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At What Price Silence?

By Gaither Stewart

19 March, 2013
Countercurrents.org

(Rome) Argentineans are still trying to come to terms with what happened
in their country during the years of the Dirty War and the military
dictatorship, 1976-1983. During those seven years, tens of thousands of
their people were tortured and murdered by a brutal military machine and its
Allianza Anticommunista Argentina, the Triple A, supported by the Argentine
Catholic Church, large landowners, much of the middle class, and above all
by the USA through the agency of the CIA's anti-communist Operation Condor.
U.S. interventions in Latin America are an old story, but Operation Condor,
the Latin American extension of the Cold War, was especially dirty and
brutal: anyone in Argentina in disagreement with the U.S. approved
socio-political model was labeled subversive and eligible for physical
elimination: abduction, torture and murder or fed alive to the sharks from
helicopters. The same ugly system is repeated today in America's worldwide
"extraordinary rendition".

In this article I have discussed the Argentinean writer, Jorge Borges, and
the newly elected Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, the Argentinean Jorge
Mario Bergoglio, in order to illustrate the role of some intellectuals of
the middle class and more importantly the role of the Catholic Church in
what happened in Argentina in those unforgotten and unforgettable seven
years.

Why them? Because, as usual, something of the past remains in every
person. Both Borges and Bergoglio were more than silent in those hot years.
Both participated, but on the side of evil. At what price, one wonders! Most
certainly something they themselves came to regret; Borges six years after
the beginning of the dirty war; Bergoglio, who knows when his epiphany
occurred?

(Most of the following about Borges was written in Buenos Aires in 2008.)

I am uneasy writing about Jorge Luis Borges (b.1899, Buenos Aires, d.
1986, Geneva). Borges wrote so much and I have read so little of his early
works. Yet his world of myth and fantasy and metaphysics has so influenced
me in the past that since I am here in his city of Buenos Aires where I can
feel Borges the man rather than only Borges the writer I have known from
afar, I feel I have to record something about him in flesh and blood.

However, I am entering a veritable minefield. Being in his very proximity
changes my relationship with him. I have known Borges-poet, essayist and
fiction writer-as one of the most important authors of the twentieth
century. In these days I have been to his old address in Calle Maipú in
central Buenos Aires, I passed through the Galleria del Est he loved
downstairs under his apartment, I sat in the confiterias, the cafès, he
frequented-El Tortoni, Los 36 Billares, La Biela-I visited the National
Library he directed, I walked along the street named after him, Calle Jorge
Luis Borges, in the barrio of Palermo where he also lived, and I have read
about his life in Buenos Aires, his curiosity about the world of tango and
gangsters and knife fights.

My problem in understanding Borges the man is a familiar one. I was
acquainted with his work before I considered him the person. As usual the
art conditions one's feelings about its creator. It happens this way
especially with painters: if you see the good art before its creator, your
relationship with the artist you might meet in person later is conditioned.
For you he will remain forever first the artist, then the person.

However, the reverse can also be true: if you get to know first the
person, then later his art, you sometimes wonder that the person you thought
you knew created the magnificent art. It seems miraculous that a childlike
person, who gets drunk, gossips about his neighbors, worries about his
falling hair and spouts absurd political and social ideas, creates
disturbing works of art. You tend to underrate the art because of the
ordinariness of the person who created it.

Borges was not ordinary. Born into an international family that lived in
Europe while he was young, Borges spoke English before Spanish. "Georgie"
was precocious and everyone assumed from the start he would be a writer.
Legend has it that he wrote his first story at seven and translated Oscar
Wilde's "The Happy Prince" at nine or ten, though skeptics in Buenos Aires
claim that his father did the translation.

After the family's return to Buenos Aires, Borges at twenty-five became
the center of Argentine letters, writing poetry, essays and stories and
sponsoring writers like the great Julio Cortázar. During the 1950s he headed
the national library of 800,000 volumes, which must have been a kind of
paradise for him since books and words were his life. For that reason the
Italian writer Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose named his librarian,
Jorge de Burgos, after him.

In his opposition to Peron, Borges resigned from the national library and
in 1976 lent support to the military dictatorship that overthrew Peron. I
was not aware of this before I got on his trail in Buenos Aires. His support
for the regime that killed and tortured and ruined the nation in the name of
"order" creates enormous problems for Borges lovers.

A politically center-left lawyer in Buenos Aires I asked about this
apparent anomaly in Borges showed little surprise, claiming that people just
didn't know what was happening. Finally, in 1980, after thousands of the
tortured bodies of the best of Argentine youth had been dumped into the
ocean, Borges signed a petition in honor of the desaparecidos.

