comparing human rights south africa and argentina - christopher merrett

Comparing Human Rights: South Africa and Argentina, 1976-1989Author(s): Christopher Merrett and Roger GravilSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 255-287Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178903Accessed: 24/10/2010 17:07

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Comparing Human Rights: South Africa and Argentina, 1976-1989 CHRISTOPHER MERRETT ROGER GRAVIL

University of Natal

Until recently it was rare to bring South Africa and Latin America into a shared focus for any purpose at all. Both regions habitually looked towards the United States of America and Western Europe and showed no interest in each other. With a few exceptions there was scant intellectual concern aroused by their common southern location. In the last few years, however, a number of academics have begun to show interest in comparisons and contrasts deri- vable from South Africa and Latin America.' Our intention is to join this promising trend by examining the vexing question of human rights in South Africa2 and Argentina since the Soweto massacre and Peronist collapse in 1976. In that historic year of burgeoning abuse, Richard Claude complained that "comparative human rights research has not been systematic."3 Con- centration on definite themes in two appallingly delinquent countries may contribute to the general improvement he urged.

The themes have been chosen on the basis of the appropriate articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in order to provide a comparative framework. Such a comparison gains validity in view of the fact that although

With acknowledgement to the University of Natal for funding fieldwork in Argentina by Roger Gravil.

I Carlos J. Moneta, ed., Geopolitica y politica del poder en el Atldntico Sur (Buenos Aires: Editorial Pleamar, 1983); D. Geldenhuys, "South Africa's International Isolation," International Affairs Bulletin (South African Institute of International Affairs), 11:1 (1987), 29-37; A. Max, ,Suddfrica: Problema racial o estrategico? (Montevideo: Edici6n Ecler, 1986); D. Fig, "South African Interests in Latin America," South African Review, 2 (1984), 239-55; Idem., "Lessons from Latin America," Sash, 31:4 (1989), 30-33; Idem., "South Africa's Expansion of Relations with Latin America, 1966-1977," Collected Papers of the Centre for Southern African Studies (University of York), 4 (1979), 21-38; P. Page, "Sudafrica: el sindrome argentino," Cuadernos del tercer mundo, 85 (1985), 50-53.

2 Important sources for details of the human rights situation in South Africa include: Survey of Race Relations, Weekly Mail, New Nation, the Human Rights Index of the South African Journal on Human Rights; reports of the Detainees' Parents Support Committee (Johannesburg), Durban Detainees' Support Committee, Pietermaritzburg Detainees' Aid Committee, and, since late 1987, the Human Rights Commission (Johannesburg); the quarterly, Human Rights Update of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the annual review published by the same body, with the Human Rights Commission.

3 R. P. Claude, Comparative Human Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), i.

0010-4175/91/2304-0343 $5.00 ? 1991 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

255

256 CHRISTOPHER MERRETT, ROGER GRAVIL

Argentina signed this Declaration in 1948, South Africa (and seven other members) abstained. Article 21(1) ("Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives") forms the basis upon which to compare use of political trials. Government restriction of individuals, organizations and meetings is covered by Article 20(1) ("Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association"). Article 9 ("No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile") provides the context for discussion of detention without trial, and Article 19 ("Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"), for a comparison of censorship. General state repression, the role of vigilantes and informal terror constitute the fifth and last theme, which relates to Article 3 ("Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of

person"). The purpose of this paper is to chart the extent to which the nature and development of human rights abuse in South Africa and Argentina have converged and to question whether these similarities have comparable historical roots and outcomes.

POLITICAL TRIALS

The South African government has frequently used political show trials4 to criminalize legal opposition activity by the extra-Parliamentary left and the trade unions. It has questioned the legality and attempted to prove the revolu-

tionary nature of political philosophies, such as Black Consciousness or Charterism, and even universal principles of human rights. The state sought to

prove charges of high treason by linking the activities of the exiled African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP), and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) with those of the internal United Democratic Front (UDF) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Whatever the charge, the judicial process was used to neutralize, harass, intimidate, and disrupt legitimate, legal antiapartheid activity.

Throughout the 1980s there was at least one major trial per year. The accused were subjected to prolonged detention of up to two years and to assault,5 and the same fate awaited state witnesses denied the right under the Internal Security Act to remain silent. Refusal to testify led to prison sentences. The familiar trial within a trial on the admissability of evidence stemmed from the veracity of statements extracted under extreme duress.6 In a

4 For an historical survey, see: J. Dugard, Human Rights and the South African Legal Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 205-75.

5 One detainee was refused treatment for a bullet wound until he had satisfied security police with information.

6 J. Riekert, "The Silent Scream: Detention without Trial, Solitary Confinement and Evidence in South Africa's 'Security Law' Trials," South African Journal on Human Rights, 1:3 (1985), 245-50.

COMPARING HUMAN RIGHTS 257

few cases this led to acquittals or judicial criticism of police methods. In the opinion of one lawyer, however, the courts gave "almost free licence to the police . . . to use sophisticated methods of interrogation and brutality to ob- tain confessions."7 In a few cases the accused were kidnapped from neighbouring countries. Parts of trials were held in secret, with mystery witnesses, often in obscure rural centres far from the support base of the accused and their lawyers. The latter protested about the complexity of charges, inade- quate preparation time, and obstruction by security police of access to the accused.

However, just as the number of state witnesses and the volume of evidence were spectacular,8 so too was the failure of some state cases, which collapsed in a welter of ill-prepared and poorly supported evidence. In the 1985 Pieter- maritzburg Treason Trial, for instance, the case against twelve of the accused was dismissed in the face of doctored tapes, incorrect translations, slovenly transcription, and the discrediting of the state's expert witness. In this instance all the defendants eventually walked free from the court, although it has been known for the acquitted, and their lawyers, to be detained immediately. Nevertheless, the state often achieved its aim of harassment by process, keeping opposition leaders out of circulation under the guise of neutral legal proceedings, as was the case in the Alexandra Treason Trial in which Moses Mayekiso and others were acquitted in early 1989. The conviction in De- cember 1988 of four antiapartheid leaders on treason charges in the Delmas Treason Trial after two years of detention and a trial of 442 days called into question the legality of any extra-Parliamentary activity. Between October 1988 and February 1989, seventy-six political trials were completed. Of the 312 people involved, 34 percent were convicted, 16 percent acquitted, and 50 percent discharged. In February 1989, there were 108 political trials in progress, with 616 accused.9

The state's lack of success with lesser political offences, such as public violence, illegal assembly and possession of banned literature, was instruc- tive. In 1984, for example, there were 134 convictions in 804 cases. In the 1980s the South African government denied the existence of any political prisoners, an argument countered by an attack on the judicial system by the

7 The Survey of Race Relations (Johannesburg: SAIRR, 1978), 98, reports the views of John Jackson, an exiled lawyer, who gave evidence to the United Nations Ad Hoc Working Committee on Human Rights. For a general view of the courts in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s, see J. D. Jackson, Justice in South Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

8 There were 588 pages of evidence in the case of the 1985-86 Pietermaritzburg Treason Trial involving UDF and South African Allied Workers Union (SAAWU) leaders. In the Delmas Treason Trial there were 22 accused, 911 individual and 50 corporate coconspirators, 27,194 pages of evidence, and 152 state witnesses. The judgment ran to 1,521 pages.

9 "HRC Update, October, 1988 to March 1989," SA Barometer, 3:11 (1989), 173. For more recent figures, see M. Guthrie, "Political Trials Still Continue," Sechaba, 27:1 (January 1990), 18-9.


International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)10 during the trial of Helene Pas- stoors" in November 1986. The ICJ argued that the South African courts could not be considered impartial as they upheld apartheid and had a subser- vient attitude to the use of detention and isolation. Perhaps the most revealing comment is that of the judge who, in giving suspended sentences to members of the neo-Nazi Afrikaanse Weerstaanbeweging (AWB) in 1983 for possession of arms, ammunition and explosives, described them as "civilised and decent people . . . victims of an unfortunate combination of circumstances."12

The Argentine policy on political trials, the opposite of South Africa's, did not employ the courts during the years of repression. The recent association of such trials with Argentina in the public mind arose entirely from the insistence of President Raul Alfonsin's democratic government that human rights offenders must be dealt with under the proper procedures which were denied to the dictatorship's victims.13 The sole exception was the well-known case of Jac- obo Timerman, and after that fiasco the military never again even attempted the formal trial of an opponent of the regime.14

Yet the armed forces had been making elaborate preparations for court proceedings for at least two years before seizing power. Even while Isabel Per6n was still president, her eventual successor, General Jorge Rafael Vid- ela, commander in chief of the army, presented to Congress on 10 September 1975, the proto-National Defence Law establishing military tribunals to try "subversives" and pass the death sentence. Less than a month later interim- President Italo Luder allowed the military a National Council for Internal Security that, in reality, could rubber-stamp any operations the armed forces said were counter-subversive. All concerned doubtless understood that the scope embraced not only "armed strugglers" in the wilds of Tucumain, but also students and those designated "factory guerrillas," who might, indeed,

10 There were suspicions in the 1960s that the ICJ might be CIA funded, but no recent allegations have been made. See L. Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy towards Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 85-86.

11 Released in April 1989 on the understanding that she would renounce violence, she reversed this undertaking upon her arrival in Brussels.

12 Survey of Race Relations (Johannesburg: SAIRR, 1983), 567. 13 J. Bums, The Land That Lost Its Heroes: The Falklands, the Post-war and Alfonsin

(London: Bloomsbury, 1987); G. Wynia, Argentina: Illusion and Reality (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); P. Giussani, iPorque, doctor Alfonsin? (Buenos Aires: Sudam6rica Planeta, 1987); N. R. Botana, et al., La Argentina electoral (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1985); J. Nun and J. C. Portantiero, eds., Ensayos sobre la transici6n democrtctica en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Puntosur, 1987); Idem., "Los hombres claves de Alfonsin," Siete dias (Buenos Aires) 1018 (del 12 al 18 de febrero de 1987), 22-25; Idem., "Los hombres del presidente hoy," Somos (Buenos Aires) 567 (5 de agosto de 1987), 4-10.

14 J. Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981); S. M. Deutsch, "The Argentine Right and the Jews, 1919-1933," Journal of Latin American Studies, 18 (1986), 113-34, is an excellent scholarly discussion of antisemitism in Argentina extending beyond the dates given; M. Coad, "The Disappeared in Argentina," Index on Censorship, 9:3 (1980), 41-43.


be Montonero kidnappers but could be simply militant working men. Throughout Peronist rule the armed forces relentlessly demanded amplified legal powers and mounted no less than six military challenges to have them conceded. The military takeover of 24 March 1976 seemed the culmination of a pattern under which the armed forces were intent on rescuing the Argentines from Peronist anarchy with a programme of legal firmness.

