>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^E00:00:04 ^B00:00:22 >> Georgette Dorn: Good afternoon. My name is Georgette Dorn and I'm the Chief of the Hispanic Division. It's a great pleasure to welcome you all to this wonderful presentation of a very important book by Professor Thomas Wright, who is a very distinguished emeritus professor at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. It is a great honor to welcome he and his wife, Congresswoman Dina Titus. >> Dina Titus: Thank you. >> Georgette Dorn: Professor Wright has written a great many books. We have 12 hits in the catalog of books written by him. Among them the "Flight From Chile: Voices of Exile; Food, Politics and Society in Latin America; More Peoples of Las Vegas; Peoples of Las Vegas; Change and Continuity: Cross-Currents in Latin-American Development; Impunity in Human Rights" he's presenting today and also "Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution" and another book he presented here a few years ago, "State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights." Welcome, Professor Wright. ^M00:01:23 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:29 >> Thomas Wright: Let me explain this little sheet. These are names that I'll mention, hopefully in the right order, and identified by country, Chile or Argentina. This reminds me of a university classroom. ^M00:01:47 [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] ^M00:01:49 You know, I'd rather not. You can hear me, right? >> Oh, yes. >> Thomas Wright: Good. >> But they have to film you. >> Because they're filming you. >> Thomas Wright: Oh, okay. Oh, sorry. >> The little one, yeah. >> Thomas Wright: This one. >> Perfect. That's good. That's good. >> Thomas Wright: This may crimp my style. I like to walk around while I'm talking. I was going to say this reminds me of a university classroom. Most people on the back row or next to the back so they won't be quite so conspicuous as those on the very back, but that's okay. We got a small enough room we can make this happen. ^E00:02:29 ^B00:02:40 This talk is based on my recent book, as Georgette mentioned. The title is "Impunity, Human Rights, and Democracy," the hardest part of this book was finding a proper title and I'm not sure we found it, really, Chile and Argentina 1990 to 2005, which came out last December. In attempting to synthesize my findings, I will probably raise more questions than I'll answer. So I'll try to be brief enough so we have some time for a discussion. What this book does is examine the background to the trials that have been ongoing for the last decade of hundreds of former practitioners of state terrorism in Chile and Argentina. Much of the research for this book happened right here, well, across the street in the Jefferson Building, in the Hispanic Division. And I want to thank the Hispanic Division for the expert guidance they provide and the warm hospitality and also for sponsoring this talk. Background to this story is Latin America's human rights crisis of the 1970s and '80s, which was a response to the threat of revolution posed by the human revolutions impact throughout Latin America. Repressive, mostly military governments replaced almost all elected governments in Latin America beginning in the 1960s. At least seven of those governments can be considered state terrorists regimes, among them the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, 1973 to 1990, and the military juntas that conducted the Argentine Dirty War from 1976 to 1983, led by General Jorge Rafael Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera. What is state terrorism? There are thousands of definitions of terrorism out there. Just Google it up. So just take that and reverse it. Instead of individuals or groups attacking the state, the state attacks those it considers its enemies, inside the country, using any and all means available to instill fear and sow chaos among those it attempts to eliminate and among the populous at large. In Chile, state terrorism was carried out primarily by the secret police, the DINA, and primarily targeted supporters of former socialist president Salvador Allende. The Argentine military specialized in the disappearance of its enemies on the left. Other grave human rights violations that occurred that included the giving away the babies of captured pregnant women, who were subsequently killed, to pro-military families. There's a film that portrays this very properly, "The Official Story." The tolls in both countries were high. Over 3000 murdered or disappeared in Chile and in Argentina between 15,000 and 30,000 people disappeared alone. That's without counting people who were murdered and whose bodies were recovered. Holding human rights violators accountable: Let's look at that for a second. In the past, such massive human rights violations have usually gone unpunished. Think of Idi Amin, the bloody dictator of Uganda in the 1970s, think of Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge that killed a million and a half at least fellow Cambodians. Then there's Papa Doc Duvalier, closer to home, whose Tonton Macoute terrorized the country for