Yet this "We didn't know" always rings suspicious. The majority of the
30,000 desaparecidos were from the city of Buenos Aires. Thousands of
families and relatives and friends were oppressed as the dictatorship
crushed all "subversion". Who were the subversives anyway? They were the
non-Marxist leftwing of the Peronist movement, the Montoneros and the
Marxist Peoples Revolutionary Army (ERP), who, though they were forced to go
underground, were the only political opposition.

Borges knew everybody. Did no one tell him what was happening? Or was it
simply too distant from his metaphysical world? But if he knew? How could
Borges not know? His one-time friend, the Chilean poet and Communist, Pablo
Neruda, was quoted as saying, "He (Borges) doesn't understand a thing about
what's happening in the modern world, and he thinks I don't either." The
Nobel Prize Committee must have believed the same, for though Borges was a
longtime candidate for the coveted prize, he never got it. His support for
the dictatorship was most likely the reason.

Like Borges, Neruda too made a major political error: he dedicated a poem
to Stalin on his death in 1953 and it took official revisionism in the USSR
for him to change his mind. Nonetheless, Neruda went on to support the
Socialism of Allende's three-year government in Chile and to defend Cuba
against the USA. Finally, in contrast to Borges, he won the Nobel in 1971.

I hope Neruda was right. How could a man concerned with circular
labyrinths and mirrors reflecting his alter ego understand what was really
happening around him? Trying to resolve the riddle of time, maybe Borges was
lost in an infinite series of times, parallel and divergent and convergent,
in his intellectual world ranging from Gnosticism to the Cabala.

His philosophic stories are masterly even if they often seem contrived. On
a visit to Rome near the end of his life he told the Australian writer
Desmond O'Grady that he wanted to write stories like those of Kipling. And
some of his earliest stories about Buenos Aires were told straightforwardly.
Borges' first steps in literature were in English, the language in which he
originally read Don Quixote. His grandmother Frances Halsam was English.
And poetry came to him through his father intoning, in English, Swinburne,
Keats and Shelley. He considered English literature the finest. It made him
aware that words convey not only messages but also music and passion.

You could classify Borges as a twice-displaced person, closer to the
English language than to Spanish, a self-confessed 'international writer'
who happened to live in Buenos Aires, but this would ignore his attachment
to Argentinean history and legends, to Buenos Aires for which he said he
wanted to invent a mythology, and to "the ubiquitous smell of eucalyptus" at
the summerhouse of his boyhood.

I read Borges' famous book, El Aleph, a collection of seventeen of his
most suggestive and mysterious stories. The story "Los Teologos" speaks of
an ancient sect on the banks of the Danube known as the Monotonous who
professed that history is a circle and there is nothing that has not been
before and that there will never be anything new. For them, in the
mountains, the Wheel and the Serpent had replaced the cross. It was heresy.
Surprisingly, Borges' protagonist reflected and decided that the thesis of
circular time was too different to be dangerous; the most fearful heresies
are those nearest orthodoxy. In fact, the poetic books of the Old Testament
are filled with such a thesis. The Old Testament has a way of saying the
most terrible things in poetic words, like the words of the King Solomon,
the teacher, that have graced film and literature:

What has been will be again,

What has been done will be done again;

There is nothing new under the sun.

Though I had accepted Borges on the basis of his creative art, I am
uncertain whether it is proper to judge an artist wholly by his work,
separating the man from his art. However that may be, now that I know more
about his role in Argentinean society my feelings toward him are colored; I
look at his writings with a more critical eye, searching for the reasons he
backed the 1976-1983 military dictatorship here and in Chile and Uruguay.
Why did he lend support to the terror of the military junta, which he called
blithely "a confraternity of gentlemen". As an adult with much information
at his disposal, he chose the wrong side.

In the first story in El Aleph, "El Inmortal," he repeats the refrain that
no one is guilty . or innocent. When life is circular, without beginning or
end, that is when man is immortal, then everything, good and evil, happens
to every man. In an apparent search for a world of order Borges seems to
have sensed that it would be madness to think that God first created the
cosmos and afterwards chaos. This now rings like a whitewash of evil.

Borges' many books are on prominent display in the magnificent bookstores
of Buenos Aires and his anniversaries are marked with new editions of his
works and round tables about him. Like Joycean tours in Dublin, Buenos Aires
offers Borgean tours-the streets Borges walked, his cafés, his bookstores,
his Buenos Aires of the neighborhoods where he lived and about which he
wrote extensively. Borges is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest voices
of world literature, winning international prizes and recognition. Yet he
chose to support the dictatorship, even during and after the terror, while
continuing to write his esoteric stories so far removed from harsh
realities.