The incoming military government was at pains to stress that Buenos Aires was not going to resemble Santiago in Chile after the fall of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. There would be no bloodbath and no indefinite presidency. Obviously, some of these bland assurances were aimed to match relief on the fall of Mrs. Per6n. Others cynically proclaimed a "phony peace" under which 1,800 people were arrested in the first two days of military rule and the dragnet pulled in nearly 10,000 in three weeks. But the new regime continued to emphasize and augment legal powers. Military tribunals with a sentencing policy that included capital punishment were reinstated. Although four Marx- ist-Leninist parties were banned, the political wing of the Peronist Movement and the 150,000-member Argentine Communist Party, both antiguerrilla, were not.15 Even the declaration of martial law envisaged a definite legal framework for the incoming regime. After all, we are accustomed to the armed forces being called forth by the law and order brigade. In spite of this, the military chose to ignore the legal means they had given themselves in their fight against "subversion."

Why was it that in practice even the attempt to keep up legal appearances was not made and in nearly eight years of military rule only one writ of habeus corpus met with a response? The perceived danger may have been that, blatantly repressive as they were, those military decrees nevertheless would have given Argentina's formidably sophisticated lawyers the opportunity of discourse. Under professional cross-examination, many cases brought by the military would have collapsed in bewilderment, farce, or disgust; but the country's legal profession was rendered powerless by the abandonment of the ostensible framework, which was not to be the new order in Argentina after all.

Such a change of mind or feint took them unawares and many paid dearly for not catching on quickly enough to this unprecedented situation in twen- tieth-century Argentina. Notices appeared in court houses requiring lawyers lodging writs of habeus corpus to sign them, though this practice had no basis in statute and is not done in any other country. It often became the lawyer's

15 D. C. Hodges, Argentina, 1943-1987: The National Revolution and Resistance, 2d ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 193-4. Of course, the "sixty-two organizations" of Peronist unions were dissolved, and their leader, Lorenzo Miguel, was detained. R. Puiggr6s, Historia critica de los partidos politicos argentinos, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires: Hys- pamerica, 1986) forms the republic's magnum opus on political parties.


death warrant.16 Over ninety attorneys disappeared, and more than a hundred were imprisoned in the first nine months of military government. After that lesson, exile was the avenue for all respectable lawyers with the means to achieve it. Most regimes will accept that a barrister who defends a murderer is not thereby parading homicidal tendencies of his own, but Argentina's juntas routinely identified defence lawyers with their clients. Accordingly, for such meagre formalities as seemed inescapable, the military selected their own appointees on that same basis for the Supreme Court of Justice downwards.17

The remaining legal vestige was Article 2318 of the Argentine Constitution, which allowed detention "at the disposal of the executive power." The spirit and correct practice of this provision in some ways resembled being detained at Her Majesty's pleasure in Britain, especially in that its use should be highly exceptional. In Britain it would result from a trial; in Argentina it was intended as preparatory to a trial. Moreover, people about to be dealt with under this clause were constitutionally entitled to leave Argentina. The fla- grant abuse of this last resort provision to protect the legitimate state provided such legal pretext as the juntas' actions ever had. Was it because the evidence was so flimsy and the sentences so drastic that the regime did not make use of its statutory powers? Certainly the juntas' single experience with a tribunal in the Timerman case was not encouraging: Show trials are not worth the candle if they do not have a salutary effect.

In both countries governments persecuted their political opponents, deny- ing them the right to take part in the political process. In South Africa one

16 E. F. Mignone, C. L. Estlund, and S. Issacharoff, "Dictatorship on Trial: Prosecution of Human Rights Violations in Argentina," Yale Journal of International Law, 10:118 (1984), 118- 50; C. S. Nino, "The Human Rights Policy of the Argentine Constitutional Government: A Reply," Yale Journal of International Law, 11:217 (1985), 217-30. See also E. F. Mignone, Iglesia y dictadura (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del pensamiento nacional, 1986).

17 R. Dworkin, "Report from Hell," New York Review of Books, 17 July 1986, 11-14; Idem., Law's Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1986) is an extended elaboration of Professor Dworkin's view that law is defined, in the last instance, by attitude. J. Dunn, "Interpreting the Interpreters," Times Literary Supplement, 22 (August 1986), 905, is a helpful discussion of this approach to law. At a conference in Buenos Aires, Roger Gravil asked one of Dworkin's pupils what happens if a regime takes the attitude that it is above the law? The response was that ideas do not go away: This seems true to the extent that Professor Dworkin was invited to Buenos Aires to advise President Alfonsin on human rights policy. He attended the first day of the trials that began on 27 April 1985. They seem to have cleared a confusing point: Argentina now has no death penalty. Newspaper coverage said that the military rulers could not be sentenced to death (see Newsweek, 23 September 1985, 32). Professor Dworkin explained that they could have been, but the prosecutor's highest recommendation was life imprisonment for five junta members. On 24 and 25 June 1989 he arranged a conference on "The Concept of Law in South Africa" at Oxford University attended by about forty experts (Sunday Tribune [Durban], 25 June 1989).

18 Nunca mds: A Report by Argentina's National Commission on Disappeared People (Lon- don: Faber and Faber, 1986), 403-4; L. Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy towards Latin America, 348-9; M. Osiel, "The Making of Human Rights Policy in Argentina: The Impact of Ideas and Interests on a Legal Conflict," Journal of Latin American Studies, 18 (1986), 135-80; for a rejection of the complacent attitude that Britain does not need a human rights policy, see T. Campbell, et al., eds., Human Rights from Rhetoric to Reality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

COMPARING HUMAN RIGHTS 26I

tactic was to use the political show trial so that even when it led to the desired convictions, it often resulted in loss of legitimacy. Antiapartheid lawyers and their clients made telling use of court testimony and speeches from the dock, many of which have become definitive statements in the liberation struggle. For the authorities, however, the risk of a political trial has often paid off with long-term neutralization of political opponents. Argentina's regime, on the other hand, foresaw that very real danger of providing the stage upon which human rights lawyers could attack contrived political charges and chose to avoid public exposure through the legal process.

ORGANIZATIONS, INDIVIDUALS, AND MEETINGS

Action against antiapartheid organizations in South Africa varied during the 1970s and 1980s. On 19 October 1977 the government proscribed seventeen organizations, including Black Consciousness groups and the Christian In- stitute, and confiscated their assets in the following year. Between 1979 and 1984 a range of organizations, including the South African Council of Churches (SACC), was banned in Transkei; a campaign to subvert the general trade unions19 was launched by the police in the Eastern Cape; and student organizations were infiltrated by police spies. With the rise of Charterist organizations in the 1980s, the government apparently began questioning the tactic of corporate banning, possibly because of the rapid development of new structures and a policy of containment considered more profitable than forcing such groups underground.20 Nevertheless, in 1985, the state banned the Con- gress of South African Students (COSAS); and in October 1986 the UDF, its parent body and the largest antiapartheid organization, was declared affected, cutting it off from foreign funding, a ruling later overturned. However, on 24 February 1988, under State of Emergency regulations, seventeen political and human rights organizations were prevented from undertaking any further political activity, although they remained legally in existence, and COSATU activities were restricted to those relating to the shop floor. By the end of 1988 thirty-three antiapartheid organizations had been restricted.21

In 1989 there were more antiapartheid organizations operating legally than at any previous stage, although their activities were tightly circumscribed, some to the point of inactivity. Under the Emergency, specific campaigns were banned, such as the 1986 "Christmas Against the Emergency." Groups like the UDF, End Conscription Campaign (ECC), South African Council on Sport (SACOS), and the Dependants Conference of the SACC were the targets

19 Independent trade unions like the South African Allied Workers Union (SAAWU) developed a role for themselves in the community and the workplace.

20 I. Sarakinsky, "The State of the State and the State of Resistance," Work in progress, no. 52 (1988), 50.

21 They may be grouped into a number of categories: youth (5); political (5); community (5); education (11); human rights (6); and trade union (1).


of disinformation campaigns: A typical tactic was the issue of fake pamphlets.22

From the Soweto uprising of 1976 all outdoor gatherings were banned, except for those of a purely sporting nature or those granted official permission, giving authorities the opportunity to restrict the activities of trade unions and community and political groups. Under the Internal Security Act and the Emergency, indoor meetings were banned on a selective basis. Amongst activities proscribed over the years have been church vigils, a conference of black writers, the unveiling of tombstones, and trade union report-back meetings. The outdoor meeting ban terminated pickets and demonstrations, except those sufficiently attenuated to defeat the description of gathering.

From 1985 onwards, control over the right of assembly tightened considerably, particularly over symbolic gatherings such as the annual Soweto Day commemoration; funerals, the one remaining outlet for black political frustra- tion; and gatherings connected with planned boycotts and stayaways. Perma- nent limitations were placed on funerals in sixty-four magisterial districts; and, under the 1988-89 Emergency, twenty-two specific restrictions were issued, whereas meetings, like that celebrating Nelson Mandela's seventieth birthday, were banned. Emergency regulations promulgated in 1986 banned all meetings of 119 organizations in both Charterist and Black Consciousness traditions in the Western Cape.23

The state's refusal to accept the privacy of funerals and the often dis- respectful actions of their agents on the scene led to intense bitterness and occasional tragedy, such as the Langa (Uitenhage) massacre of 21 March 1985, in which the police shot twenty people.24 Its attitude provoked a re- petitive cycle of political funerals, each one consequent upon its predeces- sor.25 As is often the case in South Africa, government edict produced the farcical in 1985 when a Race For Peace fun run was banned in Johannesburg; and in the KwaNdebele bantustan, all meetings, except those of the Cabinet, were proscribed. The major targets of the States of Emergency since 1986

22 There have been allegations that these were produced by Joint Management Centres (JMCs) of the National Security Management System (NSMS), which formed a shadowy, but as yet underanalysed, effective government behind the parliamentary facade.

23 G. Kruss, "The 1986 State of Emergency in the Western Cape," South African Review, 4 (1988), 173-86.

24 For background to this incident, see R. J. Thornton, The Shooting at Uitenhage, 1985: The Context and Interpretation of Violence (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1988). At least twenty people (including nine under 16) were killed, fifteen shot in the back.

