The disappeared: What we knew and what we still don’t

There are two fundamental questions we must ask ourselves about Argentina’s last dictatorship: What did Argentine society know about the people who were disappeared in those years? What aspects of that criminal system remain unknown? There have been multiple attempts to answer the first question.  The Nunca Más report in 1984, for instance, stated that society was oblivious and ignorant.  In the 1990s, however, society was accused of having been aware and complicit in what had happened due to voters’ support for Carlos Menem, the president who replicated the dictatorship’s economic plan and imposed impunity through presidential pardons. In 2006, a new foreword added to the Nunca Más during the Néstor Kirchner administration for the 30th anniversary of the coup said that society had stood by the accusers from the start. In the research for my book Pensar los 30.000 (Analyzing the 30,000), I set out to reject these opposing but equally overarching interpretations and study how those who denounced the dictatorship’s criminal enterprise came to know of its existence and how it operated. This meant examining local, regional, and transnational human rights organizations; armed groups; political exiles; relatives of the disappeared; clandestine detention center survivors; and the press. These were the people who knew the most about the illegal repression due to access to sources and political commitments, as well as being victims directly affected by the dictatorship.  Across this diverse universe, knowledge of the disappearance system — perpetrators, locations where the disappeared had been held, the number of victims, and whether they were alive or had been killed — varied widely. Journalist Rodolfo Walsh and the Argentine Commission for Human Rights (in Spanish, CADHU), for instance, quickly denounced the state’s responsibility for disappearances, torture, and murder. Other accusers — including human rights groups like the Argentine League for the Rights of Man and the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH) — initially attributed the disappearances to paramilitary groups like the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (known as the Triple A), which had operated under the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón.  They accepted the military junta’s rhetoric, which positioned itself as equidistant from “terrorism of any stripe” and promised to restore the state’s monopoly on the use of force. A question that remains open Asking what society knew at the time also leads us to ask what we currently know about the dictatorship’s criminal system. Although 80% of the abductions took place in front of witnesses — relatives, co-workers, fellow students, and neighbors — the captivity, torture, and murder unfolded in secret. This split fed competing accounts of where they were.  Some pointed to military units. There was also the idea, which was spread by the authorities, the majority of the press, and even the captors inside clandestine centers, that some of the disappeared — the ones singled out for “transfer” — were being held in “special prisons” or “rehabilitation farms” in Patagonia. The scale of the disappearances was also calculated in different ways. Guerrilla groups cited round figures in the tens of thousands, while local human rights groups such as the APDH offered numbers based on documented complaints.  My research investigates how these figures were calculated and the contentious disputes among those who advanced them. Following that, I turn to the numbers the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) and the Unified Registry of Victims of State Terrorism (RUVTE) reached in 1984 and 2015, respectively.  Based on that, I argue that the number of disappeared encompasses those who remain missing as well as those who passed through the clandestine centers and were released. The most pressing of these debates hovered around what had happened to the disappeared — whether they were alive or dead. I examined this issue through the discussions sparked by the testimony two Atlético-Banco-Olimpo clandestine center survivors gave with the support of Amnesty International in London in February 1980. The survivors said they had witnessed “transfers” of fellow prisoners, an operation they described as throwing live victims into the sea.  The accusation set off a heated argument.  Some accused the survivors of being military agents seeking to undermine the campaign for the disappeared by claiming they had been killed. Incidentally, the dictatorship had enacted the “presumption of death law” a few months earlier. The goal was to end the “problem of the disappeared” by turning them into people who were legally deceased.  To those critics, the survivors’ testimony read as part of that effort. For those denouncing the dictatorship, understanding the system of disappearances, the perpetrators behind it, and the practices they engaged in demanded a painstaking knowledge-building process, as well as acknowledging a crime that pushed the limits of the believable.  The underlying hypothesis is that if even those who came in contact with the dictatorship’s methods and crimes had a thin understanding of the full picture, knowledge among those outside these groups would have come much later and been markedly thinner and fragmentary. The dictatorship and the disappeared remain an open topic as substantial questions remain unanswered. Among them are the fate of the disappeared and the children taken from their families, the political identity of the disappeared, the political and social profile of the survivors, the number of perpetrators and their convictions, and the ties various social groups had with the dictatorship.  These gaps are why the subject remains the focus of substantial research — research that is necessary to uphold the Nunca Más.