José Manuel de la Sota, governor of Córdoba, is embroiled in a controversy after he questioned the handling of lawsuits surrounding the dictatorship in a recent interview.

Córdoba governor José Manuel de la Sota (photo by Ricardo Stucker/ABr)

Legislators and human rights organisations strongly condemned De la Sota’s proposition to negotiate with military leaders and reduce sentences for crimes against humanity in exchange for information about the location of the disappeared.

De la Sota expressed the desire for a “reconciliation cleanse” and the reduction of penalties for crimes committed during the military dictatorship.

“There are some that follow the politics of resentment, and have not made any human rights policy,” the leader told Canal 26.

The backlash followed quickly: Remo Carlotto, he head of the Human Rights Commission and brother of disappeared woman Laura Carlotto, said that “reconciliation in this case will only fuel impunity. This cynical reasoning comes from people who are not committed to the defence of human rights.”

National deputy for Cordoba Fabián Francioni rejected De la Sota’s plans, saying “De la Sota is a true reflection of Menemism, his position resembles the pardoning of neoliberalism of the ’90s, and it seems he did not realise that this political decision of impunity for genocidal leaders is a backward policy.”

The Córdoba Mayors’ forum released a statement saying “It is sad to hear this kind of position on a such a sensitive topic for the present and future of Argentina,” adding that “our country is an example to the rest of the world with regards to advances towards justice, which have allowed people to be judged and condemned, bringing the constitution and laws against murderers and torturers.”

Fourteen years ago today, a report titled Guatemala: Nunca más was released, carrying statements from thousands of witnesses and victims of the country’s 36-year internal armed conflict. The report pointed a finger at the Guatemalan government and military, attributing the majority of deaths and human rights violations to them.

Thirteen years and 363 days ago, the man who led the research – Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi – was beaten to death in his garage in Guatemala City.

Nunca más

The Nunca más – meaning “never again” – report was a work with the Interdiocesan Project Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI). The goal was to gather testimony and other documentation, reporting on widespread massacres in the highlands of Guatemala, and to investigate the perpetrators of those crimes. The report also pointed out that nine out of ten victims was an unarmed civilian.

One of the project’s former directors and Guatemalan politician Edgar Gutiérrez wrote about the project for the World Association for Christian Communication. He said “reconciliation animators” gathered thousands of testimonies from all around the country, “covering huge distances, freely giving their time and effort, dealing with terrible stories, some times putting up with indifference, others putting up with incomprehension and both open and veiled threats.”

He also noted that people often preferred to forget the past rather than bring it up.

“The people, in effect, were ill, they cried, they suffered,” he wrote. “The initial aim of REMHI, led by our inspiring pastoral director, Bishop Juan Gerardi, then responsible for the Human Rights Office of the Archbishopric of Guatemala, was to get on with the work of the [Commission for Historical Clarification], taking into account limitations of time and difficulty of access to communities, especially indigenous ones, still dominated by fear.”

A BBC report published the day after Gerardi’s murder quotes a prominent human rights activist, who declined to give their name. The activist said that the murder was “a clear message” that death squads continued “to operate in the country and do not want the truth to be known.”

UN-Sponsored Truth Commission

The framework for Gerardi’s report was instrumental in the creation of the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification, which was conducted between 1997 and 1999.

The commission found that more than 200,000 people were killed between 1960 and 1996, and an additional 45,000 were disappeared. The commission found that in the four most violent regions “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”

The UN-sponsored commission reported that between 1978 and 1983, the Guatemalan military conducted a “scorched earth” campaign against expanding guerrilla groups. The commission notes that guerrilla integration with Mayan communities was based on racial prejudices and “intentionally exaggerated” by the government.

“The massacres, scorched earth operations, forced disappearances and executions of Mayan authorities, leaders and spiritual guides, were not only an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas, but above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan communities,” it states.

The Recent Charges

Over the past few years, there have been several former military officers tried and convicted for their roles in the massacres.

On 12th March, Pedro Pimentel Ríos was the fifth person sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the Dos Erres massacre, where more than 200 people were tortured and killed. Carlos Antonio Carias López, Reyes Collin Guali, Daniel Martínez Méndez and Manuel Pop Sun were sentenced to the same in August 2011.

