The Condor Years (24 page)

Unlike the Pinochet coup, the military takeover in Argentina was not viewed worldwide through the prism of anti-Communism. The Peronist government was universally reviled and had no consistent defenders either on the right or the left outside Argentina. The Argentine left, unlike the defenders of Allende’s Socialist experiment in Chile, disliked the government almost as much as the military did. The ERP, and to a lesser extent the Montoneros, had as their goal the overthrow of the government and installation of their own radical alternative.

The new military leaders, in a junta comprising the chiefs of the army, navy, and air force, successfully portrayed themselves as reluctant moderates, especially Army Commander General Jorge Videla—a seemingly innocuous, gangling man whose scarecrow visage was in stark contrast to the sinister image of dark cloaks and opaque sunglasses affected by Pinochet when he took power.

The military’s “terrorist” enemies, to whose eradication the coup was dedicated, also garnered little sympathy either inside or outside Argentina. It might have been a different story if the guerrillas had limited their activities to the attacks on military installations, propaganda strikes, and the mountain campaign in Tucumán, with its echoes of the freedom fighter struggles of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. But both ERP and Montoneros had indulged the worst instincts of their extremist members, carrying out a long and tedious string of kidnappings and killings, often against people with no connection to the military and no particular ideology. Several highly publicized killings became symbolic of the egregious cruelty of which the guerrillas were capable: ERP chief Santucho ordered his men to execute military men in the streets in equal number to the sixteen ERP fighters who had been executed by the military after a battle. An ERP squad gunned down an army captain crossing a street with his three-year-old daughter, killing both the soldier and the little girl. Santucho expressed regret for the girl’s death, but the responsible guerrilla commander was not punished.

The Montoneros had kidnapped and executed a former president, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, and in another famous case murdered an army general with a bomb planted by a girl who had infiltrated the general’s home by befriending his daughter. Foreigners also had been targeted, usually for kidnappings for ransom—such as the ERP kidnapping of Victor Samuelson of Exxon. Two U.S. foreign service officials in the provincial capital of Cordoba were shot, one fatally, in separate kidnapping attempts by Montoneros and
ERP commandos. Several plots against officers of the U.S. military advisory group were discovered, one of which was attributed to the JCR. Inside the U.S. embassy the identification of leftist guerrillas as the enemy was personal as well as ideological.

The military government was welcomed not as an anti-Communist crusader as in Chile but as a legitimate intervention to restore order and stop the violence. Respected and moderate newspaper editors such as Robert Cox of the English language
Buenos Aires Herald
and Jacobo Timerman of
La Opinión
approved the takeover in their editorial columns, even while issuing cautions about human rights abuses. The political parties, with the exception of the Peronist Justicialist Party, lined up to endorse the coup. Even the Soviet-aligned Communist Party did not oppose it.

The new junta adopted the unthreatening title “Process of National Reorganization” for their enterprise. Even before hiring image builders in Washington, the military seemed to have won the first battle of public relations.

The underground reality was starkly different, but for the first few weeks it remained underground and out of sight. What had already begun, even before the coup, in a growing network of secret prisons, was incalculably more brutal than the junta’s public image. Behind the mild faces of the new military rulers was a dictatorship far worse—by several orders of magnitude—than Pinochet’s experiment in anti-Communist eradication. A nationwide underground extermination system had been operating since the military had taken over the anti-subversive war the previous October. With almost no public notice, the military had kidnapped and disappeared at least 522 people in the five and half months leading up to the coup. Then the disappearances more than tripled to a steady rate of 350 per month for the remaining months of 1976.

It was almost as if the reality of the repression was in inverse proportion to its publicity. The previous year, 1975, was portrayed as the worst year of violence in Argentina’s history, with wide coverage of the war in Tucumán, battles between police, military, and the guerrilla groups, and the activities of the Triple A, a Peronist-sponsored death squad.

As the military tightened its grip in late 1975 and pushed aside the Peronist death squads like so many amateurs, the already-high body count escalated. Of the hundreds of people sucked up into the secret prisons every month, almost all—one former agent of the army’s 601 intelligence battalion estimated 85 percent—were executed and their bodies secretly disposed of. There was little
public outcry about the many arrests at first and family members still harbored hope that those captured eventually would reappear alive as legally sanctioned prisoners under the national security laws.

A candid secret document, from DINA agent Arancibia, describes a two-track system of legal prisoners and secret executions. Reporting to Santiago, he said, “The Army is attacking the subversion ‘with the right hand and with the left hand.’ That is to say, some of those captured are passed on to the executive power [legally sanctioned] and the rest are RIP. Just this week, SIE [Army Intelligence
Battalion 601] eliminated 25 subversive delinquent elements, all ‘with the left hand.’ ” The same language is used in a U.S. intelligence document reviewing the early period of repression: “‘Left handed operations’ in the vocabulary of the trade means anything that is extra-legal. ‘Ultra left handed’ means an operation authorized and or run by a junior unit commander without higher permission or knowledge.”

