There is a dark side...

So, let me set aside for a moment the snark, as well as the genuine wonder and admiration that I feel for Argentina.

The first two weeks of being here I floated in a delirious pink bubble of joy to be back, basking a feeling I've never felt before: traveling (while at the same time returning) to a place that feels both foreign and familiar, a place that feels unknown and possibly unknowable, while at the same time also feeling like home. But now I am settling in and facing some ugly reminders that dark episodes from the last few decades are not in any way distant. As William Faulkner said so succinctly: "The past isn't past. It isn't even over."

One example-- the presence of Argentina's 1970's-80's "Dirty War" is still immediate-- there hasn't been a day, I think, when I haven't encountered some plaque, some graffiti, some mention of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Disappeared action group, or some other aftereffect of that systematic governmental terror crackdown on Argentina's intellectual and leftwing population, leaving tens of thousands either dead or disappeared. A Porteña we met and had dinner with named Roxana called the men who lived through the "Dirty War" a lost generation-- if not tortured or disappeared themselves, then pithed of political agency and voice, systematically silenced and disenfranchised.

To be fair, some of the reminders might be considered positive-- there are several high-profile court cases going on right now bringing a judge, some army officers, and some "intelligence" operators up on charges of colluding to sign illegal death warrants and operating torture centers from that time period. So maybe there is some movement towards a little bit of something that feels like "justice," even if it is more than 30 years too late.

~*~

There was a casual reference to the "death flights" in something I read a few days ago, and I was trying to think through why abducting someone and drugging them, and then pushing them out of a helicopter is more terrifying and psychically damaging than getting tortured in some hellhole prison somewhere, then taken out back, put up against a wall and shot, the body either disappeared forever, or dumped somewhere to send a message.

I guess it's because you actually need state clearance to operate a military or police helicopter-- there's a baked-in governmental legitimacy to the job that the more workaday measures for destroying people don't require. Some bureaucrat somewhere had to sign off on the gassing up of that assassination helicopter, and that is stone cold, if you think about it.

~*~

So I was reminded of the uneasy beast that is the state here when I saw this graffiti:

José Luis Cabezas was a photojournalist who worked for one of the most important newspapers in Argentina, Noticias, which has an independent focus and often highlights human rights abuses and governmental excesses. He had recently written an article linking the Buenos Aires police force was linked to prostitution, cartel drug networks, and other forms of institutional corruption.

He was kidnapped while leaving a birthday party in a posh resort beach town; handcuffed; beaten; then driven out to a pit somewhere, shot twice in the head, and his body burned. Whether he was killed by the police or by well-connect "business" interests was never determined. But the sobering fact was this happened in 1997-- not 1977.

His death became a cause that spawned the slogan, "No se olviden de Cabezas," "Don't forget Cabezas." It's a battlecry that reminds one that people who speak out against government institutions can meet brutal ends.

~*~

Therefore, it was with no pleasure at all that I turned the front page of Thursday's International Herald BsAs edition to read about the death of this man, Roberto Rodríguez. Rodríguez was the treasurer of the Maintenance Workers Union, an organization that is affiliated with the Azul y Blanco Party, a leftist group in opposition to CFK's government.

It was a professional hit: Eyewitnesses claim he was called by name, hustled into a van by two men, driven to some spot on the side of the road, forced to kneel, hands cuffed behind his back, and shot once in the head. He actually initially survived the shooting-- he was found several hours later and tried to speak, but died before he could be brought to a hospital.

The central government is keeping miles away from this one, calling it "a police incident." The original investigation focused on a botched carjacking, but now the police are investigating it as a mafia hit, looking into Rodríguez's "personal" connections.

Yeah, ok. But this case heule que apesta-- stinks to high heaven, don't you know, and it can get difficult sometimes when reading about the national government, the local police operators, and the mafia to know where one stops and the other starts.

It stinks even more when you consider that another union officer, Abel Beiroz, head of the truck driver's union, was killed in a similar manner in a suburb of BsAs in 2007, and according to the Herald, there have been others. Bit of an occupational hazard heading up a union.

~*~

As a Yanqui, all this leaves me doubly queasy-- both feeling the heavy psychic weight of knowing I take my holidays in a place where state-sponsored terrorism against ordinary citizens is real. (I'd really like for Brother Glenn Beck to come down here and live amongst some folks that have actually lived his fascist fever dreams, rather than just rubbing mouthing off on the notion that that's where America either is or is heading night after night.)

And in knowing that my own government, the good, old C. I. of A. was neck-deep in all that devil-dark Operation Condor horrorshow. In the 1970's and 80's, when it came to training local governments all throughout the Southern Cone countries-- Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Peru, in how to root out and destroy the leftists they could find and terrorize the ones they couldn't, along with everyone else, why, the good people of the CIA were right there to help fund and train those busy, busy boys.

So I'm not extricating myself from this region's past by staying home. But even in my tourist bubble, there's no escaping the fact that that "history" is still very close to the surface here.