Argentina: Self-Amnesty

A military pardon

It was a haunting reminder to a government all too anxious to forget. On walls, trees and newspaper kiosks around Buenos Aires last week, 30,000 painted human silhouettes were pasted up; each bore the name and age of one of the more than 6,000 civilians who disappeared during the 1970s, apparently at the hands of the ruthless military. Then the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the group that has tenaciously been protesting those disappearances for six years, launched a special 24-hour march of resistance. As onlookers applauded, 5,000 protesters marched amid a sea of waving banners, crying, "We want them back!" Even when youths insulted and spat on police, the officials did not strike back. But on the following day the three-man military junta exacted its revenge: a 15-point Law of National Pacification, in which the military sought to erase forever the embarrassing memory of its actions.

Under the new law, the junta nullified all penal actions against both dissidents and the military who brutally suppressed them in Argentina's infamous "dirty war." The dissidents, however, have already been punished with a vengeance: most of them vanished during the dirty war. In effect, the military was absolving itself of its earlier atrocities. It even declared that anyone associated with those crimes could never in the future be "interrogated, investigated, cited or confronted." The umbrella law also applies to those who have already been convicted, including some 200 members of the armed forces.

The so-called pacification law was the third attempt by the military to impose national amnesia. Last November it disingenuously urged Argentines to show "greatness of spirit" so as to "attain national unity." Translation: the next civilian government should refrain from investigating military crimes. That clumsy ploy was ridiculed into oblivion. Last April the junta tried again, publishing a "final document" in which it simply declared that those who disappeared were legally and administratively dead. Explaining that any "excesses" committed by the government were purely in the line of duty, the government did not bother even to account for individual cases. Again, the maneuver provoked national and international outrage.

But with national elections scheduled for Oct. 30, the junta is apparently becoming more desperate. The law has been constructed so that the courts cannot question its provisions and an incoming civilian government cannot reverse the blanket amnesty it grants. Nonetheless, most election candidates rejected the law. Italo Luder of the Peronists and Raul Alfonsin of the Radicals confidently promised to repeal it, if elected. Said Argentine Novelist Ernesto Sabato: "I think that this is the only case in the history of international law in which the guilty dictate a law exonerating themselves."

Whatever the outcome, the struggle is sure to continue. As the military strives to erase the past, the public seems determined neither to forgive nor to forget.