quite a few years. He dies and leaves the regime to his son. Idi Amin died in exile, comfortable exile, in Saudi Arabia. Pol Pot, he died at home, no problems. So it's unusual to hold former repressors accountable. Since the post World War II Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, there have been a few cases of holding former repressors accountable by putting them on trial. I can put these trials in three categories: First, domestically generated trials. Greece is the best know and the best example of this. The trials there followed the end of the bloody Colonels dictatorship of 1967 to '74. A second type of trial is United Nations brokered trials, including the special tribunals for Rwanda and the ex-Yugoslavia and three others that are less known and really accomplished less. And then the International Criminal Court, which hasn't done very much, has convicted very few people but has indicted more. What's different then about Chile and Argentina from these other kinds of trials of former repressors? And this kind of gets at the heart of what the book is trying to bring out. Unlike the World War II trials and the UN tribunals, alleged human rights violators in Argentina and Chile are investigated, tried, convicted, and sentenced in national courts by judges who are their fellow citizens. In contrast to Greece, the ongoing judicial proceedings in Chile and Argentina are not directed by the executive power, do not involve a small number of selected leaders, and are not subject to formal or informal statutes of limitations. In contrast to all the above, there are not orchestrated trials designed to achieve selective justice, close a chapter in national history, and allow the country and its citizens to move on. Rather, they involve intellectual authors, torturers, and killers, generals and admirals, along with enlisted men and civilians. Anyone deemed complicit in human rights violations is potentially subject to trial. In Argentina and Chile, trials of alleged human rights violators have become a routine institutionalized component of the judicial process whose pace is dictated by the plaintiffs, prosecutors, and judges and not by the political authorities. They are autonomous, ongoing, indigenous processes that to date [inaudible] hundreds of former practitioners of state terrorism in both countries. This is unique then not only in Latin America, but in the world. I knew about this difference between Chile and Argentina in previous trials of human rights violators from the last book I did. So in this book, I set out to discover how this came about. ^M00:09:58 The answer I found is that in both countries, impunity collapsed completely, undermined by the forces that I'll talk about now, to the point that no former repressor has impunity. Everyone who does not die first may be brought to trial, even if political circumstances should lead to discontinuing the trials and that's certainly possible but I don't think it's likely, the trials and their results will stand as the benchmark for future cases of bringing repressors to justice. How is impunity constructed? In our two cases, impunity was not just business as usual, with a military too powerful to challenge and the majority of the population willing to forget the past, which is common, the common situation that lets repressors go free. Owing to the Argentine military's hasty retreat to the barracks following its ignominious defeat in the 1982 war with Britain over the Falklands or Malvinas Islands in what one scholar called a transition by collapse, the new civilian government under President Raul Alfonsin was able to prosecute the leaders of the Dirty War and citizens brought thousands of charges against former repressors overloading the courts and causing the military to react. The capstone event following the restoration of democracy was the 1985 Trial of the Juntas in which Videla and Massera, the architects of state terrorism in Argentina, received life sentences. It was called in Argentina "the trial of the century." Two weakened to resist in the early years of restored democracy, the military recovered its resolve and pressured congress, the Argentine congress, to pass amnesty laws in 1986 and 1987, stopping the prosecutions. Then, the new president, Carlos Menem, a [inaudible] who took office in 1989 and who was an advocate of reconciliation through forgetting, through amnesia, pardoned all those already sentenced, including those at the highest ranks. Impunity in Argentina then was in place by 1990 after initially some justice had been done. In Chile, the military tightly controlled the transition following Pinochet's defeat in a 1988 plebiscite on whether he should rule another eight years after already having served 16-1/2 as dictator. Unlike his Argentine counterparts, Pinochet had been preparing an ironclad shield of impunity for himself and the military starting with the 1978 amnesty decree law. He adopted a new constitution in 1980 that laid out a protected democracy, as he called it, for a distant post-Pinochet Chile. By this constitution, after elections, would eventually be held nine of 35 senators would be appointed by him and