About the author
Horacio Verbitsky is a leading
Argentinean investigative journalist. He was given an
International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists in
2001. Among his books is The Silence: from Paulo VI to Bergoglio, the secret
links between the Church and the Navy Mechanics School (2005) and The Flight:
Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior (New Press, 2005).
Argentina between 1976 and
1983 was wracked by a “dirty war” in which
successive military regimes hunted down, tortured and “disappeared” tens of
thousands of citizens. The process had begun when Argentina’s already febrile
politics started to split open in the mid-1970s. The military seized power in a
coup from Isabelita Peron’s
government, in the wake of an armed insurgency by Montoneros guerrillas.
The dictatorship that
followed consigned thousands of Argentineans into military detention. Most were
tortured; a few were released, many were eventually murdered. These
“disappeared” numbered in all around 30,000.
In 1979, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission visited Argentina and inspected
the most notorious detention centre, the Navy Mechanical School in Buenos
Aires. They found no prisoners. As Horacio Verbitsky reveals in this extract
from his extraordinary book, the prisoners had been dispersed, some of them to El Silencio, an island property
that had belonged to an official of the Catholic archbishop of Buenos Aires.
The Catholic church’s
complicity in torture and murder in Argentina should be no surprise; it had,
after all, long precedents in extreme doctrines that came to Argentina (and
elsewhere in Latin America) from the far right in France. But many details of
Horacio Verbitsky’s account are revelatory, and his researches are a vital
contribution to continuing efforts in Argentina to reach a full historical,
legal and moral accounting for the violations of the “dirty war” years.
The River
“Transfer” was a word the
prisoners feared, a word they all wanted to banish from their thoughts.
There were three weeks to
the end of winter. The nights were still cold, but the sunshine brought a
feeling of warmth returning, a good sign after all the hard months. They had
been told they would be away until the end of the month. Some of them had told their
families they would not be able to call or see them for several weeks. They had
never been outside the Navy Mechanical School as a group before, and this
novelty was disturbing. In the attic and basement of the officers’ mess that
they were leaving, they had had enough time to get close. The links between
them were recent but intense, cemented by the extreme situation they had
shared, the outcome of which was still unclear.
Horacio Verbitsky’s
new book “The Silence” has been longlisted for the 2005 Ulysses award
for literary reportage:
This time they were
not called out by name and they were not lined up in the white-tiled corridor
leading to the sickroom where they had been vaccinated. When the last of them
climbed on board the bus, the officers’ mess was left empty to make room for a
refurbishment. The aim was to deceive the members of the Inter-American Human
Rights Commission, who were arriving with makeshift but accurate drawings of
the installations.
The bathroom was to
be completely altered, a marble worktop, stainless-steel sinks and a
wall-to-wall mirror were to be fitted to make the place look less forbidding.
Partitions were to be knocked down, and the metal rings in the floor removed.
The staircase between the basement and the attic was to be closed off.
The bus headed north,
parallel to the River Plate. With their casual clothes and sports bags they
might have seemed like so many similar groups of light-hearted young men and
women out on an excursion. They were well aware of the deceit and disguise.
They cannot have
taken more than half an hour to reach the landing-stage. The guards identified
the vehicle and let them through. Other prisoners were brought to the same spot
by car, blindfolded.
They were put on
board a coastguard launch, made of wood like the boats that carry passengers
between all the islands, but with the seats removed. They were made to lie on
the floor in the midst of bags, crates of food, radio equipment and weapons.
The launch headed up the River Tuyú-Paré towards the Chaña-Miní.
Some of the prisoners
estimate the journey took little more than half an hour; others, more
accurately, say an hour and a half. In the 19th century, the liberal
bourgeoisie in Argentina had called this area the Tigre,
in honour of the Tigris region in Mesopotamia. Only the people who live on the
islands of the delta can distinguish all the 350 rivers, streams and channels
into which they are divided. A century and a half ago, Domingo Faustino Sarmientodescribed the
shape of these islands as “the most capricious imaginable”, an area where “the
surface is an illusion: not everything is land that appears to be so, and there
is no way of knowing beforehand what is of any use.”
There was nothing out
of the ordinary about the dock they tied up at; nor about the house, which they
walked towards across worn wooden planks and a muddy path. The building must
have been around eighty years old. It was the same as many others in the Paraná
delta, with a pitched corrugated iron roof, floors, walls and partitions made
of wood, and raised on stilts to protect it from the frequent floods. The eight
large rooms must have covered an area of a little less than 200 square metres.
Radio equipment was set up in one of the rooms. There was an electric generator
and lots of tools. A gas water-heater supplied the bathroom and the kitchen,
and there were four water tanks for drinking water.
A stand of poplars,
another of willows, and a third of birches filled the cultivated part of the
island. The rest needed clearing. A dense screen of thorn bushes grew wild
everywhere, making it impossible to penetrate more than 500 metres inland from
the river.
Another, smaller
group made the same journey in the cold of early morning. They were frightened
rather than excited. Handcuffed and blindfolded, some of them were taken in a
large van, others were put into a lorry with a thick green canvas awning. When
they reached the landing-stage, they heard the barking of dogs and the rattle
of weapons. They were put into an open launch and covered with a canvas. If any
of them moved they were beaten.