25 A typical incident took place at Kwaggafontein, KwaNdebele on 4 June 1986, when a vigil for an unrest victim was raided four times by police using teargas, rubber bullets, and, finally, live ammunition. Several people died. See C. McCaul, Satellite in Revolt: KwaNdebele, an Economic and Political Profile (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1987), 88.


were rallies and meetings concerned with trade union activity and school and community boycotts, although dispersal was highly selective.26

South Africa has long been notorious for the imposition of banning orders restricting the right to move, assemble and communicate upon opponents, who have often been released political prisoners or detainees. The public was reminded of the nature of these bannings when victims were prosecuted for breaking them.27 Petty limitations, such as remaining in a separate room for one's own wedding reception and prescribed routes to work, had about them an air of vindictiveness that forced many banned persons to leave the country illegally.

By 1985 the heyday of bannings (156 in force in 1980) had passed, and legal actions effectively destroyed many of the remainder, such as that im- posed on Winnie Mandela. Nevertheless, the authorities had deprived organizations of the effective services of charismatic leaders. Under the State of Emergency "bannings through the back door" were achieved by restrictions placed on ex-detainees and other activists. These curtailed political activity, movement, occupation, utterances, and access to buildings; involved house arrest of up to twenty hours per day; and required daily (and sometimes twice daily) reports to police stations. Six hundred fifty-eight such restrictions, some prohibiting participation in specific campaigns, had been recorded by the end of 1989.

Meanwhile banned exiles and listed communists could not be quoted in South Africa under the Internal Security Act: In 1985 the editor of the Cape Times was charged for quoting Oliver Tambo. Expulsion of foreign passport holders, a common tactic, was applied in particular to dissident clergymen and journalists. With the intensifying unrest of the 1980s and the imposition of the State of Emergency, foreign media workers became a major target. Internal banishment for black South Africans was made possible by the existence of bantustans with repressive regimes to which opponents were exiled. The bantustans themselves used their supposed independence to expel opponents; and the fragmented geography of Ciskei was used to frustrate the movement of political activists across "international boundaries." Anti- apartheid activists were denied passports, a tactic used against supporters of nonracial sports bodies, churchmen, and writers;28 and visas were denied to the foreign press and fact-finding missions. Conscientious objection for any reason other than the strictly religious was not permitted and punished by up

26 Athletic endeavour has again been a target. On 16 July 1988 five freedom runners were arrested at Kenilworth in Cape Town en route from Tokai to Guguletu (see Human Rights Update, 1:4 [1988], 17).

27 For example, prosecutions for an innocuous activity like walking in a park in another magistracy.

28 Hassan Howa, former president of the South African Council on Sport (SACOS), had been refused a passport nine times by 1984.


to six years in prison. Organizations supporting this human right were a particular target of harassment: In August 1988 the ECC was restricted.29

The publicly declared aim of Argentina's military regime was certainly an assault on organizations, but the reassurance originally offered was that only guerrilla groups were targeted so as to restore a benign environment. On this view, the feeble civilian government had allowed guerrillas to flourish to the point that the Mercedes Benz, Fiat, and Renault corporations, to name but a few, were irked by paramilitary trade union action and peered imploringly towards the barracks not just for a crackdown, but a showdown-and it was probably this demand that had such wide appeal. Charged by broad approba- tion at home, the military set to work with gusto, while similar regimes in neighbouring states offered solidarity. Donald Hodges noted that "they turned their attention to eradicating the guerrillas instead of the oligarchy."30 This task did not take very long: The ERP ceased operations in May 1977 and the Montonero's actions petered out in 1979. However at the end of that year Amnesty International could detect no improvement in human rights. Other fronts had opened up, and the onslaught advanced from guerrillas to the closing of the National Congress and provincial parliaments, the banning of political parties and meetings, an assault on human rights groups, and, above all, the emasculation of trade unionism.31

For nearly a half-century Argentina has possessed the strongest labour movement in Latin America,32 and in Peron's exile years differences between organized workers and guerrilla groups were subdued. Moreover, under restored Peronism, automotive industry executives, for instance, judged, "At this point the guerrillas can count on the passive or active support of a majority of our workers."33 After the coup, however, the unions felt com-

29 Human Rights and Repression in South Africa: The Apartheid Machine Grinds On (Johan- nesburg: Human Rights Commission, South African Council of Churches and the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference, 1989), 75-81.

30 D. C. Hodges, Argentina, 1943-1987: The National Revolution and Resistance, 202; P. Waldmann, and E. G. Valdez, eds., El poder militar en la Argentina, 1976-1981 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna), 1983. For the argument that The Process in Argentina was not historically unprecedented, see R. Rodriguez Molas, Historia de la tortura y el orden represivo en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1985); Idem., "Como cay6 Suarez Mas6n," Somos (Buenos Aires), 540 (28 de enero de 1987), 4-7.

31 Quoted in J. Simpson, and J. Bennett, The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War (Lon- don: Robson, 1985), 81; See also 0. R. Anzorena, Tiempo de violencia y utopia, 1966-1976 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Contrapunto, 1988); P. A. Possi, "Argentina, 1976-1982: Labour Leadership and Military Government," Journal of Latin American Studies, 20 (1988), 111-38.

32 R. Munck, R. Falc6n, and B. Galitelli, Argentina from Anarchism to Peronism: Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855-1985 (London: Zed, 1987) is a first-rate labour history. Also excellent is D. James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); R. del Barco, El regimen peronista, 1946- 1955 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Belgrano, 1983); J. 0. Bord6n, La racionalidad de peronismo (Buenos Aires: El Cid Editor, 1986).

33 D. C. Hodges, Argentina, 1943-1987: The National Revolution and Resistance, 195; R. Green and C. Laurent, El poder de Bunge y Born (Buenos Aires: Editorial Legasa, 1988) is a


pelled to accept the guerrillas' obliteration, although dissociation did not result in exemption. The phrase "The Process" meant a sequence, with the labour movement next in line. Between 1976 and 1978 one-fifth of those killed by the military were shop stewards and other labour leaders. Of the 15,000 prisoners in jails in 1978, one-third were workers. The Confederaci6n General de Trabajo passed under military control, as did forty-five key unions covering 75 percent of the organized proletariat.34 A volley of five new labour laws reversed four decades of working class advance, and state control over wage increases engineered inequalities designed to undermine labour solidarity. Beyond repression lay a strategy aimed to back-pedal Argentina into a preindustrial era in which the labour force would be atomized (read de- Peronized).

Argentina's universities used to be very enlightened. As early as 1918 students had representation on all committees, including those for the appoint- ment and renewal of faculty members. This C6rdoba Convention was revoked by the military President, Juan Carlos Ongania, provoking the huge C6rdoba Rebellion in that historic university city in 1969. From that time onwards, armed intervention in campus life became increasingly frequent and reached a peak in the years of The Process.35

Under restored Peronist rule from 1973 to 1976, university education moved away from elitism, and the University of Buenos Aires, in particular, under the rectorship of leftist intellectual Rodolfo Puiggros, trebled in size to become a vast "people's education" operation of 237,000 students. In reaction against Peronist educational policies, the new military junta issued the notorious Order 572 allowing the dismissal of "dangerous" faculty members. To be considered "potentially subversive" was sufficient grounds for dismissal. There was no appeal because academic procedures were dropped in favour of the military code of discipline. The new rectors were usually right-wing civilians who supported military government, but university departments were run by military personnel, usually without credentials in the subject. In the University of Buenos Aires alone, 1,500 lecturers were dismissed and replaced by regime supporters. Another hard-hit institution was the University of the South in Bahia Blanca, a noted naval base whose district commander was particularly zealous in defending Christian principles from Marxist sub-

fascinating account of the company's experiences. See also A. Graham-Yooll, A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina's Nightmare (London: Eland, 1986); E. Crawley, "Targets of Terror," Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 1986, 883.

34 R. Munck, R. Falc6n, and B. Galitelli, Argentina from Anarchism to Peronism, 210; J. E. Miguens, Los neo-fascismos en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Belgrano, 1983) gives more general coverage of the repression; J. F. Petras, et al., "Terror and the Hydra: The Resurgence of the Argentine Working Class," in J. F. Petras, et al., Class, State and Power in the Third World with Case Studies on Class Conflict in Latin America (London: Zed, 1981), 255-64.

35 This section relies on J. Simpson, and J. Bennett, The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War, 212-5, and on many conversations with Argentine colleagues.


version. As early as August 1976, seventeen professors there were sacked and another thirty-one listed as wanted men. General Adel Vilas closed the university to facilitate what he described as the cleansing operation, and many bodies turned up on the city boundaries. Special intelligence units were given the task of concentrating on subversion in the universities.

The social sciences were the most fiercely attacked for attention to such issues as income distribution, but even architecture was suspect for its admiration of foreign buildings. Psychology was hated for its attention to Jewish practitioners, such as Freud and Jung, and its interest in sexuality. Indeed, the state-appointed dean of psychology at the University of Buenos Aires allowed 650 people to be buried as unknowns, their corpses riddled with machine-gun bullets. This same psychologist cum judge drafted the amnesty law seeking to exonerate the military from human rights offences. He, along with 12,000 other state-appointed faculty members, stayed on into the civilian era after December 1983, because the military renewed their contracts only days before handing over power to the Radical Party.

Versatile repression eventually reached even the Jehovah's Witnesses. To the tired portero these persistent door knockers perhaps represented a minor nuisance, but how many supported Decree 1867, which prohibited the sect from reading the Bible in their own homes? The refusal by the Jehovah's Witnesses to serve in the armed forces was viewed as more sinister than that of other groups allowing conscientious objection. At least 250 were jailed as deserters or common criminals.

Both countries abused the rights of individuals and organizations. In South Africa's case this tendency can be traced back to the Suppression of Commu- nism Act of 1950, after which an avalanche of legal restrictions was launched at opponents of all types in a process of relentless vindictiveness. A need to counter a guerrilla movement initially prompted Argentinian abuse of Article 20, but forceful tactics soon afterwards broadened into a general offensive in which trade unions, the universities, and certain religious groups were prominent targets.

DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL

From the early 1960s South Africa developed a strong tradition of detention without trial for government opponents.36 The law is complex, but three main types of detention can be recognized: preventive, interrogative, and state witness. The first two categories are covered by both the Internal Security Act37 and the State of Emergency. The purpose of detention has included the gathering of intelligence and occasional recruitment of informers; the under-

36 A. S. Mathews, Freedom, State Security and the Rule of Law: Dilemmas of the Apartheid Society (Cape Town: Juta, 1986), 62-100.