four of those nine had to be former military commanders of the different military branches. So you see where this is going. An electoral code that he left in place would skew the congressional vote heavily in favor of the right. But these weren't enough for Pinochet. In the 17 months between the plebiscite he lost and the inauguration of an elected president, Patricio Aylwin, the dictator packed the Supreme Court with hardliners and extended his commandership of the army for eight more years. That's pretty important. And parenthetically by his constitution, the president could not remove him as commander of the army. Thus, the new government could do nothing initially to undue impunity. Our baseline then is 1990, impunity was firm, very firm, in both countries. Truth commissions: Both countries established truth commissions and Chile actually had two. Truth commissions are designed to promote national reconciliation and individual healing following periods of severe repression or extreme internal conflict, often ethnic or religious in nature. It can also construct counter-narratives to those created and left in place by repressive regimes so that people could understand those regimes for what they were, not for what they claim to be. Sometimes truth commissions seem to work, other times not. If the Chilean and Argentine commissions had worked, I'd be giving a talk on a very different topic. Parenthetically, Argentina had established the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) which worked in 1983 and 1984 and was the first successful truth commission, one that investigated thoroughly and carefully, published its results in modern history and this served as a model for many of the dozens of truth commissions that have been set up around the world since from Sierra Leone to Germany and way beyond. The civilian government in Chile established the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation in 1990, modeled on the Argentine commission, to investigate murder and disappearance. Then, 13 years later, it held a second truth commission known as the Valech Commission to investigate torture and it found over 35,000 documented cases of people who had been tortured by the regime. Now how do we get from impunity firmly entrenched in 1990 to the collapse of impunity in only 15 years? I'll suggest three broad categories of causality and a final convergence of the three. First, human rights advocacy. Chile and Argentina developed Latin America's most powerful human rights movements during the dictatorships, maybe the world's most powerful, in terms of numbers and energy and engagement. Chile had around 15 major groups, mostly organized around the kind of human rights violation suffered. The best known is the Vicaria de la Solidaridad, a very tough word for me to pronounce in Spanish, the Vicariate of Solidarity of the Catholic Church's Archdiocese of Santiago, which was set up by Cardinal Arch Bishop Raul Silva Enriquez. The Vicaria worked tirelessly to try to prevent atrocities. It aided victims and their families and documented every case it could find. It submitted around 9000 writs of habeas corpus of which the authorities accepted only about ten. While this seemed futile at the time, it turned out that this documentation was crucial for future prosecutions. The other most active organization in Chile was the Association of Family Members of the Disappeared, since disappearance is the most egregious human rights violation possible, I believe, as closure is virtually impossible without a body to mourn or bury or at the least without knowledge of the circumstances of the loved one's death. Argentina had the emblematic Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Mothers with Disappeared Children, who marched in front of the presidential palace every Thursday afternoon with placards holding photos of their disappeared children and the slogan "Donde Estan," where are they. The legal support came from the Center for Legal and Social Studies, CELS, c-e-l-s, a group of dedicated lawyers who also submitted writs of habeas corpus that were rejected at the time but critical to the eventual breakdown of impunity. As a sidebar, in contrast to the Chilean, the Argentine Catholic Church largely supported or at least [inaudible] in the Dirty War. Only four or five of the 82-member conference of bishops were outspoken opponents of state terrorism. A couple of those paid for that with their lives. These and other groups in both countries were harassed. They had members murdered. Their offices were destroyed but they persisted. Did they reduce the number and heinousness of humans rights violations? We can't measure that, but they certainly made the situation of their countries known around the world, offered aid and comfort to the victims and their families, and laid the legal basis for eventual prosecutions. With the return of civilian government, the Argentine movement turned from fighting against state terrorism to pursuing justice with good results until the amnesty laws and presidential pardons that I mentioned before. In Chile, the transition to civilian government in 1990 was also a turning point from