A RECURRENT NIGHTMARE

Last week marked the forty-ninth anniversary of the military coup in Argentina that would mark seven years of my career in journalism. I’ve been thinking about those times a lot lately. I’m unable to get the memories out of my mind. And, truth be told, I don’t want to. Because forgetting is how we repeat the same mistakes over again.

Argentine military junta 1976

Furthermore, by forgetting, we can never warn others of the same pitfalls when they crop up elsewhere. But then again, sometimes providing those warnings, admonishing the uninitiated, can be a thankless task. Because like children, those who have never experienced what you have, are often loath to accept that the same thing can happen to them.

You can tell a child again and again, “Hot! Don’t touch!” And I’m guessing that, nine times out of ten, they’ll have to personally put their little mitt in the flame or lay their tender palm to the hot iron before they’ll know what you were talking about, and why you weren’t just being a nosy, bossy jerk. In their tiny, barely reasoning minds, they just think they have a different opinion than yours and that you’re trying to impose your will on them. You’re not, of course. You’re just trying to spare them the pain you’ve already suffered.

But maybe it’s impossible to experience another’s awareness vicariously. Perhaps you just have to climb into the meat grinder head first yourself. Problem is, it’s usually hard to come out on the other end of that move alive or unscathed.   

My revived interest in that part of my life—which, until recently, almost seemed like another life—is twofold, although both stances are connected. On the one hand, I have finally decided to finish writing and, hopefully, publish a memoir of those years. The working title is A Voice in the Storm. Its meaning will be clear to anyone who eventually reads the book, the completion of which has been eluding me for the past two decades. That’s mainly because there are a lot of things that are personally very painful for me about that era, even while I have to admit that I have never felt more alive or more self-fulfilled than in those times.

Secondly, however, my renewed interest is also due to the fact that I’m seeing everything I experienced back then, everything I know to be the wrong road to take, coming full circle and happening all over again. But this time in my own native land, where most of us were brought up thinking anything like authoritarian rule was an impossibility for us. Where we were taught that US democracy was the strongest and most infallible on earth. And where we took that belief all the way to the bank, even as those who knew world history well warned us that democracy was only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. It was an experiment that was still being tested, and it was only as strong as the strength of conviction of those responsible for its care and practice.    

Ideological repression, Argentina 1976

Argentina’s March 24, 1976, coup had been rumored for a long time. While nowadays you have to search high and low to find anyone who admits to having supported it—except in circles close to the current administration of President Javier Milei, who, despite the general unpopularity of his stance,  has tried hard to vindicate the junta leaders of that era as misunderstood heroes—but back then, just about everybody except the staunchest supporters of the Peronist government in office at the time, was of the opinion that “something had to be done.”

Even the paper I worked for, the Buenos Aires Herald, which in the months and years to come would be, by far, the staunchest and boldest media critic of the regime, at first cautiously welcomed the coup. We ran an editorial in which we talked about the elected administration—which had fallen into chaos, violence and authoritarian designs following the death of its charismatic leader, President Juan Domingo Perón—as being moribund. The only thing left to do, we posited, was to drag the virtual corpse out of Government House.

Ideological repression, Argentina 1976

I was young and had little experience, other than what I’d read, with autocratic regimes. But over the course of the next decade, I would get almost doctoral experience, not only in Argentina but in several other South American nations as well, in how tyrannies are born and how whole nations give up their freedom and independence almost willingly, or at least almost unwittingly.

One important lesson I learned is that tyrants almost always march into office as “saviors”. They are nearly always “the only ones that can fix the mess” that whatever came before has bred. They present themselves as serious and organized, not as dictators, but as caretakers. They pretty much always promise to return the nation to its past glory, to make the country great again.

In Argentina, they proposed, rather convincingly at first, that they were only stepping in to save the nation from itself, to make it safe for democracy again. They claimed that they were partially suspending the US-style Constitution as a means of saving it. It had been sorely abused, they indicated, and now had to be put on ice for a while, until such time as it could once again be dusted off and brought back on line, fully recovered and ready to guide the rule of law in the future. In the meantime, the regime would be the law, the be all and end all of national life, for as long as it took to get the country “thinking right” again, and to get it back on track.

Ideological repression, Argentina 1976

Almost immediately, people started disappearing. Not just a few here and there, as had been happening in the horrific final days of the former government, which was locked in what amounted to an inter-party civil war, but in droves. There were assassinations in broad daylight as well, summary executions carried out by paramilitary hit squads. And there were semi-formal arrests, performed by details of heavily armed, clean-cut men in suits who moved around in plate-less, unmarked cars, and didn’t bother to identify themselves or to read anyone their rights.