37 H. Rudolph, Security, Terrorism and Torture: Detainees' Rights in South Africa and Israel: A Comparative Study (Cape Town: Juta, 1984), 22-35.


mining of antiapartheid organizations by separating them from leaders; and general intimidation and disruption, which forced thousands underground. It was used as part of a general war of terror against those communities breaking away from government structures to develop as centres of people's power.38 In particular it was employed against youth, whereas random detention was used to destabilize. The increased use of detention in the mid-1980s was described by the Commonwealth Secretary-General as "a new dimension of the systematic repression that is apartheid."39

Although the scale of detention increased, the target groups remained broadly constant. Figures are unreliable, but from 1976 to 1984 it would appear that at least 8,500 people were detained. From 1985 to mid-1986, over 10,000 were detained, 75 percent of them under the partial State of Emergen- cy. When the national State of Emergency was declared in 1986, at least 25,000 were held (10,000 in five weeks, or one every five minutes),40 a figure that declined to about 5,000 in the 1987-88 Emergency and 2,500 from 1988 to 1989. This compares with 11,500 in the 1960 Emergency and 2,430 after the Soweto rising of 1976. Detention thus reached deep within organizations and into the furthest parts of rural South Africa. Of the 1986-88 Emergency detainees, 40 percent were children under 18, some as young as 10; and 75 percent probably belonged to UDF affiliated bodies. Detentions crippled national and regional executives of the UDF. Politicized youth became the main target of the state, which has also used detention to harass dissident teachers, journalists, clergy, civic associations, and trade unions.

In effect many of these persons, especially a core group of 1,000 held for over two years,4' became the forgotten people of South Africa, victims of a Gulag syndrome,42 until the publicity generated by hunger strikes in February and March 1989. Slowness in informing families and refusal to supply reasons for detention were routine, and comprehensive lists of detainees were unavail-

38 For example, it has been estimated that 8 percent of the population of Alexandria in the Eastern Cape was held in detention from 1986 to 1988, see "Detentions in and around Grahamstown" (unpublished paper presented at the Black Sash [a women's human rights organization] conference, Johannesburg, March 1988), 2. Almost everyone involved in a street committee in the Eastern Cape townships was detained, with 256 in Duncan Village in June 1986 alone (see D. Webster, "Repression and the State of Emergency," South African Review, 4 (1988), 154).

39 Survey of Race Relations (1985), p. 463, quoting Sir Sridath Ramphal, Secretary General of the Commonwealth.

40 So many were detained that jail cells filled up, and a six-month remission on 31 May 1986 (Republic Day) was held for common criminals to make room for political detainees. Subse- quently on 15 June 1986 an entire congregation at an Anglican Church in Elsies River was detained.

41 Detention as a way of life for political activists is illustrated by Port Elizabeth Youth Congress president Mkhuseli Jack, detained eleven times in twelve years, for a total of nearly four years by June 1988.

42 D. Webster, and H. Friedman, Suppressing Apartheid's Opponents: Repression and the State of Emergency, June 1987 to March 1989 (Johannesburg: Southern African Research Service and Ravan, 1989), 5.


able. The legality of some detentions was challenged, but human rights were only occasionally upheld. In most cases security forces tightened their grip through new regulations and legislation. Those concessions that were won, such as the inspection of detainees by a law officer, did not alter the fact they were at the mercy of an unrestrained political police indemnified and enjoying virtual immunity under the Emergency, who acted as policeman, judge, and jailer. Complaint procedures concerning abuse of the few rights detainees enjoyed in terms of study, exercise, and visits were investigated by the police and therefore lacked credibility. The regimen suffered by Emergency detainees was arbitrary, and there is evidence that the punitive and very precise regulations decreed by the Emergency were disregarded.43 Prolonged interrogation and random assault, including the use of tear gas in cells,44 were routine. Some of the worst abuses took place at police stations or isolated anonymous places.45

Women encountered specific problems, in particular miscarriages after assault, tear gassing during pregnancy and the imprisonment of dependent children.46 The greatest concern was expressed about the psychological and physical effects of detention upon children, who showed signs of social alienation through the loss of parental and organizational discipline. Some were per- suaded on release to attend reorientation camps, in which they were subjected to depoliticization. Adults lost jobs or pay and suffered continual harassment through the laying of trivial or concocted charges on top of postdetention stress. The proportion successfully prosecuted was miniscule: The 1985-86 detainees had a 7 percent chance of a trial and 1 percent of conviction.47 Under the Emergency a more general terror was extended to families. Hos-

tages, nine from one family in Soweto in 1986,48 were taken, people assaulted, and property destroyed in attempts to lure wanted people into detention. More general harassment included hoax phone calls to the families of detained persons.

Some detainees were driven to suicide, and a large number have been murdered under its cover. Deaths in detention numbered eighty-four up to 31 December 1989: In July 1983, for instance, Paris Malatji was shot through the head while in detention.49 In 1978 Lord Avebury of Amnesty International

43 Solitary confinement, a gazetted punishment, was abused in this way. 44 The Minister of Justice has admitted to nine instances from 10 Feb 1987 to 31 Jan 1988 (see

Human Rights Commission, "Detention," Work in progress, nos. 56-57 [1988], 34). 45 Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, then Secretary General of the Southern African Catholic

Bishops' Conference, was physically abused at a place he was subsequently unable to locate and later sued the authorities (see also A. Sparks, "The Torture of Dean Farisani," Reality, 14:6, [1982], 15-16).

46 "Detention," Agenda, no. 4 (1989), 23-29; Human Rights Update, 1:4 (1988), 79-80. 47 D. Webster, "Repression and the State of Emergency," South African Review, 4 (1988), 147. 48 The father of eight detained children from Alexandria committed suicide in September 1986

(see "Human Rights Index," South African Journal on Human Rights, 2:3 (1986), 395). 49 Five died in Emergency detention from 12 June 1986 until 31 December 1989, including

the first woman.


pointed out that the suicide of detainees in other countries was unusual5? because most are committed people with every reason to live. But in South Africa 50 percent of normal, healthy individuals died during the week after their detention. Dr. Wendy Orr, an assistant district surgeon in the Port Eliz- abeth area, submitted testimony that documented 286 cases of assault against detainees in a seven-week period in 1985.51 In the view of Amnesty Interna- tional, "Torture and ill-treatment of prisoners . . . remained common and

widespread,"52 a view supported by academic research.53 Long detentions were sometimes attributed to the need for police to conceal the physical effects of abuse.54

In Argentina detention without trial was a prominent branch of repression surpassed not by detention with trial but by outright disappearance. The Process designated at least 365 detention centres perhaps originally intended for the legions roped in under Article 23 and retaining some toehold in the republic's judicial system. However, as these centres had secret locations, there was every opportunity for the detainees of the executive power to rub shoulders with the disappeared, and there are clear indications that they were really flexible categories that the state could exploit either way. At the barest minimum there were 175 people arrested, putting them at the disposal of the executive power, before the date of the decree. In the early days detention without trial was probably intended to cope with the awkward lack of evidence needed for a court by providing a breathing space of some uncounted days to find or fake it. The Sabato Commission's stringent minimal counting identified 157 cases of disappearance of people released from the disposal of the executive power. Had all attempts to gather or manufacture evidence failed? Twenty prisoners undergoing some sort of military hearings were told that the proceedings had been dropped, and they were free to go. Did their disappearance register the Argentine police-state's disillusionment with even super kangaroo courts? Release plus survival must, of course, be superior to extinction, but it left ex-prisoners no more secure than before. They could not profit from experience, even from prison-gate taunts, to guide future life into a less hazardous course, because they probably remained ignorant of why they had been abducted or even tortured, let alone released. Ill-treatment naturally

50 Survey of Race Relations (1978), 116. 51 M. Rayner, "Turning a Blind Eye?: Medical Accountability and the Prevention of Torture in

South Africa" (Washington, D.C.: Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, Ameri- can Association for the Advancement of Science, 1987), 75; D. McQuoid-Mason, "Detainees and the Duties of District Surgeons," South African Journal on Human Rights, 2:1 (1986), 49- 59.

52 Amnesty International, Report (1988), 73. 53 Torture in South Africa (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1982), 9-

27; D. Foster, D. Davis, and D. Sandler, Detention and Torture in South Africa: Psychological, Legal and Historical Studies (Cape Town: Philip, 1987).

54 G. Bindman, ed., South Africa and the Rule of Law (London: Pinter, 1988), 104. A National Medical and Dental Association (NAMDA) survey of July 1985 showed that 83 percent of 600 ex-detainees had medical symptoms of abuse.


TABLE 1

Terms served in Argentina under Article 23

from March 1976

Period Number of Prisoners

Less than 1 year 4,029 1-3 years 2,296 3-5 years 1,172 5-7 years 668 7-9 years 431

prompted yearning for any vestige of legal rights, so for the disappeared, the upgrade to detention at the disposal of the executive power seemed worth attaining.

Article 23, however, underwent instant dilution. On the very day of the coup, the accompanying option to leave the country was suspended by Institu- tional Act. Dr. Rafael Sarmiento then obligingly showed the military how to handle this "hot potato," so that all pending applications for exile were invalidated under Law No. 21, 275. His new procedure required all these held at the disposal of the executive power to serve a ninety-day detention before even applying to leave Argentina. Processing applications was elongated to 120 days, and rejection meant a six-month wait before a state prisoner could reapply. One effect was greatly to increase the number of prisoners held at the disposal of the executive power. In nine months of military rule in 1976, some 3,485 were so detained; in 1977, 1,264. Another effect was that the term55 served in detention extended considerably (see Table 1). It could readily amount to a hefty sentence without charge and with torture. Permanent injury in the hands of one's captors would lead on to disappearance, as could release. Prisoners were often discharged at asocial hours, such as before dawn, when it was difficult for their families to meet them for such reasons as curfew and unavailability of transport. No safeguards were foolproof: One family organized shifts in a police station for sixty hours only to be told that their daughter left by a different exit, never to be seen again. How could family receptions be arranged if release meant being hurled from a moving car?

Both regimes used detention without trial with impunity. South Africa has a long tradition of such action dating back to the 1960 State of Emergency and has flaunted Article 9 on a vast scale. The numbers involved in Argentina were more modest, but the length of incarceration was often much longer. In

55 Nunca mds, 404. R. Steyn insightfully deals with the activities of the prisoners' mothers after his visit to a press forum there ("The Black Sash of Argentina," Natal Witness, 27 May 1989, 10).


both countries the trauma of detention-arbitrary, unannounced, and usually unexpected removal from a normal environment to one populated by hostile and often brutal people, with no recourse to a court and with an undefined time limit-was used as a weapon of terror against opponents. Its effects were felt not just by detainees themselves, but by many more people who feared the

possibility of detention.

