Real Dictators - General Videla Part 2: Mr Clean’s Dirty War

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Videla’s dirty war begins. ‘Subversives’ are rooted out, with torture centres established across the land - including one known as the ‘Argentine Auschwitz’. Education, music, children’s books and haircuts are subjected to new regulations. And as the Junta garners international attention, Videla will employ elaborate means to gloss over the atrocities… A Noiser production, written by John Bartlett. Many thanks to Edward Brudney, Robert Cox, Marguerite Feitlowitz, Francesca Lessa, Sara Méndez, Ernesto Semán. This is Part 2 of 4. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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military junta. A sharp wind rushes along the platform as the nose of a train emerges from the tunnel, sending a chill through the ranks of commuters. Those on the edge of the platform squeeze into the carriages, and the next line shuffles forwards, taking their places. Nobody speaks. Suddenly there's movement on the platform. Three plainclothes police officers hurry down a staircase. The tightly packed crowd parts as they push through.

Heads turn, but nobody dares stop them. The men jostle their way towards a woman in a fawn coat, her long dark hair falling to her waist. They grab her by the arms and frog march her backwards and away, muffling her screams of protest with a thick forearm. Within seconds they're gone. The crowd is shocked but nobody shows it. Slowly the commuters rearrange themselves to fill the space where she'd been stood. It's as if she was never there. Argentina's military junta is at war with the public. Anybody they deem a subversive element is to be annihilated. She must have been one of them. The crowd are left thinking.

From the Noiser Network, this is part two of the Videla story. And this is Real Dictators. real dictators. It's in the early hours of March 24th, 1976 that General Videla executes his coup d'état. The beleaguered President Isabel Martinez de Perón is whisked away by air force helicopter. Isabelita, as she's better known, is later flown south. She's placed under house arrest at El Mesidor, a lakeside official residence in the picturesque region of Patagonia. Here she wiles away the hours reading Morris West novels and tending to the garden.

But it's not all calm and relaxation for Isabelita. The military quickly put her on trial for corruption and misappropriation of funds during her presidency. The hearings take place in the house's lavish dining room. With the pressure building, she even tries to take her own life by swallowing a bottle of pills. But doctors manage to save her. In total, she will spend five years under arrest at several secluded residences around

Argentina, before being sent into exile in Spain. Back in Buenos Aires, three men are to lead the military junta. They are General Orlando Ramon Agosti, head of the Air Force, Navy Chief Admiral Emilio Eduardo Macera, and, of course, General Jorge Rafael Videla. U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert Hill sends a telegram back to Washington. He describes the coup as probably the best executed and most civilized in Argentine history. High praise indeed.

On paper, power is to be split equally between the three men. equally between the three men. Videla promises that there will be frequent changes of leader, at least every three years, to ensure no one of them becomes all-powerful. He will be the junta's first leader, however. Martial law is declared, and people's movement is curtailed.

Surveillance is rolled out across Argentina. Everybody is under suspicion. Through the night, union leaders have already been kidnapped and detained in industrial cities. Videla knows that they are the backbone of the Peronist movement, the legacy of former president Juan Perón. The union leaders must be crushed if Videla's self-proclaimed national reorganization process is to be successful. By the morning of March the 24th, uniformed officers are patrolling every major city, and tanks are parked on street corners. Professor Ernesto Seman. The government takes control of the national media, radio and television. It bans unions and political parties.

That massive shutdown and violent shutdown of political life, that repression starts right away, in the first hours of the dictatorship. That it's going to be perfected over time, that you can see the blueprint at that time. Just before 10am, there's another announcement on national radio. The Junta will take up residence in the Edificio Libertador, the imposing rectangular seat of the Ministry of Defense, just down the slope from the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada. An underground tunnel connects the two buildings. The Junta puts out 31 decrees in its first day in power. Among them, the death penalty is reinstated for anyone who seriously injures or

kills military personnel, and war councils are set up across the country. Judges are dismissed from the Supreme Court, and regional tribunals are suspended. Congress is dissolved and replaced by a legislative council, which will approve the junta's diktats without debate. The governorships of the provinces and major cities are all shifted into the hands of officials from the three branches of the armed forces. The only real civilian participation in politics is at municipal level, where loyalists to the junta are installed.