fighting state terrorism to pursuing justice in an apparently impossible situation, given Pinochet's elaborate provisions for impunity. ^M00:20:06 But in both countries, although reduced in numbers and dispirited initially, the human rights movements persisted. Without that persistence, impunity, I believe, would not have been defeated. The second category of factors in the breakdown of impunity I call the changing legal environments, both international and domestic. First international, at the time of the Chilean coup 1973, there was no international human rights lobby to speak of. Universal declaration of human rights had been adopted in 1948, but the treaties implementing its revisions wouldn't be adopted until 1976. And while both United Nations and the Organization of American States had human rights machinery in place, it was limited to reporting, observing and reporting, and didn't do much of either. Amnesty International was the primary private international human rights organization at the time. By the 1990s, an international human rights lobby had developed. It had become active and creative. It had gone beyond the stage of documenting and reporting violations to attempting to enforce international human rights law and treaties, thanks largely to the international response to the Chilean situation and later to the Argentine, as well as things such as the Cambodian disaster, the UN and Inter-American Human Rights Agency sprang into action, as did Amnesty International. Founded in 1978, Human Rights Watch added weight to the lobby and there're several others as well, as did President Jimmy Carter by making compliance with human rights a criterion, a simple criterion in his foreign policy. Two figures helped tell the story of the activation of the International Human Rights lobby. Amnesty International's membership in the United States rose from the time of the Chilean coup to 1976 from 3000 to 50,000. The caseload of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights rose from 50 just prior to the Chilean coup, 50 cases to over 7000 cases in 1980, and treaties on torture and disappearance were ratified, reflecting the impact of the Chilean and Argentine cases. In addition to institutions and treaties, there's also new international human rights jurisprudence by the 1990s. Important for our cases were the principle of universal jurisdiction and even more important the principle of the invalidity of amnesties in any form for grave human rights violations. The point is that international legal environment on human rights had changed dramatically and had got heavily engaged in aiding the domestic human rights movements in the project of undoing impunity. On the domestic front, under state terrorism, judiciaries were compliant. They had to be. There were [inaudible] in Argentina and in Chile, every judge knew that he or she would lose his or her position if they dared speak out against human rights violations. With the return of democracy in Argentina in 1983, judges adapted quickly to the new environment collaborated in indicting and prosecuting repressors, but when the door closed on further prosecutions in 1987, the legal environment became again unreceptive to justice. In Chile, because of Pinochet's building impunity into the political system he constructed and placing his supporters in the courts, the legal environment was hostile to justice. Through almost all of the decade of the 1990s, Chilean courts repeatedly upheld the validity of Pinochet's 1978 amnesty. Judicial reform in both countries eventually opened the way for an insult on impunity. The 1994 reform in Argentina occurred because President Menem wanted a second term, which is prohibited by the constitution. In exchange for an amendment that prevented a second term, the opposition and the human rights groups got a more independent judiciary and the incorporation of nine international human rights treaties into the constitution, right into the constitution, along with explicit language stating that those elements of international law take precedence over national law. That's kind of hard to imagine, isn't it? But there it is. A remarkable development but the authoritarian Menem blocked the implementation of judicial reform by packing the Supreme Court with likeminded justices. It wasn't until Nestor Kirchner became president in 2003 that reform actually occurred. In Chile, judicial reform occurred in 1997. Chile's business elite considered the judicial system antiquated and inadequate for the dynamic new capitalist economy that had been created there and the courts also proved unable to deal with a crime wave in the mid 1990s. Under President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, the Supreme Court was expanded from 17 to 21 justices. Justices were forced to retire at age 75 and specialized chambers were created in the court. Pinochet had packed the Supreme Court, as we saw, before turning power over to civilians. In 1990, though, only four of his appointees were left, but the amnesty law was still in place. The third thing that I believe led to the collapse of impunity is what I call some precipitating events that