Videla’s confession: Reconstructing the dictatorship

One should think that, when they decided to take power, on March 24, 1976, Argentina’s military had already defined what they would do with prisoners deemed “incurable.” However, Jorge Rafael Videla claimed that both he and his colleagues of the Military Junta, admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera and brigadier Orlando Ramón Agosti, were involved in the coup without knowing exactly what to do with those thousands of people.

“We didn’t make that decision before the coup, but when the problem came of what to do with those people who couldn’t be executed publicly or convicted by courts [we didn’t do] either. We went into the war without knowing what to do with all the people who were the necessary cost to win it. 

“The solution came about spontaneously, with the cases of disappeared people that happened as time went by. Spontaneous cases, but which weren’t decided by a young officer fresh off the academy: no, cases which were ordered by a captain who, in turn, received the order from the chief of brigade who, in turn, received the order from his zone commander or head.

Videla adds that, actually, “it was a figure [officer] who came from previous governments, from the Peronist government, for example,” especially after the decrees signed during the temporary position of Senator Ítalo Argentino Luder, in early October 1975.

Former Interior minister Albano Harguindeguy agrees with Videla: he claims that they burst into Casa Rosada with “the plan of defeating subversion,” an objective for which they did not have “sufficient elements in accordance with law,” although he holds that they could have re-enacted the specific legislation against guerrilla warfare, from the government of General Alejandro Lanusse.

According to Harguindeguy, “we made a serious mistake when we launched the war on subversion in military terms without having sufficient elements to combat it. The same thing happened to Montoneros. The Montoneros Military Justice Code only came into force on January 1, 1976. 

“What does it mean that we didn’t have the means? We didn’t have the legal instruments to detain an individual, interrogate them, move them to a prisoners’ camp or otherwise; we just didn’t have them, so what was left? Well, one of the things left was disappearance. Besides those falling in combat, others disappeared… if only we’d had the clarity, astuteness to see the consequences of operations the way they were carried out! Because this didn’t start with us… it started with the constitutional government, via decrees and directives by the Army Chief-of-Staff. We had very strict codes [laws]. If we’d re-enacted the complete legislation which had been repealed on May 26, 1973… We had nothing! There was a lot of fighting through the left wing.”

According to their persecutors, those thousands of prisoners who were “incurable” could not be shot or turned over to courts, much less released, because they’d go back to arms or question or face the dictatorship since the concept of “subversion” used by military chiefs was wide, elastic and discretionary: it was not confined to those who had taken up arms.

Videla’s confession on the lack of foresight on what to do with detainees is surprising. Saving historic distances and not intending to make an analogy between disappeared people in Argentine and the Nazi genocide, Adolf Hitler’s regime did not know what to do with the Jews until 1942, three years after the invasion of Poland which triggered World War II, and when German expansion was experiencing its first “setbacks.”

Nazis considered Jews an “obstacle” to the “inevitable” supremacy of the Aryan race, but they had not defined what to do with them, how to remove or solve that “problem.” Early on, they forced the mass emigration of Jews to other countries, but on January 20, 1942, in a mansion on the banks of the Wannsee lake, south of Berlin, 15 dictatorship leaders debated a “complete, final solution to the Jewish question in territories under German control” for two hours, as explained by general Reinhard Heydrich at the start of the lavish meal. 

The “final solution” they found caused the death of six million people in gas chambers. There were some participants who were against until they ultimately gave in, such as Wilhelm Stuckart, representative of the Interior Ministry. “To kill them casually without regard for the law martyrs them, which will be their victory,” argued Stuckart, who had been one of the creators of the Nuremberg laws, and proposed that, instead of the Holocaust, those laws were applied for Jews to be sterilised en masse so that they could not reproduce.

Videla claims there was never talk of a “final solution” in Argentina.“‘Final Disposition’ was a more commonly used phrase; they are two very military words and they mean to decommission something useless. When speaking, for instance, of clothes that are no longer worn or have been made useless by wear and tear, it goes to Final Disposition. It no longer has a shelf life.