Is retirement to an ivory tower permissible? Seen in this light he seems
to be the creator of art for art's sake. The belief in art for art's sake,
according to the Russian Communist theorist Georgy Plekhanov, "arises when
artists and people keenly interested in art are hopelessly out of harmony
with their social environment." It has been said that art for art's sake is
the attempt to instill ideal life in one who has no real life and is an
admission that the human race has outgrown the artist. That seems to have
happened in Argentina and Chile in the Seventies and Eighties of last
century.

Commitment on the other hand involves the writer's trying to reflect
through his work a picture of the human condition-which is social-without
losing sight of the individual. Borges seemed to believe that art was a
thing apart. Despite the obstacles politics raises, art, I believe, is part
and parcel of the social. Writing is a social act insofar as it derives not
only from the will to communicate with others but also from a resolve to
change things. To remake the world. It seems unimaginable that the military
dictatorship could be a goal or a means for the artist.

Late in life Borges denied he ever wrote for either an elite or the
masses; he wrote for a circle of friends, he said. This familiar claim is
also suspect. Can one accept his thesis that "there is a kind of lazy
pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition" underlying his tales of
fantasy and remote historical points of departure?

Borges was both universal and at the same time an Argentinean nationalist,
who wrote of tango and gauchos and the streets of Buenos Aires. Since he was
too universal to accept Peronist populism, it is a mystery how he could fall
for the "club of gentlemen" of the military assassins.

The Argentine military dictatorship, we now know, was like something so
horrible per se that its very existence contaminates past, present and
future life. By the very definition of the now international Spanish word
describing the 30,000 victims, the desaparecidos continue to lie outside
time and memory. Afterwards, Borges, again the great artist, forgiven and
reestablished, wrote that, "As long as it (the military dictatorship) exists
no one in the world can be courageous or happy."

It must have been his great regret that he never won the Nobel, the price
he paid for misreading the role of political power. Paul Bowles and Anton
Chekhov were right: the artist should take a wide berth around politics; yet
he should understand enough of it in order to protect himself. For over a
half decade Borges failed to do that.

His story in El Aleph , "Deutsches Requiem", concerns a Nazi torturer and
killer, the Deputy Director of the concentration camp of Tarnowitz, who has
been sentenced to death and is to be executed the next morning. Otto
Dietrich zur Linde credits Brahms, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Nietszche and
Spengler as his benefactors who helped him "confront with courage and
happiness the bad years and to become one of the new men." He acquired the
new faith of Nazism and waited impatiently for the war to test his faith.
His was to be the total experience, of victory and defeat, of life and
death.

Otto thought: I am satisfied by defeat because secretly I know I am guilty
and only punishment can redeem me. He thought:Defeat satisfies me because it
is the end and I am tired. He thought: Defeat satisfies me because it
happened, because it is linked to all the events that are, that have been,
that will be, because to censure or deplore one single real event is to
blaspheme the universe.

In other words, everything is linked in Borges' great circular universe.
Everything happens again and again. Everything is part of one whole. The
story written shortly after World War II closes with Otto's disturbing
words: Hitler believed he fought for his country; but he fought for all,
even for those he attacked and hated.. Many things have to be destroyed in
order to build the new order, now we know that Germany was one of those
things.. I look at my face in the mirror to know who I am, to know how I
will act in a few hours, when the end stands before me. My flesh will be
afraid, but not I.

I don't quite know what to think of this story. It upsets me. Hopefully, I
keep reading over and over the following quote from Borges which helps: "One
concept corrupts and confuses the others."

I hope he was saying that the thoughts of Otto Dietrich zur Linde were
pure speculation and merely part of the abstract universal metaphysical
whole.

So, I continue reading El Aleph, alternately exalted by Borges the writer
and at times disillusioned by him the man.

...

The purification and reform of the Roman Catholic Church became a
necessity in light of the recent moral and financial scandals rocking the
structure of the Holy See and the Papacy itself. For the first time in five
centuries the reigning pope, Benedict XVI, was forced to resign. A new pope
was elected to execute the reform and renewal.

World media have broadcast the humble, self-effacing image of the new
pope, the Jesuit and former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario
Bergoglio, who assumed the name of Francis, the hippy saint of Assisi.
During the week since his election he has moved around Rome, in his simple
white cassock, sometimes in a non-official car, sometimes in a bus with
other cardinals, visiting churches and Church social centers. He received
several thousand journalists from the far corners of the world who have
written about a pope who loves the tango, was once engaged, is a rabid fan
of the Buenos Aires soccer club, San Lorenzo, says buon giorno to open late
morning speeches and buon appetito to close. He continues to ask the
faithful to pray for him and instructs the faithful to continue to beg for
forgiveness and to grant forgiveness. Yet the shadow of his past of 35 years
ago remains.

