advisory Council, a decision-making body comprised of military personnel operating as a legislative façade.
11 Robert Cox was the British-born editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald. Jean-Pierre Bousquet was a journalist with
l’Agence France Presse. “Tex” Harris was a diplomat in the US Embassy. Patricia Derian was Jimmy Carter’s Under-Secretary of
State for Human Rights, a post created by Carter.
12 Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos, or Permanent Assembly for Human Rights. The APDH counted among its
members Graciela Fernández Meijide, who went on to play an important role in CONADEP, and the first democratic president following the transition, Raúl Alfonsín.
disappeared already to hand (Gorini 2006:114). Not only that, but Carter was able to draw on concrete examples by name, asking his counterpart what had happened to individual victims such as Jacobo Timerman. Carter secured a promise from Videla to allow for a deputation of the CIDH to visit Argentina in response for the lifting of economic and military sanctions that had been imposed by the US Congress. When Amnesty International issued a report following its own visits in 1976 and 1979, it included a list of the names of 2,673 desaparecidos, each of whom was recorded using their names, ID numbers, nationalities, ages, marital status and occupations (Gorini 2006:46). And when the CIDH undertook its visit in September 1979, it asked the Madres what they wanted from its inspection. Their reply was a list of names. The CIDH complied (Gorini 2006:340). On the completion of its work it issued a report that
contained a list of 5,818 names of the disappeared (2006:354). Many of these names had been provided by the relatives themselves, through the papelitos of habeas corpus and the APDH’s questionnaires, though their power had been substantially enhanced through their passage via this discursive feedback loop.
If the lists of names can be thought to have a genealogy, so too can the photographs of the persons who had disappeared. In the early years of their resistance, the mothers would often carry a photo of their missing son or daughter with them as they searched for news of their whereabouts at morgues, hospitals, mental institutions, prisons, military barracks and the offices of state. Some attempted to leave these photos with military officials in case they showed up. The officers refused to accept them, suggesting in a tasteless irony that they might get lost. When these mothers became the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, they attached these and other photos to their lapels, to accompany the writing of their child’s name on their iconic headscarves.14 Many scholars have noted the destabilising of the boundary between the public and private that these photographs symbolise. Some Madres used photographs of their children in public that denote private occasions such as weddings, birthdays or graduations. Others subverted the public sphere and turned it against itself. By displaying photos that were taken to secure passports or driving licenses, the mothers made a mockery of the military state’s denial that these persons existed. As with the list of names, there were not one series of photos, but many. Just as they populated their own lists of names,15 the military took their own photographs of the disappeared during their captivity. Some of these photos were secreted from ESMA by survivor Victor Basterra (Brodsky 2005) and have now entered the
14 Following their break-up in 1985/86 (the date of which is disputed), the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora have since
continued this practice. Members of the Madres Asociación have replaced the individual names of their own children with the words ‘Aparición con Vida.’ See below for more.
15 The military deny that they populated a list of names during the repression, though their use has been substantiated in the
private memorabilia of families, where they intermingle with other photos of their missing children.
During the dictatorship, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and other human rights organisations such as the APDH turned to a variety of instruments to denounce the disappearances of their children and demand the truth and justice for what had happened to them. Some of these instruments were historical formulae for denouncing the disappearances of a person, such as habeas corpus. Others were innovative and new. Some were national, others international vehicles for making a claim. However, they each had one thing in common. The relatives almost always represented their missing children as irreplaceable persons, and ‘persons-as- such’ (Edkins 2011:11), each of whom had a name, a face and an identity uniquely their own.16 This was an emerging political logic of memory. This logic was designed to shape the struggle for truth and justice in such a way as to make the recognition of the persons who had been forcibly disappeared more likely as persons, and not political militants, among an interpellated public and thus secure empathy for their plight. This political logic of memory was forged during the dictatorship itself, starting with the earliest disappearances. It was crystallised and legitimised using state power, first via CONADEP, and then in the Trial of the Juntas.
The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (or CONADEP from its acronym in Spanish) was convened by President Raúl Alfonsín shortly after his inauguration in December 1983. In a persuasive study, Emilio Crenzel (2008)17 argues that the Argentine truth
commission was scripted in ‘a humanitarian key which privileged the detailed narration of the abuses and their circumstances, the names of the material perpetrators and those of the disappeared; the latter presented as innocent and defenceless victims and classified according to their basic personal data’ (2008:182). In the main body of the final report, Núnca Más, for instance, he notes how the disappeared are presented according to their names, ages, sexes and professions, but how no mention is made of any political militancy they might have had. In the testimonials inserted into the text as a legitimisation of the truth of survivors or relatives, almost two-thirds ‘limit themselves to publishing their names,’ whilst a further sixteen per cent ‘describe [the disappeared] as “persons or human beings”’ (2008:110). This is also how the desaparecidos feature in the annex to the original version of CONADEP, where they appear as a list of names. The delimitation of the disappeared according to their ‘basic personal data’, Crenzel suggests, was a form of restoring ‘the humanity of the desaparecidos’ (2008:112) by
16 This was the case even in those media that aggregated their claims in order to magnify their denunciations, such as the
newspaper adverts or the petition of 500 habeas corpus submitted to “Congress”, or the CAL, by the APDH.
17 Crenzel’s text, la historia política del nunca más, is in Spanish. Where citations appear, these have been translated. All
restoring the ‘nombres y apellidos’ – the names and surnames18 – of those whose existence had been reduced in the clandestine detention centres to that of a number.
Emilio Crenzel refers to the form of representation used by the commission as the scripting of the disappeared in a ‘humanitarian narrative’ and he takes particular care to situate this narrative in both space and time. Thus, he relates the representation of the disappeared as ‘victims’ according to their ‘basic personal data’ within a supra-national network of what he calls humanitarian norms, whilst illustrating how this ‘narrative key’ did not suddenly emerge following the transition to democracy but as a form of representation whose origins can be traced to the instruments relatives were using to denounce the disappearance of their loved ones during the dictatorship itself. He therefore traces the continuities as well as the changes in this form of representation. The paradox, Crenzel argues persuasively, was that during the repression a growing heterogeneity in the denunciation of disappearances was being met by a ‘growing homogeneity’ in the way the disappeared were being denounced as subjects
(2008:44). On the one hand, this was due to the links being opened up between relatives and human rights groups in Argentina with INGOs and foreign governments, who ‘demanded the factual description of the violations suffered and not the reference to any political motivations they may have had’ (2008:49). On the other, it spoke to the type of information that mothers and Mothers were willing to give as relatives in the everyday context of the dictatorship as it continued to unfold.
Graciela Fernández Meijide was part of the team at the APDH that helped relatives to make their denunciations to international organisations.19 The military’s innovation of forced disappearances as an instrument of systematic mass violence meant that such organisations were forced to make up their response as they went along. ‘We were putting together a fairly basic type of questionnaire. When we saw that we needed more information, we added it’ she told me.20 However, these data ‘never included the specific political militancy.
‘No father was going to tell you “my son was a Montonero”, because at that time that would have amounted to a death sentence. We were under a dictatorship that persecuted precisely the people from the guerrillas … so they said “he was a student”, “he was a worker, a professional”, whatever it was … they told us the profession.’
This helps to explain the bias in the CONADEP report towards categories such as student or worker, as categories which often overlap and which ignore the middle-class origins of many of the victims. It also reveals the importance of the relatives in shaping the process, and