Walter Benjamin in his thesis ‘On the concept of history’ he wrote: “The past can only be retained as an image that flashes once and for all at the moment of its knowability”. In other words, we can never see how it was, because whenever we return to it, it will be with today’s eyes.
My “Trial Diary” is one of the many that live in the memory of different protagonists of that monumental work that Editorial Perfil is proud to have published. Like Benjamin’s lightning, I have some flashes in my memory.
1938
Memory to Ernest Cardinalthe cleric who was Minister of Culture in the first Sandinista government, in the Nicaragua from 1983. The Sandinistas still carried their rifles in their hands and fought with the “contras” – “counterrevolutionaries” – at that time financed by the United States. Years later this sparked the “Iran-Contra scandal” (the United States sold black weapons to Iran, with that money to finance the Nicaraguan “contras” without informing Congress) that forced President Ronald Reagan to apologize on national television, lowering his approval from 67% to 46%. For Ernesto Cardenal, the Argentine dictatorship was not a distant subject. The previous year Galtieri had been encouraged to carry out the Falklands War mistakenly believing that the United States would not align with England, in return for favors to the Argentine military who trained the Nicaraguan “contras”.
In this Cold War contextin the midst of my own exile after my arrest was ordered for treason against the fatherland after the Malvinas War, in a report that I made in Managua in 1983, with Argentina still governed by the dictatorship in its final year and with Alfonsín already a candidate for president for radicalism; Ernesto Cardenal told me: “You will never be able to judge the military as proposed by Alfonsin, in Nuremberg The Nazis could be judged because there was an army that defeated and disarmed them. Who has the weapons in Argentina? The same soldiers that Alfonsín plans to prosecute. He is wrong, it will be impossible.”
1984
I remember the dear Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú –godmother of the magazine NOTICIAS and protagonist of all its launch campaigns, almost a decade later– in January 1984, sitting alone in one of the rooms where the Conadep (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), which Alfonsín had created five days after taking office and whose function was to investigate and organize the evidence that the State would present in the Trial, only 280 days later. I remember Magdalena’s frightened face when we took the first repentant from the School of Navy Mechanics, ESMAthe end of the Marina, Raul David Villarino, whose testimony was several times on the cover of the magazine “La Semana”, predecessor of this NOTICIAS. His first statement was entitled: “I kidnapped, killed and tortured in the Army Mechanics School”. Villarino’s testimony was the first to describe what he called “flights without a door,” which later became known as “flights of death.” I had just returned to Argentina after exile, which added to the closure suffered by “La Semana”, at the end of 1982, gave it a lot of visibility as the most well-known medium for its criticism of the dictatorship, along with the magazine “Humor”. In fact, the closure of 1982 was due to the publication of the first cover story about the captain of Fragata, Alfredo Astiz, at that time unknown to almost everyone but not to the aforementioned Villarino, who should therefore have chosen to come and tell us his story.
1985
I remember the fear of Alfonsín that a future military coup would erase the evidence that was produced in the Trial of the Military boards. For this reason, he had a videotape copy of all the testimonies recorded to send it to Norway – a country that delivers the Nobel Peace Prize and it is a world model of peace diplomacy, resolving multiple international conflicts–– so that a complete testimony of that Judgment remains. The videos were saved together with the original text of the constitution of norway, in a fire or atomic bomb proof room. Since there were no social networks, no internet, no smartphones, no digital cameras, all testimony was analog, on tape or on paper. The equivalent in written word to the videos sent to Norway was to make ‘El Diario del Juicio’, a weekly newspaper that, taking the shorthand versions of the testimonies, He printed all the testimonies in their entirety throughout the nine months that the trial lasted. And several tens of thousands of copies were produced so that copies would remain in all the archives. In fact, you can still buy complete collections in Mercado Libre for 42,000 pesos and single editions for 1,000 to 10,000 pesos, depending on the importance of the testimony of that specimen. There are also complete collections in various official dependencies, starting with the Supreme Court of Justice.
In 1985, Editorial Perfil published another weekly newspaper, ‘El Observador’, which together with “El Diario del Juicio” they were inspiring background of what a little more than a decade later was the Diario Perfil.
1987
I remember when two years after the trial of the Juntas, during Holy Week in 1987, the first Carapintada uprising took place at the Infantry School in May field. My first action was to immediately take my two eldest children, then three and one years old (the eldest had been born in exile), to Montevideo, along with their mother; and return to Buenos Aires an hour later with the peace of mind that, in the face of a possible coup d’état, they would not run any risk. It is difficult to explain those sensations with today’s eyes. As Walter Benjamin said, “the instant of its knowability” has the duration of a lightning bolt. I was detained in the El Olimpo concentration camp in 1979 and placed at the disposal of the Executive Power after the Malvinas War, had the same apprehension of a possible return of the dictatorship that motivated Alfonsín to send the copies of the Trial to a safe deposit box in Oslo. Today, with almost forty years of uninterrupted democracy, with the digitization of all those testimonies and their duplication to infinity; that these testimonies would be burned and that those who had reproduced them would be persecuted may be irrational fears. But they were not at that time.
