Tough times at the Herald

A group of interns at the Buenos Aires Herald, where I work, is assembling “economic history of Argentina,” perusing old newspapers and noting anything of economic relevance. After seeing interns slogging away on this project for a few months or so, I finally became curious and picked up a volume of old papers myself. The first paper I flipped to was from Wednesday, December 10, 1980, and had an editorial entitled “Yesterday,” discussing the assassination of John Lennon. The same paper had a piece on US President-elect Ronald Reagan in which his name was spelled “Regan” (at the Herald, some things never change), talking about reporters questioning him on his lack of experience in national politics

The December 10 paper also included a note on a few terrorists killed.

I had been told by several Argentines that the Herald was the only hold-out of decent journalism during the Dirty War in Argentina, the period of military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 when the government killed about 30,000 of its own citizens. But a brief note in the middle of the paper saying that a few terrorists had been killed sounded a lot like the government line.

Next I took a look at my birthday – January 7, 1977. That day the war made the cover, in a small note on the lower right:

10 car ambush on convoy

TERRORISTS using ten cars ambushed a military convoy transporting prisoners from Coronel Brandsen to Olmos prison just outside Brandsen at 1am yesterday morning. Police sources said six of the terrorists, including one woman, and two prisoners were killed in the clash, but none of the prisoners escaped.

In another engagement, four extremists were slain in a two-hour schootout [sic] near Morón railway station at 8.45pm on Wednesday night.

Reliable sources said security forces were supported by a military helicopter from the Seventh Air Brigade two kilometres from the scene of the clash, near the intersection of Piedras and Nuestra Señora del Buen Viaje streets, about 800 metres form Morón station. (NA)

Reliable sources?

The previous day’s paper had a slightly longer story on the cover, entitled 17 suspects killed, listing 6 separate clashes. Some samples: One “couple…were shot down while resisting a house search.” Separately, “two men and two women were killed” after police found them “daubing walls with Montoneros slogans by means of spray paint.”

And on the day before, January 5, 1977, the paper reported 10 killed.

There is something particularly jolting about reading these old papers. It’s more unnerving than reading published personal accounts from the Dirty War or history books. Perhaps it’s easier to sense what things were like when I’m reading the paper in the Herald office, coming across some of the same journalists’ names that still appear in the paper in 2003. But it’s more than this. It’s seeing news of people killed normalized, and stuck next to truly mundane news, a lot of it from the United States. A note on Jimmy Carter giving up his peanut farm, for example, appears beside “17 suspects killed.” You don’t get a sense from reading the paper that anything was wrong. The people killed were all guilty, all threatening the government. You have to use your imagination to understand what was really happening when a couple was “shot down resisting a house search.”

Also on my birthday, James Neilson (who publishes opinion pieces in the Herald to this day) complained of the Army’s new policy that all suspects would be shaved before being facing the police photographer. This new policy, Neilson writes, “is quite obviously a response to the widespread prejudice among military personnel and policemen against men with beards (of which I am one). If the anti-terrorist fight needed the measure, it would have been put into force long ago, not now that it is ending.”

Neilson writes that he was embarrassed that the rest of the world was reading syndicated articles about the Argentine Army’s new policy. “How tragic,” says Neilson, “if a government that strode to office amid nearly universal applause is eventually remembered at home mainly for having spruced up the foreign ministry building, and abroad for having declared open season on beards!”

We now know the Videla administration is not remembered for declaring open season on beards.

Reading Neilson’s article, I finally began to absorb what it meant to live in Argentina at that time – to be unaware of what was happening, without any popular moral voice opposed to what was going on.

The history books talk about the awful things done by the military government, and leave you presuming the bulk of Argentines – and you, had you been here – must have been horrified at the Army’s crimes but frightened into silence. But according to many articles in many papers, the Army had no crimes; the crimes were all on the “terrorists’” side. Would I have believed that had I lived here at the time? An uncomfortable thought.

People were happy to see the military arrive. The Herald’s editorial the day after the coup applauded the Army’s arrival. It was substantially later that the paper started to catch on. Later, the Herald got information from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – the organization of mothers of disappeared children, and became almost the only voice of opposition in the press. But for a long time they had no good information.

This is not a common topic of conversation here. I came to Argentina thinking I would learn a lot about the Dirty War, but that was an innocent delusion. I’m pretty sure the subject comes up less than the Vietnam War does in the US. Not surprisingly, nobody wants to talk about it. You could live here and never hear about it.

It’s back there somewhere, though, like the dingy, unpainted back of the capital building - the Casa Rosada.

previously there was Looking Argentine
afterwards you have for the doubts

comments

• navigate
• « previous item
• next item »
• present
• past
• weblog
• chronicles
• images
• content
• herald timeline
• subway bg
• etcetera
• about
• colophon
• cambiar idioma