General Jorge Rafael Videla in 1978. AP/Eduardo Di Baia. All rights reserved.
1977 was, by many accounts, the worst year of the military dictatorship of Rafael Videla. “The Process of National Reorganization’’ (El Proceso) was the term favoured by the regime’s apologists then, to name their campaign of state terror and economic reorganization. In that year, the Argentinian investigative journalist Rodolfo Walsh used alternative, clandestine media to publish his Open Letter to the Military Junta. The country he describes, painting a Bosch-like hell with facts and figures, is a charnel house. Dissent was intolerable for the regime, and many Argentines who tried to get by unnoticed as public employees or as workers in the private sectors today can recount having been supervised by armed military police to enforce ‘’productivity’’.
In his letter to the Junta, before moving on to economics, Walsh briefly summarizes the government’s program of disappearances, constitutional and human rights violations. “The censorship in the press, the persecution of intellectuals, the raid on my house in Tigre (the river delta of Buenos Aires) the murders of my dear friends and the loss of my daughter—who died while fighting you—are some of the factors that force me into this form of clandestine expression, after almost 30 years in which I had freely given my opinion as a journalist and writer.” He goes on to tell the Junta ‘’what you call certified facts are errors, what you are willing to admit as errors are in fact crimes, and what you omit are calamities”. Walsh interprets the Junta regime as an abrupt consolidation of an unjust and repressive state mechanism put into practice under the government of Peron’s widow, Isabel Martínez, whom the gentlemen in the Junta overthrew in March, 1976. The results of the first year of that coup were devastating, as Walsh states in naked, meticulous numbers: “(…) 15.000 disappeared persons, 10.000 prisoners, 4000 dead, many tens of thousands expropriated from their lands, these are the naked ciphers of this terror’’. He condemns the building of countless make-shift prisons, the secret trials, “the concentration camps where no judge, lawyer, journalist or international monitor may enter”.