CENSORSHIP AND PRESS FREEDOM

It is natural that a government adopting a path of general repression should seek to impose a system of censorship, thus facilitating dissemination of its

unopposed version of events. The South African government has been con- sistent in its view that press freedom is a privilege. It has banned journalists from unrest areas; assaulted, harassed and detained them; expelled foreign reporters; and acted against the student press by invoking the Publications Act, which has also been used to restrict the importation and circulation of books and periodicals. At the same time the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) operates under tight government control and was accused by the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) in 1984 of being "no more than an editorial arm of government propaganda."56

Control of the collection and dissemination of information was two- pronged. First, numerous statutes concerning important aspects of South Af- rican life-defense, petroleum supply, nuclear energy and the police, for example-contain provisions restricting news reporting to official agencies. Second, the government restrained the commercial press by threatening to introduce official control unless it disciplined itself through the Newspaper Press Union (NPU). The Steyn Commission on the Media (1980) argued that

press liberties could be overridden by the security demands of the white

minority government and called for the voluntary participation of the press in the Total National Strategy. The government agitated for a patriotic press and

rejected the concept of independent journalism. The traditionally liberal press sector survived and avoided the imposition of journalist registration, but this was at the expense of virtual emasculation under a barrage of legal restrictions added to commercial pressures. For the more adventurous editors and journalists, charges and court appearances became commonplace, but the main- line press took on a more conservative mien with the demise of the Rand Daily Mail under politically induced financial pressure.57

For the alternative press, the repression was more precisely targeted. De- spite the ban on the World and Weekend World in 1977, an alternative press developed with the growth of the progressive movement in the 1980s. Subse- quently this press became the target of many of the regulations formulated

56 Survey of Race Relations (Johannesburg: SAIRR, 1984), 894. 57 S. Uys, "A Silenced Voice," Index on Censorship, 14:4 (1985), 7-8; J. Mervis, The Fourth

Estate (Johannesburg: Ball, 1989).


under the State of Emergency that gave wide powers of press control to the authorities. Publication of photographs of unrest and of "subversive" statements was banned; and so too was the use of blank spaces and deletions indicating the effect of the regulations. After the gazetting of further press restrictions in August 1987, the potential existed for positioning censors in the editors' offices. The ultimate extent of this power was the suspension of publication for three months. Eleven newspapers and periodicals, including one extreme right-wing publication, received first- or second-stage warnings, and five were suspended for one to three months.58 The editor of New Nation (a Roman Catholic-financed newspaper), Zwelakhe Sisulu, was one of South Africa's longest serving detainees, released in December 1988 after two years.59 At the same time independent news agencies were raided and their employees detained.

The destruction of Argentina's liberal traditions had to be accompanied by wholesale censorship, involving the denial of the constitution itself. It actually postulates a "state of exception" if circumstances become exceptional enough to threaten national security. Indeed, the military's assertion that chronic subversion prevailed provided its justification for the coup. Censorship then had to deal with the contention of opposition artists that the regime was unconstitutional, but they were legitimate. The boards of newspapers, maga- zines, book publishers, cinema, television and radio had to accept military members, who controlled output with standards of cultural cretinism,60 as shown by the banning of a book on Picasso because references to Cubism were interpreted as propaganda for Fidel Castro.

Both newspapers with the most central position in resistance, La Opini6n and the Buenos Aires Herald, dared to publish missing persons lists. The former's outspoken policy was undoubtedly one (of several) reasons for Jac- obo Timerman's detention and the seizure of $5 million in assets through the general confiscation of his property. Although some carped that the Buenos Aires Herald ran less risk because of its obscurity as an English language publication, all of its senior staff received death threats resulting in their flight from Argentina. Andrew Graham-Yooll has frankly admitted how he would submit his reports, then shake with terror each night.61

58 These suspended titles included New Nation, South, Weekly Mail, Grassroots, and New Era.

59 For further information on Sisulu, see Zwelakhe Sisulu: Released but not Free, new ed. (London: Article 19, 1989). His father, Walter, was a convicted political prisoner, sentenced to life in the mid-1960s, and released only in late 1989.

60 D. W. Foster, "Argentine Sociopolitical Commentary, the Malvinas Conflict and Beyond: Rhetoricizing a National Experience," Latin American Research Review, 22:1 (1987), 7-34. Full Spanish details of Aguinis', Duhalde's, and Garbetta's books are cited there. See also S. Sosnowski, ed., Represi6n y reconstrucci6n de una cultura: El caso argentino (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1988).

61 A. Graham-Yooll, Portrait of an Exile (London: Junction, 1982), 45-55; J. E. Corradi, "The Culture of Fear in Civil Society," in From Military Rule to Liberal Democracy in Argen- tina, M. Peralta-Ramos, and C. H. Waisman, eds. (Boulder: Westview, 1987), 113-29; A.


Marcos Aguinis, undersecretary of culture in the Alfonsin government, in A

Hopeful Letter to a General: A Bridge over the Abyss, made a handsome

acknowledgment of the Argentine Constitution's guarantee of the right to research and publish books. Eduardo Duhalde's The Argentine Terrorist State

brings out the military's corrupt use of the Constitution's text and the adoption of euphemism and clandestinity to cover its tracks. The main thrust of Carlos Garbetta's We Are All Subversives is that all attempts to exercise constitutional rights were treated by the juntas as subversion. The bulk of such literature was written in exile. The Constitution allows exile even for those who have transgressed and expect conviction in a proper court of law, yet during The Process exiles were often pursued to foreign countries, harassed, and murdered.

In Argentina, too, censorship opened space for the authorized version and the r6gime engaged United States public relations experts, Burson Marstellar Inc. to present national security verities to obtuse foreigners who could not be simply cowed into acquiescence or silence. Through their offices, these experts lauded the coup's first anniversary as a "Year of Peace" in full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post (6 April 1977), even as what the r6gime itself called the "The Dirty War" was raging in Argentina. Working with the Argentine Embassy in Washington D.C., Mar- stellar arranged bland interviews for visiting dignitaries from Buenos Aires. President Videla himself was presented on the television programme "Good Morning America" in September 1977 with no untoward enquiries about how Argentines faced a new day. The National Bank vice president, Raul Lanusse, emphasized punctilious debt servicing to counteract any unease his audience in the United States felt about human rights. The Council of the Americas gathered together 300 businessmen from the United States on 22 June 1976, assured them that "these [South American] countries are giving their most gallant effort to overcome 150 years of mismanagement"62 and then intro- duced them to the junta's finance minister, Jose Martinez de Hoz, known in Anglophone finance capitals as "Joe" and "The Wizard of Oz." Such bodies also showered assistance on the reverse traffic, visitors from the United States to Argentina. A eulogistic series in the Christian Science Monitor, which began on 13 October 1978, was procured from expense-account journalists; and the junta's most illustrious guest for the World Cup finals was Henry Kissinger.

As with the case of detention without trial, it is clear that both nations infringed upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in this case Arti-

Graham-Yooll, The Press in Argentina, 1973-1978 (London: Writers and Scholars, 1979); J. E. Corradi, The Fitful Republic: Economy, Society and Politics in Argentina (Boulder: Westview, 1985), 115-34; E. Crawley, "Targets of Terror," Times Literary Supplement, 19 August 1986.

62 L. Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy towards Latin America, 50-52. See Ibid, 72, for the compliments of Esteban A. Ferrer of the Council of the Americas. President Videla was in the United States to sign the Panama Canal treaties.


cle 19. Similarly, a longer tradition of human rights abuse in South Africa led to a more complex legal structure of control, although specific instances of banning could belong to either country. Control of information in both countries, a strategic necessity in order to control the populace and present a sanitized picture of events to outsiders, was also instinctive to those committed to authoritarian ideology.

VIOLENT REPRESSION

The South African authorities have repeatedly met the demands of the disen- franchised masses with violence, which apart from the institutionalized violence of apartheid took two forms up to 1980: a low-intensity war against insurgents and the periodic massacre of black demonstrators. During the dis- turbances of 1976 in the Transvaal and Western Cape, for example, the Cillie Commission found the police responsible for 451 of 575 deaths. In the early 1980s confrontation grew between police and students, and university campuses and school premises became battlegrounds. The spread of unrest through the townships resulted in the introduction of the South African De- fence Force (SADF) in 1984.

A State of Emergency declared on 21 July 1985 covered parts or the whole country for all but three months for the remainder of the decade. The result- a state of official lawlessness-was draconian power used to detain, interro- gate, search and confiscate, and control of vast areas by force-all under the protection of a prospective indemnity from criminal prosecution.63 A South- ern African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) investigation into the actions of the security forces in the Vaal Triangle in 1984 accused them of indiscipline and improper and provocative behaviour, especially at funerals.64

The Langa massacre of 21 March 1985 and the Athlone Trojan Horse incident of 15 October 1985 show that the bishops' findings were isolated in neither time nor space. The Kannemeyer Commission into the former found that the police had acted without due consideration to the facts, and the inquest into the latter in March 1988 accused the police of negligence and presentation of evasive evidence. In November 1985 thirteen people died in a peaceful march at Mamelodi after the arrest and alleged torture of the chair- person of the civic association. In February 1986 people were reportedly shot at point-blank range in Alexandra, and in March children were shot down without warning at White River. At Winterveld eleven died and 200 were injured in a demonstration by the elderly during which police continued to assault those on the ground. These events confirm Amnesty International's opinion that "some black protestors were shot dead as a matter of deliberate

63 G. Budlender, "Law and Lawlessness," South African Journal on Human Rights, 4:2 (1988), 144.

64 Police Conduct during Township Protests, August to November 1984 (Pretoria: Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, 1985).


policy."65 In many situations police were armed only with lethal weapons. An investigation by University of Cape Town researchers66 showed that of the deaths at the hands of police in Cape Town, 50 percent had been shot in the back and 12 percent were younger than fifteen. The injured were afraid to enter hospitals, where they were pointed out to police or their records were tagged.

The occupation of the townships meant a declaration of war by the state on its people who were regarded, literally, as the enemy. Evidence built up of mass arrests, tear gassing, sjambokking (assaulting with a leather, rubber, or

plastic whip), and use of birdshot, rubber bullets and live ammunition. Anti- apartheid groups pointed out that the operational area was to be found not only on the Angolan border but, for example, in Athlone (Cape Town). The emergency and its curfews were aimed particularly at organized youth and workers. Jan van Eck67 of the PFP Monitoring Group described "random beating and shooting without any plan or objective [by] groups of marauding hoo- ligans in police uniforms,"68 with damage to people, animals, and property. As one policeman said to a mother whose son had been shot in front of her at Graaf Reinet on 22 July 1985: "Botha's said we can kill you like flies."69 In July 1986 Mlungisi Stuurman was systematically assaulted (panelbeaten), then executed by drunken riot policemen at Cradock for wearing a Youth Congress T-shirt. His body was dumped in a river.70 The highest levels of repression were felt in isolated, small towns.