Nonetheless, Bergoglio's election has stirred the world of the faithful of
the Catholic Church. While his choice of the papal name of Francis, his
simple style and emphasis on a Church of and for the poor underline a
Catholic Church in change, his election also signals a shift of gravity of
world Catholicism away from a largely secular Europe of beautiful but empty
churches to Latin America with 41% or 483 million of the world's 1.2 billion
Catholics and where Catholicism lives among the people. In his first words
as Pope Francis, Bergoglio said: "They found me at the end of the Earth."

Despite his new style and promise for drastic changes and despite that
shadow hanging over his past, the mainline press, also in Argentina itself,
recalls the accusations against Bergoglio for collaboration with the
Argentine military junta during its bloody regime, 1976-83. This part of his
background has been mentioned in the Italian press and TV and indignantly
denied by the Vatican.

During my time in Argentina it became clear that the generation emerging
from the bankruptcy of Argentina on the heels of both Peronism and the
military dictatorship was scarred, confirmed by an ongoing national debate
about crime and punishment. Argentina is especially scarred by the moral
crisis of the years of the dictatorship. People are uncertain about what
went wrong in a nation that permitted the horror of 30,000 desaparecidos,
the emigration of many more, and the moral degeneration of the nation.

Though Argentina apparently wants to come to terms with that past, it has
proven to be an elusive operation. Who is guilty of what is still an open
question. That the Argentine Catholic Church was largely silent (and guilty
of that silence) during the dictatorship is clear. But the full role of
individuals like Jorge Bergoglio, despite the accusations against him
personally, and the horror of the personal role of some priests, is not
clear. For confusion and fear too reigned in those times in Buenos Aires.
And actions that afterwards seemed odious and indefensible seemed different
at the time. Now, since America and again Europe have their scarred
generations, the Argentine experience is worth examining in more detail for
one hopes that Americans too someday are going to discuss questions of crime
and punishment, guilt and the moral crisis. Someday Americans too will have
to come to terms with America's crimes and their individual roles in those
crimes.

From journalism and films I knew of the horrors of the Argentine military
dictatorship but from afar I was not aware of its continuing effects on
people today. Therefore I don't believe that a little history will ruin the
flow of this narrative of an important period of my life.

After World War II, army Colonel Juan Perón, emerged as the strongman of
Argentina, winning the presidential elections of 1946 and again in 1951. His
political clout was reinforced by his second wife-Eva Duarte de Perón
(Evita)-and her popularity with the working classes: Evita, as de facto
minister of health and labor, established a national charitable organization
and awarded wage increases to workers, who responded with wide political
support for Perón. However opposition to Perón's authoritarianism stirred
reactionary forces and led to a coup by the armed forces, which sent him
into exile in 1955, three years after Evita's death. Argentina then entered
a period of military dictatorships with brief intervals of constitutional
government. In 1973, Perón returned to power and his third wife, Isabel
Martínez de Perón, was elected vice president. After Perón's death in 1974,
she became the hemisphere's first woman chief of state, assuming control of
a nation teetering on economic and political collapse. She brought it down
in her total incapacity.

In 1975, as terrorism exploded in Europe, in Argentina terrorist acts by
left- and rightwing groups killed some seven hundred people while the cost
of living skyrocketed and strikes and demonstrations were constant. The
Argentine Right still refers to that period as a civil war. On March 24,
1976, during the period the original Red Brigades were being crushed in
Italy by the CIA-sponsored Gladio forces, a military junta supported by the
USA seized power in Argentina, imposed martial law and initiated seven years
of terror to stamp out "subversives and Communists".

The military conducted a so-called "dirty war" to restore order and
eradicate its opponents. In the aftermath, the Argentine Commission for
Human Rights charged the junta with 2,300 political murders, over 10,000
political arrests, and the disappearance of 20,000 to 30,000 people.

A Swiss journalist friend in Buenos Aires, Hans Moser, wrote that many
Argentineans greeted the putsch, in the hope that the generals could pull
the country out of recession and stop the violence. Instead the military
substituted it with institutional violence. Then, when the violence finally
abated the economy was in chaos. Paradoxically much of the terrified middle
class that in the end suffered considerably had supported the military
intervention.

