Argentina 1985
How do we speak about the unspeakable?
Of all the southern cone dictatorships of the 1970s, the Argentinian iteration was the cruellest and the bloodiest. It was also the most devious, cunning, and depraved. Unlike Chile, there were no air strikes on the presidential palace to attract negative international attention. The junta that took control of Argentina in 1976 did so with the seamless serenity of a genteel change in management, accompanied by a few tanks.
It was a coup that many Argentinians had anticipated, and there were many people like Borges and Jacobo Timmerman, who initially supported it, and welcomed the calm it seemed to bring to a nation plagued by political violence.
To do those who wanted to look closer, it was clear what the military junta intended to do. In 1975 General Rafael Videla told a gathering of Latin American army officers ‘As many people must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure.’ Before the coup, Jacobo Timmerman - acting in his capacity as newspaper editor - had lunch with a naval officer, who told him that the armed forces intended to eliminate all suspected terrorists. When Timmerman asked what he meant by ‘all’, the officer replied, “All ... about 20,000 people. And their relatives, too - they must be eradicated - and also those who remember their names. ...Not a trace or a witness will remain.''
Timmerman didn’t foresee that he himself would be arrested and tortured, and only narrowly escaped becoming one of these people. And yet the military was true to his interviewee’s word. Where the Uruguayan military relied mostly on torture and imprisonment in its dismantling of the Tupamaros revolutionary organisation, the Argentinian military tortured and then killed most of the people it had tortured, without ever admitting that it was doing it.
The result as the writer Ernesto Sabato put it in his prologue to the CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of persons) Nunca Mas report was a ‘demented generalized repression’ and the most terrible tragedy in Argentinian history.
The crimes carried out by the Argentinian military were so shocking that they challenge our understanding of what it means to be human, and they can easily elude the ability of those who did not witness them to understand how such crimes could have happened.
As CONADEP noted in its report
the men and women of our nation have only heard of such horror in reports from distant places. The enormity of what took place in Argentina, involving the transgression of the most fundamental human rights, is sure, still, to produce that disbelief which some used at the time to defend themselves from pain and horror. In so doing, they also avoided the responsibility born of knowledge and awareness.
These observations should not be limited to Argentinians. When governments perpetrate crimes against humanity, the ‘knowledge and awareness’ of such crimes should not be confined within national borders. But there are certain crimes that are too painful to think about, or which seem to be beyond the reach of the human imagination to encapsulate. Writing of the torture of whole families that he witnessed during his own detention, Jacobo Timmerman described how
The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father's genitals ... or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses.
This year, international cinema audiences were given a rare insight into the world in which such things became possible, in the Oscar-nominated film Argentina 1985. Driven by the great Ricardo Duran’s riveting performance, it revisits the trial that sent Videla and the leading members of the military junta to jail. It’s a moving and uplifting film, with a hopeful message that is derived in part, from the young lawyers who helped prosecutor Julián Strassera assemble his case, and also from the fact that it has a ‘happy’ ending – the generals are convicted. Argentina’s democratic institutions triumph. Catharsis has been achieved.
The film has been criticized in Argentina for not referring to the work of CONADEP – whose investigations provided so much of the material that was used to indict Videla and his cohorts. At the same time it has been viewed by more than 1 million Argentinians, many of whom will have no knowledge of the horrendous events that took place in their country between 1976-83. One member of the Mothers de la Plaza de Mayo praised the film, and said that she and many other activists were particularly grateful for it at a time when many of them are infirm and very old.
Far be it from me to question such responses. Argentina 1985 deserves all the praise it has reserved, and it should have been an Oscar-winner. But as good and as important as it is, it is also a limited film, precisely because it is an audience-pleasing film. It’s an Argentinian film that appeals to a longstanding Hollywood convention: the dogged hero-lawyer who overcomes fear, threat and danger to bring about justice, whose final ‘nunca mas’ speech provides the dramatic apotheosis and also a comforting message to take home from the cinema.
But despite the harrowing testimonies from some of the defendants, I would argue that the courtroom conventions and the trial’s focus on the leaders of the dictatorship rather than its lower-level protagonists, serve to keep the audience at a safe - and comfortable - distance from the crimes it describes. The film refers to historical events and real people. It tells - or rather reminds - its audiences what happened, but it doesn’t look too deeply into why or how it happened.
Some might think ‘good thing too’ - who wants to watch people being tortured or thrown drugged out of airplanes? What cinemagoer could bear to see what Jacobo Timmerman and others were forced to see? Aren’t there certain acts that cannot be described on the page or on the screen, without incurring the risk of voyeurism or doing disservice to the victims?
Such reservations are valid - up to a point. But it is sometimes necessary, if we are pay due diligence to the truth of history - no matter how awful - and the fate of its victims, then from time to time we need to look that history in the face, and we need artists and writers who can help us do that.