A long list of books and music, as well as their authors and composers, were suddenly deemed toxic and subversive. Just the possession of any such literature or music was enough to warrant arrest or disappearance.

The people who actually became registered names on an official police blotter weren’t necessarily charged with anything. With the rule of law suspended, it wasn’t necessary. The Executive Branch, under a modified form of martial law known as the State of Siege, could hold people indefinitely and move them to any jurisdiction it wished, because there was only one power in the entire country: the Executive Branch, in the person of the military Junta.

Book-burning Argentina 1976

None of this was random. No. It was systematic, and was invoked under the Executive Decrees outlined in the master plan known as the National Reorganization Process, or Proceso for short.

It didn’t take long for us to figure out that the “caretaker” government was no such thing, not some benevolent elite of patriots bent on a quick clean-up of armed terrorism and the immediate restoration of the rule of law under new and favorable conditions in which it could thrive in peace. The military started making it clear that “the ballot boxes were well stored away” and that they would remain that way until the regime decided to get them out again. Suddenly, anyone who disagreed even slightly with the regime was marked as “a terrorist”. Dissent was often a death sentence, and organized protest a crime.

Party politics, union activity, university rallies, gatherings of more than a handful of people, public debate, all of these things were prohibited and considered subversive. The subjects of the most immediate kidnappings and murders were people with direct ties to armed anti-regime militancy. But it didn’t take any time at all for the net the regime cast to be expanded to include some of the country’s best minds—teachers, writers, artists, scientists, human rights activists, pacifists, democratic socialists, anyone who sought to nurture thought, analysis and debate. Anyone who raised their voice to defend human and civil rights. Just among journalists, nearly a hundred of our colleagues went missing or were murdered. Many more, including three from our own newspaper, chose self-exile over the course of the Proceso in the face of credible death threats.

With no rule of law to hinder them, the enforcers of the regime could take their time. In gloomy safehouses all over the city and country, people snatched on the sole suspicion of the regime were strapped to metal bedsprings naked and wetted down before being subjected to simultaneous electric shock torture and beatings, often combined with sexual abuse, and punctuated by demands for the names of others. On the say-so of torture victims out of their heads with pain and terror, hundreds of others were arrested, often people innocent of anything but having known someone who disappeared.

The president and head of the Junta, General Jorge Rafael Videla, at first posed as a “moderate”. He claimed, in a meeting with the editor of our paper, that none of the horrific things that were happening were part of the Proceso’s plan. Yes, certain rights had been suspended to make it possible to wage war on armed terrorists. But the abuses that were taking place parallel to that “dirty war” were the result of proper orders being given at the top of the chain of command, but then being carried out in improper ways by the rank and file.

Eventually, when the cat was already out of the bag, he no longer bothered to deny anything. It had become clear that the pact among the military was that everybody had to have blood on his hands. Videla went from pretending the Junta was looking into abuses, to tiring of making excuses about the “missing”, and finally, cynically, three years into the regime, responding to a question about the missing by renowned local journalist José Ignacio “Nacho” López telling the public, in a televised broadcast,   “I can tell you this in regard to the missing. As long as they remain as such, they are an unknown quantity. As long as they are missing they can have no special treatment, because they have no entity. They are neither alive nor dead. They are missing.”

So-called “third world clerics” were particularly targeted, as were social workers. Anyone who sought to help the poor, whom the regime considered their enemies. Despite its almost carnal relationship with Catholicism and the Church hierarchy, the regime had no problem violating the sanctuary status of churches harboring those considered “subversive”, including priests and nuns who served the material and social needs of the poor and unprotected.

Twelve people, including two French nuns, disappeared from the Iglesia de Santa Cruz, a church that provided a meeting space for human rights activists. Some of their bodies later washed up on remote shores of the South Atlantic and were buried as unidentified NN’s in a local small-town cemetery. Decades after the end of the regime, some of those bodies, including those of the two nuns, would be identified. All had been de victims of brutal torture and summary execution. 

Already in the second year of the Proceso, seven Roman Catholic priests and seminarians equated with terrorism by the regime because of the social work they were doing with the poor, were shot to death inside of the church to which they were assigned while they were in the midst of their daily prayers.