They give no time frame for a return to civilian rule. Professor Edward Brodny. There's actually a lot of pressure from the armed forces, within the armed forces, for a coup before March of 1976. There are those who are advocating as early as mid-late 1975 that the military needs to seize power, that the situation is out of control, that this is when they should intervene. Bedella kind of holds them all in check. He does not want to until, in his mind, the people are ready for this. He wants to make sure that when they do take over, and he's not pretending that that's not going to happen,

that they do so with some veneer of legitimacy or popular support or whatever you want to call it. And in that, he is successful. When the coup actually does happen in March, on March 24, 1976, there are stories of opposition, especially among Peronist unions, people gathering guns together to go out in the street and oppose the military, people organizing marches, people preparing to fight against this coup. But in the end,

that doesn't really happen. Again, this has been a long time coming. The situation in Argentina is very bad, politically, economically, socially. Generally speaking, the coup is greeted with cautious optimism. After enduring the bleakest, bloodiest years of their lives under Isabelita's presidency, Argentines are hopeful that the terror will come to an end. presidency. Argentines are hopeful that the terror will come to an end. Even labor unions and workers who had grown tired of inflationary problems, of the violence, of the political instability, things that I've found in the archive that are fascinating are statements published by trade unions basically saying, welcome, this is what we needed, right?

You can count on us to support this national reorganization project. An important part of this apparent consensus around the coup is that Argentina had lived through many, many coups by this point. The 20th century had been defined by military intervention since 1930. After decades of turmoil, corruption and violence, the extremity of the junta's early actions quite simply doesn't seem so extreme. And so on March 29, 1976, General Videla is installed as Argentina's de facto president. The ceremony lasts just 21 minutes.

Videla isn't comfortable in the limelight. Alicia Hartridge, his wife, says that the situation in Argentina remains too serious for idle self-congratulation. For now, the couple and their children will live at the Campo de Mascio military base, rather than at the traditional presidential residence. Alicia will not countenance a move there until the remains of both Juan Perón and his second wife, Evita, have been evicted from the crypt. Like her husband, she despises what Peronism has done to the country. Fidelio is 51 years old, tall and gaunt,

with a trademark scrubby moustache and sunken eyes. He's awkward and shifty, hardly the typical image of a dictator. Over the past three decades, while Argentina lurched between extremes, he has risen through the military ranks. The army represents order, strength, discipline, everything his country desperately lacks. It's left Fidelio with a deep, unshakable belief that the armed forces must be the guarantors of security. But he will have to work to get his message out there, to establish his authority.

Until recently, there was little known about him publicly. So people knew about him, and mostly towards the last two months or so, his name is of course mentioned as a possible face of the coming military regime. But I don't think more than that. A lot of things have to do with his personality or lack of. But also, and this is not a compliment for him, but I think that he embraced this idea of discipline and social order at any cost. Fidelio might not be a household name, but he moves quickly to establish a presence. He begins touring Argentina, always with the same message,

that democracy will be restored as soon as subversion is crushed. He completes five nationwide circuits in 1976 alone. Journalist Robert Cox arrived in Argentina in 1955, and by the time of Videla's coup, had become the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald newspaper. To begin with, Videla was heralded as La Pantera Rosa, the Pink Panther. He was a nice, charming character from a cartoon who was funny and laughable and delightful, and he had this funny mustache. Before that, before he came into the presidency, he was looked upon as the upright general, the man with a clean record, so much they called him Mr. Clean, which was a product at that time, too.

