Remembering and Investigating Oscar Romero's Death

This past week (March 24th to be precise) marked the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of Oscar Romero, archbishop of El Salvador. Right-wing death-squads connected directly to eventual president Roberto D'Aubuisson were responsible for the murder, though exactly who pulled the trigger and how the plan was executed remains murky.

While there were many moving tributes over the past week, there was also a somewhat-overlooked translated journalistic investigation into Romero's death. Many have claimed former Air Force Captain Álvaro Rafael Saravia as the man responsible for the murder. Journalist Carlos Dada tracked down Saravia, as well as several other individuals connected to the assassination, and offered this intensive report investigating Romero's assassination, finding (among other things) that Saravia's claims to (relative) innocence (in that he didn't pull the trigger) may have some validity. It is a lengthy report, but well worth reading in its entirety due to its analysis and findings, the varying viewpoints on the murder, the conditions of appalling poverty and violence that Saravia (in hiding) and his neighbors live in, and the criminal networks that existed in right-wing death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s, squads that often had the tacit or explicit support of the United States. As we remember all that Romero did this week, it's also worth taking time to look at the broader terror-networks that impacted hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans.

Six Charged in Murder of Former Chilean President Eduardo Frei

In one of the more intriguing human rights cases in the Southern Cone, six men have been charged in the murder of former Chilean president Eduardo Frei. Frei had been president of Chile from 1964 to 1970, and while Frei wasn't a "radical," he did launch some significant reform programs in Chile, including agricultural reforms. While Salvador Allende would push for even broader social and economic reforms, many of Allende's own efforts were extensions of processes Frei had already begun. Frei had originally been opposed to Allende's administration and reforms, but in the wake of the overthrow of Allende in 1973 and the establishment of the Pinochet regime, Frei became a major leader in the effort to organize opposition to the regime. As the report mentions, Frei died mysteriously in 1982, and rumors that he was murdered because he was too powerful a threat against the Pinochet regime have existed for years.

Indeed, Frei isn't even the only Latin American ex-president who many feel was murdered; many suspect that Brazil's Juscelino Kubitschek (who governed from 1955 to 1960, and who "built" Brasilia) was likewise murdered in Brazil. Although Kubitsheck died in a car crash in 1976, there is reasonable evidence not only that a military vehicle forced him off the road to almost certain death, but that the military used this technique against other high-profile opponents to the dictatorship, including Zuzu Angel, who died in the same year as Kubitschek and who suspected the military was trying to kill her after she fought to find out what happened to her son, whom the military had disappeared.

Which leads us back to the Frei case. While I don't have high hopes, it would be wonderful if this unprecedented case could have long-term results in places like Brazil. While it seems the Chilean prosecutors have a case against these six men, I honestly don't know how strong that case is. That said, if the charges result in conviction and jail time in Chile, maybe the case could set a precedent for similar investigations into the deaths of Kubitschek, Angel, and others in Brazil. I don't think it will result in trials - the 1979 amnesty law granted amnesty to both political prisoners and members of the military involved with torture and murder. But at this point, just learning the truth about these deaths, be they Frei's or Kubitschek's or anybody else's, is more than a worthwhile quest unto themselves.

An Argentine-Chilean War?

This certainly would have been interesting had it happened:

The last Argentine dictatorship headed by General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri had plans to attack Chile following the invasion and recovery of the disputed Falklands/Malvinas Islands in 1982 revealed on Sunday the former chief of the Argentine Air Force at the time, Brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo.

I'm not sure how credible or believable this is. So far as I know, it's the first time any mention of a possible Chilean-Argentine war has ever appeared. Certainly, it's not out of the question. Just because both countries were led by right-wing murderous dictatorships in the late-1970s and early-1980s did not mean that they were always on the same page, and diplomatic tensions flared up at the time over some border disputes. However, Dozo's narrative seems a bit strange (and his constant referring to himself in the third-person doesn't make it any more lucid). Argentina more than had its hands full with the Malvinas/Falklands War, and while the dictatorship definitely thought its victory would be quick and assured in 1982 (something recent primary documents from Brazil that I'd been reading support), I can't imagine why the military would want to then turn around and engage in a trans-Andean war with its neighbor. Again, it's not out of the question, and Dozo makes some vague references to hawkish elements. More documentary evidence (rather than just the claims of one former brigadier general among many generals) would really be helpful in understanding this relatively-unexplored aspect of relations between Southern Cone dictatorships. Still, even if Dozo is just making this up, the idea of the effects of a war between Pinochet and Argentina's dictatorship do offer some tantalizing counterfactual and hypothetical scenarios, even if at the end of the day they mean nothing.

Chilean Ex-Soldiers Willing to Reveal What They Saw During the Pinochet Era

Some (non-officer) Chilean soldiers have begun to seek pensions, something that has been denied them in the past because of their roles as the "grunts" of the dictatorship. In return for gaining amnesty and being eligible for pensions, they will reveal some of the secrets of the basic functioning of the dictatorship's repressive apparatuses at the local level.