These prisoners were
put into a second building, smaller and rougher than the first. Its external
walls were made of corrugated iron, and the gap between them and the wooden
stilts had been filled in to accommodate them. Each night one or two of them
were taken to the big house for a bath, along dark earthen paths, their way lit
by torches. Despite the primitiveness of the conditions, these prisoners were
happy that they were left on their own in this house, where the guards refused
to sleep. This was the first time they were able to talk freely to each other,
and thanks to this, they discovered that one of them was missing.
The last prisoner to
arrive was “The Old Lady”, so called because she was 52 years old. Unlike the
others, she was brought on her own. When she reached the island she read on the
wooden sign that it was called El Silencio.
This was where the
last men and women kidnapped by the Navy Mechanics School Task Force spent a
month in September 1979.
The Catholic City
Cardinal Antonio Caggiano and his secretary Bishop Emilio
Grasselli worked together in the two decades when Argentina’s defining tragedy
was prepared. The cardinal played an important role in those preparations.
Elements of the
Catholic church elsewhere had long taken an interest in “counter-terrorism”. In
1958, an advance party of La Cité Catholique arrived in Argentina. This was an
offshoot of the French Catholic monarchist movement known asL’Action Française,
created by in 1889 by Charles Maurras, the brilliant French
philosopher and later apologist for Fascism. La Cité Catholique brought a doctrine of
counter-revolutionary warfare and torture, justified as part of Thomist
dogmatism.
Jean Ousset,
Maurras’s private secretary, established La Cité Catholique in 1946. The idea originated in the
French armed forces. In his bookLe
Marxisme-leninisme, Ousset states that this enemy can only be
successfully combated by a “profound faith, an unlimited obedience to the Holy
Father, and a thorough knowledge of the Church’s doctrines”.
Charles Lacheroy, a
member of La Cité Catholique, was
the first person to reflect on the ideological and technical reasons behind the
defeat of the French colonial army in Indochina in 1954. Another member,Roger Trinquier, theorised on the use of
torture in Modern Warfare, a bible
for its followers.
Another of Ousset’s
recruits was the chief French expert in psychological warfare – Colonel Jean
Gardes. Between them they developed a new concept, that ofsubversion. This conceived
a protean, quintessential enemy who, rather than being defined by his actions,
was seen as a force trying to subvert Christian order, natural law, or the
Creator’s plan. For this reason, Ousset states that “the revolutionary
apparatus is ideological before it is political, and political before it is
military”. This explains the wide range of enemies he sought to define.
When the torture that
French paratroopers used in Algeria during the bloody war of 1954-62 aroused
protests and debate, French military chaplains calmed the officers’ troubled
consciences. One of them, Louis Delarue, wrote a text that was distributed to
all units:
“If, in the general
interest, the law allows a murderer to be killed, why should it be seen as
monstrous to submit a delinquent who has been recognised as such and is
therefore liable to be put to death, to an interrogation which might be
painful, but whose only object is, thanks to the revelations he may make about
his accomplices and leaders, to protect the innocent? Exceptional circumstances
call for exceptional measures”.
As success in theAlgerian wargradually slipped away from the
crusaders, Ousset decided to create branches of La
Cité Catholique in
other parts of the world. The first of these was in Buenos Aires in 1958. Its
members had been part of the clandestine Organisation of a Secret Army (OAS),
which brought terror to Paris itself and attempted to assassinate GeneralCharles de Gaulle, whom they accused of
treason for withdrawing French forces from Algeria and thus facilitating its
independence from French rule.
Charles de Gaulle
succeeded in destroying the OAS and had several of his former military colleagues
shot. The OAS chaplain, Georges Grasset, organised the flight of many members
of the organisation along a route which led from Paris to Madrid and finally to
Buenos Aires. Grasset himself arrived in 1962 to take charge of the Argentine
branch.
Horacio Verbitskyis a
leading Argentineaninvestigative journalist.
He was given an International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect
Journalists in 2001. Among his books are The Flight:
Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior (New Press, 2005) andThe Silence: from
Paulo VI to Bergoglio, the secret links between the Church and the Navy
Mechanics School (Buenos Aires, Editorial
Sudamericana,2005), which uncovers
the assistance and protection that the Catholic Church gave to Argentina’s
brutal military dictatorship.
Horacio Verbitsky’s
work is translated into English by Nicholas Caistor
Another founder of
the OAS describes Grasset as “a true soldier-monk, a virulent anti-communist,
who became the spiritual guide of the OAS. Thanks to him and the Cité
Catholiquenetwork, of which he was one of the mainstays, several of
the OAS leaders managed to find refuge abroad, particularly in Argentina”.
Jean Gardes reached
Argentina in 1963. Forty years later, his daughter Florence showed the French
journalist Marie-Monique Robin the notes her father had made. They show that,
in March 1963, a naval lieutenant commander called Roussillon offered Gardes a
deal: he would arrange Argentine government protection so that Gardes could
settle in Neuquén; in exchange, he would deliver a series of lectures in the
Navy Mechanics School on the counter-subversive techniques developed in
France’s colonial wars.
Gardes, who soon
established a small factory making paté de foie in Neuquén, did not ask to be paid or
to have a fixed post, but only wanted to be an adviser. Gardes’ notes, as
conserved by his daughter, coincide with those of the file on naval officer
Federico Lucas Roussillon.
In 1955, the then
Lieutenant Roussillon took part in the Catholic nationalist movement led byEduardo Lonardi,
which overthrew President Juan Domingo Perón. One of Lonardi’s
general staff was Major Juan Francisco Guevara, who proposed that the password
the conspirators should use should be: “God is Just”. By 1963 Roussillon was a
member of the Naval Intelligence Service; he retired with the rank of captain
in 1979, as Cardinal Caggiano was approaching the end of his life.
