“I attended, for the first and last time, an oral trial. The oral trial of a man who had suffered nearly four years of imprisonment, flogging, humiliation, and daily torture. I expected to hear complaints, insults, and the indignation of a human body endlessly subjected to that hideous miracle that is physical pain. Something different happened. Something worse happened. The debauchee had fallen completely into the routine of his hell.” Jorge Luis Borges, to whom this text belongs, attended only one session of the Junta’s trial, but he achieved what none of the journalists who attended the courtroom for more than six months were able to express. In three sentences he summed up the essence of what was happening there: “He was not a Peronist, he was not a communist, he was a suffering man.” A person devoid of his beliefs and beliefs, and therefore alone facing the humiliation and pain of torment.
That day we listened for four hours to the testimony of graphic operator Victor Pastera, a prisoner who had disappeared from the Naval Mechanical School, where Admiral Eduardo Massera had designed a horrific mechanism: using Montonero prisoners to fulfill his ambitions to become a new Peron. The chart operator was forced to forge documents which some sailors used, in addition to kidnapping and disappearing people, to seize their assets and property. Because of his “work”, Pastera was allowed to go home for the weekend and return to his prison on Sunday. He removed from his clothes the only photographs available as evidence of what he tried to deny, which was the crime.
Borges that day spoke of the “innocence of evil,” which may be a counterpart to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” “They took all the prisoners into a room where they had never been before. It was not without some astonishment that they saw a long table laid out. They saw tablecloths, china plates, cutlery, bottles of wine. Then the delicacies arrived (I repeat the words of the guest). It was Christmas Eve dinner. They had been tortured and did not know that they would be tortured the next day. The Lord of that Hell appeared and wished them a Merry Christmas. It was not a mockery, it was not an appearance. It was not remorse for himself, but It was, as I said before, a kind of innocence of evil.
Now that the calendar reminds us that we are marking the fortieth anniversary of the ruling that condemned nine of the ten leaders who made up the three juntas, we can remember that text that Borges wrote to humanize the tragedy and prevent the public conversation from becoming tinged with ideology again, with disputed stories denied by each side, without being able to truly get close to “that man who suffered.” A political metaphor in which all the suffering of a society destroyed by its confrontations is deposited.
Today the necessities of the present color any evocation. But it is worth remembering that the prosecution of the junta gave the current democratic phase an auspicious start and reconstructed the horrific mystery of state terrorism. The trial has concrete fathers and an undeniable fact, namely the decision and stubbornness of then-President Raúl Alfonsín, who knew that the democratic future was tied up in the way the terrorist past was resolved.
But over time, political slogans replaced the truth of what happened, and memory also became something that was deliberately hidden or forgotten. Far from stripping us of the past as weight to transform it into shared memory, Never Again is softened in written accounts of the empty space left in the wall after the dictator’s painting is removed.
By blaming others, we avoid our responsibilities. Political slogans distorted the facts. Arguing over numbers prevents us from constructing a shared reality. However, everything that happened after the trial, from the Carapintada uprisings that wrested amnesty laws from democracy, to Menem’s pardon, which released both commanders and guerrilla leaders, does not invalidate the junta’s trial, which allowed the restoration of law and justice. “Historical facts are only true, that is, universally compelling and binding, if they are confirmed by the facts of reason,” Hannah Arendt wrote, and there is no reason stronger than that of law, because it protects us from those who claim decision-making authority over our lives and our thoughts.
It now remains for judges and other prosecutors to follow the example of those who, forty years ago, were neither afraid nor succumbed to pressure or threats and gave us citizens an idea of justice and a legal reason to trust in democracy. A democracy that, at least by definition, enshrines equality before the law.