mobilized the human rights movements, reenergized them, and molded public opinion to be favorable to ending impunity and prosecuting the repressors. I can't say that without these precipitating events impunity would not have been defeated, but I'm sure it would've taken much longer than it did. It might not have happened at all. First in Argentina, and the same holds true for Chile, anniversaries activate memory and emotion, bring pain, sometimes they bring pleasure. Argentina had three important anniversaries between 1994 and 1996. The tenth anniversary of the truth commission's report that documented and named 9800 and some disappeared people, the tenth anniversary of the Trial of the Juntas and the 20th anniversary of the coup that installed state terrorism. These anniversaries elicited much commemoration and made Argentines relive state terrorism. In the middle of these anniversaries, a bombshell hit the country in 1995. Adolfo Scilingo, a naval officer who had been forced into retirement and resented that, revealed in great detail on television the workings of the death flights that took prisoners from the largest and most notorious of over 400 secret detention centers in the country, the naval mechanic school, and dropped them into the ocean. His serious demeanor, calm manner made his story credible and shocked the public even more than the truth commission's report had done earlier, because of the medium of television. Other confessions followed and the military's blood pact of silence was dramatically broken. Although little was accomplished in the next few years, the Scilingo effect lasted and eventually moved Argentina toward the elimination of impunity. In Chile, 1998 was the 25th anniversary of the overthrow of democracy and installation of state terrorism. That brought about much commemoration as in Argentina, much publication about the coup and the military regime, and it forced Chileans to relive the past, the same year Pinochet's eight-year extended term as army commander ended and he took his seat as a senator for life with corresponding immunity from prosecution, another little feature of his 1980 constitution and his shield of impunity. Topping off an agitated year, a lot of you know this story, Pinochet was arrested in London on October 16th, at a clinic where he had gone for back surgery, on an extradition warrant from a Spanish judge for torture and murder. This was universal jurisdiction in action. Well, almost in action, the action didn't happen. But such a high profile and delicate case was difficult for British justice and after 503 days of house arrest, he was released on grounds of mental incapacity to participate in his defense. Nonetheless, the Pinochet effect had set in, in Chile. ^M00:29:57 Pinochet and what he stood for were still deeply feared. State terrorism has that effect. But his arrest cut him down to human size. A woman I interviewed put it this way. With the arrest, people began to talk. The fear began to diminish. A sociologist said that the arrest brought Pinochet back to earth and caused the loss of that aura of invincibility, a sort of symbolic death. As in Argentina, the precipitating events reenergized human rights movement, swung public opinion in favor of justice, and impacted even the judges and the military. Finally, the end of impunity: While it appeared unassailable in 1990, it was over by 2005 as a result of the factors and forces we've discussed. It happened first in Chile. Upon his return from London, Pinochet faced something that would've been totally unthinkable before his arrest, indictments on multiple charges. His 1978 amnesty decree law was still in place but some judges had begun to accept and apply the new jurisprudence of the invalidity of amnesties. The Supreme Court itself in 2001 refused to rule on the amnesty law, leaving it to individual judge's discretion. Although he avoided trial, the Supreme Court in Chile followed the London precedent. Pinochet was indicted three more times in the following years for grave human rights violations. As a result, his stature shrank more and he became a liability to the military, which began to distance itself from him. Then another bombshell, US senate investigators looking for something else, discovered accounts belonging to Pinochet amounting to $27 million in the Riggs Bank in Washington. Unlike many of his fellow dictators, Pinochet had cultivated an image of probity, of austere living, selfless service to his country, saving Chile from Marxism and subversion. The revelation that he was a crook as well as a state terrorist was too much for all but a tiny hardcore of supporters. The same year then that this happened 2004, the Valech Commission reported its findings of 35,000 people documented as having been tortured. Meanwhile, prosecutions and convictions mounted of former repressors, as judges now routinely ignored the amnesty law. As these developments unfolded, army commander Juan Emilio Cheyre, born a generation after Pinochet, rejected the past and embraced a democratic future. In a speech, he announced the army of Chile has made the difficult and irreversible decision to assume institutional