Soon after Gardes met
Roussillon, the cadets at the Navy Mechanics School were also introduced to the
world of counter-revolutionary warfare. In one of their courses they were shown
the filmThe Battle of Algiers, an Italian-Algerian
co-production made by the communist director Gillo Pontecorvo with the intention of exposing the
methods used in Algeria by the French colonial army.
The film was
subsequently used in counter-insurgency classes in Argentina and the United
States to teach those same methods. The naval chaplain introduced the film and
added a commentary from the religious point of view. Thirty-five years later,
two of the cadets described the experience to Marie-Monique Robin:
Did the chaplain
justify the methods used in The Battle of Algiers?
Anibal Acosta: Absolutely.
Including torture?
Julio César Urien: Yes. Torture was seen not as a moral problem but as a weapon.
Anibal Acosta: Part of the Catholic hierarchy supported this kind of practice. They showed us that film to prepare us for a kind of war very different from the regular war we had entered the Navy School for. They were preparing us for police missions against the civilian population, who became our new enemy.
Anibal Acosta: Absolutely.
Including torture?
Julio César Urien: Yes. Torture was seen not as a moral problem but as a weapon.
Anibal Acosta: Part of the Catholic hierarchy supported this kind of practice. They showed us that film to prepare us for a kind of war very different from the regular war we had entered the Navy School for. They were preparing us for police missions against the civilian population, who became our new enemy.
The first edition of Le
Marxisme-leninismeto be published outside France appeared in Buenos
Aires on 6 February 1961, translated and annotated by Juan Francisco Guevara
(now a colonel) and with a prologue written by Cardinal Caggiano, who thanks
the “men ofLa ciudad
catolica of
Argentina” for publishing Ousset’s book.
Marxism, continues
Caggiano, is born of the negation of Christ and his Church, “put into practice
by the Revolution”. He affirms that Ousset’s book is a training tool for the
“fight to the death” to which “all the peoples of the western world, America
and those in Asia who are still resisting, are in grave, imminent danger of
falling victim”.
According to
Caggiano, it is necessary to “prepare for the decisive battle” even though the
enemies have not yet “taken up arms”. As often happens in a continent that
imports ideas, the doctrine of annihilation preceded that of the revolutionary
uprising. In order to reinforce his idea of a holy war, Caggiano compared this
vigil to the one that preceded the 1571 battle of Lepanto “to save Europe from
domination by the Turk”. The book includes a list of the papal bulls condemning
communism; they were the cross which kept Satan at bay.
In October 1961,
Caggiano and the then president of Argentina, Arturo Frondizi inaugurated the first course on
counter-revolutionary warfare in the Higher Military College. One of the tasks
set in the course was to explain this quotation from the bishop of Verden,
Dietrick von Nieken in 1411:
“When the existence
of the Church is threatened, it is no longer bound by the commandments of
morality. When unity is the aim, all means are justified: deceit, treachery,
violence, usury, prison and death. Because order serves the good of the
community, and the individual has to be sacrificed for the common good.”
Among the advisers
for this course were the French colonels Robert Bentresque and Jean Nougues;
among its instructors were priests such as Victorio Bonamín, whom Caggiano had
chosen as his associate in the military vicariate general. At the start of the
course, the director of the Higher Military College explained that it would be
dealing with a new kind of warfare “which we could call ‘internal warfare’”, to
be fought “without concern for the means, or scruples, or ethical principles”.
This warfare knew no
boundaries. Among the enemies were demagoguery, immorality, vices of all kinds,
and low passions, all of which were employed “through the dialectic of
communist action” in order to create “confusion and contradictions”. Caggiano,
who attended the ceremony at Frondizi’s right hand, gave his blessing and
invoked God’s aid so that the military might “discover the true path to defend
the peace of our nations”. As usual, Grasselli was at his side. A few months
later, Frondizi was overthrown, accused of being too tolerant towards
communism.
The Island
When the photographer
Marcelo Camilo Hernández, who had been forced to work as a laboratory
technician in the Navy Mechanics School, went to the federal police to renew
his passport, the navy task force kept his enrolment papers. They used the
number and all his personal details to fake a new national identity document.
Hernández left Argentina in mid-January 1979.
A fortnight later,
the navy task force used his fake identity document to purchase El
Silencio, an island a few metres from the mouth of the Chaná Miní
river, where a huge coastguard detachment is based. The signature on the deed
of sale is not that of the real Hernandez and there appears to have been no
attempt even to make it look similar. This was how the navy got possession of
the place it needed to hide the prisoners while the Inter-American Human Rights
Commission was visiting Argentina.
According to the deed
of transfer, the vendor of El Silenciowas Emilio
Teodoro Grasselli, secretary to the Military Vicar-General, who was well aware
of what went on in the dictatorship’s clandestine concentration camps.
Grasselli had bought
the island from Antonio Arbelaiz, a long-serving official of the curia (the
papal civil service) who had been appointed diocesan administrator in 1966. It
was said of Arbelaiz’s service in the curia: “Bishops come and go, but Arbelaiz
remains”.
Every year, he would
invite the priests and seminarians of the archdiocese to El
Silencio for a
classic barbecue. In his will, drawn up shortly after his appointment as
diocesan administrator, he bequeathed everything to the archbishopric of the
city of Buenos Aires, including the proceeds from the sale of the island.