Harguindeguy also uses this phrase. The first and, so far, only list of disappeared people found since the return to democracy contains the acronym DF (for “Disposición Final,” or “Final Disposition”) next to 195 of the 293 names of detainees at the Police Headquarters in Tucumán. The document was produced on June 15, 2010 by Juan Carlos ‘el Perro’ Clemente, a Juventud Peronista activist who later went on to collaborate with illegal repression, during a trial of the police and military. The list had been typewritten by repressors and the names are ordered alphabetically, with their alias or alleged “war name”; the third column contains the fate of each of them: “DF,” “Libertad” (“Freedom”) or “Disp. PEN” (“Disposition to PEN”), in reference to detainees who were “whitewashed” and made available to the Executive Branch.

According to the Army Logistics Functional Service, “Final Disposition” is “the logistical activity whereby the destination of those objects deemed irretrievable, obsolete or which have lost their condition before they are disposed of as an asset.” These words – “Final Disposition” – already show up in “Terrestrial forces guidelines,” dated 1968.

Harguindeguy claims that superior officers (colonels and generals) never met to decide what to do with detainees deemed “incurable” by their persecutors: “It was not discussed [among superior officers]… now, you remember the Military Junta would meet and there were three of them; the others were the ‘dog’s tail.’ There were three heads… in the Army, the corps commanders, and then above them, the commander-in-chief. Whether they talked or didn’t talk… I think they couldn’t have not talked because it was very significant for the life and future of the country, more so if there was going to be a Final Disposition; there would have to be a name, place and event. How did they justify the event? How was sufficient evidence gathered to achieve such a penalty?”

The Military Junta was the country’s supreme authority, and it consisted of the commanders-in-chief of the Army, Navy and Air Force. All three of them unanimously elected the President – who had to be a superior officer of the Armed Forces, whether in office or retired. Videla was the first one, up to 1981, and kept the key position of head of the Army until mid-1978, when he was replaced by his ally, General Roberto Eduardo Viola. 

Videla claims the Military Junta never met to debate the fate of prisoners deemed “incurable.”

“There was no meeting to decide this; every force decided as the events unfolded. War on subversion was not the jurisdiction of the Military Junta but of every force via its commander-in-chief,” he said.

Following the coup, disappearances, which had already taken place, increased exponentially, in tune with the maximum degree of autonomy the military had acquired compared to the rest of Argentine society. They were not accountable to anyone, they had the entire political power in their hands. Videla owns up to “all those events” and points out that he encouraged them tacitly.

“In the face of those situations, there were two paths for me: to prosecute those responsible or encourage these situations tacitly as an unwritten order by a superior, which would create the certainty among lower ranks that nobody would be reprimanded. There was no, there could not be, any operations order establishing this. There was a tacit authorisation. I’m responsible for all those events,” said Videla.

And he adds that, in the context of the time, it was “the best solution” they could find.

“There was no other solution; we all agreed that it was the price to pay to win the war and we needed to make it not obvious so that society wouldn’t realise. We had to dispose of a large set of people who couldn’t be taken to court or shot either. The dilemma was how to do it so that society wouldn’t notice. The solution was subtle, people disappearing, which created an ambiguous feeling in people: they were gone, nobody knew what had happened to them; I defined them as “imaginary people” at one point. For that reason, so as to prevent protests in this country and abroad, it was decided on the fly to make these people disappear; every disappearance could certainly be understood as the masking, concealment of a death.”

The military chiefs who took power were willing to use any means available to defeat guerrilla warfare. Videla had already anticipated this on October 23, 1975, in Montevideo, during the Eleventh Conference of American Armies: “If necessary, all people who have to die in Argentina to achieve peace in the country will have to die.”

