Rodolfo Walsh Open Letter to Military
1. Press censorship, the persecution of intellectuals, the raid on my house in the Tigre, the murder of dear friends and the loss of a daughter who died fighting them, are some of the facts compel me to this form of expression illegal after opinions freely as a writer and journalist for nearly thirty years. The first anniversary of the military junta has provoked an assessment of government action on official documents and speeches, where what you call good are errors, which errors are recognized as crimes and calamities which are skipped. On March 24, 1976, you overthrew a government to which they belonged, whose prestige helped as executors of his policy of repression, whose term was marked by elections called for nine months later. In that perspective what you destroyed was not the transitional mandate Isabel Martínez, but the possibility of a democratic process where people would remedy the ills that you continued and worsened. Illegitimate source, the government that you practice the facts could legitimize retrieving the program where they meet in the 1973 elections Eighty percent of Argentines and that still stands as an objective expression of the will of the people, the only possible meaning that "national" that you invoke so often. Reversing this path you have restored the flow of ideas and interests of minorities defeated that hinder the development of productivtas forces, exploit the people and divide the nation. Such a policy can only be imposed temporarily prohibiting political parties, control of the unions, gagging the Press and implementing the most profound terror that society has ever known in Argentina.
2. Fifteen thousand missing, ten thousand prisoners, four thousand dead, tens of thousands of exiles are the naked figure of this terror. Ordinary jails being full, you created in the country's main garrisons virtual concentration camps where they do not enter any judge, lawyer, journalist, international observer. Military secrecy of the proceedings, invoked as a need for research, makes the most arrests in kidnapping that allow unlimited torture and execution without trial. More than seven thousand applications for habeas corpus have been denied this past year. In other thousands of cases of missing the action has not even been submitted because they know in advance their uselessness or because no lawyer is present ose after fifty or sixty who did were in turn seized. Thus you have stripped the torture of his time limit. As the detainee does not exist, there is no possibility of submission to the judge within ten days, according to a law that was respected even at the heights of previous repressive dictatorships. The lack of time limit has been complemented with the lack of limits on the methods, an era in which it operates directly on the joints and viscera of victims, but now with surgical and pharmacological who did not have those torturers. The rack, winch, skinning alive, saw the medieval inquisition reappear in testimony along with the prod and the "submarine", the torch of contemporary times. Through successive concessions to the assumption that in order to exterminate the guerrillas justifies all the means they use, you have arrived at absolute torture, timeless, metaphysical, in the original order information is lost in the disturbed minds that to give in to the impulse to crush human substance to break it and make him lose his dignity he lost executioner who yourself lost.
3. The refusal of the Board to publish the names of the prisoners is also coverage of a systematic execution of hostages in open fields and into the night on the pretext of fighting fabricated and imaginary escape attempts. Extremist pamphlets in the countryside, painted ditches or pile of ten vehicles that are burned are the stereotypes of a script that is not made to be believed but to circumvent the international response in order executions while it emphasizes the internal retaliation unleashed in the same places and immediate date guerrilla actions. Seventy-pump shot after the Federal Security, 55 in response to the bombing of the police department of La Plata, 30 for the attack on the Ministry of Defence, 40 in the Slaughter of New Year that followed the death of Colonel Castellanos, 19 after the explosion that destroyed the forms Citadel Station part of 1,200 runs in 300 cases fights where the opponent had no injuries and the forces under his command had no deaths. Repositories of collective guilt is abolished in the civilized norms of justice, unable to influence the policies that dictate the acts for which they are detained, many of these hostages are union representatives, intellectuals, relatives of guerrillas, unarmed opponents, simple suspects who are killed on the balancing of deaths according to the foreign doctrine of "mind-bodies" used by the SS in occupied countries and the invaders in Vietnam. The figure of guerrillas wounded or captured in real combat is also an evidence from military communications, which in a year attributed to the guerrillas 600 dead and only 10 or 15 wounded, unknown proportion in the most bitter conflicts. This impression is confirmed by sampling clandestine circulation newspaper reveals that between 18 December 1976 and February 3, 1977, 40 real actions, legal forces had 23 killed and 40 wounded and 63 dead guerrillas. More than a hundred defendants have also been killed in attempts Leakage whose official story nor is it intended for someone to create but to prevent the guerrillas and Ios parties recognized that prisoners are still strategic reserve of retaliation available to the Corps Commanders as the progress of the fighting, advisability or the mood of the moment. This has won his laurels General Benjamin Menendez, leader of the Third Army Corps, before 24 March with the murder of Mark Osatinsky arrested in Córdoba, after the death of Hugo Vaca Narvaja and fifty prisoners in various applications fugitive law enforced without mercy and related without shame. Dardo Cabo's murder, arrested in April 1975, shot 6 January 1977 with seven other prisoners under the jurisdiction of the First Army Corps commanded by general Suárez Masson, reveals that these episodes are not hallucinating overflow a few soldiers but the same policy that you plan to their staffs, discussed in cabinet meetings impose as commander in chief of the 3 Arms and approved as members of the Governing Board.