Grasselli admitted
that Arbelaiz had sold the island “to some friends of mine”. He claimed that
they were motor-boat builders who needed a place to test, and that he himself
had merely acted as an intermediary because he had worked with Arbelaiz in the
curia. But the documentary evidence shows he was part of the group that bought
it.
The deal was signed
on 26 September 1975. Title deed Number 205 shows that Arbelaiz sold the island
to Grasselli and his associates at a price equivalent to $21,350. The
purchasers paid half the total amount, and guaranteed payment of the rest by
mortgaging the island. Arbelaiz died in June 1976. Under the terms of his will,
the curia was owed the other half of the agreed price, but on 28 November 1978
the curia asked for the mortgage to be cancelled and the land registry to be
informed that “the entire sum has now been paid”. Did they already know of the
transaction that was to take place two months later?
Jorge Alfredo
Regenjo, one of the longest-standing residents of the Tigre, had worked as
caretaker at El Silencio. He recalls
that in 1979 the place became the property of someone called Señor Ríos. He saw
coastguard launches arriving carrying 40-50 people. Some of the local
inhabitants thought that Ríos was a colonel who worked in the presidential
residence.
A boat contractor
described how Archbishop Aramburu used to contract one of his launches to take
people to the island. The cardinal would arrive in the morning, have a barbecue
onEl Silencio,
then return to the city or to his residence in Olivos.
When questioned by
the judicial authorities about the island and the concentration camp there,
Grasselli said he had never met Marcelo Camilo Hernández. And perhaps he had
not: whilst Hernández was out of Argentina, his father went to see a magistrate
and declared that his son had never either bought or sold the island. Others
did so by falsely assuming his identity.
In 1980, Hernández’s
identity document was used yet again, this time to sell the island to Mario
Pablo Verone, a member of Lande Ltd, an import-export company, who is the
current owner. He paid $35,000 for it. A curious detail: there is no record of
a deposit having changed hands, and the vendor declared that he had been paid
before the contract was signed. A comparison with Hernández’s handwriting on a
power of attorney he left for his father before leaving Argentina confirms that
his signature was forged.
The deed states that
the vendors and the purchaser signed the document in the presence of the notary
Rubens N Larumbe Sepic. Both transactions, 1979 and 1980, were carried out in
his office. But the notary says he has no recollection of any of the persons
involved, and refers everything to what appears on the public documents he
signed. Both Grasselli and his associates maintain that a “Señor Ríos” carried
out the operation on behalf of Hernández. In other words, it was performed by
Jorge Radice, the person responsible for all the real-estate business in which
the Navy School was involved.
Christmas 1979
At the end of August,
a guard told Basterra, a prisoner at the Navy Mechanical School, that he was
going to be taken somewhere else. He was transferred, wearing handcuffs,
shackles and a hood, in the middle of the night (of either 4 or 5 September),
on board a Swat vehicle containing bunks for the
periods of waiting prior to the kidnapping and torture of any new victim.
Basterra thought they
were going to kill him. Beneath the hood, he tried to decipher the meaning of
every sound he heard. As dogs barked, they took him to open ground by the
river. He heard the guards’ weapons, their jokes about firing at a house where
they saw light, the blows on the canvas of a boat onto which he was being
carried. “I was stuck up against a piece of metal which dug into my shoulder.
Each time I moved because of the pain, I was beaten with a rifle butt”.
He was never able to
identify the spot where he spent the next month. “They put us in a very damp
room, the water tasted bad, there was a rotten smell, and all of us fell ill”.
The guards used walkie-talkies to speak to each other, and a radio to
communicate with the Navy School. Among the prisoners detained with him were
Brodsky; Lepiscopo; Enrique Ardeti; Villaflor’s wife, sister and
brother-in-law; and Norma Cozzi and her partner.
“They put us in the
lower half of a house built on stilts that had been bricked in to make a room.
It was an enclosed space with no ventilation, and several prisoners fainted
from the heat. Then they opened the door. There was a tremendous stampede
because a neighbour went by and saw us. We never found out what had happened to
that neighbour, but we heard shouts and several shots.”
The guards were in
the upper half of the house. One night after they had drunk too much they
terrified the prisoners down below by stamping loudly on the wooden floor of
their room, which was the prisoners’ ceiling.
Despite all the
testimonies, Grasselli denied that there were ever any people kept prisoner on
the island. “I don’t see how it could have been possible, because they were
raised wooden floors. The house was small and very uncomfortable, so how could
they keep people there, anybody could have escaped”. In addition, “there is no
proper security there, how could they guard them? And besides, the passenger
launch passes by in front of the house, it’s very visible”. This sounds like
the judgment of a jailer rather than a priest.
Norma Cozzi met
Josefina Villaflor, and, in this miserable hovel on the island, became friendly
with her mother-in-law, La gallega Martínez. “She was a very intelligent
girl, but she looked very ill. She had no idea what had happened to her
husband”.
On the island, Norma
Cozzi was able to talk to her aunt without any witnesses. During a stroll in
the sun, Thelma Jara de Cabezas told her that they had killed Raimundo Villaflor
in the Navy School. When she returned to the bricked-off room, Norma could not
bring herself to tell this to La Gallega because she was worried that she might
lose control and be killed by the guards. But she did tell Enrique Ardeti,
another leading member of the Popular Armed Forces (Fap), known as Fatty
Ramón. “For two days, he couldn’t speak. All he did was sleep. On
the third day, he talked to Villaflor’s wife and sister. La
Gallega took it very
badly. She asked for tranquillisers, and spent the first days after hearing the
news in a stupor”.