It's a disinfectant. And that's how he was looked upon, not in any way a menacing character. Just a few days after the coup, the United States throws its diplomatic weight behind Videla's junta, recognizing it as the rightful government of Argentina. With Cold War tensions ratcheting up, the White House regards Videla as a steadying anti-communist force, similar to General Augusto Pinochet next door in Chile. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sends a brief secret cable to Buenos Aires. Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed, it reads. The quicker you succeed,

the better. The human rights problem is a growing one. We want a stable situation. We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. Three weeks after the coup, the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires sends a cable back to Washington, offering insights on the three leaders of the newly established junta. All are moderates and enjoy the respect of their subordinates. They will have to keep a close eye on hardliners within the ranks, however, and have to walk a thin line between control and repression in their attempts to deal with Argentina's myriad problems. The note concludes that General Videla, General Agosti and Admiral Massera will probably work well together, as they draw on their long-term professional association and personal friendship.

Author Marguerite Feitlowitz I think it's a mistake to focus just on Videla. He's not Pinochet. He's one among this sort of military mosaic, if you will. So in the first Punta, you have these three characters. And Massera is actually, he becomes the grand orator of the process. And so I think it's really important that they have this stereophonic kind of rhetoric. And they each play off of the other. kind of rhetoric, and they each play off of the other. So where you have Videla at first, who is severe and calm and taking over more in sorrow than in triumph. And then you have Massera.

He always considered himself very literary and very intellectual. His speeches are very high-flown and hallucinatory and messianic and quite brilliant rhetorically. Admiral Emilio Macera is ferociously ambitious. He enrolled in Argentina's naval school in 1942 and graduated as a midshipman four years later. In late 1973, he was handpicked by President Juan Perón to be commander-in-chief of the Navy. Handsome and charismatic, Macero does not shirk the limelight. He has undeniable ambitions to be Argentina's savior.

But, contrary to that American diplomatic cable, he and Videla rarely see eye to eye. And he's made his fair share of enemies elsewhere in the armed forces too. Massera's private life is the subject of intense, albeit hushed, gossip. He's a member of a far-right Italian Masonic sect called Propaganda Due, and is known to engage in numerous extramarital romances with Argentine and foreign actresses. Now, he was evil. I use that word rarely, and my wife told me you should never use it ever.

But I use it for Messer. He was really evil. To give you an example, he invited the husband of a woman that he was particularly interested in at that time out on a boating incident and had him drowned. And he would be like that all the time. General Ramon Agosti, Hunter Huncho No. 3, is a very different figure. He and Videla are lifelong friends.

They grew up together. As youths they would hang around the pool at the same country club. Agosti has a chequered past as a coup monger and is an avid anti-Peronist. Caught between Videla's prominence as de facto president and Macero's force of personality, Agosti often finds himself playing a supporting role, though he holds the important responsibility of acting as mediator. spectatorship. They each had their note, depending on what your orientation was, depending on where you were. One might be more in your ear than others, but the effect was constant. The rhetoric was constant. They were on the radio all the time. They were on TV. They controlled the newspapers and they did some very clever things. They would read out military memoranda to the population to prove that the military is serving you.

We are your ultimate moral reserve. We are serving you. General Videla now busies himself laying out the detail of his self-described national reorganization process. It will be a messianic crusade to reorder Argentina in line with Western Christian values, and the bloodiest campaign of wanton slaughter and state terror perpetrated by any of South America's 20th century dictatorships. Each morning, he arrives at the Casa Rosada at 8am and installs himself in his office beneath a framed portrait of his father on horseback, where he reads La Prensa, a right-wing daily newspaper. Come mid-morning, he meets with the head of the SIDE, the State Intelligence Service, and at 1pm eats his lunch alone. and at 1pm eats his lunch alone. The afternoons are spent signing presidential decrees amid clouds of cigarette smoke. Isabel Perón's disastrous tenure has burdened Argentina

with foreign debt of $9.7 billion. Videla puts the economy in the hands of a law professor called José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz. I don't know anything about economics, Videla tells him. Martínez de Hoz is one of just two civilians in Videla's cabinet. He comes from one of Argentina's largest landowning families. Joe, as he's known, studied at the University of Oxford, and enjoys the personal friendship of financier David Rockefeller, no less, who facilitates loans of nearly one billion dollars

from Chase Manhattan Bank and the IMF. Above all, Martinez de Os abhors Peronism. With politics suspended and unions and striking prohibited, he sets about reversing the policies of his predecessors. He wants to undo the recent populist redistribution in favor of a free market economy. to undo the recent populist redistribution in favour of a free market economy. He frees exports and imports by abolishing prohibitions, quotas and tariffs, and eliminates all price controls. The black market, which Argentines had come to rely on under Isabelita, all but disappears. Everything Videla is doing is based on the premise of rooting out subversive elements.