These were also the times of America's Cold War against Communism. The CIA
intervention in Latin America with the code name Operation Condor was ever
more powerful. It backed the military junta in the repression of anything
smacking of subversion or Communism. "Subversion" of Castro-backed Communism
was the same bugaboo in Argentina, Chile, and across Latin America that
terrorism is in the United States today. (Ostensibly, and for almost a
century, the US and its far-flung agencies, fought against "Communism",
usually understood during the Cold War, as Sovietism. This however contains
a contradiction and a deliberate confusion, on the part of the propagandists
of the right. For the real enemy has always been "people's power," or any
nationalism willing to defend the nation's resources against multinational
corporations' plunder. The agenda has always been a class war, of the rich
against the poor, by any and all means necessary, no matter how dirty. The
fact that the "Cold War" was merely a chapter in the eternal war waged by
capitalists against their opponents is confirmed by the fact that although
the Soviet Union is no more, the fight against popular power continues
unabated, as does international interventionism for the benefit of
corporations.-Eds.)

Only years later was the extent of state terror in Argentina fully
uncovered, as it will surely happen in the USA when Americans begin to come
to terms with its desaparecidos and torture and concentration camps and
hundreds of thousands of dead it has left across the world. Though terrorist
bombs killed indiscriminately in Argentina, the torturers were gruesome;
pilots have testified to the flights over the ocean to dump the wrecks of
prisoners to the sharks, which may have well happened at Guantànamo. Those
wounds to Argentine society have not yet healed.

Soon after my return to Buenos Aires in 2008, in a park along a busy
commercial street, I found a sign bearing the park's name, "Plaza Tenente
General Mitre" over which had been written by hand:

El Gobierno ordena

La SIDE organiza
La policia dispara

(The goverment orders, the secret police organizes, the police shoots)

I wandered deeper into the park of Las Heras and to my astonishment I
found the same words written on statues and plaques dedicated to the
ubiquitous memories of the Argentine military establishment. Since the
arrival of the Spanish, since the liberation era of San Martin himself,
since the murderous military marshallers, the Argentine military has called
the shots. It is very quiet today, but their men are always ready in the
wings.

No, the wounds have not healed here, no more than the wounds from Vietnam
have healed in America. The relatives of the victims here have not
forgotten; the families of American soldiers fallen in Iraq have not
forgotten. Some of the guilty in Argentina have been punished; seldom are
the real guilty ever punished in the USA. As is perhaps emerging in silence
in America today, there were two sides in the "dirty war" in Argentina and
those two sides still exist in peoples' minds.

The movement of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires began with
a dozen mothers gathered in front of Presidential Palace of Casa Rosada
wearing symbolic white head kerchiefs to demand information about their
children. A most suggestive idea for American mothers and wives and
grandmothers, too! What an effect it would make if hundreds, then thousands
and tens of thousands of mothers of American soldiers stood in silence in
front of the White House. Though they were afraid, the organization of
Argentine mothers grew. After the return of democracy they continued their
struggle, until in 1985 they brought about the trial and imprisonment of
Junta chief Videla and other generals, who however were amnestied five years
later.

No wonder the issue is not settled. No wonder the persistence of the
question about who is guilty. No wonder the protest about the amnesties. No
wonder the scars have not healed. Concerning the trials of the torturers,
Jorge Borges once summed up: "It seems no one wants a precise investigation
and this means that everyone feels guilty." Perhaps Borges had in mind the
Italian resolution to tragic deviations: If everyone is guilty, then no one
is guilty.

The murderous Triple A is not forgotten. People have not forgotten the
leftwing Montoneros either. The Montoneros, whose name is still on the lips
of many Argentineans, were born as the Peronist Left-their name suggestive
of the Montagnards of the French Revolution. They were an urban, lower
middle class conspiratorial movement in opposition to the establishment of
Army, Church and landowners.

It is clear as day why a spirit of anti-Americanism remains in Argentina,
embedded in both people and the present government of moderately leftwing
Christina Fernandez Kirchner, who like her deceased husband Nestor Kirchner,
a self-proclaimed ex-Montonero, is detested by the Roman Church. As a
result, Argentina today does not vote against Cuba in the United Nations; it
lends a hand to Venezuela; and it does not support the United States in its
wars. I never met outspoken pro-Americans in Buenos Aires.

When Great Britain won a decisive victory in the 1982 war over the
Falkland Islands, the General-President Galtieri resigned amid increasing
pro-democratic public sentiment: inflation hit 900% and Argentina's foreign
debt reached unprecedented levels. Democracy returned to face massive
unemployment, quadruple-digit inflation and riots over high food prices and
recession. In 2001 Argentina defaulted on its huge foreign debt payments.
The banking system plunged into crisis and millions of the middle class into
poverty. In 2002 the former junta leader, Galtieri, and forty-two other
military officers were arrested and charged with the torture and execution
of leftist guerrillas during the military dictatorship. Finally, in 2003
Néstor Kirchner became Argentina's president, vowing to continue prosecution
of perpetrators of the "dirty war". The economy rebounded with a growth rate
of 8%. In 2006 the word "genocide" came to be widely used to describe what
happened in Argentina in the Seventies. In comparison to the United States,
Argentina can boast that at least some of the military dictatorship's
torturers and assassins of 30,000 desaparecidos have been jailed. Still,
most of the guilty are free and still today many ex-ministers of the brutal
junta receive generous pensions from the state.