Rent, consumer, and transport boycotts were the only avenues of dissent remaining for the oppressed. The uncompromising reaction included cutting off services in Cradock and Mpophomeni in 1985; political use of licensing laws; and detention of black shopowners and intimidation of exempted whites. In September 1985 detentions destroyed an accord between black activists and white businessmen at Port Alfred.

As the scale of repression intensified, the South African state had to recruit allies to control a popular uprising spreading across vast areas. Traditional vigilante (makgotla) groups originally elicited respect from black communities. In the early 1980s, however, they began to fall under the control of community councillors and bantustan political movements clearly acting in collusion with the government, a state of affairs the Eminent Persons Group

65 Amnesty International, Report (1982), 89. 66 Weekly Mail, 9 May 1986; J. Duflou, "A Study of 93 Deaths from Gunshot Injuries during

Security Force Action in the Greater Cape Town Area, 1985," South African Medical Journal, 70 (19 July 1986), 89.

67 Subsequently he was an Independent Member of Parliament, in the House of Assembly, who joined the Democratic Party in May 1989.

68 Democratic Movement under Attack: A Report on the State of Emergency, South Africa, July-Sept. 1985 (Bramley: DPSC/Descom), 21.

69 Translated from the Afrikaans: "Botha het gese ons kan julle doodmaak soos fliee" (Ibid., 23).

70 P. Auf der Heyde, "Two Days with the Riot Squad," Work in progress, 52 (1988), 31-33.


noted.71 Their emergence as a political force for controlling resources and suppressing antiapartheid groups dates from the declaration of the 1985 Emergency. 72

In each of these situations vigilante action was assisted by committed or omitted police activity, often by bantustan officials.73 Vigilante groups gained easy access to weapons, identified with ethnic groups, and had a vested interest in the status quo. There was well-founded speculation that groups, such as Mbokotho in Kwandebele, which allegedly ran a concentration camp at Siyabuswa,74 were linked to right-wing death squads. The best publicized action of vigilantes was that of witdoeke (or white scarves, a right-wing vigilante group in Cape Town) under the control of Johnson Ngxobongwana at Crossroads, where 100 people of KTC (one of Cape Town's squatter settle- ments), Nyanga Bush, Nyanga Extension, and Portland Cement died and 70,000 lost their homes in twenty-seven days of systematic destruction in 1986. This forced removal, the most brutal in South African history, showed signs of the security force's collusion.75 Documentary evidence in the Kwan- debele and Crossroads cases shows that vigilante groups ran freelance prisons: Torture was routine, and in the latter case summary executions took place.76 Within the Pietermaritzburg township conflict, there was evidence from Au- gust 1987 onward of passive state collusion in a process in which the predomi- nant victims were anti-Inkatha youth suffering at the hands of well-connected warlords whose activities seemed largely immune from interference or legal action.77

The state thus used violent reactionary tendencies within black commu-

71 Mission to South Africa (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1986), 61-62. 72 At Ekangala, for example, KwaNdebele's Mbokotho instituted a reign of terror against

Action Committee supporters who opposed the bantustan system and had led a campaign concerning bus fares. At Leandra, Chief Mayisa of the Action Committee was murdered by Inkatha, a right-wing vigilante group (Inkatha is not to be confused with the Zulu organization of the same name: Such groups in South Africa often borrow names from other organizations). For further information, see N. Haysom, Mabangalala: The Rise of Right-wing Vigilantes in South Africa (Johannesburg: Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986).

73 An attack on Mmashadi High School at Siyabuswa, KwaNdebele by Mbokotho on 28 February 1986 was assisted by police in casspirs (armoured personnel carriers). See C. McCaul, Satellite in Revolt: KwaNdebele, 79. The assault, at Siyabuswa in late 1985, of dissident Moutse residents opposed to incorporation into KwaNdebele was personally supervised by the Chief Minister C. M. Skosana and P. M. Ntuli, Minister of the Interior and bantustan strongman.

74 Ibid., 84. 75 J. Cole, Crossroads: The Politics of Reform and Repression, 1976-1986 (Johannesburg:

Ravan, 1987), 131-56; M. Phillips, "Divide and Repress: Vigilantes and State Objectives in Crossroads," in States of Terror (London: Catholic Institute of International Relations, 1989), 15-36.

76 Now Everyone Is Afraid: The Changing Face of Policing in South Africa (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1988), 83-86 and 124-5.

77 J. J. W. Aitchison, Numbering the Dead: Patterns in the Midlands Violence (Pieter- maritzburg: Centre for Adult Education, University of Natal, 1988), 27.


nities to control resistance to apartheid. Municipal police and kitskonstabels78 were recruited from vigilante groups (known generically as the "A team") and unemployment fund queues. They unleashed a lawless reign of terror and brutality on black communities, aided and abetted by the Emergency's news blackout.79 All their actions, ranging from murder to assault and destruction of property, formed a useful vehicle for proxy repression, which was explained as black-on-black conflict and general lawlessness. There were also allegations concerning the use of criminals, dirty tricks (such as booby- trapped grenades) and private security firms. Thus, "semi-autonomous violence" can be seen as part of a strategy of control80 manipulated by groups comparable to Contras.81

For decades antiapartheid and human rights activists in South Africa have been victims of various right-wing terror tactics centring on theft and arson, petrol and other bombings,82 defacement of buildings, threatening phone calls, break-ins, damage to and tampering with cars, the discharge of weapons, desecration of graves, and false death notices. Only a few of those responsible have ever been tried, such harassment has frequently preceded detention, and some incidents have involved access to unlisted phone numbers or other confidential information. From 1964 to 1978, sixteen hundred right- wing attacks were documented and only two prosecutions ensued.83 Ten years later an eminent South African lawyer concluded that South Africa is in "the grip of state-sponsored terror violence."84

The existence of police informers in student and township organizations has been well documented, but periodic evidence of agents provocateurs, particularly on university campuses, has also emerged. In 1985 Parliamentary accu-

78 Kitskonstabels translates from the Afrikaans as "instant police." They are South African Police auxiliaries with as little as six weeks in training and backgrounds that often make them totally unsuitable for disinterested policing. Since 1985 more than 1,000 complaints have been lodged against a similar but different force, the municipal police, for offences ranging from murder, rape, and torture to robbery and crimen injuria (general-purpose charges including insults and using foul language). Full details are given in Greenflies: Municipal Police in the Eastern Cape (Cape Town: Black Sash, 1989).

79 F. Kruger, "'Wild Rats' of the Township," Weekly Mail, 15 April 1988, 6; P. Harris, "The Role of Right-Wing Vigilantes in South Africa," in States of Terror (London: Catholic Institute of International Relations, 1989), 1-13.

80 Southscan, 4:3 (1989), 26. 81 D. Webster, and M. Friedman, Suppressing Apartheid's Opponents: Repression and the

State of Emergency, June 1987 to March 1989 (Johannesburg, Southern African Research Service and Ravan, 1989), 22.

82 These included, for example, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) House, Johannesburg; Wilgespruit Community Centre, Transvaal; and Community House, Cape Town (all May-August 1987); Khotso House, Johannesburg and Khanya House, Pretoria (September- October 1988).

83 ADAC News, 9 (July 1984). 84 J. D. Van der Vyver, "State Sponsored Terror Violence," South African Journal on Human

Rights, 4:1 (1988), 70-71.


sations were made about a police department of dirty tricks in connection with the release of smear material about Reverend Allan Boesak, and in the following year fake pamphlets were attributed to the Joint Management Centres (JMCs), local units of the National Security Management System. This coincided with a spate of attacks on, and burglaries of, the offices of lawyers and academics working in the human rights field.85 Court-martial proceedings revealed the fact that the South African Defense Force (SADF) was involved in a dirty tricks programme against the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) in 1987.

There was an increasing death toll. From 8 January 1978, when Durban academic Richard Turner was assassinated, until 26 May 1989, when trade unionist Jabu Ndlovu died in Pietermaritzburg, at least sixty-two activists were assassinated.86 Only one case, that of Eric Mntonga, an official of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa (IDASA) was resolved, and even that happened only because of dissension in the ranks of the Ciskei police. Although it was known that a death squad was working in southern Africa and Europe to eliminate ANC members, evidence of its operation within South Africa itself has finally come to light.87 Victoria Mxenge, a UDF official killed in August 1985, was convinced of a link between Turner's death and the elimination of her lawyer husband, Griffiths, in November 1981. Siphiwe Mtimkulu of COSAS, an ex-detainee suffering from thalium poisoning, disappeared in April 1982 after lodging a 150,000-rand claim against the minister of Law and Order. The deaths of Cradock and Oudtshoor activists Goniwe, Calata, Mkhonto, and Mhlawuli in July 1985 occurred during a journey known only to a few and was undertaken on the understanding that they would stop only for uniformed police. There is no mystery about the death of Transkei student leader Batandwa Ndondo, shot at Cala on 24 September 1985 in broad daylight by security policemen. A similar incident leading to two deaths in early 1988 in Transkei was attributed to a freelance group with police connections.88

The disappearance on 8 May 1985 of Hashe, Godolozi, and Galela of the

85 The End Conscription Campaign (ECC) and South African Council of Churches (SACC) were recent victims of disinformation and smear campaigns, at least one orchestrated by the South African Defence Force (SADF).

86 The definition of activist is problematic: Many of those murdered in general political unrest have been low-profile community organization members. Yet another prominent person assassinated in recent months was Dr. David Webster, University of the Witwatersrand social an- thropologist and human rights activist, shot dead outside his home on the morning of 1 May 1989. Prior to her death in May 1989, Mrs. Ndlovu had briefed the press on the role of the police in the Pietermaritzburg violence.

87 The existence of a renegade ANC hit squad, the Askari Group, came to light in the Yengeni (Rainbow) Terrorism Trial in Cape Town, May 1989. "Askari" is a name of Arab derivation used to describe soldiers in East Africa, but the South African connection is not clear.

88 For further details on the situation in Transkei, see L. Flanagan, "Putting the Dead on Trial," Work in Progress, 59 (1989), 10-13; and Southscan, 4:25 (June 1989), 189.