Argentina is historically a Western Christian country, he says. One becomes a terrorist not only by killing with a weapon or planting a bomb, but also by encouraging others through ideas that go against our Western and Christian civilization. And so, the disappearances begin. Sometimes it was theatrical. Sometimes people were taken in dead of night. As many said, everyone knew someone who has disappeared. Every family knew of someone who has disappeared. Every family knew of someone who has disappeared.

Within days of the coup, bodies were washing up. The Agnus Diplomo, the years of lead, have begun. Task forces in unmarked cars, usually green Ford Falcons, begin snatching workers, unionists, students, and political activists from their homes or places of work. The junta's net soon widens to include lawyers and journalists with suspected ties to radical groups. Suspicion alone is enough to be taken.

Some of those target are members of guerrilla organizations. The majority are not. The AAA and other right-wing paramilitary groups are officially disbanded, but many of their members are absorbed into death squads and continue to work alongside government forces. Fidela has no time for the slow wheels of justice. Very few of the supposed subversives have charges brought against them. Instead, they find themselves piled into makeshift detention and torture centres.

Within a month, Videla's terror network has already established 40 facilities. In a month, Videla's terror network has already established 40 facilities. In two years, more than 350 are set up to receive the thousands of disappeared. And in total, there are thought to have been approximately 800 secret detention centers around Argentina. So these are in military installations, they're in hospitals, they're in private corporations, they're in some private houses, they're in little neighborhood police stations, they're in schools, they're all over the place. Detainees are stripped naked, beaten and submitted to the most depraved torture. They're kept alone and upright in tall cells, too narrow to lay down in, called tubes. Most are hooded and blindfolded for days on end,

disappeared in darkness. Prisoners are told by their torturers, in here we are gods. It's October the 1st, 1976, a perfect spring afternoon in Buenos Aires. To the north of the city centre is the Navy Mechanical School, or ESMA. There's a large white building surrounded by manicured lawns and eucalyptus groves. A young cadet steps out between the colonnades. Warmed by the spring sunshine, he walks between dormitories and mess buildings,

past a small chapel and an infirmary, making his way over to the sports ground at the back of the complex. He arrives at a narrow pedestrian bridge that leads over a busy highway. Here, an officer is standing in his path, rifle slung over one shoulder. The pitches are closed today, he says sternly. We're having a barbecue. Columns of yellow-brown smoke rise behind him. The fires have already been burning for more than two days, giving off a sickly, acrid smell. The cadet understands immediately. They've got to get rid of the body somehow

to ensure the disappeared stay just that. The ESMA becomes known as the Argentine Auschwitz. There the navy kidnap, torture and disappear around 5,000 men and women. kidnap, torture and disappear around 5,000 men and women. More than 30 children are estimated to have been born in the camp's makeshift maternity ward. They are illegally adopted, often by military personnel. Their mothers are disposed of after receiving lethal injections. We will fight not only to the death, but beyond death, declares Admiral Macera, who oversees the Esmer camp.

Across town, in the Campo de Mascio military base, close to where the Videla family have been living, 4,000 prisoners arrive across two years. Only 94 survive. And with the country divided into zones under military control, the repression spreads far beyond the capital. The dictatorship was experienced very differently depending on where you lived in the country, right? And in the far hinterlands,

in the province of Corrientes, among subsistence tobacco farmers, there the repression was absolutely medieval, with workers being macheted in the fields, etc., etc. Another man by the name of Juan Jose Sorenille, also a campesino, farmer, he saw two girls dropped from an airplane. And he said, they looked like they were twins, had long, blondish-reddish hair. One was wearing white sneakers. One had one red sneaker. And he said, I was out walking and they dropped from the sky. He said, I was working my fields.