responsibility for all the punishable and morally unacceptable actions of the past. The next year, 2005, constitutional reforms gutted the protected democracy Pinochet had established and put Chile on the road to real democracy, definitively ending impunity. And parenthetically, Pinochet died the next year, 2006, abandoned by almost everyone. In Argentina, [inaudible], the legal center for the push for justice, aided by the international human rights lobby in many concrete ways, discovered novel ways to circumvent Menem's pardons. Most importantly, baby kidnapping had not been cited as a crime for which the repressors for pardoned back in 1989 and 1990. And soon, some of the biggest names of the Dirty War including Videla and Marcela were under arrest again. But it took a presidential election in 2003 for the Scilingo effect to play itself out fully. Nestor Kirchner, along with his wife, the current president Cristina Fernandez, who's in the news these days, had been persecuted during the Dirty War, he came into office determined to undo impunity. He accomplished this by getting congress to annul the 1986 and 1987 amnesty laws by forcing change in the Supreme Court that Menem had packed and by replacing the military commanders with leaders who, as he put it, would be committed to the future, not the past. In a dramatic ceremony at the military school on March 24th, 2004, the 28th anniversary of the coup, [inaudible] state terrorism, he had his new army commander, General Bendini, who was a generation younger than the Dirty War instigators, remove General Videla's portrait from the gallery of former directors of the institution. That symbolism reverberated throughout the country and the revitalized Supreme Court in 2005 finally agreed with lower court decisions, adopted since 2001 but blocked by the Menem-packed Supreme Court. Based on the new international jurisprudence, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1986, 1986 amnesty laws were unconstitutional, clearing the way for prosecutions. A couple years later, the Menem's pardons were also ruled unconstitutional. So by 2005, the doors to justice were wide open in both Chile and Argentina. Did justice follow? Maybe you'll ask me. Thank you. ^M00:36:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:36:16 Remarks, objections, questions? Yeah? >> I was in Guatamala when they published [inaudible], because they had had their own, one could say, what's the phrase, [inaudible]. >> Thomas Wright: Oh yeah. >> Okay. And when I picked up my copy from the library, you had to go to a bank and get a receipt for the money that you paid and then you had to go to another place to pick up the three volumes and I felt as if I was being followed when I was doing that and that was at the end of the '90s. So, I mean, it's still going on. >> Thomas Wright: You know what? I think I've told Dina [phonetic] this. Of all the places-- Of all the seven countries that I consider to have been state terrorists regimes, that would be Guatamala, El Salvador, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile and for a briefer period Peru, Guatamala is the one place I would not go to do research on that period of the past. It's still alive there. Everywhere else, it's safe. I mean, they've turned a page, unwillingly certainly in Brazil and maybe in Uruguay, but you're okay there, but I can see just what they were doing. They were documenting who bought the book of revelations about state terrorism. Yeah. Wow. You're still here though. Anything else? Yes. >> I like an answer to your question. >> Thomas Wright: An answer to my question. Okay, well, ending impunity is not equivalent to doing justice, but some justice has been done in both countries. Argentina got a much later start than Chile did. Well, not so much later, five years, but then the Argentine legal system moves a little more slowly than the Chilean, but here I think are the telling statistics. At the end of 2012, the latest information I have, Chile had 1342 active criminal cases of human rights violations. Argentina had 380. In Argentina, that number has mushroomed since. Okay, for those sentenced zero to five years in Chile, 66% of the cases and many of those, I don't have the figure, were for zero years. In Argentina, no one was sentenced to zero to five years. Five to 15 years, in Chile, 31%; in Argentina, 3%. Fifteen to 20 years, 10%-- Wait a minute-- Yeah, 2% in Chile, 50% in Argentina. Life, less than 1% in Chile and 50%-- I think I'm misreading this. ^M00:40:01 Fifty percent in Argentina sentenced to life; 31%, 15 to 20; 19% five to 15. And nobody in Argentina sentenced to zero to five. Okay, percentage of sentences involving incarceration: In Chile, 24%; in Argentina, 100%. Number and percent of those convicted who were in prison at the end of 2012: In Chile, 25%; in Argentina, 73%. But the rest of the percentage is accounted for by people over 70 years old who are allowed to serve their sentences at home by judge's discretion. So in reality, it's probably 100% are serving a sentence, whether in prison or under house arrest. The number held in preventive detention, in other words people who are presumed to