Port Elizabeth Black Community Organization (PEBCO) has never been resolved. They were last seen alive at a police roadblock, and affidavits attest to their sighting at a police station.89 The police deny any knowledge of the PEBCO Three but raided Hashe's house the day after his disappearance. There are reports of many disappearances in KwaNdebele in mid-1986.90

Sufficient evidence exists to suggest the presence of a death squad close enough to the authorities to be privy to personal information and operating against key activists in the hope of undermining their organizations. The murder of the Ribieros at Alexandra in December 1986 produced allegations of the involvement of whites and the use of false number plates. In March 1988 evidence accidentally came to light of a JMC-linked hit squad in the Witwatersrand area that abducted and assaulted a Duduza activist. Such deliberate usage of terror using unknown perpetrators belonging to a group with no legal existence has a number of advantages, including the ability to paralyse the opposition by removing leaders and frightening survivors. It flourishes under states of emergency.91 At the end of 1989 the death-squad theory gathered credence as evidence emerged from dissident members of the security forces. After details of a South African police death squad were made known, a similar organization, the Civil Cooperation Bureau, surfaced in the SADF.92

In Argentina, The Process was by its nature violent repression. Within a couple of months of the military seizure of power General Iberico Saint Jean, as governor of Buenos Aires, explained: "First we kill all the subversives; then we kill their collaborators; then . . . their sympathisers; then . . . those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid."93 During Hector Campora's brief presidency, the National Congress on 25 May 1973 granted amnesty to 600 jailed guerrillas. Maybe it was the belief that they had re- sumed operations that initially triggered such savagery. If so, ideology soon supplanted gut reaction. National Security Doctrine proclaimed that the regime constituted the vanguard in the epic world struggle between order and terrorism. It discouraged scrutiny of the details, because the object was the unselfish one of showing the world how to eradicate subversion. The rdgime's behaviour showed repeated contradiction, including a striking combination of

89 Three witnesses testified in the Port Elizabeth Supreme Court in August 1988 that they had seen the PEBCO Three at Alexandria Police Station (Weekly Mail, 12 August 1988).

90 C. McCaul, Satellite in Revolt: KwaNdebele," 90. A recent disappearance involved Stanza Bopape of Community Resources Information Centre. Police claim that Bopape, shackled hand and foot, escaped while in the presence of three policemen who were changing the wheel of a vehicle on 12 June 1988, but confirmed his detention on 14 June. One year later friends and supporters placed advertisements in the antiapartheid press appealing for news of him.

91 Disappeared: Technique of Terror: A Report for the Independent Commission on Interna- tional Humanitarian Issues (London: Zed, 1986), 39-42.

92 "Hit Squads: Can They Be Tamed?" Work in Progress, 64 (1990), 14-17. 93 Quoted in J. Simpson, and J. Bennett, The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War, 66.


pride and reticence, well-illustrated in a crucial incident. In 1978 Emilio Massera dealt with President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, concerning the where- abouts of two French nuns on a mission in Argentina. Massera sent the French president a list of names and explained that those marked with an asterisk were dead. At the time, he was dealing with the head of a major European country, man-to-man. In 1985, in court, he denied the written testimony of the French president and then allowed his lawyer to admit it to the media afterwards.94

If repression at the level of statecraft formed part of a strategy of reversing all trends towards social organisation, the links between the dirty war and a dirty economy were obvious at the subterranean level. Although the Minister of Finance abolished death duties within days of his father's funeral, thereby evading taxation on one of the largest personal fortunes in the country, they were later reintroduced for everyone else to pay. The vaunted principle of free

enterprise was completely undermined by military pressure for highly lu- crative appointments on state control boards. The disappeared frequently included quite apolitical but well-to-do people with readily lootable homes. The purpose of torture was sometimes to force victims to sign away the title deeds to their houses and property and even sell their children for money to childless couples. Before The Process, Argentina's external debt was about $5 billion, and the figure climbed to 46 billion by 1983. Jorge Wehbe declared it as 37 billion, however, after air force officers threatened him. Perhaps some military personnel thought that economic triumph would excuse the obliteration of human rights. Without commenting on the morality of su;h thinking, one must say the plain fact is that there was no economic triumph. Aldo Ferrer commented that Argentina was the only country in which a spectacular increase in the foreign debt coincided with a no less spectacular decline of industrial production.95

In Argentina the Anti-Communist Alliance, or Triple A, was the best known vigilante group. The founder, Jose L6pez Rega, used the funds and nationwide facilities of the Ministry of Social Welfare in support of Triple A activities. Its members were mainly off-duty policemen and some armed forces personnel: They seemed to regard it as an unorthodox branch of moon-

lighting that could be highly profitable. The Triple A made its debut at Ezeiza

94 "The Generals' Day in Court," Newsweek, 23 September 1985. Emilio Massera was sentenced to life imprisonment, yet at the beginning of July 1989 he was recognized walking freely down the street. Pressed by a federal court, Defence Minister Horacio Juanarena stated that Massera was allowed to go for treatment of a liver complaint. However, the ex-Admiral was seen sixty blocks from the hospital and was not in custody (SAPA/AP report in the Natal Witness, 5 July 1989). Many military detainees were set free by the new Peronist President, Carlos Menem, on 12 October 1989 as part of an amnesty on the Day of the Race.

95 Quoted in D. C. Hodges, Argentina, 1943-1987: The National Revolution and Resistance, 201; A. Marshall, "The Fall of Labour's Share in Income and Consumption: A New 'Growth Model' for Argentina?" in Lost Promises: Debt, Austerity and Development in Latin America, W. L. Canale, ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1989), 47-65.

COMPARING HUMAN RIGHTS 28I

Airport on Juan Per6n's return to Argentina on 20 June 1973. On the orders of the Ministry's under-secretary, Colonel Jorge Osinde, this force fired into the Montonero crowd, killing twenty-five and wounding hundreds. Escalation was rapid.96 In 1974 there were 200 reported murders, mainly of leftists, and 850 in 1975. By March 1976 Argentina had a political killing every five hours, and a bomb attack every three. After the flight of L6pez Rega, and even more after the coup, the direction of the Triple A passed into other hands, particularly the naval officers, Emilio Massera and Ruben Chamorro, but assorted organisations saw the value of operating their own vigilante groups, which multiplied swiftly in the 1970s. Even the state oil board, Y.P.F., possessed one. This uncoordinated proliferation caused much confusion on the streets of Argentina. Gangs of armed men, in civilian clothes, in un- marked cars, behaving violently, understandably interested the legitimate police; there were also many shoot-outs among rival groups pursuing the same

targets. Incidental shafts of light illuminate the intriguing career paths of vigilantes. In September 1988 Argentine television displayed a film of supermarket looters during a political rally and appealed for public assistance with identification. A Uruguayan newspaperman visiting Buenos Aires, Enrique Rodriguez Larrera, named one of the thieves, Osvaldo Forese, as his captor during The Process.97

For the Argentine authorities, the disappearances had logistical advantages in view of the large numbers arrested. They also offered possibilities of self- protection in that, on completion of The Process, the military might not be exposed to legal action. In practice, however, the Pinochet government in

adjacent Chile proved more adept in the permanent disposal of corpses than

Argentina's "dirty warriors," though even they avoided the public body dumps of Central America. Did some anonymous counter-insurgency expert point out the known effectiveness of the night-and-fog approach in terrifying a whole nation into quiescence? If so, better international object lessons were available. Contemporaneous with the Argentine crisis was the murderous chaos wrought in Italy by terror gangs ranging from Fascist groups to the Red Brigades, yet the Italians confronted their comparable difficulties without ever suspending legal principles. All the cases of this nature were tried in the normal courts, and the accused received a fair hearing. The Italian authorities maintained unswervingly proper conduct, demonstrating a superiority over their opponents that won international admiration. Notwithstanding their close cultural and family ties with Italy, the Argentine regime took precisely the opposite course. They operated at depths far surpassing the atrocities

96 "Editoriales de Criterio. El peronismo gobernante y la guerra interna, 1973-1976," in R. del Barco, et al., Historia politica argentina, 1943-1982 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Belgrano, 1985), 104-47.

97 F. Luna, "El Proceso, 1976-1982," in R. del Barco et al., Historia politica argentina, 1943-1982, 148-69. See Somos, Afio, 11:6 (6 de octubre 1988), 6, for the details of the security officers robbing the supermarket.


committed by guerrillas and thus reduced their country to an international pariah.

As always in atrocities, casualty figures are disputed. Six hundred abduc- tions have been estimated under the Peronist government. These were not disappearances, but assassinations with bodies left behind as an open warning. The Sabato Commission-hobbled by lack of subpoena powers, witnesses' persistent fears, and, perhaps, misapplied British understatement-count- ed 8,960 disappearances for The Process altogether, although the coopted North American member, Marshall Meyer, estimated 15,000, including the reappeared.98 An experienced researcher writing a history rather than a report says: Between March 1976 and the end of 1978 the Military Process was responsible for some 30,000 "disappearances," at least four times as many cases of torture, another 10,000 assassinations carried out by the forces of repression. Detention without due process and extended imprisonment without formal charges or trial had become a matter of course.99

These atrocities were carried out through "the peculiar method of repression perfected by the Argentine military-disappearance without a trace into par- allel, extralegal police and military network," with the result that "the Argen- tine experience had the unfortunate distinction of introducing the term de- saparecido into the international lexicon,"'00 and indeed of grammatical innovation in making the verb "to disappear" both transitive and intransitive.

Thus the repression quickly broadened and, as in the transfer from legal powers to illegal practices, a shift in intentions also occurred. As stated, the original precise target was the guerrilla organisation. In 1972-73 President Alejandro Lanusse had permitted the Peronist Movement to return to power to test whether El Conductor Juan Peron could control his muchachos, the Montoneros and even more problematically, the Trotsky-inclined Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo. '10 The bloody fighting between the Montoneros and the Triple A at Ezeiza Airport on the day of Peron's return to Argentina was a portent that he would prove powerless to do so. Instead of rendering assistance, the armed forces from that day forward stood by as gleeful observ- ers, entering the fray only to settle scores if soldiers happened to be killed. Bombings, kidnappings, death threats, and summary executions committed by the right and left became so prevalent that, especially after Juan Peron's death102 on 1 July 1974, they seemed to extinguish hopes of dialogue. A military crackdown increasingly recommended itself to those lacking robust faith in the art of politics.

98 E. E. Mignone, C. L. Estlund, and S. Issacharoff, "Dictatorship on Trial," 120, n.2. 99 D. C. Hodges, Argentina, 1943-1987: The National Revolution and Resistance, 199.

?1o E. E. Mignone, C. L. Estlund, and S. Issacharoff, "Dictatorship on Trial," 118, 120. 101 Guido di Tella, Argentina under Perdn, 1973-1976: The Nation's Experience with a

Labour-based Government (London: Macmillan, 1983) is a highly scholarly "insider" account. 102 J. Godio, Per6n: regreso, soledad y muerte, 1973-1974 (Buenos Aires: Hyspamerica,

1986); E. P. Pereyra, Los ultimos dias de Perdn (Buenos Aires: Ediciones la Campana, 1981).


