The Disappeared: Remnants of a Dirty War, by Sam Ferguson

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'The Disappeared' by Sam Ferguson

Argentina’s military rulers fought a “Dirty War” (1976-83) against their nation’s dissidents. Torture and summary executions were their main weapons, along with secrecy. Thousands of suspects disappeared, leaving family and friends to wonder about their fate. The Argentine navy ran its own torture center, drugging their victims and tossing their bodies from aircraft over the ocean. Few bodies were ever found.

American attorney Sam Ferguson writes of the belated trials (2010-11) of several Dirty War perpetrators. He begins by placing the 1976 coup that brought the military to power and the campaign of terror that followed in context. By the time of the coup, Argentina had descended into hyperinflation and daily political violence by several factions. Most Argentines welcomed the military takeover, trading chaos for order.

But not law and order, as the regime observed few limits on its own reign of terror. When the military relinquished power after losing the Falklands War to the U.K., they sheltered themselves behind amnesty laws that allowed a peaceful transition to democracy but brought no justice for the victims and no effort to confront the nation’s history. In 2003, Argentina repealed the amnesty, and the trials began. Ninety percent of those sent to trial were convicted.

Ferguson delivers a fair assessment of the proceedings, their political motivations as well as their necessity. Several cases might not have stood up in a U.S. court (assuming they were argued by good defense counsels). The evidence against some individuals was unsound, but the prosecutors pressed forward on the assumption that the past must be reckoned with. According to Ferguson, the court eventually got “lost among the competing purposes of the trial—between memory, truth, and justice.” But despite “small areas of doubt,” a band of perpetrators “had finally been brought to justice for kidnapping, torturing, and disappearing thousands of people, and such a conviction was important for society.”