The total death toll would not be officially counted until years later, and even then the numbers were considered to be significantly lower than the actual number killed. The National Commission on the Disappeared documented 8,961 disappearances through the end of the military government in 1983.
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Intelligence Battalion 601 itself was keeping a secret count with a much higher number, according to a document in Arancibia’s files. Noting that he received his information directly from Intelligence Battalion 601, Arancibia reported to his superiors in Chile: “They have counted 22,000 between dead and disappeared, from 1975 to the present date [July 1978].”

Public perception lagged behind the reality in 1976 because the military established elaborate systems to keep the killing secret. The Argentine military eschewed the most high-profile actions taken by Chile. There were no mass roundups, no stadiums, or visible concentration camps filled with tens of thousands of prisoners. A minority of prisoners were held under “executive power” and thus were judicially acknowledged and publicly known. Few of those prisoners ultimately disappeared. The secret system fooled the U.S. embassy. An embassy cable three weeks after the coup reported that the number of judicially acknowledged prisoners increased from 1,500 before the coup to about 3,000 after the coup. “The general consensus is that the arrests so far, with few exceptions, have been carried out within legal framework,” the cable noted. About twenty-five death squad–style killings had occurred, with bodies dumped in ditches, but that was attributed to “off-duty policemen without the knowledge or authorization of senior army officers.”

These sanguine assessments were shared in the early weeks after the coup by moderate Argentine politicians such as Radical Party leader Ricardo Balbín. Actually, hundreds were being exterminated and the secret system of violence was intensifying. It was not until mid-May that the terrifying reality set in: the coup leaders’ moderate image was a cruel sham.

For the United States embassy, the wake-up call came with a handful of spectacular attacks against international targets. Those killings we now know were part of Operation Condor.

MOPPING UP THE JCR

With the coup, a combined DINA-601 Intelligence Battalion operation moved quickly to mop up JCR operations in Argentina. The main targets were MIR leader Edgardo Enríquez and ERP leader Roberto Santucho. In May 1975, JCR couriers Jorge Fuentes and Amílcar Santucho had been captured in Paraguay. Then, Jean Yves Claudet, arriving in Buenos Aires with JCR documents on microfilm and a suitcase full of cash, fell into a trap set by 601 operative Osvaldo Rawson. The captured documents showed Enríquez was still operating out of Buenos Aires. A DINA letter in late December—just three weeks after the Condor founding meeting, names several MIR suspects and asks that they be captured and “delivered to Chile.”

Only days after the coup in March, 601 and DINA got an important break in their search for Enríquez and ERP leader Roberto Santucho. Despite the military’s stranglehold on the city, Santucho decided to go ahead with a large secret meeting of his entire central committee plus members of the JCR executive commission, including Enríquez. At least fifty people were gathered for the two-day meeting, starting March 29, in a house in the Moreno district on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Topic A was the analysis of the recent coup. Santucho and Enríquez were close friends and usually saw eye-to-eye on political strategy, but they disagreed strongly on the current situation. Enríquez advocated a strategic retreat, following MIR’s example after the coup in Chile.

To the contrary, Santucho saw the coup as opportunity. On the morning of the second day he gave a speech to the gathered revolutionaries that laid out a strategy of accelerated offensives against the military. The coup, he argued, “closes off definitively all possible electoral and democratic solutions and
marks the beginning of a process of open civil war.” It was, he proclaimed, “a qualitative leap in the development of our revolutionary struggle.”

It was instead a leap of such colossal self-will and arrogance that its folly was almost instantaneously revealed. The group adjourned for lunch and began the one-hour siesta that was a tradition in central committee meetings, no matter how clandestine. As the leaders slept, shooting broke out in the walled garden around the house. A military squad of about a dozen men was attacking the house, apparently unaware that there was a superior guerrilla force inside. ERP guards easily held the attackers off while most of the assembled leaders made their escape into the surrounding neighborhood. Enríquez and Santucho, as the top leaders, were among the first to leave. But when army reinforcements arrived and surrounded the entire area, Enríquez was forced to hide in an irrigation ditch in a cornfield for two days.

Twelve guerrilla leaders were killed, some of them captured alive and able to give information before they were killed. One of those captured alive was the ERP intelligence chief. The guerrillas’ underground network was fatally compromised. Enríquez apparently made his way to another safe house designated for the JCR, where other officers had taken refuge. That house had also become known to the military. On April 10, Enríquez and a young Brazilian woman, Regina Marcondes, were captured as they left the house.