He said, they dropped from the sky. And he said, and then I was told I had to leave and they were buried in a mass grave. And he said, when I came back, because he said I had animals, my animals would fall into these mass graves because they were shallow. They were a menace for my animals.

And he said, I would see all these bones, all these bodies. With the bloody repression in full swing across the land, General Videla makes his first official foreign visit. In October 1976, he travels to Bolivia to meet Hugo Bansa, a fellow military dictator, to discuss the country's role in a sinister international spy network. It's known as Operation or Plan Condor.

Professor Fran Le Sa. With the passing of time, we see military coups unfolding in Bolivia in 1971, Uruguay and Chile in 1973, and then Argentina in 1976, all of these military regimes realized that they had a common objective, which was being able to silence activists of interest once they were no longer in their national territories. Plan Condor was a secret and transnational network formally set up in a meeting held in Santiago in Chile in late November 1975, where they agreed to effectively coordinate their actions

so that they could more efficiently go after exiles of interest. These military coups across South America have displaced thousands of people. Until General Videla's own takeover in 1976, Argentina had been the one remaining refuge for exiles from neighboring countries As many as 500,000 people have fled persecution and settled in the country A small number of these have been involved in guerrilla activities in their home countries This gives Videla a powerful bargaining tool Indeed, when he meets with General Banser in Bolivia he is able to offer

him an illustrious prisoner, the head of a Bolivian guerrilla cell who had taken refuge in Buenos Aires. In mid-1976, Brazil also joins Operation Condor, and by early 1978, we also have Peru and Ecuador become formally members. And so we have a secret and encrypted communication system being set up called Condortel, which enables the Condor member states to communicate quickly with each other to share information. to share information. The secret headquarters of the operation, known as Condoreje, are located in a police building at number 2457 Billinghurst Street, in one of Buenos Aires' wealthiest neighborhoods.

From there, communications are monitored and information shared, so that targets can be picked off. Enemies of the participating dictatorships are hunted down across South America, but more than 70% of Operation Condor's crimes are committed on Argentine soil. In 1976, Sara Mendes had settled in Argentina having fled her native Uruguay On July the 13th that year she is at home in Buenos Aires when there's a knock at the door A large number of heavily armed plainclothes officers

arrive at my house and violently break down the door They spread throughout the house and there's one who's in charge. The first thing we realized was that we weren't going to get out of this alive. 20 days earlier I'd had my son, Simon. It was a moment of great upheaval, fear and insecurity. Simon was born on June 22nd, right on his due date. Sara is kidnapped and taken to Automotores Oleti, the secret detention centre in Buenos Aires

where we opened the previous episode. It serves as an interrogation facility for foreign detainees. She leaves behind her three-week-old son, Simon, fast asleep in a cradle. When we arrived at Orleti, of course we knew nothing about it. We were handcuffed and blindfolded and had nylon bags, which nearly suffocated us, put over our heads in the car that took us there. We didn't eat the whole time, they never let us. Sometimes they took us to the toilet,

but other times we had to do our business right there, where we were tied up. The torture started with the person being stripped naked, man or woman, they made no distinction. Your body had been placed in the hands of your torturer. It was an orgy of horror, because they would sing in Orletti, and there would be music playing constantly, with the radio turned up to drown out the screams of the victims, and the shouts of the torturers added to the clamour. They were clearly drunk or on drugs or something, because they seemed to be putting on a kind of show.

They'd turn on the engines of the old cars too. It was unbearable. Not just the noise, but the smell of the fumes from the engines too. Then they would take one of us and hang us upside down in a tank of water they had for the interrogations, until the victims stopped moving. We saw it all. They never hid any of it,

because they never intended for any of us to live to tell the tale. The national reorganization process's war in Argentina isn't just an armed one. It's ideological and cultural too. Public gatherings are prohibited. Mirroring the image of the leader, men are made to wear their hair short. He's very conservative. He's very Catholic.

