Since his election in 1989, Menem had been trying to shelve the whole question of military culpability during the so-called “dirty war” that ravaged Argentina from 1973 to 1982, and during which more than thirty thousand people were killed. Not content with the deadline for filing charges against the military (which his predecessor, Raul Alfonsin had set as 22 February 1988), on 6 October 1989 Menem had offered most of the military involved in human rights abuses a general pardon. A year later, three days after Christmas, Menem issued a general amnesty to all involved in the events that had bled the country for nine long years. Accordingly, he released from prison Lieutenant General Jorge Videla (who was later re-arrested) and General Roberto Viola, both of whom had been appointed to the presidency by the military junta, from 1976 to 1981 and for ten months in 1981, respectively. In legal terms, a pardon implies not an exoneration or acquittal but only a relief from punishment. An amnesty, on the other hand (such as the military had granted itself in extremis in 1982, and which was repealed by Alfonsin), is, in effect and intention, a recognition of innocence that wipes away any imputation of crime. After the declarations of Scilingo and Ibáñez, President Menem briefly threatened the military with a retraction of the 1990 amnesty.
Until the confessions of 1995, the Argentinean military authorities had recognized no wrongdoing in their so-called anti-terrorist activities. The extraordinary nature of guerrilla war demanded, the authorities said, extraordinary measures. In this declaration they were well advised. In 1977, following a joint report from Amnesty International and the U. S. State Department’s Human Rights Bureau accusing the Argentinean security forces of being responsible for hundreds of disappearances, the military hired an American public relations company, Burson-Marsteller, to plan its response. The thirty-five-page memorandum presented by Burson-Marsteller recommended that the military “use the best professional communications skills to transmit those aspects of Argentine events showing that the terrorist problem is being handled in a firm and just manner, with equal justice for all.” A tall order, but not impossible in the Age of Advertising. As if moved by the hackneyed motto “The pen is mightier than the sword,” Burson-Marsteller suggested that the military appeal for “the generation of positive editorial comment” from writers “of conservative or moderate persuasions.” As a result of their campaign, Ronald Reagan declared in the Miami News of 20 October 1978 that the State Department’s human rights office was “making a mess of our relations with the planet’s seventh largest country, Argentina, a nation with which we should be close friends.”
Over the years, others answered the advertisers’ appeal. In 1995, shortly after Ibáñez’s and Scilingo’s confessions, an article appeared in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, signed by Mario Vargas Llosa. Under the title “Playing with Fire,” Vargas Llosa argued that, horrible though the revelations might be, they were not news to anyone, merely confirmations of a truth “atrocious and nauseating for any half-moral conscience.” “It would certainly be wonderful,” he wrote, “if all those responsible for these unbelievable cruelties were taken to court and punished. This, however, is impossible, because the responsibility far exceeds the military sphere and implicates a vast spectrum of Argentinean society, including a fair number of those who today cry out, condemning retrospectively the violence to which they too, in one way or another, contributed.”
“It would certainly be wonderful”: this is the rhetorical topos of false regret, denoting a change from shared indignation at the “atrocious and nauseating” facts, to the more sober realization of what they “really” mean — the impossibility of attaining the “wonderful” goal of impartial justice. Vargas Llosa’s is an ancient argument, harking back to notions of original sin: no one soul can truly be held responsible because every soul is responsible “in one way or another” for the crimes of a nation, whether committed by the people themselves or by their leaders. More than a hundred years ago, Nikolai Gogol expressed the same absurdity in more elegant terms: “Seek out the judge, seek out the criminal, and then condemn both.”
Using the case of his own country as a history lesson, Vargas Llosa concluded his cri de coeur: “The example of what has happened in Peru, with a democracy which the Peruvian people have distorted — because of the violence of extremist groups and also because of the blindness and demagogy of certain political forces—and which they let fall like a ripe fruit in the arms of military and personal power, should open the eyes of those imprudent justice-seekers who, in Argentina, take advantage of a debate on the repression in the seventies to seek revenge, to avenge old grievances or continue by other means the insane war they started and then lost.”
Burson-Marsteller could not have come up with a more efficient publicist for its cause. What would a common reader, confident in Vargas Llosa’s intellectual authority, make of this impassioned conclusion? After hesitating, perhaps, at the comparison between Argentina and Peru (where the novelist-turned-politician thunderingly lost the presidential election), which seems to protest too much, too obviously, the reader is led into a far subtler argument: these “justice-seekers,” the seekers of that justice which, according to Vargas Llosa, is desirable but utopian—are they not in fact hypocrites who not only must share the guilt for the atrocities but are also to blame for starting a war which they then lost? Suddenly the scales of responsibility are tipped ominously to the victims’ side. Not a need for justice, not an urge to acknowledge wrongs officially, but an itch for revenge or, even worse, sheer spite apparently drives these so-called justice-seekers. The thirty thousand disappeared are not to be lamented; they were troublemakers who started it all. And those who survived — the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the thousands forced into exile, the hundreds of tortured men and women who crowd the pages of the 1984 Report on the Disappeared by the National Commission on Disappeared People, with their sober accounts of utterly indescribable sufferings — should not seek redress lest they themselves be called to judgment. And furthermore, the seventies are now so long ago … Would it not be better to forget?
Fortunately, there were readers who were not so confident. Mario Vargas Llosa’s article was reprinted in Le Monde on 18 May 1995. A week later (25 May), the Argentinean writer Juan José Saer published an answer in the same newspaper. After correcting a number of important factual errors in Vargas Llosa’s piece — calling Isabel Perón’s presidency a “democratic government,” ignoring the fact that between 1955 and 1983 Argentina enjoyed barely six years of freely elected leaders — Saer notes that Vargas Llosa’s arguments coincide, point by point, with those of the military leaders themselves, who argued that the official tactics of murder and torture had not been their choice but the choice of those who provoked them and forced them to make use of “extreme measures.” Saer also points out that Vargas Llosa’s notion of “collective responsibility” might place Vargas Llosa himself in a delicate position since, at a time when Argentinean intellectuals were being tortured or forced into exile, the Peruvian novelist continued to publish willingly in Argentina’s official press.
Saer responded to Vargas Llosa’s role, accusing him of being a spokesman for the military: he dismissed or ignored his arguments, which are based on a number of false assumptions. And yet, since these arguments must stand, thanks to Vargas Llosa’s craft, as the most eloquent of those penned by the defenders of a military amnesty, they deserve, perhaps, a closer examination.