On 21st March, former civil patrollers Eusebio Grace, Julián and Mario Acoj and Santos Rosales as well as former military commissioner Lucas Tecú were found guilty for their roles in the Plan de Sánchez massacre, and each was sentenced to 7,710 years in prison. At least 256 indigenous people died in the massacre, which took place on 18th July, 1982.

“Slowly but surely, justice is beginning to prevail for these horrendous crimes that have hung over Guatemalan society for three decades,” said Sebastian Elgueta, Central America researcher at Amnesty International, soon after the verdict.

In January, former president José Efraín Ríos Montt was placed under house arrest, awaiting trial for charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The retired general was de facto ruler of Guatemala between 1982 and 1983, during the height of violence in the country. Half of all the documented human rights violations during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict took place in those years.

That said, exhumations are still in progress in certain regions, like the one taking place at a former military outpost near Cobán.

Also, according to the Guatemalan newspaper La Prensa Libre, about 14 people are still wanted for crimes related to the Dos Erres massacre. Countless others are wanted on other violent crimes related to the internal armed conflict, as well.

Lauren Carasik – clinical professor of law and director of the International Human Rights Clinic and the Legal Services Clinic at Western New England University School of Law – wrote an opinion piece for Al-Jazeera in January.

She said there is evidence demonstrating that current Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina was a military commander in the Ixil Triangle during the period in which the UN found that the army had committed genocide, and 70-90 per cent of the villages in that region were razed.

“Instead of signalling his intention to reconcile with the past, Perez Molina denies that genocide occurred and conveniently ignores the UN Truth Commission’s finding that 93% of the war crimes were committed by the army – and only four per cent were attributable to the insurgents,” she wrote.

And in the 2007 book The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? author Francisco Goldman suggests that Pérez Molina could have been the mastermind of Gerardi’s murder – an accusation denied by the president.

As we approach the first anniversary of his death, the Beyond Borges series arrives at the Argentine essayist and existentialist author Ernesto Sabato.

Ernesto Sabato, the essayist and novelist known for bringing Existentialism to Argentina

As revered at the time of his passing as Jorge Luis Borges, Sabato is widely-known for his role in bringing about justice for the crimes committed by the nation’s military leaders during Argentina’s most infamous dictatorship.

Having received a great deal of critical acclaim for his novels ‘El túnel’ and ‘Sobre héroes y tombas’ he was awarded the 1984 Miguel de Cervantes prize and is commonly regarded one of South America’s most influential writers.

Scientific Beginnings

Born in 1911 in Riojas, a small town in Buenos Aires province, Sabato was the tenth of 11 sons born to Italian immigrant parents. Whilst studying physics and mathematics at the University of La Plata he joined a movement of student activists calling for university reform and independence. By 1933 he had set up a campaign group of communist ideals and, during the same year, was appointed general secretary of the Communist Youth Federation.

Recognising Sabato’s waning belief in Stalin’s methods a year later, the Communist Party of Argentina ordered him to attend the International Lenin School (ILS) for two years. En-route to Moscow he travelled first to Belgium as a delegate of the party and onto Paris, where he is said to have drafted his first unpublished novel, ‘La fuente muda’.

On his return to Argentina he married Matilde Kusminsky Richter, a woman he’d met at a Marxist lecture in Belgium three years earlier, and in 1938 gained his PhD in physics from the University of La Plata aged 27.

Sabato's signature (Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Nobel laureate Bernardo Houssay helped to secure Sabato a research fellowship at the prestigious Institut Curie in Paris, which placed him among surrealist writers in an environment that would only draw out his creativity.

“During that time of antagonisms, I buried myself with electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning, and spent the nights in bars with the delirious surrealists. At the Dôme and in the Deux Magots, inebriated with those heralds of chaos and excess, we used to spend many hours creating exquisite cadavers,” he said.

In 1939 he transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and returned to Argentina one year later, intent on leaving science behind. Disillusioned with what he called the dehumanising effects of science, Sabato turned to literature, where he found the unexplained aspects of the human personality relayed in German romanticism and existentialism.

Whilst he became almost immediately active in Argentina’s literary circles he continued juggling his writing and teaching careers until 1943, when he eventually made a more permanent transition to writing.

