The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; The Troubled Country of Argentina

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. Winning soccer`s World Cup last week may turn out to be a mixed blessing for the South American nation of Argentina. On the up side, reports of the victory`s triggering a new sense of pride, purpose and unity among the people of Argentina; on the downside, the dramatic soccer wins attracting a new spotlight on the troubled country, revealing an economy with the largest inflation rate in the world, reports of widespread terrorism by both left-and right-wing guerrillas, charges of political repression by the government, with horror stories of kidnapping, torture and murder.

Argentina: the second largest country in South America, population twenty- six million, the nation of the Perons, now ruled by the military; once expected. to become one of the real powers of the Western Hemisphere. Tonight, the story of Argentina: what went wrong and what`s going wrong, in an extended film report from the BBC program "Panorama."` The reporter is David Taylor. It was done late in May, prior to the World Cup victory, but even then soccer was important.

DAVID TAYLOR, Reporting, BBC, Panorama: For five years Argentina has been in a state of siege, its people caught up in a civil war between the forces of terrorism and counterterrorism. The exact death toll is unknown, but it`s estimated that 7,000 people have been murdered, 8,000 detained without trial, while 10,000 have disappeared altogether.

Such was the political and economic chaos in Argentina that in March 1976 the armed forces staged a coup, and General Jorge Videla and his colleagues in the military junta took over the ruling of the country. Hailed by the people as a national savior, Videla promised to create a strong democracy.

Gen. JORGE VIDELA, President of Argentina (Translated): Argentina is a people born at the light of freedom. Consequently, it`s a free people that enjoys freedom, loves freedom and proclaims freedom. We are convinced that democracy is the only viable way for the free development of our national way of life.

TAYLOR: To preserve the national way of life, the military junta have fought what they call a war against subversion. Two guerrilla armies, the Montaneros and the Marxist ERP, have been defeated and their leaders driven into exile. Today the junta rules alone. From left to right, General Videla, the army commander; Brigadier Agosti, the air force chief of staff, and Admiral Massera, commander of the fleet. Interservice rivalry is intense, particularly between the army and the navy. But in public they stage an impressive show of national unity. Argentina`s military leaders are drawing up a constitutional system which will allow for an orderly return to civilian government. On this, as most things, opinion in the armed forces is divided. Some favor early elections, while others, like General Menendez, the commander of the 3rd Army Corps, believe that they`re still fighting the Third World war against Communism.

The military are also the prisoners of their own immediate past, haunted not so much by the dead as by those who are neither dead nor alive. There`s hardly an officer here who`s not been beseiged by the families of kidnap victims. Here in the offices of the Argentine League for the Rights of Man, the mothers and wives of the desparecidos --the disappeared people -- gather to console each other and to tell their stories to visiting journalists. The League has documented 1,130 disappearances in Buenos Aires alone, while another organization, the Assembly for Human Rights, has drawn up an even longer list. In almost every case the victim was spirited away by armed men claiming to be the Security Police. Marcos Arecena, a well- known Argentine playwright, is one of the thousands who`ve disappeared in this way. At five o`clock in the morning on July 9, 1976, he was taken out of his flat at gun point by men purporting to be the police.

Do you think your son is alive?

HELENA ARECENA: Yes, I do; yes, I do. I feel that he`s alive. I don`t know where he is, but I feel that he`s alive.

TAYLOR: Senora, supposing your son is dead. Would you rather know that than be left in suspense? Is there anything worse than not knowing?

ARECENA: There`s nothing worse than not knowing. There`s nothing worse than that. It`s. really -- it`s torture.

TAYLOR: When times are bad, as they`ve often been in Argentina, sport is the popular therapy. Anyone coming from Europe who`s only read about Argentina might expect to find a cowed and fearful people eking out a meager existence. The truth is somewhat different. Even so, there are obvious constraints. It would seem there are many subjects they never discuss; human rights is one of them. It`s almost as if they didn`t care about other people`s suffering. Another possible explanation is that they don`t know very much about it. Although Argentina has scores of newspapers and magazines, they exercise a considerable degree of self censorship -- which is hardly surprising, considering that forty journalists have died or disappeared since the military coup. But there`s one paper that goes on publishing the bad news as well as the good, an English-language daily called the Buenos Aires Herald. The Herald publishes stories no other paper will touch , and its London-born editor, Bob Cox, writes pungent editorials ... not that he gets much response.