be guilty and are on risk of flight, in Chile, nobody; in Argentina, 684. You can tell from this that when they finally were able to do it, judges in Argentina are much harsher on the former repressors than are their Chilean counterparts. How would I account for that? The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile isn't held in nearly as negative repute as the Dirty War in Argentina. It accomplished some things. It brought order. It laid the groundwork for a very dynamic economy, which is not, you know, very unequal than what it distributes, but very dynamic nonetheless, and people-- I think their figures, public opinion polls show that about half the population thinks it did well for Chile. The other half thinks it did poorly. So the verdict on that is mixed. One of the indicators of how this works is that the term "state terrorism" is never used in Chile. The Pinochet period is called the military government or at the harshest, the military dictatorship. Argentina, the Dirty War period did nothing for anyone. Even the wealthy there-- The economy was driven down. Even the wealthy did not benefit as they did in Chile, because the economy was dragged down and, furthermore, there was a lot of basic criminality among the military police in Argentina. They would arrest people and disappear them for their property. And when they'd arrest them, if they didn't kill them, they'd have them sign documents turning over their house, their car, their business to the individuals making the arrest. So nobody benefited whatever in Argentina from this regime. And in Argentina, state terrorism is right in the heart of the vernacular, it's pronounced all the time. People know that that regime was a state terrorist regime and I think those are kind of the reasons. One other concrete reason is that in Chile the what we call it is the sala [phonetic] the chamber within the Supreme Court that was dealing with these issues of human rights, trials and sentencing, for several years was under the control of people who were conservative and who didn't mind convicting but they didn't want to sentence those convicted to any time in prison or to a minimum. And that's one little incidental concrete reason I think for these differences. Does that answer my question? Yes, Catalina [phonetic]. >> Do you know more information about the current situation with kidnapped babies, I mean, the-- >> Thomas Wright: Yeah. Well, along with the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, there's another organization, the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo been very active. These are women whose daughters were arrested and disappeared and if they knew that their daughter was pregnant or suspected she might be, then they suspect they might have grandchildren out there raised by pro-military families, the families the babies were given to. They have been actively pursuing the discovery of their biological grandchildren since almost the beginning. The last figures I've seen suggest that there are about a third of the around 500, maybe a little bit less than a third have been identified. When that happens, it's not always a happy outcome, because if you've been raised from the moment almost of your birth by a family, that's your identity and then somebody comes from nowhere and says, by the way, you're my grandchild, it causes all sorts of trauma for the child, who's now an adult, and for the real parents or grandparents and for the adoptive parents. So it's just an unhappy situation. There's no solution really. Some children have acknowledged their real grandparents and kind of not necessarily lived with them but made up with them. Others have just rejected that. There're been a few famous cases where this has kind of made headlines. Yes. >> Kind of going along with that, I [inaudible] initial story [inaudible], how is that accepted [inaudible]? >> Thomas Wright: I think it was accepted pretty well, because, again, in Argentina, there are not many defenders of the military regime. There's a really, really tiny fringe of kind of Dirty War deniers, you know. The most they can do basically is deny that it happened because they can't point to anything concrete that improved. So I think it was well accepted and it's available at your local video store or probably in other new electronic ways as well. I love the movie. I've shown it in class. It's really gripping, really gripping. David. >> I'm just curious, a little off topic, but on the seven countries that do have state terrorism, what was sort of the common theme [inaudible]? Was there one thing sort of common [inaudible] social media at least [inaudible]? ^M00:47:30 >> Thomas Wright: Well, I just go back to the Cuban Revolution. Today, the Cuban Revolution seems totally obsolete. I mean, today, the emphasis is on preserving the revolution, what they can preserve of it, but in the '60s into the '70s, the Cuban Revolution had a tremendous impact across Latin America. Fidel called on people to emulate his revolution but more than anything else, it was the example of what happened in Cuba. To have-nots, the people who were marginalized and poor and so forth, it didn't matter