•The notion of guilt shared between the military government, which came to power by force and used torture and murder to fight its opposers, and the victims, including guerrilla fighters, political objectors, and ordinary civilians with no political associations, is fallacious. While it could be argued that in a sense the army of insurrectionists and the official Argentinean army were equal forces (though, even here, the numbers appear to be on the order of 1 to 1,000), no argument can find a balance of power between the organized military forces and the intellectuals, artists, union leaders, students, and members of the clergy who expressed disagreement with them. The civilian who voices an objection to the actions of the government is not guilty of any crime; on the contrary, vigilance is an essential civic duty in any democratic society, and every citizen must become, as it were, God’s spy. “And take upon’s the mystery of things,” says King Lear, “As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by th’ moon.”
But the repression overflowed even the realm of civilian opposition. The National Commission on Disappeared People, led by the novelist Ernesto Sabato, concluded its report in September 1984: “We can state categorically—contrary to what the executors of this sinister plan maintain—that they did not pursue only the members of political organizations who carried out acts of terrorism. Among the victims are thousands who never had any links with such activity but were nevertheless subjected to horrific torture because they opposed the military dictatorship, took part in union or student activities, were well-known intellectuals who questioned state terrorism, or simply because they were relatives, friends, or names included in the address book of someone considered subversive.”
•Any government that uses torture and murder to enforce the law invalidates both its right to govern and the law it enforces, since one of the few basic tenets of any society in which citizens are granted equal rights is the sacredness of human life. “Clearly,’’ wrote G. K. Chesterton, “there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.” Any government that does not recognize this truth, and does not hold accountable those who torture and murder, can make no claims for its own justice. No government can rightly mirror the methods of its criminals, responding in kind to what it might deem an act against the nation’s laws. It cannot be guided by an individual sense of justice, or revenge, or greed, or even morality. It must encompass them all, these individual deeds of its citizens, within the parameters established by the country’s constitution. It must enforce the law with the law, and within the letter of the law. Beyond the law, a government is no longer a government but a usurped power, and as such it must be judged.
•Trust in the ultimate power of the law sustained many of the military dictatorship’s victims during those terrible years. In spite of the pain and the bewilderment caused by the officialized abuses, the be lief remained that in a not-too-distant future these acts would be brought to light and judged according to the law. The wish to torture the torturer and to kill the murderer must have been overwhelming, but even stronger was the sense that such acts of revenge would become indistinguishable from the acts that caused them and would be transformed, in some abominable way, into a victory for the abusers. Instead, the victims and their families continued to believe in some form of ultimate earthly judgment, in which the society that had been wronged would bring the guilty ones to trial according to the laws of that society. Only on the basis of such justice being done did they believe that their country might have another chance. Menem’s amnesty denied them that long-awaited possibility.
•This “absence of justice” was reflected with ghoulish symmetry in the “disappearing” tactics employed by the military, by which their victims—kidnapped, tortured, thrown from airplanes, dropped into unmarked graves — became not officially dead but merely “absent,” leaving the anguished families with no bodies to mourn. Julio Cortázar, speaking in 1981, described in these words the dictatorship’s method: “On the one hand, a virtual or real antagonist is suppressed; on the other, conditions are created so that the family and friends of the victims are often forced to remain silent as the only possibility of preserving the life of those whom their hearts won’t allow them to presume dead.” And he added, “If every human death entails an irrevocable absence, what can we say of this other absence that continues as a sort of abstract presence, like the obstinate denial of the absence we know to be final?” In that sense, Menem’s amnesty didn’t heal the sickness of the past—it merely prolonged that sickness into the present.
•Menem’s revisionist attempt is not original. One of the earliest instances of perfecting the present by erasing the tensions of the past took place in the year 213 B.c., when the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi ordered that every book in his realm be thrown into the fire so as to destroy all traces (as one legend has it) of his mother’s adultery. But no deed, however monstrous or trivial, can ever be abolished once committed — not even by a Chinese emperor, even less by an Argentinean president. This is the adamantine law of our life. The immutability of the past does not depend on the volubilities of government, nor on cravings for revenge or for diplomacy. No deed can be undone. It can be pardoned, but the pardon must come from the offended person and from no one else if it is to have any emotional validity. Nothing changes in the deed itself after a pardon: not the circumstances, not the gravity, not the guilt, not the wound. Nothing except the relationship between the torturer and the victims, when the victims reaffirm their sovereignty, “not weighing our merits,” as the Book of Common Prayer has it, “but by pardoning our offences.” Pardon is the victim’s prerogative, not the torturer’s right—and this Menem’s government and his supporters, such as Vargas Llosa, have apparently forgotten.
•The pardon granted by a victim — the dripping quality of mercy— has no bearing on the mechanics of justice. Pardon does not change or even qualify the act, which will cast its shadow forward, throughout eternity, into every new present. Pardon does not grant oblivion. But a trial, according to the laws of society, can at least lend the criminal act a context; the law can contain it, so to speak, in the past so that it no longer contaminates the future, standing at a distance as a reminder and a warning. In a mysterious way, the application of a society’s laws is akin to a literary act: it fixes the criminal deed on a page, defines it in words, gives it a context which is not that of the sheer horror of the moment but of its recollection. The power of memory is no longer in the hands of the criminal; now it is society itself that holds that power, writing the chronicle of its own wicked past, able at last to rebuild itself not over the emptiness of oblivion but over the solid, recorded facts of the atrocities committed. This is a long, dreary, fearful, agonizing process, and the only possible one. This sort of healing always leaves scars.
•Menem’s amnesty, bowing to the demands of acknowledged murderers and torturers, has postponed the healing for what appears to be a very long time. As it stands today, since all the torturers and murders in the military regime have not been brought to justice, Argentina is a country bereft of rights: its right to social justice ignored, its right to moral education invalidated, its right to moral authority forfeit. The need to “carry on,” the need to “reconcile differences,” the need to “allow the economy to flourish once again” have all been invoked by Menem and his successors as good reasons for forgiving and forgetting. Supported by literate voices such as that of Vargas Llosa, Menem apparently believed that history could be paid off; that the memory of thousands of individuals like my friend from school could be left to yellow on forgotten shelves in dim bureaucratic offices; that the past could be recovered without expenditure of effort, without making official amends, without redemption.