My Life in Argentina and Beyond

Argentina’s Dirty War

I have read in the paper that Reynoldo Bignone, the military president of Argentina from July 1982 to December 1983, has been sent to jail for all the crimes he committed during the Dirty War in Argentina in the 1970s. He sent people to be tortured and killed. I think he said that in a war that type of horrible behavior was acceptable because it was a war and that the people who died were not too young to be killed. I was not living in Argentina in the 70s, but I have lived in my country of origin off and on since October 1982. At around 1995, people in Argentina started to want to have justice done. On the radio and in the newspapers, you’d hear about this and that case coming to light. The horrible torture tactics used were detailed. I am glad that the relatives of those killed and made to disappeared never gave up. They (the police or another type of authority) could knock on a person’s door in the middle of the night and kidnap you while you were walking down the street. It could happen to anyone. Whatever their political views, these persons did not deserve to die or never be heard from again. Their children did not need to be taken and given to someone else.

My novel Different Flags, is set in the 1980s, when Bignone was still in power. I don’t touch on the subject of the disappeared because at the time I wrote it I didn’t know enough about it. Later I heard stories from people—friends and neighbors. If I had to rewrite my novel, I would have a character or maybe two have something to do with these horrible crimes.

There was, in 2006, an excellent night soap opera, on Argentine TV called Montecristo, after the Alexander Dumas novel The Count of Montecristo. It tells the story of the disappeared and some of their torturers. Montecristo was one of the two most popular TV shows of that year, 2006.