ARGENTINA
The New York Times
By MORT ROSENBLUM
In 1975, I watched Buenos Aires churches fill with distraught mothers praying futilely for news of missing sons and daughters. Troubled police officers frequented the confessionals. Most Argentines suspected that President Isabel Perón and her Rasputin, José López Rega, were behind official death squads that made so many people disappear. Priests knew the details.
A military junta bundled Ms. Peron off to exile in 1976 and unleashed full-bore repression. They called it war, but it wasn’t. Disparate acts by unconnected rival leftist groups brought institutional torture and official terror. Military flights dumped victims at sea. Still alive, they would gasp in water and sink.
For three crucial years, as placid Argentina headed toward hell, I was based in Buenos Aires. I arrived in 1973 when night noises ranged to wailing tango chords and traffic din. Within a year, those were punctuated by spine-curdling shrieks as victims were bundled into those famous Ford Falcons without license plates. By the time I left in 1976, after the coup, we slept in different places each night because of unsettling threats. When profiles of those shadowy death squads emerged, they were as we had thought: off-duty cops commanded by high-ranking police and military officers. Many were devout family men who believed themselves on a mission for God and country. My sense is that the “war” would have been far less dirty had the Roman Catholic church stood up to its perpetrators.
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