“Freedom of action led to groups which operated with too much autonomy. There was a purpose, which was to achieve peace without which there would be no republic today. But the means were tremendous,” he said.

Since before the coup, the military chiefs attempted to conceal, hide, mask the decision not to observe laws or the most basic human rights. So much so that Massera had coffee with US Ambassador Robert Hill on March 16, 1976 – eight days before the coup – when, as conveyed by the diplomat to his government, he confirmed that the military may be forced to intervene “very soon” to prevent “total chaos,” and pointed out that, in that case, “they will intensify the fight against terrorism and subversion, but under the law.”

“He said the commanders’ intention is to do so as ‘democratically’ and moderately as possible. He pointed out that they were having some difficulty containing hot heads, but he expressed his confidence that they could do it,” said the US ambassador.

Hill added in cable 1751 to his country’s US State Department, which was classified, that Massera emphasised that the military were “fully aware of the need to prevent human rights problems” and that, if they took power, “they would not follow the guidelines of [Augusto] Pinochet’s intervention in Chile. Rather, he said, they would proceed under the law and in full compliance with human rights.” Always according to that source, Massera held that the military were “very worried about their public relations in the United States if they had to intervene;” he even asked Hill for him to recommend “one or two renowned public relations companies in the United States that could handle that problem for a future military government.” The ambassador answered that “I could not give any advice he asked, but I could offer the list of public relations companies available in the [US] Embassy’s library. Massera said that would be fine and he’d like to receive that list ‘in the next few days.’”

Massera, Videla and the military understood that the political situation in the United States was no longer favourable to “friendly” governments which violated human rights, such as the Chilean government. In March 1976 there were only seven months left until the presidential election which would bring the return of the Democrats to the White House with James ‘Jimmy’ Carter, who championed the condemnation of illegal repression in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations but also military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. 

Carter’s triumph left public opinion made aware of the open backing of Republicans for General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup in Chile in 1973. When the Argentine military overthrew Isabel Perón, that change in US public opinion was already taking place, to the extent that the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.

For that reason, the US State Department – despite the military and anti-Communist preferences of its head, Henry Kissinger – took a cautious stance to the coup by Videla and company. So much so that, in his classified cable on March 16, 1976, Ambassador Hill informed that he had no intention of cancelling his trip to the United States the following day: “If I cancel my plans now and the coup were to take place on March 18, for example, this will be interpreted by many as proof that we had prior knowledge of military action. Besides, it may be argued that I cancelled my plans and stayed behind to help run the coup. The fact that I’m out of the country when the coup happens, I think will be in our favour which will indicate non-involvement by the Embassy and the government of the United States.”

The previous month, Hill had sent a cable to his government confirming that “Diego Medús, the director of the North American Department of the Foreign Ministry, confided in me at a launch that ‘the group that’s planning the military coup’ asked him for a study and recommendations on how the future military government could prevent or minimise the kind of problems the Chilean and Uruguayan governments were having with the United States on the human rights front. [The Argentine diplomat] held that he answered that they would have problems if they started executing people. Officers replied that they would try to lead an all-out war against terrorists and that some executions may be necessary, but they wished to minimise any resulting problem with the United States, and they asked him to prepare the report anyway.”

The turn in US public opinion and the electoral situation were two of the factors which persuaded Videla and the military towards a “Final Disposition.” They did not want protests in the United States. In tune with that, Videla’s collaborators presented the new president as the leader of the moderate faction within the military, “the doves,” who had to be backed because he was the only one who could keep “the hawks” in line, meaning those partial to fierce repression.

Early on, the dictatorship managed to confuse US diplomats and those from other major countries in Buenos Aires. The Israeli delegation was one of the first to realise that this division did not work, at least in terms of repression, according to a cable from the US embassy dated June 23, 1976 dubbed “Israel’s opinion.” Hill pointed out that, according to his colleagues, “the military made the decision to eliminate subversion and terrorism, and to silence and terrorise the entire potential opposition, long before the March 24 coup. The only remaining matter was how to do it with less exposure to criticism abroad than what had isolated the military regime in Chile. The government gave the go-ahead to the security forces to face the internal security problem with any method deemed appropriate, but always keeping the government in a position of ‘plausible deniability’ of responsibility.”