In Argentina the lines of demarcation in the 1970s were: the military, the
Church, large landowners and much of the middle class on one side, and the
rest of society on the other. The extreme right still speaks of that period
as a civil war, claiming it acted for the nation against Communism and
disorder. Since then the question has remained open: Did a civil war take
place in Argentina of the 1970s? No! State terrorism was the reality. The
term "state terrorism" is now widely diffused in Argentina. Genocide of the
best of a generation is recognized. Language is a formidable weapon.
Religious orthodoxy and political correctness differ little in their
intents. The word "genocide" marks in fire what happened in Argentina in the
1970s.

Since the country is practically 100% Catholic, the Argentine Catholic
Church was cast in a major role. Silence was the majority answer. Church
leaders later claimed silence was necessary for survival. However there were
divisions within the Church, ranging from active support and participation
in torture and murder of "subversives" to mild acceptance, or to silence.
That is, the Church failed miserably.

When the golpe arrived in Buenos Aires in 1976, Jorge Bergoglio headed the
powerful Jesuit Order. Today the nature of his relations with the military
junta is an object of controversy. Despite his claims that he saved some
persons from torture and death, he is accused of responsibility for the
abduction of two Jesuit priests, advocates of liberation theology, working
in the slums of the huge city, and of continuous contact with the junta.
Bergoglio had long actively opposed and fought Marxism and liberation
theology in its struggle for a Church for the poor and defenseless. He
allegedly withdrew his support of the two priests, thus leaving them to
their fate of abduction and torture. Bergoglio has denied all such charges.
When he finally agreed to testify in court, the judges said he was evasive,
that is, he lied. Left leaders in Buenos Aires are critical of the new pope's
activities in general during the entire Dirty War against "subversion".

The Vatican today claims that the accusations are false. That they
originated on the Argentine anti-clerical Left. Today, in Rome, Jorge
Bergoglio, now Pope Francis has begun his Papacy under the old liberation
theology slogan of "a Church of the poor, for the poor."
...

America's Operation Condor in Latin America began from the 1950s and
accelerated after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara began spreading the Communist
message throughout the continent. The real dirty war, the cleansing, the
guerra sucia, against anything that even smacked of Marxism, from Texas to
the Terra del Fuego, was in reality led by the CIA and the Pentagon and the
troops they trained in Latin America. All in the name of democracy and
freedom. Apart from Jimmy Carter all the other American presidents of that
period participated even if few knew of the sordid details of the Dirty War.
The worst and most extensive crimes were carried out in Argentina, Chile and
Uruguay, though Guatemala and Salvador and Nicaragua were not exactly
playgrounds.

Today's turn to the Left in Presidential elections throughout the
continent are some of the results of a half century of Dirty War, of Dirty
Imperialism.

I was surprised by the interest for Bolivia among Argentinean
progressives. Bolivia, where elected government and society march hand in
hand. Alain Touraine, the French sociologist, went so far as to write in the
Buenos Aires daily, Página 12, that the key to the political life of the
continent and its capacity to invent a political-social model capable of
working in an exceptionally difficult situation was without doubt in
Bolivia.

"There seems to exist a general awareness of the necessity of accepting
the Bolivian model: in its radicalism, its nationalism and heroism, in its
excesses of language and also actions." Touraine believed that the political
future of the continent depended on Bolivia's ability to construct and
realize a model of social transformation and at the same time maintain its
independence.

Argentina is a clear example of the failure of the historical
national-populist political model of the past. Though rapidly emerging from
the socio-political disaster that destroyed its economy and society,
governability here has been difficult. Touraine reduces Argentina's economic
recovery to three short-term positive factors: exports to China, cheap oil
from Venezuela and a concentration of power in the hands of its President.
Though President Kirchner claimed to be a Leftist, it is hard to speak of a
Left and Right in Argentina since the country's economic situation requires
free market solutions, which are not of leftist inspiration and which not
even powerful Kirchner could change.

Though I noted in Argentina an optimistic air and confidence in the future
absent in Europe and though-despite Brazil-it would be hazardous to claim
social-economic triumph in Latin America, it has occurred to me that
surprisingly, in this moment, the world is witnessing a rebirth of the
Spanish-speaking world. Precisely because of that optimism, Latin America
must also make a quantum leap ahead politically and socially. According to
Touraine, it needs a radicalization on the political and social front in
order to escape from two old threats: a government of the free market elite
(today based on a globalized economy) and the illusion of neo-Castroism
which has never died.

