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The worst fatality is the press

By Robert Cox Posted Oct 1 2002

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The seeds of the current economic, financial and societal chaos in Argentina were sown in the darkness that descended upon the country with the 1976 coup and the total breakdown of Argentina’s institutions that followed.

I once wrote that Argentina could be used as a laboratory for the study of terrorism because, for more than a decade, terrorism was an integral part of everyday life and seemed likely to become endemic, like gangsterism in Chicago in the 1920s.

In the 1970s, I recall counting more than 30 different terrorist groups active in Argentina. They covered the political spectrum from the extreme left to the far right. In the end, the officials’ barbarity surpassed the terrorists’ in savagery. The military dictatorship turned Argentina into a terrorist state by using terrorist methods even more indiscriminately than the so-called “subversive elements.”

Can anything be learned from such an extreme case in coping with global terrorism?

The most important lesson, I believe, is to ensure that the threat posed by terrorists is not used as a pretext to prevent the free flow of information. The Argentine media, accustomed to self-censorship for so many years under military dictatorship, utterly failed the Argentine people. Before the 1976 coup, the press sensationalized terrorism. After the coup, the press, ever compliant to the military, demonized all political dissidents — not solely those who used violence.

Lacking the oxygen that a free press provides to society, justice expired, education became indoctrination, suspicion flowered and unreality ruled.

When the military seized power on March 24, 1976, toppling the widow of elected president Juan Domingo Perón, the country’s major newspapers became accomplices of the junta. The mass-circulation newspapers of Buenos Aires — La Prensa, La Nacion and Clarin — could and should have continued to report and comment on what the military grandiloquently proclaimed was their “Process of National Reconstruction,” but they didn’t.

In 1976, the word “media” did not have the meaning it has today. The media as we know it today did not exist in Argentina. The sole television channel, all of the nationwide radio stations and the entire communications network — telephones, wireless and Teletype systems — were state-owned and -controlled.

So it was easy for the military to take over the country’s communications network. Military officers took charge of television and radio stations and, moreover, were able to monitor outgoing Teletype messages, the normal way that foreign correspondents sent their stories to their home offices. If the military guardians did not like what a foreign correspondent was filing, they would simply pull the plug, an experience I remember vividly. The only other alternatives were the telephone, which could be, and often was, blocked, or persuading a passenger on an outbound flight to cooperate by hand delivering copy.

In addition to these hurdles, the real test of the press came a few days after the coup. At the Buenos Aires Herald, where I was editor, we received a telephone call informing us that the press could only report official communiqués relating to security matters, particularly kidnappings, assassinations and the discovery of bodies. Our city editor, Andrew Graham Yooll, took the call from the Government House Press Office. I questioned the apparent order and asked Andrew to request the order in writing. He was told that he would have to go to Government House. When he returned, he showed me a piece of plain, rough paper with no signature. It was a list of restrictions that, if complied with, would have prevented our readers from knowing what was happening.

For some time, the Herald had, as a matter of policy, been keeping a record of the toll taken by the underground civil war that had been tormenting Argentina from the beginning of the 1970s. Andrew kept what we called the “black book” of deaths. Periodically, we published the list, along with editorial comment. Our intent was to wake Argentina to the tragedy that was unfolding. If we concurred in repressing reports about killings, they would not only continue but would grow in number.

I decided to publish the list of restrictions on the front page so that readers would be aware of what was going on. Most of the newspapers did not tell their readers about the restrictions. We continued to report on kidnappings, killings and the appearance of bodies when we were able to confirm them and verify sources. But with very few honorable exceptions, the Argentine press conformed to what was described at the time as a “gentlemen’s agreement” between the editors and publishers of the major newspapers.

A major handicap for the press was the fact that a significant number of journalists were members of guerrilla organizations. Argentina’s leading cartoonist, Hermenegildo Sobat, said that when he worked for Jacobo Timerman’s La Opinion, some of his colleagues saw their participation in revolutionary activities as a game. They saw themselves as Clark Kent during the day and Superman at night.

Another problem for the press was that it has been traditional for journalists to participate in military coups, even to the extent of being co-conspirators. I well remember chatting with Timerman after the 1976 coup at an embassy reception when Rafael Perotta, owner and editor of Cronista Comercial, then the leading financial newspaper, joined us. They began to reminisce about previous coups, recalling the times they had taken part in military plans to overthrow other governments. It was cruelly ironic that both men were kidnapped and that, as Timerman later recounted, they met when both were being held in a clandestine prison. Timerman, though tortured viciously, survived; Perotta did not.

What Argentina needed to restrain the horror was just plain, down-to-earth reporting. Instead, the press, with so few exceptions, chose to ignore the mounting atrocities. A friend of mine who was then the British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent for Latin America told me that he asked an editor at La Nacion why the newspaper did not report that people were being kidnapped and “disappearing.” He was astonished that the response he received was exactly the same response he received in the Soviet Union when he asked the editor of Pravda why plane crashes were not reported. Both said: “Our readers are not interested in such things.”