This gets into a really sticky question of who is or isn't a victim, but I'm inclined to agree that some of these soldiers very well may also be victims of the dictatorship. I realize that sounds silly up front. It's a military dictatorship - isn't saying the military is a "victim" too just an affront to those whose families really did suffer? The short answer would seem to be "yes," but the biggest and easiest trap in studying and writing about military dictatorships is the assumption that "the military" is a unified whole, when that's never the case; even when scholars know better, we often find ourselves having to refer to "the military" as shorthand, which just further creates the impression that there was some unified whole that was imposing repression, authoritarianism, torture, and state-sponsored murder on its nation's citizenry.

But as anybody who can studies dictatorships in detail can tell you, the idea of a single "military" is never accurate. Firstly, there is the fact that there are always dissensions within the highest levels of the military leadership itself. Pinochet didn't start off as the sole leader of Chile; he was part of a junta, but through power-plays and the removal of those who disagreed with him (including high-ranking air force brigadier generals and naval admirals, as well as other high-ranking generals), he was able to consolidate power. In Brazil, there were five military generals who occupied the post of president in its 21 year dictatorship (1964-1985), and scholars generally agree that they really represented two groups: "moderates," and "hard-liners." While I've always wondered if that categorization hasn't been too simple, it holds up in the documents, and indeed, in the mid-1970s, Ernesto Geisel (one of the "moderates") had to do some tricky maneuvering to prevent the hard-liners from taking control again (after two hardline generals and a brief junta held the presidency from 1967 to 1974). Rarely among dictatorships do you see any kind of unity even among the leadership; even when generals and military leaders publicly seem to be on the same page, there is often conflict behind what Derek Sayer called the "mask of the state."

Beyond high-level internal disagreements, militaries also often see disagreements between the officer corps (who are often highly-educated men from middle- and upper-class families) and the soldiers (who are often comparatively speaking, less-educated working-class men who are drafted or who enlisted for financial or professional reasons). In this kind of structure, multiple dividing factors can and do emerge - hierarchical differences, cultural differences, political differences, and class differences. Many times in Latin America, these men joined the army in peacetime, or turned to it as a last resort for stable income, and suddenly found themselves being ordered by their superiors to arrest, torture, and even kill civilians.

This brings us back to Chile. It's not a big secret that many soldiers were horrified at what they had to do, and often tried to avoid duties like torture. Indeed, a particularly harrowing account in this collection of eyewitness reports from Chile in 1973 (a book that I cannot recommend strongly enough for those interested in the fall of Allende) tells of how one soldier refused to arrest the residents of a poor neighborhood in the wake of Allende's overthrow, and his commanding officer shot him dead on the spot and said the same would happen to anybody else who did not follow orders. And for those who did follow orders and survived, it's clear that many of these conscripts are still suffering severe psychological and personal trauma for what they had to do during the Pinochet regime:

In a lengthy interview with The Associated Press, Mellado said the former draftees also are victims — forced into service as minors and made to do unspeakable things or be killed themselves. He said many have told him of horrifying crimes they want to get off their chests.

One confessed to shooting an entire family. Another — now an alcoholic who sleeps in the street in Santiago — said he was forced to drown a 7-year-old boy in a barrel of hardening plaster. Others describe harrowing torture sessions, and loading bodies onto helicopters to be dumped at sea.

"Our mission was to stand guard outside, and listen to their screams," said former draftee Jose Paredes, who described his service at the Tejas Verdes torture center in an AP interview. "They would end up destroyed, torn apart, their teeth and faces broken."

"There are things that I've always said I will take to the grave," Paredes said, his grizzled face running with tears as he named a half-dozen officers who he said gave the orders. "I've never told this to anyone."

When you read passages like that, it's hard not to see how many soldiers in the lower ranks also ended up being victims of authoritarian regimes.

Now, this isn't to say some soldiers, be it in Chile, Brazil, or elsewhere, did not relish in their duties, or at least have little problem with their role in combating "subversion." Just as with the leadership, the non-officer soldier corps is diverse in its attitudes, opinions, beliefs, etc. Nonetheless, many men in multiple dictatorships in Latin America found themselves put in the position of having to risk their income and their lives on one hand, or torturing and killing innocent civilians on the other, and while it's easy to say from a distance that they never should have tortured, the long-term and real-time consequences of their actions at the time no doubt made things much more difficult.

In that regard, I think the soldiers in the Chilean case mentioned at the beginning here have a strong case. Some would say, "well, they should just offer up the information anyways." Perhaps. But just as it's easy to say that they shouldn't have tortured in the first place, it's easy to say they should just cough up what they know when you're not in their position. Is it possible that some of these men are just in it for the money? Again, perhaps. Amnesty laws in general are tricky matters. But, as the AP article points out, in spite of the prosecutions of men like Chile, and in spite of what we know about how torture functioned under the Pinochet regime, it's also true that, "in nearly two decades of democracy since then, less than 8 percent of the disappeared have been found." Thus, at the end of the day, if the conscripts' accounts are accurate and shed new light on how exactly the mechanisms of repression and torture functioned (because, after all, it wasn't Pinochet who was in the cells demanding information from victims), then I think it's a worthy endeavor to pursue.