They learnt from
their guards that there was another group of prisoners on the island who were
not kept with hoods or shackles. These were prisoners who had been kept a long
time and had adapted. These were the ones who had been brought in a navy bus
like students on an outing. They later met one of them when he was brought to
their house as a punishment for insulting a member of the task force. Because
of the foul smell, their guards used to shackle them and then go off and leave
them, so they were able to talk to each other. To lift their spirits, Basterra
told them stories. This was how they spent their month on the island.
One of those in this
larger group was Carlos Muñoz, who had been captured by the Navy School task
force in November 1978. His process of recuperation had started three months
later. He was obliged to forge identity documents in the navy workshops in
order to save his life and to recover increasing amounts of freedom.
At first he was
allowed to see his family again, in very occasional visits and always
accompanied by navy personnel. Afterwards the visits became more frequent, and
he was allowed to come and go on his own, and to sleep outside the Navy School
at weekends. On Monday mornings, he had to present himself at a bar opposite
the Navy School, and telephone from there using a code so that a car could pick
him up and bring him back to the workshop. Muñoz also states that in the house
on the island where he stayed, those prisoners who had got furthest in this
“recuperation process” lived in normal conditions, without shackles or hoods.
Another member of
this group was Enrique Fuckman, known as Cachito. The police had
killed his 17-year-old younger brother in 1977, after he had been chased in the
street and finished off when he fell to the ground injured. Both of them wereMontonerosactivists.
Fuckman was kidnapped in November 1978 at the age of 22, and went through the
whole cycle of the Navy School. When the prisoners were transferred to the
island, he was working in the archive. He was among the first group of
prisoners taken to El Silencio.
The prisoners in the
larger house had a daily routine. They got up at 7am, had breakfast, and then
were put to work. The men were given machetes to clear the land. The guards cut
down poplars and willow trees with a chainsaw. The prisoners stripped the
trunks and carried them to the water’s edge, where a launch came to pick up the
timber. They also gathered leaves to make rope with. The navy personnel sold
all this production.
The head of the task
force, Captain Horacio Estrada, once said jokingly that the man who bought the
timber saw the prisoners and thought they were workmen. He asked how they were
paid, and when Estrada told him they got an hourly rate, he replied: “They’re
taking the piss, boss. They should produce much more”.
While the men were
dealing with the timber, the women did the house-cleaning and prepared food.
They used water that had been made drinkable thanks to the use of four
fibro-cement tanks suspended in a metal tower. As the water passed through
narrow tubes between the four tanks, it became purified. An architect had
designed the filter, using sand; he had been freed in 1978, and been recalled
after the task force bought the island.
There was also time
for leisure. One day a guard called Giba blew on his whistle and ordered: “4
o’clock: game of volleyball, insurgents versus lawfuls”.
“We got together and
agreed – we have to lose this game without them realising it”, saysCachito. They carried out
their plan without too much trouble. But when the game finished, Giba shouted
again: “Now for the return match”. The umpire was Cachito.
“You should have seen us. We were barefoot or in rubber boots. They had on
their Fred Perry or Lacoste T-shirts, and were wearing Adidas running shoes”.
Each team had their supporters to cheer them on: on one side the guards, known
as the Greens because of the colour of their uniforms, on the other the
prisoners who weren’t in the team.
This time something
went wrong, and the result was the opposite. “We didn’t win it, they lost it”,
according to a prisoner called Lorkipanidse. A guard called Peyón then ordered
them to play the decider, and all their plans went out of the window. “Our
blood was up, and we killed ourselves trying to beat them. Peyón was furious.
He snatched the whistle from Cachitoand took over as
judge. He cheated, but they still lost. When the game was over, we took it out
on them. We sangWe are the
Champions to the
music of the Peronist march”.
Reprisals were harsh,
but not as bad as they had been expecting. One of the prisoners was sent to the
punishment hole under the floor of the smaller house for insulting a guard
during the game. “The next day they made us get up at five o’clock, gave us no
breakfast, and sent us off to haul logs with snakes all around us”.
“We were given
machetes to do the work with, but they had rifles. One day the neighbour from
across the channel opened the door to the downstairs of the small house. The
guards rushed out with all their hardware”. The shots heard that day were fired
by the marine known asFatty
Tomás, who was shooting ducks with his Ithaka rifle.
What did the
neighbours, whose life was going on as normal, know about this group; what did
people for whom time had not stopped hear and see of the prisoners?
Their comments
reached the socialist leader Fernando Barberini, who had a daughter among the
disappeared. When the dictatorship was over, Barberini passed them on to the
Radical congressman Alberto Firpo. The two men began an investigation which
ended in a lawsuit.
A sergeant in the
Buenos Aires police lived opposite El Silencio. His wife’s
curiosity was aroused by the large sacks she saw on the coastguard launches,
the way helicopters flew low overhead without ever landing, and the sound of
gunshots she heard from time to time. What she found most curious was the
difference between the number of people arriving and those leaving.