At the time, and even now in looking back, I’m astonished at the blasé attitude of other journalists in regard to colleagues who had been abducted. Desperately seeking company in my concern, I met such responses as: “This is a war, and people disappear in wars.” At parties, journalists would joke about the rumors that prisoners were being disposed of by being thrown from planes into the sea.

It wasn’t any help that the information that became public came from the guerrilla groups themselves, which, of course, had a propaganda purpose.

A fairly accurate account of the methods that the military were using in what they called the “war against subversion” was made public by the Montoneros, the largest of the guerrilla organizations. Drawing on their multimillion-dollar war chest, derived from kidnapping business executives for ransom, the Montoneros published a full-page advertisement, in the form of an open letter, in major newspapers abroad, including The New York Times and Le Monde, on the first anniversary of the coup.

It was written and signed by Rodolfo Walsh, a investigative journalist and Peronist activist, and it was a gesture that, I remember, struck me as suicidal, even though he had gone into hiding and was running a clandestine news agency. Walsh said, “I know I will be hunted down, but I am faithful to the commitment to give testimony in difficult times.” Walsh was indeed hunted down. A military death squad with orders to capture him alive lured him into a trap, but he was shot to death when he pulled out a .22 pistol to defend himself. Walsh was lucky. Writer and journalist Haroldo Conti, a contemporary of Walsh, was tortured to death, a common fate.

My response to covering the secret “dirty war” was to report it myself. Journalists were being arrested, were disappearing into clandestine prisons or into exile. I did not think it would be right to ask a reporter to investigate what other newspapers were ignoring. It was a risk I decided to take because journalism became, for me, very basic. I had discovered that a timely story on a disappeared person could save that person’s life. It was that satisfaction that got me through the horror.

The military justified their horrific actions to themselves, while denying them to the outside world, by convincing themselves that they were fighting World War III. The enemy, they believed, was international communism. It was comforting, perhaps, to believe that. But one officer gave away the military’s true political alignment when he told me that the allies were on the wrong side during World War II. The United States, Britain and the other Western nations should have fought with Nazi Germany against Communist Russia, he said.

I was given a far more dramatic illustration of the political philosophy of the military regime when I was arrested and briefly jailed in April 1977. I was taken first to an underground prison in the Superintendencia de Seguridad (SS) building of the Federal Police. The first thing I saw when I was escorted out of the secret police car in a subterranean tunnel was a huge swastika painted on the wall that masked the entrance to the cellblock. Under the sign was painted “Nazi-nationalism.”

Gradually, the groups that called themselves varying conjugations of “people’s army,” “liberation army,” “revolutionary army” or “revolutionary armed forces,” and para-military nationalist organizations coalesced into broader armed bands. The civil war became simplified, though distorted, into a struggle between the left and the right. Fascism is so deeply ingrained in Argentina, and so deeply rooted in Peronism, that the “left-wing” Montoneros, which grew from a handful of socially conscious Catholic students to become the largest guerrilla organization, owed far more to Mussolini than to Marx.

Terrorism results in the loss of common sense and mental equilibrium. It turns people’s minds into furies, all too willing to respond to violence with violence and atrocity with atrocity. Wittingly and unwittingly, the press encouraged a terrorist response to acts of terrorism. Before the military took over, the printed press, radio and television gave the impression that Argentina was living a daily catastrophe. The headlines told of assassinations, kidnapping, bombings and, of course, implied that the military was needed to restore law and order.

I myself hoped, as the Buenos Aires Herald editorials argued, that the military would put a stop to the right-wing death squads. The squads were operating openly by using standard Federal Police Ford Falcon automobiles, though not bearing any identification markings or license plates, and clearly enjoying impunity guaranteed by the government.

It is still not known how many journalists lost their lives in the “dirty war.” There is general agreement that some 100 are among the “desaparecidos.” The official government report, “Nunca Mas” (Never Again), says that 1.6 percent of the documented cases of disappeared people were journalists. Of course, it is also not known how many were active members of guerrilla organizations, were secret government agents, or were victims because their reporting discomforted the military or the guerrillas. The death threats came from all sides, as I can testify.

In my case, the death threat that made me decide, very reluctantly, to leave Argentina was addressed to my 11-year-old son. It was in the form of a hand-written letter, purportedly from the Montoneros but actually from military intelligence. It contained so much precise information about my wife, my five children and our family that I recognized that it was deadly serious and could not be ignored as I had ignored, almost daily, other threats and intimidations.

The press did fail Argentina in its darkest hour. Hector D’Amico, who was editor of the news magazine Noticias and who is currently an editor at La Nacion, put it fairly and squarely when he wrote: “In regard to el Proceso [the so-called Process of National Reconstruction], journalism has not made its mea culpa. We have asked the Church [to apologize], we have asked the military, but we have not asked journalism. There were rare exceptions, but only a few carried out the noble duty. It is possible that we did not know everything, or that we refused to see the dimension of the tragedy. But we, and I include myself, did not do all that we could.”