I recently watched Garage Olimpo, the 1999 film by the Chilean-Italian director Marco Bechis, which shows the hidden world of one of the clandestine detention centres set up by the Argentinian dictatorship in a garage to torture and murder their opponents. Bechis was a prisoner in one of these centres himself, and was only released because of his Italian passport, and because his father, a high-level functionary for FIAT, was able to bring about pressure for his release.
So this is a director who knew what he was talking about when he made this profoundly disturbing film which takes the viewer deep into the dark and rancid heart of the dictatorship’s killing machine. The plot revolves a twisted ‘love story’ between a kidnapped activist and her torturer. Such relationships were not unknown during el proceso. There were cases in which female detainees who had been kidnapped and raped formed relationships with their torturers.
But Bechis did not make his film as a voyeuristic melodrama. This is not The Night Porter. There is no kinky sex and no scenes of actual torture, though enough is revealed to make it horrifically clear what is taking place. In revealing the inner workings of a clandestine detention centre, Garage Olimpo shows the banal ordinariness of the ‘task forces’ who kidnap, torture, and ‘transfer’ (ie. kill) their victims in a relentless production line.
It’s a system that operates according to lists and quotas. No sooner does one car bring its latest blindfolded victims to the garage, to be told by the commanding officer that they are now ‘at the disposition of the federal executive power’ than the kidnappers are off again, working through the other names on their lists. No sooner has one group of prisoners been tortured and their ‘information’ squeezed out of them, then they are given an injection, and placed in the trucks that will take them to the planes, waiting to toss them alive into the sea.
We tend to think that the people who carry out such actions must be monsters and sadists, and some of these task force kidnappers and torturers clearly are. One guard is an out-and-out gangster, who forces relatives of his victims to sell them their houses in the hope of saving their loved ones, and then shoots them. Others are ‘violence workers’, as Martha Knisely Huggins and her colleagues once described the Brazilian torturers they studied. These are men who torture and kill in shifts. They listen to rock and roll on the radio. They play ping pong during their breaks while prisoners are being tortured.
As for the victims, they too are transformed by the garage. One cracks immediately, telling a guard ‘please don’t touch me’ even before being tortured, and offering up four names in an attempt to save himself. Other prisoners bow their heads and do whatever they are told to do in the hope that they might survive. Or their sense of reality and their moral universe collapses completely, to the point when they will ‘love’ their torturer-protector in order to save themselves from someone even worse.
All this takes place in a garage in Buenos Aires, while millions of people are going about their lives, some of whom pass by the garage on a daily basis. Do they know what is happening inside the building where cars full of armed men come and go? Do they prefer not to know? Are they afraid of knowing or are they supportive? Bechis doesn’t say, but through his occasional cuts to everyday Buenos Aires or the radio songs that guards use to accompany their tortures, and merely implies a wider collusion between inside and outside that may be due to any of these factors,
Needless to say, this makes for devastating and heart-breaking viewing that sometimes borders on the unwatchable. This is not the story many cinemagoers will ever want to watch. There is no valiant hero here, doing the right thing; no triumph of democracy or civil society, and yet I have never seen such a brutal and unflinching demolition of the lies, myths and fantasies that Videla and his fellow-officers wove around their madness and cruelty.
Bear in mind that this was a regime that invited its torturers to see the torture chamber as a ‘battlefield’ in a new kind of ‘war’; whose defenders still depict its protagonists as noble patriots, all the more noble for having dirtied their hands in order to save the patria from international communism.
Garage Olimpo destroys all that. When we think of ‘political’ crimes we often forget how ordinary their protagonists are. But history shows us again and again, no matter how much we refuse to believe it, that the most incredible and extraordinary crimes can be perpetrated by entirely ordinary people. Some may already be sadists, waiting for the opportunity that history gives them, such as the convicts and murderers unleashed by the Russian Wagner Group in Ukraine.
But for every Beria and Mengele there will always be thousands of people who kill and torture as a day job, without blinking an eye, who hang their coats up and go along with what they are told. These are men like the commanding officer of the Olimpa garage, who ticks off the names on a clipboard of the drugged prisoners he has just ordered to be thrown into the sea, and then goes home to cuddle his teenager daughter on the couch.
It takes a certain kind of artistic fearlessness to show such things, without sentimentality and without compromising to please an audience. Garage Olimpo is not a flawless film. The plotline involving a female urban guerrilla and a bomb is attached somewhat awkwardly to the story of the detention centre. But it is nevertheless as close an approximation to the horrors of the dictatorship as any film has ever come, with the possible exception of Crónica de una fuga (Chronicle of an Escape).
To be uncompromising does not mean to be gratuitous, and Garage Olimpo is painful, shocking and disturbing not just in what it shows, but in what it suggests. Argentina 1985 might remind its audiences why the slogan ‘never again’ was adopted by the CONADEP.
Garage Olimpo attempts something else. It asks how such things could have happened in the first place, and raises questions that cannot be answered through the cathartic mechanism of a cinematic trial, but which nevertheless need to be considered if the slogan ‘never again’ is to become a meaningful principle for the construction of a better future for Argentina and other countries that have suffered crimes of a similar magnitude, and a guardrail that can prevent the past from repeating itself.