Yet, when the
investigating magistrate asked her to testify, she denied all knowledge of any
large bundles being shifted. She agreed there had been a helicopter, and said
that a coastguard launch had brought about 50 people to the island, some of
them women. Some of the people worked, others sunbathed. The gunshots were
target practice. Nothing in particular caught her attention.
The owner of the
general store in Paraná Miní and Tuyú Paré saw the inhabitants of El
Silencio arrive in
groups. There was always someone in charge, although it was not always the same
person. They played cards, drank, and talked a lot, until their chief shut them
up. They bought lots of foodstuffs, always the best, and did not mind how much
it cost. He never saw anyone in uniform, but coastguard launches did berth at
the island’s landing-stage.
The coastguard station
had a football pitch. A team from the coastguards and some locals used to play
against another from El Silencio. The Chaná
Miní hospital is opposite the station. The policeman’s wife told the doctor on
duty there that she had seen 59 moving bundles. Then someone from El
Silencio warned her
that if she carried on talking, they would chop her head off and feed it to the
catfish. Perhaps that is why, as a general rule, nobody knew anything.
On 2-3 October 1979,
the prisoners were taken back to the Navy Mechanics School. The Inter-American Human Rights Commissionhad
finished its inspection, without finding anything it was looking for.
According to
Caggiano, it is necessary to “prepare for the decisive battle” even though the
enemies have not yet “taken up arms”. As often happens in a continent that
imports ideas, the doctrine of annihilation preceded that of the revolutionary
uprising. In order to reinforce his idea of a holy war, Caggiano compared this
vigil to the one that preceded the 1571 battle of Lepanto “to save Europe from
domination by the Turk”. The book includes a list of the papal bulls condemning
communism; they were the cross which kept Satan at bay.
In October 1961,
Caggiano and the then president of Argentina, Arturo Frondizi inaugurated the first course on
counter-revolutionary warfare in the Higher Military College. One of the tasks
set in the course was to explain this quotation from the bishop of Verden,
Dietrick von Nieken in 1411:
“When the existence
of the Church is threatened, it is no longer bound by the commandments of
morality. When unity is the aim, all means are justified: deceit, treachery,
violence, usury, prison and death. Because order serves the good of the
community, and the individual has to be sacrificed for the common good.”
Among the advisers
for this course were the French colonels Robert Bentresque and Jean Nougues;
among its instructors were priests such as Victorio Bonamín, whom Caggiano had
chosen as his associate in the military vicariate general. At the start of the
course, the director of the Higher Military College explained that it would be
dealing with a new kind of warfare “which we could call ‘internal warfare’”, to
be fought “without concern for the means, or scruples, or ethical principles”.
This warfare knew no
boundaries. Among the enemies were demagoguery, immorality, vices of all kinds,
and low passions, all of which were employed “through the dialectic of
communist action” in order to create “confusion and contradictions”. Caggiano,
who attended the ceremony at Frondizi’s right hand, gave his blessing and
invoked God’s aid so that the military might “discover the true path to defend
the peace of our nations”. As usual, Grasselli was at his side. A few months
later, Frondizi was overthrown, accused of being too tolerant towards
communism.
The Island
When the photographer
Marcelo Camilo Hernández, who had been forced to work as a laboratory
technician in the Navy Mechanics School, went to the federal police to renew
his passport, the navy task force kept his enrolment papers. They used the
number and all his personal details to fake a new national identity document.
Hernández left Argentina in mid-January 1979.
A fortnight later,
the navy task force used his fake identity document to purchase El
Silencio, an island a few metres from the mouth of the Chaná Miní
river, where a huge coastguard detachment is based. The signature on the deed
of sale is not that of the real Hernandez and there appears to have been no
attempt even to make it look similar. This was how the navy got possession of
the place it needed to hide the prisoners while the Inter-American Human Rights
Commission was visiting Argentina.
According to the deed
of transfer, the vendor of El Silenciowas Emilio
Teodoro Grasselli, secretary to the Military Vicar-General, who was well aware
of what went on in the dictatorship’s clandestine concentration camps.
Grasselli had bought
the island from Antonio Arbelaiz, a long-serving official of the curia (the
papal civil service) who had been appointed diocesan administrator in 1966. It
was said of Arbelaiz’s service in the curia: “Bishops come and go, but Arbelaiz
remains”.
Every year, he would
invite the priests and seminarians of the archdiocese to El
Silencio for a
classic barbecue. In his will, drawn up shortly after his appointment as
diocesan administrator, he bequeathed everything to the archbishopric of the
city of Buenos Aires, including the proceeds from the sale of the island.
Grasselli admitted
that Arbelaiz had sold the island “to some friends of mine”. He claimed that
they were motor-boat builders who needed a place to test, and that he himself
had merely acted as an intermediary because he had worked with Arbelaiz in the
curia. But the documentary evidence shows he was part of the group that bought
it.
The deal was signed
on 26 September 1975. Title deed Number 205 shows that Arbelaiz sold the island
to Grasselli and his associates at a price equivalent to $21,350. The
purchasers paid half the total amount, and guaranteed payment of the rest by
mortgaging the island. Arbelaiz died in June 1976. Under the terms of his will,
the curia was owed the other half of the agreed price, but on 28 November 1978
the curia asked for the mortgage to be cancelled and the land registry to be
informed that “the entire sum has now been paid”. Did they already know of the
transaction that was to take place two months later?