BOB COX, Buenos Aires Herald: I can remember the first cases, which horrified me, and people would say, "Well, he`s an American businessman, he`s an imperialist," as if to say, "He deserves to be murdered for doing this." There was always a reason, always a justification. And then you go ahead a few years and you find the same thing happening now. If a schoolteacher vanishes or something like that, they say, "Ah, well, she must have been teaching the children Communism." People have always found this kind of thing; there aren`t the links whereby you worry and you`re concerned about another human being suffering or another human being being murdered.

At the turn of the century Argentina had the second highest growth rate in the world, after the United States. Argentina was the country of the future. But it didn`t make it. Other countries did, like Canada and Australia. These countries had institutions that worked; they took over a working system, a working parliamentary system; they took over a judicial system that worked. Argentina took over nothing that worked. We`ve just swung from military governments to civilian governments, and none of them have worked properly.

TAYLOR: The revolution of 1943, a purely military coup, gave the presidency to General Ramfrez, just another Latin American dictator. A certain Colonel Juan Peron was appointed Labor Minister. Peron used his post to climb to power as the champion of Argentina`s underdogs, the working class. Helped by his new wife, Eva, he was elected president three years later. Between them they captured a nation. Eva provided the glamour, the passion, and the mob oratory, while her husband courted the trade unions and the army.

And in 1952 Eva died of cancer, and much of the soul went out of Peronism. But during the next three years, as Peron became more and more dictatorial in his methods, the legend of Santa Evita was born. She had preached a simple hate and a simple love: hate for the rich, love for the poor. She was a patron saint of the shirtless ones, the descamisados. For many, Peronism had become a dangerous religion. Determined to crush it at all costs, in 1955 the armed forces staged a successful coup. And in a Paraguayan gunboat Peron sailed away into exile. He left behind him a bitterly divided country.

Presidents came and went as the armed forces fought to keep Peronism at bay and as the civilian politicians, who tried to rule without Peron, failed miserably. By the `60s the frustrated Peronist masses had turned to labor strife and the guerrilla warfare of the Montaneros. In 1973 the people got their way; democratic elections brought Peron back to power. On his death a year later the presidency passed to his third wife, Isabel. She was an empty caricature of Evita. She tried to hold together a movement which by now embraced everything from Maoism to Fascism. With hyperinflation and the collapsing economy, with left-wing guerrillas controlling no-go areas, and with right-wing murder squads stalking the land, Peronism had developed its own death wish. Even now, after two years of military rule, Argentina is still a land of blood where no one is safe from the assassin`s bullet.

This is the funeral of Miguel Padilla, an undersecretary for economy. Six weeks ago, as he was putting the finishing touches to Argentina`s new labor legislation, Padilla met a violent death.

No one knows who their enemies are or when they`ll strike; and being in government in Argentina is a dangerous business. In a way, Alec Reynal is lucky to be alive. After the coup he was offered the job Miguel Padilla died trying to do. Fortunately for him, Reynal chose instead to move his family up to the northern province of Corrientes, where, at thirty-two, he`s Minister of Economy.

The government has brought in many young men like Reynal, men who believe in President Videla`s vision of a strong democracy. They belong to the same generation and come from the same social background as the guerrillas who picked up their arms in the `60s. The government has given them great responsibility. They`re provincial ministers for the economy, for agriculture and for social welfare. They believe that by tapping Argentina`s vast natural resources they can make their country great. It`s an attractive economic argument.

Potentially, Argentina has always been a wealthy country. Its enormous fertile pampas feeds its own population and half the world besides. In the minds of many, this is Argentina, a land that is as rich as it`s flat, inexhaustible and infinitely forgiving, a land of crops and of cattle herds. Historically these four-legged beasts are the currency in which the country has traded.

Yet, two years ago Argentina was virtually bankrupt. Public expenditure was being financed by simply printing money. Inflation was 900 percent. The country was being destroyed by its political instability. The return of law and order and conservative economics has brought the inflation rate down to 160 percent and restored international confidence. Although inflation has been curbed, prices have continued to soar while industrial wages have been held down. To make matters worse, taxation has gone up, credit is scarce and there are fewer jobs around. Overall, most people`s living standards are only half of what they were in 1976.