He has ambitions about the sort of reorganization of Argentina that I think go far beyond just the re-imposition of order under the military. In terms of how it views its project, what it hopes to accomplish, it's a much bigger task than previous military dictatorships have taken on. There is a very traditionalist, moral, Catholic underpinning to this dictatorship. The institutional church, at least initially, is supportive of the coup,

supportive of the dictatorial project, and the initially, is supportive of the coup, supportive of the dictatorial project, and the military envisions what they're doing as essentially re-founding Argentina. The process of national reorganization was supposed to put Argentina back on that virtuous path. It was supposed to undo all of the bad, all of the missteps, the errors, the mistakes that have characterized the previous 60, 70 years, and restore Argentina to its rightful place as a leader in the world, in the Americas, and as a defender of traditional Western conservative ideas. Literature, films, and music are censored.

Some books are taken out of circulation altogether or burned in great infernos. Artists are detained and disappeared. Children's fiction doesn't escape the censor's scalpel either. One work is banned by a junta decree because it depicts a strike among the zoo animals. Almost every day, children sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of flickering television sets suddenly find Little House on the Prairie interrupted by General Videla, peering down at them through thick spectacles with another important announcement. If they ask inconvenient questions in class about Peronism or the disappeared,

teachers take them aside and warn them that these are not subjects to be discussed. While Videla expresses his wish to embrace Western values, he very much picks and chooses which of those values are allowed. They would bring in a lot of foreign films, right, to prove there's no censorship here, except that all the foreign films, you know, they would cut out certain things. So you would see a film all but 28 minutes

or all but 17 minutes. The same thing, they would bring in books of foreign writers, even as they were disappearing their own writers. So you could look at the newspapers and say, well, they're just reviewing the new book by John Barth. No problem here. And yet that was a facade. It was a facade. You talk about cultural repression. This is an era in which sex becomes incredibly taboo. There's censorship of sexual material. Drug laws are enforced in new ways and with far more severe penalties. Music is controlled.

Censorship of the media becomes a far more robust aspect of everyday life. And so it is a cultural project as much as it is a political and economic project. The Ministry of Education puts in place a program called Operativo Claridad, Operation Clarity. A surveillance squad set up within the ministry, referred to as Human Resources, is tasked with weeding out Marxist aggression. Security agents spy on schoolteachers and pupils and build blacklists. Hundreds of teachers are dismissed and more than 50 are disappeared. Thousands more flee. In universities, some courses are banned and others have intakes suspended.

Thousands of lecturers and students are exiled or murdered. Meanwhile, Videla's justification for his anti-subversion crusade remains intact. The guerrillas have been all but eradicated by his dirty war, but sporadic attacks do continue. Throughout 1976, 17 senior military officials are killed by left-wing groups. In October, a bomb nearly kills Videla himself at a military parade in Campo de Mascio. It leaves a gaping hole in the seating area, exactly where he'd been moments before, having only wandered fifty yards from the spot. Having survived the assassination attempt, Videla goes from strength to strength.

Just a few days later, on October the 20th, he reaches the highest rank the army can bestow upon him, Lieutenant General. Around this time, Robert Cox was invited to meet Fidele at the Casa Rosada. First time I met him was when Fidele and the people around him were trying to paint a picture of a moderate, which the United States went along with somewhat. And I got an invitation to meet him with two other journalists. And he received us, not in the main presidential office, which is very impressive, but in a little room on the side. He was dressed like somebody was going to go to the golf club in Swedes.

And he was very pleasant, very edgy. I found him a very nervous man, incredibly nervous. I said, they're still rolling around and picking up people, and people are disappearing still. What are you going to do about it? And he got furious. And then he edged up. There was another cartoon character he reminded of, was a rabbit who used to stamp his foot. And that's how he reminded me at that time.