Echoes of Existentialism

Sabato published essays on a variety of scientific and literary topics, but famously burned many of his manuscripts. A surviving trio of novels includes the existentialist classic ‘El túnel’ (1948), ‘Sobre héroes y tumbas’ (1961), and the lesser known ‘Abaddón el exterminador’ (1974). Though the second is generally considered his best work, it is his first novel which will likely remain the most known outside Argentina.

Originally published in Sur magazine in 1948, it received a great deal of attention from Nobel prize laureates Alfred Camus and Thomas Mann and was almost immediately picked up for translation by French publishing house Gallimard. The first English translation in 1950 was superseded by a 1988 translation and the release of ‘The tunnel’ as a Penguin Classic only two days before Sabato’s death last year will likely secure its place for some time as the most-widely read of all his novels.

The opening lines from 'El Túnel' displayed outside Casa Museo Ernesto Sabato (Photo: Kate Bowen)

Covering little more than 100 pages, ‘El túnel’ takes us on a discomforting journey into the mind of a convicted killer – the painter Juan Pablo Castel. Imprisoned for the murder of his lover Maria Iribarne, the novel begins with his confession and continues by explaining the circumstances of his crime.

Narrated entirely in the first person, the scene is set entirely within Castel’s conscience. Never stepping for a moment outside of his self absorbed and over-analytical mind, we are carried down every dark hallway of his paranoid imagination, charting the growth of every obsessive thought.

Whilst some praise Sabato’s approach for accurately presenting the complexities of a crazed mind, others have criticised him for painting his protagonist with too broad a stroke. Nonetheless, the novel succeeds in raising questions about logical understanding and rationality – is our killer insane, or quite the opposite?

Though the reader may never be intended to achieve empathy, he does achieve, in some terrifying way, an understanding of his subject. Throughout the novel he is asked to continually shift his stance until it rests somewhere between sympathy and abhorrence.

Since the opening lines of the novel grab the readers attention so firmly, Sabato sets himself the challenge of continuing a novel where the outcome is already known and the element of intrigue is lacking. While this does demand a certain tolerance from the reader, Sabato steers clear of tedium with an energy and a darkness that could only have been maintained successfully in such a short novel.

Opinion remains divided, however. Some argue that Sabato’s stab at the existentialist genre amounts to nothing more than an un-engaging retrospective that fails to reveal much about the human condition. For others, it is a novel well deserving of its place among the likes of Camus’ ‘The stranger’, Franz Kafka’s ‘The trial’ and George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen eighty-four’ on a shelf of existentialist classics.

Many crime novels have since offered slices of insight into their killer’s minds but, at the time, Sabato’s edgy existentialism followed a genuinely innovative European wave and represented the height of originality in Argentine writing.

Political Poles

Though Sabato may always be remembered as a tireless campaigner for justice and human rights he has also come under occasional fire for his changing political positions. Where the likes of Leopoldo Lugones and Leopoldo Marechal made themselves unpopular with their political views, Borges and Sabato managed to swing their political stances relatively easily and relatively unnoticed.

Journalist Osvaldo Bayer, however, accused him of forming part of the “Argentine hypocrisy” in light of his actions and apparently contradictory statements made during the Argentine dictatorship of 1976- 1983.

Sabato was characterised by his thick framed glasses, bald head and moustache

Critical of the government of Juan Domingo Perón, Sabato originally appeared welcoming of the military dictatorship that began in 1976 and lasted until 1983. In the same year, both he and Borges attended a dinner held by the military leader Jorge Rafael Videla, after which Sabato was recorded as commenting that Videla was a “cultured” man. Several years later he explained to a German magazine that the majority of Argentines had welcomed the military power because they’d been able to put an end to the leftist groups threatening the stability of the country.

At the end of the dictatorship, newly elected president Raúl Alfonsín appointed Sabato to preside over the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) – a newly created commission tasked with investigating the fate of tens of thousands of Argentines who disappeared at the hands of the military.

Sabato presented his findings to Alfonsín on the 20 September 1984. His 50,000 page report entitled ‘Nunca más’ was later used to prosecute nine members of the military establishment for crimes committed during the dictatorship years.

Despite whatever he may have said before, it is the undeniably good work he performed as president of CONADEP that has stayed in the memory of Argentines and resulted in Sabato’s non-literary legacy being shaped to appear as significant as his literary one.