An Update on the Common Grave in Paraguay

At the beginning of this week, I mentioned that Paraguayan officials discovered a common grave that contained at least two bodies of suspected victims of the Stroessner regime's dictatorship at a police barracks. The bodies have been exhumed, and while they are only two (perhaps three) bodies, they are of major importance for a few reasons.

Firstly, as the head of a local NGO put it, "Until yesterday, the 'Stronistas' (as Stroessner's followers are referred to here) said there were no victims of forced disappearance, that it was all just our lies," and this is true. Allegations of disappearances are hard to prove without concrete physical evidence of the murders of individuals; this common grave provides physical proof of extrajudicial killings during the Stroessner regime.

It also adds physical evidence in the case against Augusto Montanaro, the minister charged with human rights violations for his role in ordering the repression of dissidents during the Stroessner regime. Finally, the discovery will allow at least two Paraguayan families to learn what happened to their loved ones who disappeared and were never seen again, offering closure to those families and the hope for others that perhaps they, too, will one day gain closure.

Luis Arce Gomez, the "Minister of Cocaine," Sent to Bolivia to Serve Jail Time for Human Rights Violations

Bolivian Colonel Luis Arce Gomez, a military officer who helped bring about right-wing dictator Luis García Meza Tejada's 13-month repressive regime, has been deported to Bolivia, where he will face jail for human rights abuses after serving a jail-term for drug crimes in the U.S. Although barely lasting more than a year, the military killed more than 1000 Bolivians during García Meza's brief reign. Arce Gomez, now 71, can look forward to spending the rest of his life in jail as he begins a 30-year sentence for "human rights violations including genocide, armed uprising, constitutional violations, and murder." Gomez was so in favor of repressive measures and state-sponsored killings as the Secretary of the Interior during García Meza's regime that he notoriously claimed that Bolivians should "walk around with their written will under their arms." In addition to his human rights abuses, Arce Gomez was closely tied to drug cartels, ties that earned him the nickname "Minister of Cocaine," as well as the 17-year jail sentence he served in the United States. To understand just how repugnant the García Meza government was, one simply needs to know that even Ronald Reagan distanced himself from the Bolivian dictator, even while he cozied up to repressive regimes in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Lillie has more.

Why I Study Latin American Dictatorships and Military Politics

There's no big mystery or moral crisis as to why I study Brazil. Through a series of happy accidents that aren't worth recounting in detail here, I discovered early in my graduate career that I really enjoyed Brazilian history, that it made sense to me, and that I was good at it. I opted for Brazil over Chile, and the rest is cheesily history.

But, as Erik pondered here, the explanations not just as to why I study dictatorships, or how I can, is more interesting, and more difficult. And quite honestly, at the end of it, I don't know. A lot of historians are fascinated by the dark, macabre side of history - I suspect that's what draws many environmental historians to their field. Likewise, labor historians probably find labor unrest more interesting than labor rest, and there's a reason that there are so many amateur (in the broadest and worst sense of the word) "military historians" out there. I think we historians generally just like things when they are at their messiest, most complex, most volatile.

But studying dictatorships has a particular oppression looming over it. Environmental destruction, strike-breaking, and war all have really ugly components. Yet, at least to my way of thinking (and I think a lot of people's more generally), dealing with issues like methodical torture, disappearances, and murders in lop-sided "battles" is really, really hard to deal with. I'm pretty sure every Latin Americanist who studies dictatorships (not just Southern Cone) passes through a phase somewhere in their professional path where they seriously worry, "is there something WRONG with me for wanting to study this?" At least for me, it wasn't just some passing question I waived off - it ended up involving some pretty heavy moral and philosophical reflection in my second year of my Master's. And I've known many people who started off wanting to study dictatorships, but once they really got into how awful those governments could be, they opted out, choosing to focus on some other issue either topically or temporally (or both).

Ultimately, those of us who really want to study these things in depth find many ways to deal with it. Partly, you take comfort in the fact that, if those who survived this made it through some of the most brutal tortures you could imagine, then you can too. In part, there's a wish to overcome the frustrations, the horrors, the complete despair in the face of some of the despicable acts humans can perpetrate against other humans, because I (we?) believe that, if we can just teach others about these horrors, then maybe we're taking some small step to preventing their repetition. There is also the fact that you learn and understand the complexities of the issues, so the fact that the French or Americans taught many of these torture techniques leaves plenty of blame to be spread around. And, at least in the case of Latin America, we have other areas we don't study that seem even more horrific. The 30,000 dead in Argentina is terrifying and brutal, but we can still say, "well, at least it's not Stalin, or Pol Pot."

Ultimately, none of this satisfactorily answers the question, "is there something wrong with me?" But at the end of the day, it's much better to be teaching others about the torture and murders that happen in dictatorships than to be perpetrating them in the name of a government.