One of the “lucky” ones was nineteen-year-old Patricia Erb, the daughter of American Mennonite missionaries, who, while studying at a Buenos Aires university, was carrying out social work in an underprivileged neighborhood. Paramilitary thugs under orders from the regime kidnapped her. She later turned up imprisoned, at the disposal of the Executive. No charges were ever filed against her, and the combined pressure of the US Embassy under Jimmy Carter’s administration and the Inter-American Human Rights Committee eventually secured her release and return to the US. But  not before she was held for a month at the Campo de Mayo Army base, where she was subjected to multiple torture sessions and repeated sexual attacks.

Her congressional testimony about her treatment helped draw international attention to the brutality of the Proceso. She wasn’t an exception in terms of that treatment. It was standard operating procedure under the regime. What was exceptional in her case was that, for others, this continued indefinitely, and, more often than not, ended in eventual execution and secret disposal of their bodies.

The Proceso’s most powerful supporters were the corporate wealthy, those who benefited most from the prohibition and persecution of anything and anyone who stood in the way of “business as usual”.

I recall once at a luncheon hearing an executive from British and American Tobacco who was talking in glowing terms about how great it was to do business under the “Proceso”. Then, he added praise as well for the cruel dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in neighboring Chile. Specifically, he said, “You know, I’ve just come back from Chile. What a breath of fresh air!” I was unable to eat when lunch was served.

To this end, the courting of international business, the regime countered its barbarous political actions with what was considered a “serious” economic team, headed up by a Cambridge-educated lawyer, businessman and economist from one of the country’s wealthiest cattle-ranching families. His plan to “insert Argentina into the global economy” and his sound contacts in the IMF, World Bank and international business community were an attempt by the Proceso  to legitimize the regime on the world stage. And for quite a long time, it worked.

At the other end of the de facto government’s policies, however, was an unprecedented level of repression and violence, best summed up by one of its top generals who once said during a military camaraderie dinner: “First we’ll kill all of the subversives, then we’ll kill their collaborators, then we’ll kill their fans, right after that those who remain indifferent, and, finally, the faint of heart.”

It was a pretty accurate description of what actually happened. Once one person’s rights could be suspended, no one else had rights anymore either. Everybody became fair game. And some thirty thousand people were to perish.

Ideological repression USA 2025

So why is all this top of mind right now, as I watch in horror at what’s happening in my native United States? Because what I am witnessing is reminiscent of how the authoritarian regimes I’ve studied, close up and personal, all began.

I’m seeing rule by executive decree in my native US. I’m seeing people being snatched off US streets, paramilitary style, by unidentified government agents. I’m seeing those imprisoned with no due process being spirited off to other jurisdictions, or even other countries ruled by cruel dictatorships. I’m witnessing  an Executive power that is daily violating the Constitution and legal precedents. I’m observing official disregard for human and civil rights, including, besides the right to due process, the right to freedom of speech. I’m watching in shock as the Executive Branch grossly invades the jurisdictions of the other two branches of government and makes a mockery of the checks and balances that guarantee a healthy democracy.

Ideological repression USA 2025

What I’m also observing are the ever-increasing attempts by the Executive to “dehumanize the other”—a hallmark of dictatorial regimes. A trend in which anyone who disagrees with official executive policy is labeled “a leftist lunatic”, “the enemy of the people”, “enemies from within”, “communists”, “terrorists”, and even “vermin”. And another sure sign of authoritarian rule is a regime that governs only for itself, imposing its policies, without consultation, on its followers, while ostracizing and persecuting its detractors.

This is already looking like a reign of terror, in which universities, cultural institutions, think tanks and other forums—the very venues where debates, belief-questioning and dissent should be cultivated and encouraged—are being extorted into submission and compromised by the official story. Political opponents and journalists are being pressured and pursued and vengeance is being sought against anyone who has ever opposed the head of state.

The most frightening thing, for someone like myself, who has lived through it all before and knows the progressively worsening consequences all too well, is that this is only the beginning, in which far too many remain convinced that “maybe extra-constitutional action is the only way.” What they don’t know that I do is that, breaking the rule of law is easy. But picking up the pieces and gluing them back together again is a painstaking and all too often impossible task.

More chilling still is the fact that there are already plans to extend this cult of personality beyond its legal term, in violation of two constitutional provisions. This fear of mine is underscored by the fact that this is the same regime that toyed with the idea of imposing martial law to avoid an election loss in 2020.

Knowing what I know, being able to compare with a previous life experience that few other Americans share, I’m worried. I’m very worried. And any American, regardless of race, creed or party, who values his or her freedom should be worried as well.