The Argentine labor movement has always been the most militant in Latin America, with the car workers of the northern town of Cordoba in the vanguard. The students, too, are highly politicized. Cordoba`s massive university used to be a breeding ground for the Montaneros. Before the coup, lectures were constantly interrupted for political harangues, but an academic purge has damped the students` ardor.

The workers too are docile, and for the same reason: fear. Before the coup, at Perkins, Argentina there was hardly a week that passed without a strike. Although the factory is now on half-time working, the management prefer life under the soldiers.

Minister, you talk about the workers cooperating with you, but surely they`ve been coerced into it.

Dr. JOSE MARTINEZ De HOZ, Minister of Economy: No. You cannot call that there is coercion when you have a freedom to work properly, or better or worse, or even strike, at factories. We have had the odd strikes at factories, which shows that strikes are possible.

TAYLOR: I thought it was outside of the law to strike.

De HOZ: No, no.

TAYLOR: According to the Law of Industrial Security, published six months after the coup, workers who decide on strike action or do anything to prejudice production can be imprisoned for up to six years. Most of Argentina`s big unions have been intervened. That`s to say they`re now run by the army. Collective bargaining has been suspended and wages rigidly held down. At the Perkins factory the highest paid worker gets twenty pounds a week; the lowest, thirteen pounds.

This old man`s only son was a Communist shop steward.

He was killed by men wearing black berets and red ponchos. This woman`s husband and brother disappeared soon after the coup. So did this woman`s husband. All three were in the milkmen`s union. This young woman has two children. Her husband was kidnapped two years ago. He was a union delegate at his bank.

It wasn`t just in the working class areas of Cordoba that terror struck suddenly; it`s happened all over the province, even at St. Paul`s School. Many of St. Paul`s teachers come from England, and two years ago Alan McHugh secured a post here to teach English and Spanish. He and his Argentine wife were delighted with their new situation. The idyl came to an abrupt end one afternoon as they were taking their siesta.

ALAN McHUGH: We were woken up by the sound of somebody knocking at the door, so I went to answer and I saw the school accountant. And he pointed to several people behind him, and I strained my eyes and looked, and I saw that they were soldiers, armed soldiers, pointing machine guns at us.

TAYLOR: The problem was McHugh`s wife Anna, who, like most students of her generation, had belonged to the Peronist youth movement. This apparently made both of them suspect.

It was reason enough for the soldiers to pack them into a lorry and to drive them for several hours over the Cordoba hills, before eventually they got to this spot on the outskirts of the city, a place with one of the most evil reputations in Argentina -- the Campo de Rivera. Alan and Anna were kept in the Campo de Rivera for ten days. What they saw there will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

ANNA McHUGH: All of the dead had been tortured, and I saw the marks of cigarettes and burns. And the picana -- when someone has been tortured with a picana there`s a little mark in the skin, and some of them had been raped several times.

TAYLOR: In Argentina it isn`t the ostriches who bury their heads in the sand, it`s the people. All the landowner wants is to be left alone to enjoy his traditional pastimes: to dress up as a gaucho and to hunt as his forefathers did. He doesn`t kill the ostrich any more; it`s too rare a bird for that. He plucks it instead and sells the feathers for dusters. There`s always money to be made out of the land and what lives on it. It was the British who first exploited Argentina`s wealth. They ran the railways which took the beef and the wheat to market. They also acquired the ground on which it grew, and named railway stations after themselves. In 1870 a Warwickshire lad, Edmund B. Perkins, emigrated to Argentina and founded a landed dynasty. The Perkins family used to own 300,000 acres, and although some of it has gone they`re still one of the largest landowning families in the country. What they have to offer is a colonial style, a belief in European values, somewhat overlaid by Argentine custom.

Those who have the land want to keep it, and that makes them fiercely anti- Peronist and pro-military.

Do you know any of the people who have disappeared? Many have disappeared, haven`t they, Senora?

MERCEDES PERKINS De ULLOA: Yes. Many have disappeared, and I know, yes, I know several -- I know people that are in jail, I know people that have disappeared and I know that are in Europe, and people that have disappeared and nobody knows if they are dead or not.

TAYLOR: Does that bother you?

De ULLOA: No, it doesn`t, because I feel such a terrible hatred for those people that killed innocent people, that do such harm. If I were the government I would do ten times more, ten times -- not what they do; ten times more.

