Report on the `disappeared'. Argentina struggles to come to terms with a brutal past

Nunca M'as: the Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. Introduction by Ronald Dworkin. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 450 pp. $22.50. A national drama with worldwide import is playing itself out in Argentina.

For the past three years, this newly democratic country has been struggling to come to terms with its recent past - with the campaign of repression that flourished under the authoritarian military regime of 1976-83, and with the fact that a large portion of the population, whether out of fear or acquiescence, looked the other way. At least 12,000 Argentine citizens (some say 30,000) were abducted and sent to detention/torture centers, and 9,000 completely disappeared.

``Nunca M'as'' (Spanish for ``never again''), recently published in English for the first time, is Argentina's own report on this national nightmare. Prepared by the National Commission on the Disappeared, which carried out an exhaustive investigation, the report tells the story of a government that, to fight terrorism, deliberately set out to create a climate of fear and uncertainty among its countrymen, kidnapping Argentines of all classes from homes, offices, and street corners, all the while claiming it knew nothing of their whereabouts.

Though the scale of abuse in Argentina seems huge, it was not unique. Tiny neighboring Uruguay during the same period is said to have had the highest number of political prisoners per capita in the world. And the problem ranges far beyond Latin American military regimes. Freedom House of New York recently pointed out that in this century more than three times as many people have been killed in their own countries by repressive governments as have died in all civil or foreign wars - some 119 million, compared with 36 million.

Yet the course of action Argentina has chosen since 1983 is unique. The government of President Ra'ul Alfons'in has sought to reestablish the rule of law by seeking justice through the courts. The trials and convictions of military junta members and top police officials during the past 18 months are unprecedented in Latin American history. Never before has a country moving from military to civilian rule insisted on holding the armed forces directly accountable for their excesses.

This has come about in Argentina for several reasons: the military's dramatic loss of public support because of the disastrous Falklands (Malvinas) war of 1982; the pressure from human rights groups, including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose children were among the thousands who disappeared; the courage of a new civilian government highly committed to democratic principles; and the work of the National Commission on the Disappeared, created by President Alfons'in soon after his election in 1983.

The commission's report, first issued in Argentina in 1984, laid the foundation for the trials that began the following year. Based on 50,000 pages of documentation from the testimony of torture victims, families of the disappeared, and members of the security forces who participated, this extraordinary document lays bare, in a straightforward but devastating fashion, the structure of repression created by the military to rid the country of ``subversive thought.'' After the military coup of 1976, the Supreme Court and many other judges were replaced with junta appointees (resulting in a virtual suspension of habeas corpus), and a carefully organized ``dirty war'' was initiated, to be waged in some 340 secret detention centers.

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