4. Between fifteen hundred and three thousand people have been massacred in secret, after you prohibited reporting of dead bodies in some cases have, however, affect other countries, for their genocidal magnitude or the disgust provoked among their own forces . Twenty-five mutilated bodies surfaced between March and October 1976 on the Uruguayan coast, small part of the cargo might tortured to death in the School of Naval Mechanics, anchored in the Rio de la Plata by vessels of that force, including the boy 15, Floreal Avellaneda, bound hand and foot, "with injuries in the anal region and visible fractures," according to the autopsy. A true lakeside cemetery in August 1976 found a neighbor who was diving at Lake San Roque de Córdoba, went to the police station did not received the complaint and wrote to the newspapers that published it. Thirty-four bodies in Buenos Aires between 3 and 9 April 1976, eight in San Telmo July 4, ten in the Río Luján on October 9, provide a framework for the massacres of August 20 that piled 30 people 15 kilometers from Campo de Mayo and 17 in Lomas de Zamora. In your statements you repeat the fiction right banding, presumed heirs to the 3 A López Rega, capable of entering the country's biggest garrison military trucks, carpet of dead on Rio de la Plata or throwing prisoners into the sea from transport of the First Airborne Brigade, without General Videla, Admiral Massera and Agosti Brig. The 3 A 3 Armed Forces are today, and the Board that you govern is not the guardian of the balance between "violence of various signs" or the just arbiter between "two terrorism ", but the very source of terror has lost its way and can only babble the speech of death. The same historical continuity links the murder of General Carlos Prats, during the previous government, with the kidnapping and death of General Juan José Torres, Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz in dozens of inmates who wanted to kill the possibility of democratic processes in Chile, Bolivia and Uruguay.'s safe participation in these crimes by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Police, led by officials mentored of the CIA through the AID, as the commissioners Juan Antonio gettor Gattei and, subject themselves to the authority of Mr. Gardener Hathaway CIA Chief of Station in Argentina, is a hotbed of further revelations as those currently shaking the international community not die out even when they clarify the role of that agency and the Army top brass, led by General Menendez in creating the Lodge Libertadores de America, which replaced the 3 A until its global role was assumed by the Board on behalf of the 3 arms. This box does not even exclude extermination grooming accounts as the murder of Captain Horacio Gandara, who for a decade investigating the business dealings of senior officers of the Navy, or the journalist of "Prensa Libre" Horacio Novillo stabbed and burned, then that newspaper Minister denounced the connections Martinez de Hoz and international monopolies. In light of these episodes the true meaning of the definition of war given by one of their leaders: "The struggle we are waging recognizes no moral or natural boundaries, takes place beyond good and evil."
