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Show Lifting the bloody curtain It went on for seven years, the torture, the killing, the sudden disappearance usually forever of decent citizens. Some were forcibly taken in the streets of Buenos Aires, shoved into military vans by jack-booted jack-booted thugs with heavy clubs. For others, it was the knock on the door in the dead of night and the rough command, "Come with us!" Sometimes men resisted and were dealt with in the classic Nazi style. The stories that drifted northward brought back Stephen Vincent Benet's litany for gestapo victims. It was a mind-searing poem (written in 1936), an elegy for the beaten men "who spit out the bloody stumps of their teethQuietly in the hall." It paid tribute "to the men crucified on crossed machine guns," forgotten men, "faceless as water, naked as the dust." Today, with civilian government restored to Argentina, the faceless men are being resurrected. Mass graves are giving up their dead. Prison gates have swung open for the maimed and broken, old before their time. And the fresh winds of liberty blowing across the pampas have begun to lift the bloody curtain that hid from public gaze the screaming agony of the "desaparecidos." Not since the 16 th century, when the Conquistadors left naked Incas tied to trees their tongues cut out, their bodies smeared with honey has this hemisphere known anything comparable compar-able to the barbarism of the Argentinean junta. This week the London Observer gives a full page to an interview a brave Argentinean journalist had with two official torturers. The conversation took place in December, shortly before the new president, Raul Alfonsin, took office. One of the torturers toyed with a pistol throughout the meeting. "Did you enjoy your job?," writer Andrew Graham-Yooll asked. "At times," he replied. "But it was not a matter of liking. I had my orders ... We had to rid the country of subversion, and we nearly did it." Indeed, they almost exceeded their goal. Sometimes the torture had to be stopped for a time because the mounting death rate threatened to leave the investigators "with nobody to question." j Young soldiers proved more adept at torture than their elders. Could Lucho and Janvier (the torturers) describe a typical day's routine? "There was none ... We were called in whenever a new batch arrived. We had to go to work immediately. No questions, no time-wasting. Their clothes were torn off, they were pushed onto a metal table, strapped down and they got the electricity ..." To inspire the young beasts in their work, officers had only to tell them, "That is your enemy, a communist." In truth, very few of the "disappeared" "disap-peared" were communists. More likely they were trade-union members, intellectuals, teachers, writers or scientists. Jacobo Timerman was tortured because his newspaper dared to ask what had happened to the disappeared ones. The abuse visited upon women was deemed too shocking to discuss. "You couldn't help but get excited when you were handling a naked body totally at your mercy," said Lucho. Standard tortures included submersion submer-sion in filthy water, and the packing of bare feet in damp cement. For seven years Amnesty International endeavored endeav-ored to bring these hideous practices to world attention. Under President Jimmy Carter, our State Department made vigorous protests, and sanctions were levied. The protests ended with the arrival of the Reagan administration. adminis-tration. It's chilling to read that the one item in the Kissinger report on Central America that drew dissent from the president was the suggestion " that military aid be linked to improvement in human rights. Putting on his pious face, the president said of course he deplored the death squads and torture in FJ Salvador, but will continue military aid with no strings. He said he had a duty with a higher priority "and that is1 fighting communism in this hemisphere." hemis-phere." It was a statement that left me wondering. Would an American soldier carry out the "torture detail" as brutally, as heartlessly as did the Argentinean soldiers? And the answer came, "Probably so, especially if the president were to remind him, "This is your enemy'." Copyright 1983 Harriet Van Home |