By the end of 1976, after less than a year in power, the indiscriminate killing is finally landing Videla in hot water. U.S. President Gerald Ford has continued to stand behind the general, but reports of human rights abuses are flooding the foreign media, and have even been debated in the U.S. Congress. in the US Congress. An Amnesty International delegation visits Argentina in November 1976, but finds its work frustrated by uncooperative soldiers. They are only permitted to visit one official prison.

They do not get access to any of the detention centres. Yet, its report, when it's finally published in March the following year, is damning. It says that at least 15,000 people have already been disappeared. By then, another seismic change has taken place. In January 1977, President Jimmy Carter's Democratic administration moves into the White House marking an immediate change in policy. The following month, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance announces that military aid to Argentina will be slashed explicitly citing human rights violations.

He also presents Videla with a list the names of 7,500 disappeared people, demanding evidence of their whereabouts or legal proceedings. Congress then passes an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, prohibiting all military sales, aid, loans or training to Argentina. loans or training to Argentina. It's Saturday, April 30th, 1977. We're back in the Plaza de Macho, the open square in front of the Casa Rosada. The autumn breeze is starting to bite as the offices around the square empty

and people make their way home hurriedly heads down. Fourteen women are huddled around the squat pyramid in the center of the square speaking in whispers. They cast nervous glances around them. Most don't know each other personally.

They refer to one another by surname only. But they all have one thing in common. Their son or daughter has vanished, and they have no idea what has happened to them. A soldier takes a pace towards the group and barks at them to keep moving. They're frightened. They're not activists. There's no plan. They know that congregations of more than two people are forbidden by the dictatorship. And so, arm in arm, in pairs, they begin walking around the pyramid in the center of the plaza. One pulls a white handkerchief from her breast pocket and ties it loosely around her head to cover her hair. The others follow suit.

They don't know it, but their silent protest will begin to resonate. The women agree to meet every Thursday to do the same thing. They nominate one woman from the original 14, Asukena Viseflor, as their leader. They put in an official request to meet with President Videla to demand information on their children. Word of the protest spreads. So many others are missing relatives. To recognize one another, they start wearing metal nails in their lapels. Soon there are 60 or 70 women walking silent laps of the statue on Thursday afternoons.

The junta takes to calling them las locas, the mad women. Each week after their protest, they go into the lobby of the Casa Rosada to see if they've had a response from Videla. Each week, nothing. Then, one winter's night, two months after their

first protest, there's news. On July the 11th, General Albano Aguindohoy, Videla's interior minister, will see Vichaflor and two others. But when they meet him, he is relaxed and feigns surprise. Grinning, Aguindohoy tells the three women that there's no such thing as disappeared people.

They'd be better off checking the official police registers. Enraged, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, as they've become known, vow never to leave the square until all of the women have answers. Meanwhile, General Videla is increasingly preoccupied with the international image of his regime. On September 5, 1977, he travels to the United States to take part in the signing of the Panama Canal Agreement. He holds meetings with President Jimmy Carter, who expresses grave concerns over human rights violations. who expresses grave concerns over human rights violations.

Videla, dressed in a dark alpaca wool suit and striped tie, grins and promises Carter that he will look into the alleged abuses. He reiterates for the first time on the international stage that he is fighting a dirty war, but a necessary one. So Videla, for example, in Washington, on American TV, asked about this, said, there are no missing persons in Argentina. There are no concentration camps in Argentina. This is an anti-Argentine campaign. This is madness.

This is a myth that needs to be dispelled. Despite receiving a grilling from his hosts, Argentina's dictator manages to afford himself some downtime while in the U.S. He meets with now-former Secretary of State Kissinger while his wife shops for clothes in Manhattan. He buys his grandson a small motorized bike and, much to the horror of his AIDS,

gives it a quick test ride across the carpets of the Waldorf Astoria. When Videla and Alicia Hartridge land back at El Palomar airfield on September 11th, measures are taken to hide their bounty from the journalists awaiting them on the tarmac. Not that this is particularly necessary. Back home, he enjoys a much easier ride in the press than he does overseas. The problem with dictatorships in regard to the press is that it makes them lazy because they know that if they step out of line, they're in trouble. So they

