MARK KURLANSKY
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military rebellion by granting amnesty to four hundred officers on the
grounds that they were obeying orders. The second president, Carlos
Menem, facing another military rebellion, granted amnesties to the re–
maining officers, and pardons for the two serving sentences.
Like Mussolini and Fascism in Italy, the Dirty War keeps popping up
in Argentina at inconvenient moments, chronically bogging down the
national dialogue. In the first few years of democracy it popped up -
quite literally. Mass graves were repeatedly stumbled upon - sixty-eight
unmarked and unexplained bodies in a pit discovered in Benavidez,
twenty bodies that surfaced in a lake in Cordoba, bodies bobbing up in
the Rio de la Plata that divides Buenos Aires from Uruguay and is so
wide it looks like an ocean.
More recently, political life has been plagued by unsolicited confes–
sion. Retired naval captain Adolfo Scilingo said in February 1995 that up
to 2,000 political prisoners were hurled into the Atlantic Ocean from
navy aircraft in 1976-77. This led to increased demands for more infor–
mation. The government released the names of 545 more disappeared
victims of the Dirty War. Sounding like Charles deGaulle in postwar
France, Menem complained, "Publicly coming forward to give testimony
is a way of returning to a horrible past that we are trying to forget." He
suggested that if officers felt the need for confession they should see a lo–
cal priest. Nevertheless, other officers have come forward.
There is something perverse about guilt and shame. After the military
stepped down in 1983, an officer named Alfredo Astiz used to go regu–
larly to his favorite bar in the port of Bahia Blanca, relaxed and fearless
while customers shivered with shame because they recognized him as their
torturer. This is a familiar scene in bars, cafes and restaurants all over the
country. Nowhere in Argentina do torturers fear being recognized, but
psychiatrists have full case loads of victims who fear running into their
torturers. Many cannot speak about their experiences, suffer chronic
headaches, and insist they hear screams while listening to loud music.
It makes a comfortable environment for Nazi war criminals. In spite
of regular requests by numerous governments over the years only two
Nazis, out of thousands let in by the Juan Peron government after the
war, have ever been extradited. The first, Gerhard Bohne, was extradited
during a short-lived civilian government in 1966, and Franz
Schwammberger is currently serving a life sentence in Germany after be–
ing turned over by Menem's government.
Menem has been opening some, but not all, files for public scrutiny.
Though extradition requests are getting a more favorable reception,
Argentine courts are still turning them down. When the pressure is on,
the ruling party, which calls itself Peronist, would rather talk about