From a strictly military viewpoint, the other reason for disappearances was the starring role intelligence had in the fight against guerrilla warfare, according to Videla.

“Intelligence always acts in secret, whether to prevent the enemy from infiltrating and to create uncertainty among the enemy’s ranks; hence the importance of disappeared people.

Such a ‘hawk’ as General Santiago Riveros, the head of Zone 4, has a very direct and brutal explanation on the method used against prisoners deemed ‘incurable’: terrorist detainees who were active members of ERP and Montoneros had to be annihilated, meaning eliminated, a procedure which was applicable as they did not fall under war legislation since they were not regular soldiers but partisans or irregular combatants who, as such, were excluded from that treatment.”

In his defence statement dated April 20, 2010, before he was sentenced to life in prison for the second time, Riveros held the constitutional Peronist government liable for that decision, through three decrees issued on October 6, 1975. And he added: “In the specific event of detentions there were three alternatives: 1) Release due to lack of evidence or suspicion; 2) Making them available to the Executive Branch if it was a mere suspicion; 3) Annihilation in cases where it was attested, by military procedure and based on the evidence gathered, that they were terrorists, which was decided by the commander-in-chief of the Army.”

There is a difference with Videla here, who claims he encouraged the deaths and disappearances “tacitly,” by not prosecuting those responsible, and that all his written orders were “generic: a written order is always generic,” and they never recommended any Final Disposition.

Riveros, in turn, stated that “all operations were documented, and until they were destroyed, they were available at the different forces’ headquarters, at the Interior Ministry (information coordinator) and at the respective commands. It should be clear that no-one was persecuted for their way of thinking, ideology, race, nationality, religion or social status, but exclusively for being a terrorist.” Riveros alludes to the burning of documents linked to repression ordered by General Reynaldo Bignone, the last President of the dictatorship, who on April 28, 1983 signed reserved decree 2726.

Repression was capillary and the decision was left up to every force and, in the case of the Army, up to the commander of each of the five zones into which the country was divided. As was the case with feudal lords, these “warlords” operated autonomously in their territories. Videla claims that zone heads did not have to ask for permission from him or even inform him of every particular case, except for those they deemed so important or relevant that they ought to be known by the commander-in-chief.

“Responsibility for every case fell on the zone commander, who used the method he deemed more appropriate. Every commander had the autonomy to find the fastest and least risky method. Nobody opposed it in the Army or the Armed Forces; it did not bring any debate. There were problems in some cases due to the person’s resonance. Zone commanders or heads didn’t ask for my permission to proceed: I consented by default.

“Sometimes, they’d let me know. I remember the case of a visit to Córdoba where General Luciano Menéndez welcomed me with some news: ‘Escobar’s son was falling in with the wrong crowd, and we bumped him off last night’ – he was the son of a colonel who had been our classmate. So I knew that if Escobar came, I had to say: ‘I’d rather not talk about that.’ His father didn’t ask any questions.”

​* This extract has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

 

∗ Title: Final Disposition
∗ Author: Ceferino Reato
∗ Publishing house: Sudamericana
∗ Edition: March 1, 2016
∗ Pages: 360

Ceferino Reato (born 1961, in Crespo, Entre Ríos Province) is a journalist with a degree in Political Science. Among other outlets, he has worked at Clarín, Perfil, Telefe and served as the correspondent for the ANSA international news agency in São Paulo, Brazil; He is a former press attaché at the Argentine Embassy in Vatican City. He currently serves as executive editor of Fortuna magazine and hosts the programme Retweet, on +Radio FM 107.5.