Jorge Alfredo
Regenjo, one of the longest-standing residents of the Tigre, had worked as
caretaker at El Silencio. He recalls
that in 1979 the place became the property of someone called Señor Ríos. He saw
coastguard launches arriving carrying 40-50 people. Some of the local
inhabitants thought that Ríos was a colonel who worked in the presidential
residence.
A boat contractor
described how Archbishop Aramburu used to contract one of his launches to take
people to the island. The cardinal would arrive in the morning, have a barbecue
onEl Silencio,
then return to the city or to his residence in Olivos.
When questioned by
the judicial authorities about the island and the concentration camp there,
Grasselli said he had never met Marcelo Camilo Hernández. And perhaps he had
not: whilst Hernández was out of Argentina, his father went to see a magistrate
and declared that his son had never either bought or sold the island. Others
did so by falsely assuming his identity.
In 1980, Hernández’s
identity document was used yet again, this time to sell the island to Mario
Pablo Verone, a member of Lande Ltd, an import-export company, who is the
current owner. He paid $35,000 for it. A curious detail: there is no record of
a deposit having changed hands, and the vendor declared that he had been paid
before the contract was signed. A comparison with Hernández’s handwriting on a power
of attorney he left for his father before leaving Argentina confirms that his
signature was forged.
The deed states that
the vendors and the purchaser signed the document in the presence of the notary
Rubens N Larumbe Sepic. Both transactions, 1979 and 1980, were carried out in
his office. But the notary says he has no recollection of any of the persons
involved, and refers everything to what appears on the public documents he
signed. Both Grasselli and his associates maintain that a “Señor Ríos” carried
out the operation on behalf of Hernández. In other words, it was performed by
Jorge Radice, the person responsible for all the real-estate business in which
the Navy School was involved.
Christmas 1979
At the end of August,
a guard told Basterra, a prisoner at the Navy Mechanical School, that he was
going to be taken somewhere else. He was transferred, wearing handcuffs,
shackles and a hood, in the middle of the night (of either 4 or 5 September),
on board a Swat vehicle containing bunks for the
periods of waiting prior to the kidnapping and torture of any new victim.
Basterra thought they
were going to kill him. Beneath the hood, he tried to decipher the meaning of
every sound he heard. As dogs barked, they took him to open ground by the
river. He heard the guards’ weapons, their jokes about firing at a house where
they saw light, the blows on the canvas of a boat onto which he was being
carried. “I was stuck up against a piece of metal which dug into my shoulder.
Each time I moved because of the pain, I was beaten with a rifle butt”.
He was never able to
identify the spot where he spent the next month. “They put us in a very damp
room, the water tasted bad, there was a rotten smell, and all of us fell ill”.
The guards used walkie-talkies to speak to each other, and a radio to
communicate with the Navy School. Among the prisoners detained with him were
Brodsky; Lepiscopo; Enrique Ardeti; Villaflor’s wife, sister and
brother-in-law; and Norma Cozzi and her partner.
“They put us in the
lower half of a house built on stilts that had been bricked in to make a room.
It was an enclosed space with no ventilation, and several prisoners fainted
from the heat. Then they opened the door. There was a tremendous stampede
because a neighbour went by and saw us. We never found out what had happened to
that neighbour, but we heard shouts and several shots.”
The guards were in
the upper half of the house. One night after they had drunk too much they
terrified the prisoners down below by stamping loudly on the wooden floor of
their room, which was the prisoners’ ceiling.
Despite all the
testimonies, Grasselli denied that there were ever any people kept prisoner on
the island. “I don’t see how it could have been possible, because they were
raised wooden floors. The house was small and very uncomfortable, so how could
they keep people there, anybody could have escaped”. In addition, “there is no
proper security there, how could they guard them? And besides, the passenger
launch passes by in front of the house, it’s very visible”. This sounds like
the judgment of a jailer rather than a priest.
Norma Cozzi met
Josefina Villaflor, and, in this miserable hovel on the island, became friendly
with her mother-in-law, La gallega Martínez. “She was a very intelligent
girl, but she looked very ill. She had no idea what had happened to her
husband”.
On the island, Norma
Cozzi was able to talk to her aunt without any witnesses. During a stroll in
the sun, Thelma Jara de Cabezas told her that they had killed Raimundo
Villaflor in the Navy School. When she returned to the bricked-off room, Norma
could not bring herself to tell this to La Gallega because she was worried that she might
lose control and be killed by the guards. But she did tell Enrique Ardeti,
another leading member of the Popular Armed Forces (Fap), known as Fatty
Ramón. “For two days, he couldn’t speak. All he did was sleep. On
the third day, he talked to Villaflor’s wife and sister. La
Gallega took it very
badly. She asked for tranquillisers, and spent the first days after hearing the
news in a stupor”.
They learnt from
their guards that there was another group of prisoners on the island who were
not kept with hoods or shackles. These were prisoners who had been kept a long
time and had adapted. These were the ones who had been brought in a navy bus
like students on an outing. They later met one of them when he was brought to
their house as a punishment for insulting a member of the task force. Because
of the foul smell, their guards used to shackle them and then go off and leave them,
so they were able to talk to each other. To lift their spirits, Basterra told
them stories. This was how they spent their month on the island.
One of those in this
larger group was Carlos Muñoz, who had been captured by the Navy School task
force in November 1978. His process of recuperation had started three months
later. He was obliged to forge identity documents in the navy workshops in
order to save his life and to recover increasing amounts of freedom.