Latin America has had two traumatic and interrelated experiences: military
dictatorship that destroyed the continent with its neo-free market economics
supported by the International Monetary Fund and the United States, and the
ruinous economic systems facilitated by those military regimes. On the other
hand, the two European immigrant countries, Argentina and Chile, have the
European social model in their DNA. Yet they have in their blood stream also
the North American savage free market model and the disasters of the
military dictatorships it has caused in their history. Perhaps the best news
from Latin America today is that the option for the former has never been
closer.

Protest and resistance are largely phenomena of the modern age. Although
often linked together, they are not the same thing. In Europe and USA we are
familiar with protest against injustice. Resistance is something else.
Resistance is totalizing, directed against all-pervasive power and a system
of injustice. In comparison, protest is easy, and immediately rewarding.
Resistance instead means commitment, struggle and a hard way of life. You
can protest, march and wave banners, then go back home to comfort and ease.
Resistance demands your life, its price is high, and as Che Guevara liked to
say, "you either win or die."

I try to imagine what Jorge Borges and Jorge Bergoglio might have said
about their fellow countryman, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, on the other side of
the barricades. Never in a thousand years would the Jesuit anti-communist
Bergoglio admire this idol of the Left. Borges however must have been
curious and intrigued by him but I doubt he ever approved of the
revolutionary. If he could have seen it through the yellow mist he said was
in his eyes, he would have abhorred the famous photograph of Che with long
beard and hair, and his cap with a star in the middle.

Ernesto Guevara was born in Rosario in western Argentina in 1928. He died
at the age of 39 in the Bolivian village of La Higuera on October 9, 1967.
At age seventeen he moved to Buenos Aires with his parents, studied
medicine, and then traveled through Latin America. He studied Marxism while
in the youth brigades in Guatemala during the Jacobo Arbenz leftwing
government before it was crushed by a CIA-organized coup d'état. In 1955 he
joined Castro in Mexico where he became el Che. (Che is an Argentinean usage
of the interjection that means something like Tu or Vos (for you) and by
extension, comrade or friend. Nowadays, Che stands on its own to mean also
Guevara.) He sailed with the Castro brothers and Cienfuegos on the Granma to
Cuba to overthrow the corrupt Batista regime. And years later, as a
commander of the guerrilla movement in Bolivia, he was executed by a
Bolivian soldier for the CIA.

Posters hanging on the walls of young people of the world testify that
Ernesto Che Guevara was a hero of our times. A profound explanation of the
universal appeal of this single Argentinean is found in the words of Jean
Paul Sartre that "Che Guevara was the most complete human being of our age."

Though most everything has been written about "el Che", it is unclear what
took place in that young Argentinean, what clicked in some prominent brain
cell, to transform him into the man of action who became the idol of
successive generations of youth. According to some clichés there are more
heroes in life than we imagine. Personally I doubt it. Or it depends on the
definition of "hero" which I believe includes above all a big dose of a
quality called commitment. The reality is that for most of us it is too
difficult to be a real hero, too demanding and uncomfortable. Therefore we
are envious of those who are capable of that necessary commitment. And who
succeed.

The Italian Left has always had strong sentiments for Che Guevara. The
Italian journalist, Gianni Minà, did a major interview with Castro in 1987
in which he concentrated on the figure of Che Guevara and his revolutionary
calling. Castro stressed el Che's altruism, his determination, his
impulsiveness and his fear that the revolution in Latin America against
imperialism would end like the others. Castro recalled that when they were
in Mexico, Ernesto was determined to scale the gigantic Popocateptl peak,
despite his asthma. He never succeeded but he never gave up trying.

Che Guevara believed in exportation of the revolution, something today's
Left only dreams of. But Washington was right to be afraid of El Che.
Washington saw its nice arrangement with an entire continent threatened.
Mario Vargas Llosa describes in his novel Traversura de la niña mala the
arrival of his fellow Peruvian students in Paris, recruited for training in
Cuba or China or North Korea for guerrilla warfare in the Andes. I was
curious to learn that many belonged to MIR, the Movimiento de Izquierda
Revolucionaria in Peru. Others arrived in Paris from other movements, from
other countries, in competition for the places Cuba made available. For Che,
Bolivia was a stepping-stone back to his native Argentina. First the
revolution in Bolivia, then Argentina. As usual his foresight was striking.
The explosive year of 1968 was just around the corner and Che Guevara was to
become one of its symbols.

Today Leftist leaders again consider Bolivia a key to the future of a
democratic Latin America, the one country where society and political
leadership are united: the socio-political movement of miners and peasants
headed by Bolivian President Evo Morales emerged from the resistance that
Che furthered.