that Cuba became communist. What mattered was they could see that there was as social net and it was healthcare and education and food, not always that much but obviously the guarantee of food and work. And that made a huge impact. So revolutionary movements broke out everywhere. Some were guerrilla wars. In other places, the political spectrum moved way to the left and these movements destabilized a lot of governments, whether they were guerrilla movements or just movements that remained peaceful and each country that became a state terrorist regime reached a tipping point based on how great the conservatives, the elites, and the militaries saw the threat to be. And the threat they could see was to their interest based on what happened in Cuba. The elites would, if Cuba were replicated, would lose their money and their property, because that's what the Cuban Revolution in about, an egalitarian model. The military would be disbanded, as happened in Cuba, and Fidel's guerrillas became the new military, and so it was like the whole way of life of not only the elites, middle class people as well would be wiped out and so as they watched these things happen, each country reached a certain tipping point. In the case of Chile, it was having a socialist in the presidential palace, you know, from the beginning-- It took three years for the coup to happen, but you can see ominous signs within [inaudible] first year. ^M00:49:58 In Argentina, it was the urban guerrillas who became very powerful and developed a lot of public support actually in Argentina that got the military to act. In the case of Brazil, well, it goes back to the '60s, not really a good example. In the case of El Salvador, the FMLN, the guerrilla movement there came to a point of equilibrium with government military forces and so then you turn on, you just install state terrorism to not only fight the guerrillas or your opponents, but to intimate the population into not supporting them, not even thinking about supporting them. And then in Guatamala, things went to the greatest extreme, ethnic cleansing, the military decided that the Mayan Indians in their villages scattered throughout the highlands were harboring guerrillas. There wasn't much of a guerrilla war in Guatamala anyway, but, of course, if you get a lot of US aid for fighting a guerrilla war, you're going to create a much bigger guerrilla war that really exist so the aid keeps flowing in. And so, you know, each country had its own. In Peru, there was the very fairly close to successful shining path, sendero luminoso , which in one of Garcia, not Garcia, in one of Vargas Llosa's novels is knocking on the door of Lima after capturing much of the country and so it's the threats, each country with a different form that leads people to state terrorism. Most of the other countries really became much more repressive than they had been, without reaching a stage [inaudible] state terrorism for the same reasons. Does that answer it all? >> Yes. >> Thomas Wright: Alright, oh, maybe-- Go ahead. >> I was just-- You mentioned that the Catholic Church was complicit in all of this in Argentina. Has there been any backlash against the church? >> Thomas Wright: Well, they picked an Argentine pope and I'm not qualified to get into what he was doing during the Dirty War. I really don't know. There are stories that implicate him, many more stories that suggest he was doing what was possible to shelter people. I mean, he didn't stick his neck out the way at least two bishops did and got them killed and that's probably smart not only because [inaudible] life, but you wouldn't be useful anymore if you were killed. The Argentine church is just very different from the Chilean church, a tradition of seminaries that are much more conservative, a lot of Opus Dei, and, furthermore, the Argentine military has built in a series of vicars and other militaries do, too, of course. But in Argentina at the time of the coup in 1976 that started state terrorism, the head of the Argentine bishop's conference was also the head vicar of the army. So that's kind of a close connection that's hard to undo. Barbara, you had the last comment or question I think. >> It's slightly off your subject, but it has relation. Right now in Argentina, there's a lot of speculation about what happened to this person who was bringing, who was going to present his findings concerning the blowing up of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires. Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Thomas Wright: I really don't. That subject is so murky. It's been what, 21 years since it happened in 1994 and Argentina is pretty hard to decipher in a lot of ways. And so I really don't. I mean, there're all these allegations. You don't bring any Iranians to the point of prosecution or really expose them for having done it if they did, because of trade relations that are now quite robust between Argentina and Iran, but beyond that, I really don't know. Do you have any thoughts on it? Very mysterious. Well, thank you all for coming. I've really enjoyed this and I appreciate your attendance. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.