At first he was
allowed to see his family again, in very occasional visits and always
accompanied by navy personnel. Afterwards the visits became more frequent, and
he was allowed to come and go on his own, and to sleep outside the Navy School
at weekends. On Monday mornings, he had to present himself at a bar opposite
the Navy School, and telephone from there using a code so that a car could pick
him up and bring him back to the workshop. Muñoz also states that in the house
on the island where he stayed, those prisoners who had got furthest in this “recuperation
process” lived in normal conditions, without shackles or hoods.
Another member of
this group was Enrique Fuckman, known as Cachito. The police had
killed his 17-year-old younger brother in 1977, after he had been chased in the
street and finished off when he fell to the ground injured. Both of them wereMontonerosactivists.
Fuckman was kidnapped in November 1978 at the age of 22, and went through the
whole cycle of the Navy School. When the prisoners were transferred to the
island, he was working in the archive. He was among the first group of
prisoners taken to El Silencio.
The prisoners in the
larger house had a daily routine. They got up at 7am, had breakfast, and then
were put to work. The men were given machetes to clear the land. The guards cut
down poplars and willow trees with a chainsaw. The prisoners stripped the
trunks and carried them to the water’s edge, where a launch came to pick up the
timber. They also gathered leaves to make rope with. The navy personnel sold
all this production.
The head of the task
force, Captain Horacio Estrada, once said jokingly that the man who bought the
timber saw the prisoners and thought they were workmen. He asked how they were
paid, and when Estrada told him they got an hourly rate, he replied: “They’re
taking the piss, boss. They should produce much more”.
While the men were
dealing with the timber, the women did the house-cleaning and prepared food.
They used water that had been made drinkable thanks to the use of four
fibro-cement tanks suspended in a metal tower. As the water passed through
narrow tubes between the four tanks, it became purified. An architect had
designed the filter, using sand; he had been freed in 1978, and been recalled
after the task force bought the island.
There was also time
for leisure. One day a guard called Giba blew on his whistle and ordered: “4
o’clock: game of volleyball, insurgents versus lawfuls”.
“We got together and
agreed – we have to lose this game without them realising it”, saysCachito. They carried out
their plan without too much trouble. But when the game finished, Giba shouted
again: “Now for the return match”. The umpire was Cachito.
“You should have seen us. We were barefoot or in rubber boots. They had on
their Fred Perry or Lacoste T-shirts, and were wearing Adidas running shoes”.
Each team had their supporters to cheer them on: on one side the guards, known
as the Greens because of the colour of their uniforms, on the other the
prisoners who weren’t in the team.
This time something
went wrong, and the result was the opposite. “We didn’t win it, they lost it”,
according to a prisoner called Lorkipanidse. A guard called Peyón then ordered
them to play the decider, and all their plans went out of the window. “Our
blood was up, and we killed ourselves trying to beat them. Peyón was furious.
He snatched the whistle from Cachitoand took over as
judge. He cheated, but they still lost. When the game was over, we took it out
on them. We sangWe are the
Champions to the
music of the Peronist march”.
Reprisals were harsh,
but not as bad as they had been expecting. One of the prisoners was sent to the
punishment hole under the floor of the smaller house for insulting a guard
during the game. “The next day they made us get up at five o’clock, gave us no
breakfast, and sent us off to haul logs with snakes all around us”.
“We were given
machetes to do the work with, but they had rifles. One day the neighbour from
across the channel opened the door to the downstairs of the small house. The
guards rushed out with all their hardware”. The shots heard that day were fired
by the marine known asFatty
Tomás, who was shooting ducks with his Ithaka rifle.
What did the
neighbours, whose life was going on as normal, know about this group; what did
people for whom time had not stopped hear and see of the prisoners?
Their comments
reached the socialist leader Fernando Barberini, who had a daughter among the
disappeared. When the dictatorship was over, Barberini passed them on to the
Radical congressman Alberto Firpo. The two men began an investigation which
ended in a lawsuit.
A sergeant in the
Buenos Aires police lived opposite El Silencio. His wife’s
curiosity was aroused by the large sacks she saw on the coastguard launches,
the way helicopters flew low overhead without ever landing, and the sound of
gunshots she heard from time to time. What she found most curious was the
difference between the number of people arriving and those leaving.
Yet, when the
investigating magistrate asked her to testify, she denied all knowledge of any
large bundles being shifted. She agreed there had been a helicopter, and said
that a coastguard launch had brought about 50 people to the island, some of
them women. Some of the people worked, others sunbathed. The gunshots were
target practice. Nothing in particular caught her attention.
The owner of the
general store in Paraná Miní and Tuyú Paré saw the inhabitants of El
Silencio arrive in
groups. There was always someone in charge, although it was not always the same
person. They played cards, drank, and talked a lot, until their chief shut them
up. They bought lots of foodstuffs, always the best, and did not mind how much
it cost. He never saw anyone in uniform, but coastguard launches did berth at
the island’s landing-stage.
The coastguard
station had a football pitch. A team from the coastguards and some locals used
to play against another from El Silencio. The Chaná
Miní hospital is opposite the station. The policeman’s wife told the doctor on
duty there that she had seen 59 moving bundles. Then someone from El
Silencio warned her
that if she carried on talking, they would chop her head off and feed it to the
catfish. Perhaps that is why, as a general rule, nobody knew anything.
On 2-3 October 1979,
the prisoners were taken back to the Navy Mechanics School. The Inter-American Human Rights Commissionhad
finished its inspection, without finding anything it was looking for.
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