Some observers believe that Che Guevara transformed the nationalist Castro
into the Latin American revolutionary he became. Everywhere his slogan was
resistance to imperialism. The great escalation in Vietnam was beginning at
the time Guevara created the phrase of universal resistance: "Create two,
three, many Vietnams."

His credo was, "Any nation's victory against imperialism is our victory,
as any defeat is also our defeat."

Among Ernesto Guevara's lessons on the road to revolutionary resistance
was that of guerrilla warfare. In his mind guerrilla warfare was the
shortcut to the victory of Socialism. "Resistance, resistance and again
resistance" was his great message. That became the legacy of revolutionary
1968. Che was earlier than others. He must have first seen the light after
the CIA organized the crushing of the Arbenz revolutionary government in
Guatemala. I believe he left Cuba, his wife and children and a life of ease
for Bolivia because his vision was broader in scope than that of Castro.
Early in his development when he biked over Latin America his vision became
universal. Opposition to U.S. imperialism was fundamental.

Ideas exploded in all directions. Revolution in the Andes as in the Cuban
sierra.

From Washington, anti-Communism. And, anything to stem popular power,
actual democracy. (They do that at home, too.)

Meanwhile the middle class in much of Latin America feared that weak
governments could not handle the resistance fighters and that a military
dictatorship would return to take care of it. In the Sixties there was the
suspicion that the Peruvian military and its intelligence and the CIA helped
organize the revolutionaries there in order to justify the return to power
of a military regime. Che Guevara was right to be wary. For that is the
story of Latin America. Like the ebb and the tide, a brief taste of
democracy to the tune of protest and resistance, and then another round of
military dictatorship. A handful of Communist guerillas have always been the
pretext for a golpe followed by a decade of safe and secure dictatorship. In
1965 when the MIR exploded in the mountains of Peru, the Leftist opposition
party APRA accused the government of complicity with the Castro-supported
guerrilla. Golpe hung in the air. Predictably, the government ordered the
army to crush MIR and Tupac Amaru resistance. The army did. And soon after,
in 1968, the golpe arrived in Peru as it did in Argentina in 1976.

To return to Pope Francis, in the March 18 edition of the Buenos Aires
leftwing daily newspaper Pagina 12, the journalist Paul Kollmann writes:
"While the majority of Argentineans approve of the election of Cardinal
Jorge Bergoglio as Pope, they demand that he modernize the Church:
acceptance of homosexuality, use of contraceptives, marriage of priests, and
women in the priesthood." Basing his conclusions on a telephone survey of
1000 Argentineans in Buenos Aires, people of varying ages, education, and
social and political positions, Kollmann points out that in Argentina
Bergoglio is widely considered a conservative in regard to Church
traditions. Still, people of Buenos Aires, who call for a progressive Church
closer to the people and to the Third World, appreciate the Argentinean
touch Bergoglio has shown in his first moves as Pope Francis. They believe
that he will try to reform the Church. The results, Kollmann points out,
reflect above all nationalistic pride that an Argentinean heads an
institution with 1.2 billion followers in the world, and believe it will
have a positive impact on Argentina itself. The journalist concludes however
that conservative Bergoglio-Pope Francis seems too distant from the
progressive demands of Argentineans, few of whom are aware of his relations
with the dictatorship.

In light of this Pagina 12 article and its survey, the words spoken and
the image projected by Pope Francis in Rome in these days become clearer:
his insistence on forgiveness and his requests for the prayers of the
faithful for him, and his frequent expressions of his desire for "a poor
Church, a Church for the poor." Moreover, his papal image is the embodiment
of simplicity, the same simplicity of Saint Francis of Assisi. He allegedly
rejected the papal name the cardinals suggested him, Adrian VI, one assumes
because it would have cast him into a traditional Roman Catholic
institutional role.

Time will show if Pope Francis will fulfill the desires of Argentinean
people and-whether or not, as Stephen Greenblatt wrote in The Swerve, all
religions are truly superstitious delusions-if he sincerely intends
reformation of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. At the same
time, while there is little doubt about his relations with the dictatorship
and his proven social-political conservatism, I personally want to believe
that people can and do change. Most certainly Bergoglio's image projected
today in Rome is different from any Pope in the history of the Roman
Catholic Church.

GAITHER STEWART, a senior editor, is also The Greanville Post European
Correspondent, based in Rome. His latest novelTime of Exile, the third part
of his Europe Trilogy, dealing with the secret world of great power
espionage and the subterranean clash between human liberation from
exploitation and its enforcers, is due to appear later this year, published
by Punto Press.

 




 

 


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