become so cautious. When I arrived there, the first thing that I did, I covered a press conference, and I was surprised that nobody took notes. The reason they didn't take notes was that they were waiting for the gazetteja, the handout, which was handed out at the end, not before, because if they handed it out before, they'd all leave. Unless they provided sandwiches, they would stay for the sandwiches,

and some of those, I mean, they hardly rewrote them. They just put them in because that's what they were used to doing. With the national press under the control of the dictatorship, Robert Cox and his colleagues at the Buenos Aires Herald are receiving calls to its marriages and deaths section. A pattern emerges. calls to its marriages and deaths section. A pattern emerges. Many of the callers cannot give a date of death. They simply do not know where their relatives are. One man tells a particularly harrowing story.

He says the police arrived unexpectedly at his house in the middle of the night, looking for his son. Initially, his son was happy to cooperate. And they said, oh, we have some questions, and they took it quite normally, and so he left with them, and then the next thing they knew, they heard that his body had been found. They held a funeral, and when they held the funeral, a column of Ford Falcons came by throwing out leaflets which said that justice had been done to him because he had betrayed the Montaneros, that he's a former Montanero who betrayed the Montaneros and they killed

him for that reason. Totally untrue. Nobody believed it. Finally, we had just a mass of people coming. It was like a doctor's office. One time we had people lining up outside just to tell us, just to tell us. Meanwhile, the US is keeping

its own records. At the embassy in Buenos Aires, political officer Franklin Tex Harris sets about interviewing survivors and mapping the secret detention centres as best he can. He keeps his own daily count of the disappeared, which is growing all the time.

Other things were happening at the same time. A wonderful man called Tex Harris put together a list of over 10,000 names, opened his office to the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, said, come and tell me all about it. That was the period when, under Jimmy Carter, the US had a policy of human rights which had an enormous effect and definitely saved lots of lives because they would have gone on. But even as the small acts of resistance grow, Videla's strangled hold on Argentina remains tight. The mothers

of the Plaza de Mayo are about to be given a terrible reminder of who is really in charge. It's December 20th, 1977. A stub-nosed transport plane belonging to the Argentine Navy climbs out from a military airfield in Buenos Aires. It arcs out over the river plate towards the Atlantic Ocean. The horizon is brushed with an indigo haze which blends with the pinks and golds of the sunset behind it A beautiful summer's evening In the body of the Skyvan SC-7

Six limp bodies lull at the movement of the aircraft Stupefied by an injection of tranquiliser Administered by Gadi Esma They are barely conscious Their feet bound tightly stupefied by an injection of tranquilizer administered back at the ESMA. They are barely conscious, their feet bound tightly. Videla knows three of the prisoners on board personally. Two are French nuns, named Alice Dormand and Léonie Duquet, who previously happened to have cared for the president's sickly son Alejandro at a convent.

But this hasn't brought them any favor. Right now they're almost unrecognizable. So badly have they been beaten. The two sisters have been punished because they have links to a dissident group of women who have been causing the general a headache. Next to them on the plane is Asukena Vichaflor, one of the original mothers of the Placida Marshal. After a few minutes, the pilot glances down at his radar to see that they're several miles out over the wide mouth of the river plate.

This is far enough. He carefully lifts the cover over a switch and presses down hard on the button. A hatch at the back opens, and the six bodies fall silently from the aircraft. The plane banks away to return to the airfield The pilot loses sight of the bodies before they hit the water As the murders and disappearances continue Videla publishes a document entitled A National Project for the New Republic As his views and disappearances continue, Videla publishes a document entitled A National Project for the New Republic.

One figure stands out. He estimates that the regime will rule Argentina for another 12 to 15 years. So much for a swift return to democracy. But with international ranker growing, Videla knows he must alter perceptions of his country and his rule. What he really needs is some effective PR. Fortunately for him, he has the perfect opportunity coming just around the corner. The 1978 FIFA World Cup.

That's next time, in part three of the Videla story.