The disturbance of a highly urbanised society does not require massive numbers sworn to violence. A small minority can blot a general scenario of law-abiding opposition. In Argentina in the mid-1970s Montonero strength was variously estimated from 5,000 to 10,000 activists, while the Trotskyite E.R.P. numbered far less, due to heavy casualties under the Per6n government. Gillespie's conclusion is that "at no time during the 1970s did the Montoneros appear capable of leading a popular revolution or of seizing state power by military means"103 in a republic of thirty million people. This same judgement extends emphatically to the E.R.P., and these figures and facts should be firmly opposed to officially encouraged equation, say, with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which commands resources equivalent to many among the top 500 corporations in the United States and has always anticipated ruling a country. Neither did these Argentine formations in any way resemble the ANC; and, even though a military solution was sought by the authorities, it could have been pursued by the civilian government following legal procedures if loyally served by the armed forces. The latter were, however, contemptuous of politicians and ludicrously confident of their own prowess.

In the aftermath, the Radical Party's strategy of encouraging the military to denounce human rights offenders in order to clear the armed forces' reputation struck receptive chords in precious few uniformed breasts. Why is that? Some say it is because National Reconstruction required wide involvement in atrocities precisely so that few would have clean hands. For instance one would not ordinarily think of trainee naval mechanics as central figures in state security, yet ESMA deserves a place alongside the Lubyanka or the Bastille in the history of torture chambers. Others say that, although there are legions of military personnel who harboured doubts and even phobias concerning the dirty war, they feared that speaking out would bring them the same fate as any other category of opponents. The provisional character of Argentina's restored democracy does not reassure them of permanent protection in exchange for testimony even now. Another view is that a sizeable proportion of the armed forces feel they merely did their duty during the years of The Process and have now been let down by an ungrateful public that basked in their protection at the time. The Alfonsin government frequently attempted to squash this latter claim, reiterating that the military have no internal security duties and are confined purely to external defence.104 Indeed, after menacing the civil government three times in as many years, a significant current of

103 R. Gillespie, Soldiers of Per6n: Argentina's Montoneros (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), v; see also C. Szusterman, "Review and Commentary," Journal of Latin American Studies, 16 (1984), 157-70; R. Cox, "The Second Death of Per6n," New York Review of Books, 8 December 1983, 18-22.

104 C. J. Moneta, E. L6pez, and A. Romero, La reforma militar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Legasa, 1985) contains three excellent discussions and various presidential and congressional statements on the position of the armed forces in Argentina.


public opinion urges the abolition of the Argentine armed forces and the adoption of the Costa Rican model.

The abandonment of legal and judicial procedures in favour of an exclusive concentration on violent methods was the most fundamental fact of The Process in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. All familiar safeguards for life and property were disregarded, not only by extremists of left and right but by the regime itself. Talk of the excesses committed by individuals who overstepped official guidelines was pure camouflage: Acts described as excessive were in all cases acceptable to the government, and the only disciplinary proceedings involved personnel who refused to commit atrocities. This occurred not because of the gradual erosion of the legal constitutional framework but as a result of its overnight abolition. The South African situation has exhibited steady disintegration rather than instant collapse. The violent actions of the security forces, allied vigilante groups, and clandestine repressive agencies took South Africa into an era of officially sanctioned lawlessness in the late 1980s and a further step towards the River Plate nightmare. Article 3's life, liberty, and security of person were at severe risk in Argentina until 1983, and that experience, it appeared, was beginning to replicate itself in South Africa at the end of the decade. The extent to which South Africa is following the Argentinian path is examined in the conclusion.

CONCLUSION

The contrast between the two countries was total in that South Africa persisted with political trials, braving failure and ridicule, whereas Argentina aborted this approach before even the first case reached a court room. South Africa's

policy on the restriction of individuals, organizations, and meetings was to issue public announcements and publish lists with the apparent object of clearly identifying those to be deprived of rights and ostracized. Argentine policy, generally leaving unannounced and obscure those privately defined by the authorities as subversives, a Nazi borrowing known as nacht und nebel (night and fog), was mirrored in the popular reaction sera por algo (it must be for something) to the mistreatment of individuals and closing of associations. Arbitrary arrest and detention were major repressive practices in both countries; and exile failed to ensure the safety traditionally intended, as the South African and Argentine regimes both violated the sovereignty of would-be havens. Although the emergency allowed for censors in editors' offices, South African censorship was not as draconian as that practised in the Junta's Argen- tina, where military personnel actually controlled the media. State repression, vigilantes, and informal terror burgeoning in South Africa at the end of the 1980s threatened to match Argentine levels. That country can, therefore, serve as an awful warning of where the failure to respect human rights can lead; but it also offers a message of hope: The Republic of Argentina is no longer a pariah but a paragon, and the restoration of civilized life has been


achieved despite a material crisis incomparably worse than South Africa's economic difficulties.

In Argentina's case the repressive onslaught has receded into the past: In a country that had persecuted human rights activists, one was elected president. Raul Alfonsin did not try to be all things to all men, nor did he satisfy everybody. Certain repressive laws from the military era remained in force and were utilised by his Radical government. Collective bargaining remained subject to intervention from the Ministry of Labour; social welfare funds, estimated at $2.5 billion, built up from workers' and employers' contribu- tions, stayed under government supervision; and workers could not participate in the management or profits of state enterprises. Whereas workers had received almost 50 percent of national income under the former Peronist government from 1973 to 1976, they were far from recovering that position under the Radical administration from 1983 to 1989. Above all, limitations on the scope and time-scale of atrocity trials have disappointed civil rights groups. 05

Military rule in Argentina failed to fulfill even its basic promise of stable leadership. Between March 1976 and July 1982 three juntas (nine people) were in charge of Argentina. From March 1981 to July 1982, the country had seven military presidents and Bolivianisation was the contemptuous epithet, although no Bolivian Indian ever behaved like the Argentine military. It must be supposed that in assessing the performance of repressive regimes, the criteria include continuity of personnel or the persistence of a bureaucratic form unaffected by personality clashes or feuds. The Argentine armed forces achieved neither but turned their country into a pariah bringing to mind possible comparisons with South Africa.

The crucial fact about human rights abuse in South Africa has lain in its duality.106 The system of apartheid involves social engineering based on an amalgam of statute, administrative process, and brute force. In the 1980s this was tempered by cosmetic reform in order to adapt a discredited system to moder needs while still ensuring white domination. A context of superficial change and heightened expectation necessitated further human rights infringe- ments. In short, human rights abuse was both ideologically inevitable and tactically necessary. South Africa developed a justifiable reputation for the punctiliousness of its legal repression sanctioned by an unrepresentative legis- lature and a legal system that placed a premium on state security. Political trials, the bannings of individuals and groups, and detention without trial were as relevant as ever; but they were joined by other methods.

A widening of the tactics of human rights abuse coincided with the rise of

105 J. Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (London: Zed, 1989). 106 For a social democrat's perspective, see F. Johnstone, "South Africa," in J. Donnelly, and

R. E. Howard, International Handbook of Human Rights (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 339- 58.


the National Security Management System that aimed at removing antiapartheid activists and replacing them with pliant officials, aided by material improvement in the townships. Abetted by the State of Emergency through control of the media, circumvention of the courts and stifling of debate, it provided the context for the growth of a security state in which terror was employed as a deliberate tactic. Thus Bindman was able to conclude in 1988: "The apparatus of the police state is already well-established in South Af- rica."'07 The growing influence of the securocrats coincided with an increased willingness to turn guns on crowds and the intensification of informal repression. 108 The latter was epitomized by the rise of vigilante groups and a growth in harassment, assassinations, and disappearances. Characterized by increased black involvement as the government became more skilled in ex- ploiting the rifts in black society, this was a development of great propaganda value to the South African government, which was able to disguise state repression as "black on black violence." To securocrats schooled in censorship and anxious to avoid publicity, the methodology of the vigilante became more compelling than show trials and long detentions, around which international campaigns could be organized.

Is South Africa travelling the same path as Argentina? Superficially this would seem to be the case. Conflicts developing after the government's volte- face of February 1990 have exacted an enormous toll of lives and damage and bear all the marks of collusion between the authorities and right-wing vigilante forces. In the Edendale conflict from 26 March until mid-April 1990, over 200 died and 20,000 were made into refugees, almost all of them United Democrat Front supporters or people not prepared to show allegiance to Inkatha. Certainly on a regional scale a South African process seems to be well underway.

The particular characteristics of the South African situation, however, give reason to hope that such a development will not be the case. The antiapartheid broad democratic movement, although suffering setbacks, has reacted with growing innovation and maturity. Emphasis upon unifying factors in a future democratic South Africa, especially human rights, has been made possible by the availability of key documents, such as the Freedom Charter. Another sign of encouragement for South Africa is that despite the severe threat of repression, the numbers and energy of human rights organizations have expanded; and the suppression of one is the signal for the growth of another. 09 Univer-

107 G. Bindman, ed., "South Africa: Human Rights and the Rule of Law, 124. 108 D. Webster, and M. Friedman, Suppressing Apartheid's Opponents, 32-33. 109 E. H. Mignone, et al., "Dictatorship on trial," 124, n. 21. Human Rights Watch, an

American agency monitoring government's attitudes to human rights organizations, in 1987 placed South Africa at the bottom of its league, alongside Chile, the Soviet Union, and Czecho- slovakia. A number of activists were assassinated and organizations banned or restricted in the 1980s. In Argentina at the end of the dictatorship there were only eight major national human rights organizations, although their numbers had grown as the regime became weaker, a fraction of the South African number.


sities have played a growing role in the monitoring of repression as the

concept of academic freedom has been replaced by a more sophisticated and

socially relevant understanding of academic responsibility. South Africa, apartheid notwithstanding, is a relatively open society in

terms of the flow of communication to a world-wide information network. Trade and communication links and the availability of plentiful data in English mean that information about South Africa has rarely been lacking. Although Parliament is unrepresentative and regarded as illegitimate by most South Africans, opposition members have been able to use their privileges both to extract information and publicize abuses, such as torture. Within the culture of resistance is an innovative group determined never to allow the authorities to stop information about human rights abuses from reaching the international

community. Furthermore, had the constant threat of economic and financial sanctions throughout the 1980s been conclusively fulfilled, the South African securocrats would ironically have had no reason not to resort to Argentinian- style repression. In the human rights context the value of sanctions must be seen in their potential beyond their realization. Publicity and international

support are probably the last protection for the victims of state repression, as was proved in Argentina. But for these factors South Africa could have descended into the abyss; and without Argentina's tradition of democratic institutions, recovery could by no means be guaranteed. In South Africa's case this lack of a democratic tradition, indeed the fact that the underlying philosophy of the state has been based on denial of meaningful civil rights to others, indicates that human rights remain fragile and endangered.

comparing human rights south africa and argentina - christopher merrett

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