“Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior” is quite a story to untangle without a good knowledge of Argentina’s recent history, but it'll be worth your effort. Adolfo Scilingo was an Argentinian naval officer who participated in "death flights” during the dictatorship of the 1970s. Left wing political prisoners were drugged, stripped naked, then loaded onto planes and dropped into the ocean. With no bodies, there could be no certainty what happened and the victims are known as the disappeared of Argentina’s dirty war. Democracy returned to Argentina in the 1980s, and in the 1990s President Menem gave impunity to those who had committed human rights abuses during the dictatorship, i.e. the military.

Under these circumstances, Scilingo made a series of confessions to the author of this book, Horacio Verbitsky, investigative journalist and former member of the left wing guerrilla group, the Montoneros - many of the people dumped from the planes were Montoneros or their family members. Scilingo’s detailing of the torturing of prisoners is harrowing - the sort of thing you are disturbed by but find gripping reading. It must have been somewhat surreal reading these confessions during Menem's government, knowing that Scilingo and many like him weren't being punished at all.

Scilingo was the first to break the armed forces' silence on the abuses. He had become an alcoholic and was motivated by guilt. A visit in January 2020 to the Museo Internaciónal para la Democracia in Rosario, Argentina reminded me about reading this book. The museum, located in a beautiful historic building on the city’s main drag, was opened in 2017 and is part of the Alliance of Museums of Social Justice. As they manifest themselves here in New Zealand, social justice causes can make me groan and in Argentina the left wing uses the history of the dictatorship to discredit any right wing opposition, no matter how far removed from the military junta. However, although undoubtedly political, the museum was excellent.

In an exhibition about Operation Condor there was a looped video of Scilingo confessing. Operation Condor was the secret US plan to overthrow leftist governments in Latin America, it also recommended paramilitary type operations to crush guerrillas. The guide told me that Scilingo is now in jail in Spain having been extradited there. In Spain there is a law allowing those who committed crimes outside Spain to be tried. Scilingo is now claiming his innocence, the guide said, he claims he made his confessions up. I’m not sure about that, but certainly a lot of navy officers took the defence that they were just following orders from those higher up. Scilingo is serving a thirty year term.

I highly recommend this book to anybody wanting to begin to make sense of the bitter divide between the left and right in Argentina, known as ‘la grieta’, and in Latin America as a whole. The military dictatorship was responsible for thousands of murders and this wound is often reopened in Argentina. Under the recent right-wing government of Mauricio Macri, the opposition, led by the Kirchneristas, accused the government of being a state of assassins in an attempt to draw parallels with the dictatorship. I couldn't take this seriously although many of my leftist friends in Argentina did. An advantage of this book is that it largely allows the perpetrator to speak for himself - which was the best approach. ( )

Although this is a significant historical document it is a essentially a journalistic account involving protagonists and does not provide a dispassionate historical overview of the 'dirty war'. I found it a clunky read (perhaps down to the translation?), sometimes sensationalist and occasionally too focused on the minutiae to deliver a clear view of the bigger picture of the significance of individual events. It does little to illuminate the wider historical context of the period. ( )

When the Abu Ghraib scandal first came to a light a few years ago American citizens were (at least for the most part) as shocked as much of the rest of the world--or at the least the first world industrialized part of it. Over the ensuing months the hammer eventually was to come down on a hapless bunch of weekend warrior national guardsmen while those who set the policies whether high level Bush 2 administration officials (Rumsfeld, Cheney) or almost as high level CIA officials and military figures actually behind the torture, humiliation and occasional deaths therefrom--walked away free. Off to prison went Lyndie English--Rumsfeld meanwhile got off scot free to go on and pursue his goal of making a horrible situation even much worse.

The book 'Flight'--written by the Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky tells in some respects a similar tale. When Naval officer Adolfo Francisco Scilingo approaches Verbitsky about events and experiences of Argentina's dirty war (1976-1983) against so-called subversives he becomes the first eyewitness to blow the lid off the policies that a military dictatorship employed to disappear 30,000 + people. As a mid-level staff officer of the motor pool at the infamous Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA) Scilingo's own part in the dirty war was two flights out over the ocean with 15 (each time) living (and drugged) 'subversives' on board--people he didn't know who were thrown into the ocean. On one flight Scilingo himself slips and almost falls out himself--saved at the last moment by another crew member. The Argentine military dictatorship posited that special methods were required to meet the threat that a guerilla terrorist organization--the Monteneros posed to it. The truth though is that over the period of that dictatorship the reaction to the Montenero's far outweighed the capacity of that guerilla organization to wage a campaign of its own--and that in fact the dictatorship used them as an excuse to rid themselves of enemies and potential enemies of the left whether violent or not--mostly not. Many young people--many hapless passersby caught in the wrong place at the wrong time--others for personal reasons unrelated to political conviction and also critics of the regime in the press--in the clergy (though the top level of the Catholic church was on board with these atrocities).

Scilingo as it happens suffered from nightmares and depression. He is a curious case in his own way. Loyal to the idea of the Navy--obedience to the chain of command--he is mystified that those upper level Naval officers who did their level best to enable the atrocities commited by their charges won't defend the policies or the men they ordered to undertake them--in fact, still in many cases work the system for promotions while their former underlings take the heat. The interviews between him and Verbitsky go back and forth on issues of military discipline, obedience and trust crossing a line into criminality. I at least found them riveting.

In any case, it's an interesting book--to think that it could not happen here--well I think there is parallel between these events described here and Abu Ghraib. Much of what Scilingo describes is straight forward and graphic and includes not only the murder of innocents but descriptions of torture as well. Scilingo as it happens though was not a major figure--he happened to be like most other Argentine naval personnel just another person that the regime wanted to make in part culpable for the policies they were undertaking. In that regard they would continuously transfer their personnel in and out so that everyone would get a taste.

Many of these same policymakers went on to higher positions. Scilingo as it happens--a minor figure all in all now sits in a Spanish prison while some of the most truly barbaric perpetrators of torture and murder in the dirty war continue to use the courts to stay out of harms way. So much for whistle blowing. ( )

See my blog post on it:

http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2005/09/booknote-confessions-of-argentine... ( )