5. These events, which shock the conscience of the civilized world are not yet those who have brought more suffering to the Argentine people and the worst violations of human rights that you have incurred. In the economic policy of the government must look not just explain their crimes, but also a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings misery planned. In a year you have reduced the real wages of workers by 40%, reduced its participation in the national income to 30%, elevated from 6 to 18 hours the working day you need a worker to pay for the basket, thus reviving forms forced labor that exist even in the last colonial outposts. Freezing salaries with rifle butts while prices rise at the tips of bayonets, abolishing all forms of collective bargaining, prohibiting assemblies and internal commissions, extending hours, raising unemployment to a record 9% increase to 300,000 by promising new layoffs have regressed rates production at the beginning of the industrial age, and when workers have tried to protest, you have labeled as subversives, kidnapping entire bodies of delegates that in some cases were found dead, and others were missing. The results of this policy have been withering. In this first year of government food consumption has declined 40%, clothing by over 50%, the drug has virtually disappeared in the working class. There are already areas of Greater Buenos Aires where infant mortality exceeds 30%, which makes us equal to Rhodesia, Dahomey and the Guianas; summer diseases such as diarrhea, parasitic diseases and even rabies in the figures climb to world record levels exceeded. As if these were desired and sought goals, you have reduced the budget public health to less than a third of military spending to hospitals suppressing free while hundreds of doctors, professionals and technicians join the exodus caused by the terror, the low wages or the "rationalization." Just walk a few hours in Greater Buenos Aires to see the speed with which this policy has become a slum of ten million inhabitants. Half-lit cities, entire neighborhoods without water because the industrial monopolies groundwater, thousands of blocks converted into a pothole just because you only pave the military districts and decorate the Plaza de Mayo, the largest river in the polluted world in all its beaches porque los socios del ministro Martínez de Hoz arrojan en él sus residuos industriales, y la única medida de gobierno que ustedes han tomado es prohibir a la gente que se bañe. Tampoco en las metas abstractas de la economía, a las que suelen llamar "el país", han sido ustedes más afortutunados. Un descenso del producto bruto que orilla el 3%, una deuda exterior que alcanza a 600 dólares por habitante, una inflación anual del 400%, un aumento del circulante que en solo una semana de diciembre llegó al 9%, una baja del 13% en la inversión externa constituyen también marcas mundiales, raro fruto de la fría deliberación y la cruda inepcia. Mientras todas las funciones creadoras y protectoras del State atrophy, dissolve into pure anemia, one grows and becomes autonomous. Eighteen hundred million dollars, equivalent to half of all Argentine exports for Security and Defense in 1977, four thousand new positions at the Federal Police agents, twelve thousand in the province of Buenos Aires with salaries twice that of an industrial worker and triple that of a school principal while secretly raise their own military salaries as of February by 120%, proving that there is no freezing or unemployment in the realm of torture and death, the only field of activity Argentina where the product grows and where the price goes up a guerrilla killed faster than dólar.6. Issued by the International Monetary Fund as a recipe that applies equally to Zaire or Chile, Uruguay or Indonesia, the economic policy of this Board only recognizes as beneficiaries of the old ruling oligarchy, the new oligarchy speculative and a select group of international monopolies led by the ITT, Esso, automakers, the USSteel, Siemens, which are linked personally Minister Martinez de Hoz and all members of his cabinet. A 722% increase in the prices of animal production in 1976 defined the extent of oligarchic restoration undertaken by Martinez de Hoz in line with the creed of the Rural Society exposed by its chairman Celedonio Pereda: "Amazed that some small but active groups continue to insist that food should be cheap." The sight of a stock exchange where in a week it was possible to win without working for some one hundred and two hundred percent, where the companies that overnight doubled their capital without producing more than before, idler speculation in dollar bills, adjustable values, usury that calculates simple interest per hour, are strange practices under a government that came to end the "feast of the corrupt." Denationalizing banks puts the national credit union in the hands of foreign banks, with compensation to ITT and Siemens is awarded to companies that robbed the state, returning the outlets will increase the profits of Shell and Esso, lowering tariffs will create jobs in Hong Kong or Singapore, and unemployment in Argentina. Faced with all these facts, one wonder who are the unpatriotic official statements, where are the mercenaries at the service of foreign interests, what is the ideology that threatens the national identity.
If an overwhelming propaganda, warped reflection of evil acts intended that the Board seeks peace, that the general human rights advocates Videla and Admiral Massera loves life would still request that the commanders in chief of the 3 Arms that consider the abyss to which lead the country after the dream of winning a war that, even if you kill the last guerilla, would simply reappear under new forms, because the causes of more than twenty years ago provoked the resistance of the Argentine people not dcsaparecidas but are aggravated by the memory of the havoc caused and the revelation of the atrocities.
These are reflections on the first anniversary of their disgraceful government I want to convey to the members of that Board, without hope of being heard, with the certainty of being persecuted, but faithful to the commitment I long to witness in difficult times.