Thirty Years are Nothing

Thirty years ago, the world was different.

In 1976, a coup d’état introduced military dictatorship in Argentina for the sixth time in 43 years. After the death of charismatic President Perón two years before, the constitutional government had been walking on eggshells; despite not being president, the anti-communist extremist Jose López Rega controlled the administration. In city streets, he led a dirty war with socialist organizations. While his factions killed one person every 19 hours in 1975, cadres from the opposing side resorted to bombs and kidnappings.

Society and foreign embassies knew the coup was coming, and they welcomed it. Military officers explicitly declared that they were to change everything in a “process of national reorganization.” In their quest for security, they lost sight of what they were securing: there was no room for Congress, independent judiciary, free press, or fair trials for suspects.

The Argentine military hunted subversive terrorists but then moved on to civil dissidents: they targeted everyone from union leaders to liberal college students. These people, according to the de facto President, were neither alive nor dead; they were just desaparecidos.

But what did that mean? At illegal detention centers, they were tortured in the name of “national security” or their keepers’ dark pleasures. Babies born to captive mothers were given to officers, thus erasing their identities. Thousands ended their existence in “death flights”: airplanes from the Buenos Aires airport threw them into the river with deadweights to leave no trace.

Fleeting memories drowning in the silence of cold nightly tides: desaparecidos.

1976 is the perfect symbol of the Latin American decade. That year, 11 of 20 Latin America countries were governed by military regimes. The United States and Europe not only overlooked human right abuses, but they actively helped the regimes and often trained repressors. Long gone were the Atlantic System dreams from the ashes of WWII promising a world based on international law and respect. Fear of communism made everything valid.

Thirty years ago, was the world really that different?

Today, the Red Scare has been replaced by radical Islam and nuclear proliferation. Look at the news, and you’ll find that every large issue in America is related to security in some way. The Dubai port deal, the war on terror, immigration, the Mexican border, and even Fox News’ obsessive forays into random murders, all illustrate this. People are concerned about security because they feel insecure. And so, just as the Argentine society supported the military in 1976, Americans today are too willing to compromise the civil liberties in the name of security.

Yet, this solution is shortsighted. Despite the pointed differences between the two countries, the compromises themselves are similar. The impasse of values still has consequences in Latin America today: economic inequalities, constitutional traumas, and unspeakable pasts. Such wounds do not easily go away. And besides, this prioritization of security only provides ammunition for the true enemies of our values. Wire-tapping on American soil, torture in Iraq, lack of fair trials for detainees at Guantánamo, and qualms with the new UN Human Rights Council are the perfect examples that extremists like to quote. Al-Qaida, North Korea, Iran, and Sudan are beneficiaries of America’s impasses.

To those radicals’ dismay, our ideals of human rights, freedom, and democracy do lead to a better world. And, in memory of the terrible Latin American decade, we must apply them uniformly and categorically, not merely as rhetoric leitmotifs. Memory requires bravery but also consistency; the road to heaven does not transit through the hell of torture, breaches in civil liberties, and legal loopholes.

A renowned Argentine tango sings about how, if you think about it, three decades are nothing. Thirty years later, the world must be different: nunca más, never again.



Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Thayer Hall.