Martín Balza is 91 years old, his voice is firm and his memory intact. He was head of the Argentine Army throughout the nineties, fought in the Malvinas and served as a military observer in the Middle East in 1970. But if his name was recorded in history it was for something he did one night in April 1995: sit in front of Bernardo Neustadt’s cameras, with forty points of witness rating, and pronounce the first public self-criticism of the Army—and the Armed Forces—for the crimes committed during the dictatorship.
50 years after the coup of March 24, 1976, Balza answers the phone from Buenos Aires. In a long conversation, crossed by memory, the retired general makes three convictions clear: that What happened during the Process was not a war; that the vast majority of the Army did not participate in the clandestine repression; and that the excuses that those who claim the dictatorship still repeat are “a mockery of the Argentine people”.
Find out by dropper
Balza was not in Argentina when the coup occurred. From the end of 1975 until February 1978 he studied at the Center for Higher Military Studies of Peru (Lima). Although the overthrow of Isabel Perón was, he says, “the most heralded coup in Argentine history”, distance kept him away. He remembers that an embassy official told him not only the date but also the name of the future Minister of Economy, Martínez de Hoz, and added: “When I leave the ministry, the country is going to be a disaster.”
Back in the country, his destinations were academic and operational: mobilization for the conflict with Chile, the unit command with which he went to the Malvinas. None had territorial responsibility in the so-called “fight against subversion.” What he learned about the atrocities, he assures, he learned like the rest of society: in dribs and drabs.
“Those who were affected by the repression did not reach 15% of the Army’s troops. They acted clandestinely, hooded. The rest acted as a soldier should act. But very few did much damage”synthesizes.
Neither war, nor obedience, nor salvation
There are three arguments that Balza dismantles with the obstinacy of a gunner every time he hears them: that there was a war, that orders from political power were carried out and that the coup was carried out to save Western and Christian civilization. “There are three falsehoods,” he shoots.
Regarding the first, his argument is technical and experiential. The word “war” was prohibited in all documents of the Process; the official term was “fight.” The difference is not semantic: the war has codes—the Geneva Convention and International Humanitarian Law—that in the Malvinas both sides respected. “Here the only war of the last century was the Malvinas,” he remarks, and poses a devastating logical trap: “If we accept that there was war, war crimes were committed. And if there was no war, common crimes. In any case, there were crimes”.
Regarding due obedience, Balza points out that the Executive Branch (decree 2772/1975) ordered “annihilating the actions of subversive elements” under the command of the president. To annihilate, he explains, means to break the opponent’s ability to fight, taking away the hope of victory. “In the Malvinas we were totally annihilated. And I’m talking to you on the phone,” he says ironically. Besides: “They threw out the constitutional government, and they are going to make me believe that they later carried out orders from María Estela Martínez de Perón. It is making fun of the Argentine people”.
And regarding the third argument, he quotes General Genaro Díaz Bessone himself, one of the ideologues of the coup, who recognized that “the coup was not given to combat subversion, but to change a political economic system”. Subversion, Balza specifies, was already diminished in 1976. “There were perhaps 2,500 men between ERP and Montoneros. The security forces and the Armed Forces totaled 300,000. What war?”
The night that broke the silence
The story of how the 1995 message was created has the cadence of a military operation: methodical, secret, resolved in hours. Balza had been sowing his ideas since he took over as head of the Army in November 1991. At each graduation of officers and corporals, at each ceremony, he said a little more. But no one recorded it.
On Tuesday, April 25, 1995, he read in La Razón a title that shocked him: “Inexplicable silence of the Army”, reiterating complaints of clandestine burials in Campo de Mayo. He took out of his safe some sheets of strong ideas that he had been preparing, summoned four or five collaborators and told them: “Look at this, prepare a message for me. I’m going to work on mine alone.” Within an hour, the text was ready.
His press chief got him a spot on the Neustadt program, the one with the highest political rating in the country. They offered him three or four minutes; He ended up speaking eight or ten. Nobody knew the content: neither Menem, nor Defense Minister Oscar Camilión, nor Neustadt himself. He notified Camilión due to institutional ethics, but did not show him the text.
He informed his corps commanders and the heads of the other forces of his going to the TV program. When he finished reading the message in front of the cameras, The silence in the studio was total.. Neustadt asked him two questions. The first: “Did the president know what you just said?” The answer: “No one knew him.”
“I felt enormous tranquility,” he remembers about that night. “A response out of respect not only for society but for my subordinates who had nothing to do with it: worthy generals, officers and non-commissioned officers. These men, and many others, had been suffering for years for something they did not do.”
Traitor to the country
The response from the sectors linked to the Process did not take long to arrive, and it was brutal for him and his family. Balza lists the threats with the same precision with which he describes an operation: a fake bomb thrown on the balcony of his apartment in Barrio Norte with a sign that said “The next one is serious”, dozens of telephone threats, including that of a classmate – today sentenced to two life imprisonments – who called one of his sons and told him: “Your father is a traitor. We are going to kill you and your three brothers, not your parents so that they suffer more.”and another sent him a letter urging him to commit suicide. He pauses for a long time before continuing.
From the active Army, and from many retired, he received explicit support. Except for the retired supporters of the Process protected by Menem’s pardons, who formed resistance organizations. “They said they saved the country from communism. Communism was ended by Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa, a Polish trade unionist. These criminals did not finish it either here or in the world“.
Balza also gets irritated when he hears the Argentine trials compared to Nuremberg. “In Nuremberg the winning powers judged with laws, judges and prosecutors that they put in place,” he distinguishes. “Here Argentines were tried, in Argentina, with Argentine laws and with Argentine judges and prosecutors. President Alfonsín was very brave. And if we do not respect justice, we will have nothing.”
fifty years later
Balza gets sad when she thinks about the present. It pains him that soldiers trained entirely in democracy continue to be included under the nickname “milicos.” Let journalists and politicians repeat that there was a war. And that 50 years after the coup, society continues, in his words, “anchored in a past from which she cannot escape”.
“What have we Argentines learned?” he asks. He worries that the arguments will be transferred intact from generation to generation, from grandfather to son, from son to grandson, without anyone stopping to review them. Whoever is fifty years old today was not born when the coup occurred, but he repeats the same slogans. “I give an interpretation of what I experienced and what I studied. I may be wrong and I respect all other opinions. But I appreciate that obviously we have not learned enough in these fifty years“.
“I swore to defend the National Constitution. I did not swear to defend either Videla, Galtieri, or Viola,” he says, as if he needed to repeat it once again. And he finishes, almost without air: “If Argentine society believes that these were the saviors of the country, a monument will have to be erected in an important place. I don’t agree with it. I think neither does our society.”.
Image gallery
