The marriage of Prince Willem-Alexander and Máxima Zorreguieta on 2 February 2002 was the crowning glory of Wim Kok’s career; a few months later he resigned. Of all the political knots he had to untangle in his career, this was the most difficult. The Documentary Series A porcelain wedding of BNNVara showed this week how unruly Jorge Zorreguieta was and how headstrong the royal family, and how close to the abyss the kingship of Willem-Alexander has gone.
But Padre Braun’s episode went unmentioned. While it is worth remembering.
When the parliament gave permission for the royal wedding on 3 July 2001, the matter was over for Kok. He had piloted the ship into port. In doing so, he witnessed the grief of Máxima, who had been inconsolable. Now it was time to organize a dignified, grand celebration. He no longer wanted to talk about Jorge Videla’s junta, his supporters, adjutants and ideologues.
The wedding service in the Nieuwe Kerk would have been reformed. The Catholic Máxima indicated that she thought it was important to introduce her own culture, ‘something from home’. She had already made the greatest sacrifice, everyone was willing to please her. Máxima suggested that dear family friend Rafael Braun, better known as Padre Braun, be given a role in the Protestant church.
The Braun family is one of the richest and most powerful in Argentina. For generations, Patagonia started with sheep, expanding their trade from grocery stores to passenger ships, electricity, banks, meat exports and supermarket chains to an immense business empire. At their country club Los Pingüinos, 100 hectares of park with villas, holiday homes, polo fields, horse stables, restaurants, golf course, tennis courts and swimming pools, Máxima spent many a weekend in a Braun house.
Just as in Argentina large landowners ruled the country for centuries, politics and administration are full of Brauns. The most powerful man behind the previous president was Marcos Peña, Braun’s cousin and the son of one of Máxima’s mother’s best friends.
Influential position
During Videla’s junta, Padre Braun held an influential position. Eight months after the coup of 1976, the professor of theology became editor-in-chief of the Catholic magazine Criterion. It is difficult to overestimate the role of the church in traditional, strictly Catholic Argentina: landowners, the military and the church formed a close-knit troika. Jorge Videla was the head of a very conservative Catholic regime. One that also looked to the clergy when making major decisions. And Criterion was leading.
In his editorial, the new chief showed what the magazine stood for. The case of the kidnapped French nuns is significant. Shortly before Rafael Braun took office, two French nuns were arrested in Buenos Aires in December 1977. They had organized a meeting in a church with relatives of the missing. A naval vigilante group invaded the church. The two sisters were tortured in a detention center and then ‘deported’. That was usually: thrown alive from a plane into the ocean.
Now that even foreign religious became victims of the regime, there was a renewed commotion among international human rights organisations. In neighboring Chile, the Catholic Church supported Pinochet’s victims. The Argentine church was silent about the murdered nuns. Also Criterion didn’t mention it. Until the Archbishop of Paris refused a request from the Argentine embassy in protest. He didn’t want to read mass for the Argentine diplomatic corps.
On March 9, 1978, Braun denounced France’s ‘sickened climate’, which had been ‘poisoned by leftist propaganda’. According to Braun, no government “could be held responsible for everything that happens in the country.” And so it was wrong for the Paris Archbishop to “morally punish the Argentine government for events for which no perpetrators can be identified.”
Human rights violations
The 1979 visit to Argentina by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights caused such a stir that all newspapers reported human rights violations, including Criterion. Braun buried the state terror under the avalanche of violence that had plagued Argentina for a decade: “abductions, attacks, torture, torments, disappearances, people killed in gunfight…” Even an arch-conservative newspaper like La Prensa published a list of names of missing persons. Brown not. Instead of the kidnappers, torturers and murderers, Rafael Braun denounced the regime’s critics.
Since the opponents of the dictatorship in Argentina were imprisoned or murdered, testimonies of the crimes came from America and Europe. Braun’s comments lashed out at President Carter and European human rights groups for years. A campaign was waged against our country which hides far from clean interests. On August 9, 1979, he expressed his own mission: “The defeat of the terrorist guerrillas is due not only to effective repressive action, but also to the responsible attitude of the press, which has always fought with peaceful weapons certain individuals who are now from the continue to glorify crimes abroad.’
Even when the democratic government of President Alfonsín established a truth commission in 1984 and the Nunca Más report was published, Padre Braun did not distance himself from the military dictatorship. At the Wilson Center in Washington, he published an essay that same year in which he argued that human rights are a national matter. And had America not committed crimes in Vietnam? Later, in 2003, Braun fulminated in the main conservative newspaper La Nacion against Spain, which had requested the extradition of Argentine human rights abusers. He criticized the ‘left-wing ideas’ about military trials. They were just ‘opinions’ and ‘opinions’.
Bible study at ‘Raffy’
It is not surprising that Máxima asked for Padre Braun when she was looking for a Catholic element in her wedding service. She’d known ‘Raffy’ all her life. Braun’s cousins Tomás and Ignacio Peña were good college friends. Together they visited Braun for catechesis. Under the direction of the theology professor, they conducted Bible studies and discussed social issues. Braun was Máxima’s teacher and a good friend of her parents.
Given the Argentine history, it is likely that Kok’s Ministry of General Affairs then checked Rafael Braun’s antecedents. Then the status of Padre Braun would soon have been clear: important Catholic ideologue of the Videla regime. Nevertheless, Rafael Braun got the biggest stage of the day: he stood next to Reverend Carel ter Linden in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.
Shortly before the wedding, in January 2002, appeared in Free Netherlands an extensive article by Latin America correspondent Jan Thielen, the only journalist who extensively interviewed Jorge Zorreguieta. Thielen had in the archives of Criterion found Braun’s comments and published an anthology – above excerpts from Criterion have been translated by Thielen. In it it becomes clear that there was a difference between the friends Jorge Zorreguieta and Rafael Braun. Zorreguieta has always claimed to have known nothing about human rights violations. Braun knew about it, and gave a justification.
In ‘The conversation with the Prime Minister’ of January 25, 2002, Wim Kok responds to the Free Netherlands-article: ‘I think we are making it very difficult for Máxima by constantly providing this with negative publicity, because there is supposedly something wrong with all those people.’ And: ‘Of course it is true that publicity wants to score. It also sells well again, it also broadcasts well on the Journaals.’ With which Kok – probably unknowingly – used the same argument as Braun against the press who wrote about torture and murder.
Interviewer Wouke van Scherrenburg asked whether the guests had been screened before the wedding? Kok: ‘They were not members of the Videla regime.’ With that the stocking was over. It had to ‘remain human’. With political handiwork, the prime minister had made this marriage possible. He was no longer interested in the moral or ethical suitability of one of the most important guests.
*Marcia Luyten wrote about the recent history of Argentina ‘Motherland, The early years of Máxima Zorreguieta’