COX: If one keeps one`s sanity in all this, one has all the time to say to oneself, How can we move forward, how can we get out of this madness, this sort of bloody ideological bent where people on the Right will say I do not care, we have to wipe out the Left at any cost whatsoever, when what has happened of course is that the Left was saying the same thing perhaps two or three years ago.

TAYLOR: You`ve been remarkably successful in defeating left-wing terrorism, but why haven`t you been able to control right-wing terrorists?

VIDELA (Translated): It is difficult to determine what is left-wing terrorism and what is right-wing terrorism. Everything that attempts against human life, against man`s dignity as a person, either through armed aggression or psychic or moral pressure to force a change of ideas -- for us, all this is terrorism. We have fought against all that. The fact that we were more successful or less successful in one way or another is the result of circumstances, of things that cannot be measured in figures; but we do not make any difference between fighting one type of terrorism and condoning another. Both are evils that Argentina does not want. We are fighting against these evils.

TAYLOR: General Videla`s claim that he hasn`t got complete control over his own security forces is treated with skepticism by human rights workers inside and outside Argentina. But what is not at issue is the hard fact that thousands of killings and kidnappings have taken place in the last two years, many of them in Buenos Aires. Vast areas of the city have been turned into military zones where security is total. Passing motorists who slow down or stop their cars in one of these zones can be shot on sight by soldiers made trigger-happy by frequent guerrilla raids. The warning signs say so, and they mean it.

There are also secret detention centers scattered around the city, places where kidnap victims are held and interrogated. Our sources told us of a dozen such centers. We managed to film five of them. Two young students who were recently released from this place agreed to tell us about their experiences.

FIRST STUDENT (Translator): They tied her hands up behind her back and her legs as well, took her clothes off and put a black hood on her and then started torturing her with electric shocks -- all over her body, the most sensitive parts...vagina, breasts and the face.

SECOND STUDENT (Translator): One form is (unintelligible) on the eardrums, and another form is ... sticking needles into your eyes, tearing off nails.

TAYLOR: Every Thursday afternoon the mothers and wives of the disappeared protest in the Plaza de Mayo. There are fewer kidnappings these days, perhaps because the junta has brought them under control, perhaps because there`s less need for them now. But in his pink palace President Videla is still faced with the problem of those who`ve already vanished.

VIDELA (Translated): Concerning missing persons, since you have touched on this question, we cannot deny this reality. In our country there are people who have died, persons who were gravely injured in armed confrontation, namely, seriously wounded people, amputees and persons who have disappeared. These are the consequences of a war.

TAYLOR: If Argentina wants to convince the world that it has restored the rule of law, surely every effort should be made to find the disappeared; or if indeed the disappeared are now dead, then that information should be given to their relatives.

VIDELA (Translated): Yes, sir. I share the sense of your question but not the tone in which it`s made. You seem to refer to a future to which we should aim. I tell you that this is already a reality in our country. In our country there`s a considerable number of people who are being released when there`s no motive for their detention; and there are persons whose whereabouts we have tried to establish, and recently a long list of persons was published, persons who were claimed as missing, and clarified their situation and their existence. That is a task being carried out for some time. We will go on doing it up to where our strength will permit, but being sure of not promising what we cannot do. There will always remain a certain number of missing persons about which it might perhaps not be possible to provide information.

TAYLOR: Occasionally the disappeared turn up again. This is the San Roque Lake, one of the beauty spots in Cordoba Province. Last year a man went skin-diving here, and found a mortuary - nineteen decomposing bodies; or so he said. He reported his find to the authorities, but they didn`t believe him; so he told his story to the press, but they didn`t print it. In Argentina there are some things that are safer left unsaid, and what lies at the bottom of the lake is not only out of sight, it`s out of mind.

LEHRER: That film was done by the BBC; the reporter, David Taylor.. Two upcoming developments concerning the future of Argentina. On August first General Videla becomes the civilian president of Argentina and will begin a new three-year term ruling the country with a three-man military junta, the heads of the three branches of the armed forces. The New York Times reports that a struggle has developed within the army over who with succeed General Videla as army commander. One candidate supports relaxation of the government`s attitude toward political opponents and the unions; the other is considered a hard-liner on the issue.

Also, after September 30 the United States can approve no more military arms sales or credits for Argentina because of human rights violations. It`s forbidden under a section of the Foreign Assistance Act. Argentina: a nation with a lot more on its mind than soccer.

We`ll see you tomorrow night. I`m Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.