Opinion Sur
They went to the ESMA first to be interrogated and then to die
What are we talking about when we talk about a breakdown, a rupture in the evolution of history? We are talking about something definitive: nothing will ever be the way it was. After the historical fact that we point out as a breakdown or rupture, history is another story. It is the history that follows such fact. It is the history in which such (guessed, prophesied, or feared) fact has already occurred. Adorno and Horkheimer pointed to Auschwitz as the fact that fracture the tradition of Western culture. Always (or, to put it bluntly, since the appearance of clandestine detention camps in this country, ours), I thought that the Adornoian dictum about Auschwitz included us doubly. Because we have repeated Auschwitz. It does not matter if to a greater or lesser extent. You cannot measure horror. From the perspective of the victims, it is always absolute, and our perspective is such, that of the victims, since it is from such suffering that we have learned to think of history as Horkheimer: as a history of pain.
If Auschwitz broke the tradition of Western culture, Argentine culture was fractured in situ, in its strict particularity, by the extermination camps of the dictatorship. ESMA[1] is our Auschwitz. Just as Adorno chooses Auschwitz as the symbol of death (despite the notorious existence of other camps), we will choose ESMA, despite the notorious existence of other camps. There is a reason: in ESMA, as in Auschwitz, there was the greatest confluence of death’s rationality. There was no sign at ESMA, as there was in Auschwitz, that said: Work will set you free. But there was the same conception of putting instrumental rationality at the service of death.
Perhaps the information aspect distinguishes ESMA. No one went to Auschwitz to have information extracted that could take the repression to other areas, that would allow other victims to be caught. Auschwitz was not, as ESMA claimed to be, a space at the service of a war. I say this in this unequivocal sense: ESMA intended to extract information to wage the so-called dirty war, hence the primacy of torture. At ESMA, torture – within the criminal scheme – was more important than at Auschwitz. Prisoners went to Auschwitz to die, not to be interrogated. They went to ESMA first to be interrogated and then to die. That is, first, they were going to be tortured and then, those who did not die in torture, were thrown into the river on death flights. But the torture ratio was more essential to ESMA than to Auschwitz.
They both coincide in the cold rationality of death. If Hannah Harendt extracted from Auschwitz the concept of the banality of evil, it is because in the camp of horror there was an order, a rationality, a planning. And that rationality was applied without passion. Eichmann did Evil as Sarmiento said Rosas did: without passion. This bureaucratization of death is the condition of possibility for the camps. The ESMA torturer (as seen in Marco Bechis’ film focusing on the Garage Olimpo detention camp) arrives at the ESMA and signs his employee card. He records his check-in and check-out times. He then returns home and has dinner with his wife and children, whom, of course, he loves as intensely as he intensely insults the human condition day by day.
This objectification of victims is central to the camps. The victim is, first and foremost, a thing to be interrogated. A thing that possesses information. A thing that is a body, a body that has an infinite capacity for pain whose extremes it will sometimes be necessary to reach to extract that, what is sought, the information. Electricity is used at ESMA and its use is planned. So many watts per kilo of weight. Beyond a certain level of electricity, the thing to be interrogated dies and does not deliver the information. There is an error in the planning of torture there. The interrogable thing must always die after handing over the information, when it is no longer interrogable, when it is only one thing, a pre-corpse. If you die earlier, you have a corpse and not the information.
In this way, ESMA implies a breakdown in Argentine culture. Not because crime and torture did not exist before, but because they never existed with such a level of planning, of methodical coldness, and because never before did their existence involve the plan of the disappearance of bodies. Never the barbarism (understanding here not what Sarmiento understood in his civilization/barbarism scheme, but barbarism as a negation of the cultural values that give meaning and elementary dignity to the human condition) has been so extreme, so rational, planned, cold and cruel. Let us say: never has cruelty been so methodical and profound. Thus, there is a before and after of ESMA. However, it would be inappropriate for this statement to cover the former with innocence. What crystallizes in ESMA are innumerable trends that existed before and that converged towards it. If ESMA existed, it is because our past is not innocent and because our future has the density to necessarily appropriate that guilt and bear it in one and a thousand ways to make it unrepeatable. In this country, as in Germany, horror was enthroned; pain became history and now what is left for us is to reflect on the history of pain and its conditions of impossibility. We are anything but innocent.
There is a final scene in Garage Olimpo that will help me explain my point. It is one of the most powerful, thoughtful, and tragic images of our culture. It is like this: the victims (who have already gone through torture, who have ceased to be interrogable things, either because they handed over the information or because they died) are loaded onto a plane. Those who remained alive were injected with what with sordid, cruel irony, the perpetrators called pentonaval[2]. Now, the plane, with its load of dead bodies or, most, the vast majority, still alive and numbed by the drug of death, rises and flies over the river. Here, we hear the sweet song of our childhood, the beautiful song of our school years, our flag song, the song “Aurora”, which is one of the most impeccable symbols of homeland. Now, it accompanies the plane of death and its words shudder: High in the sky, a warrior eagle, blue rises, in triumphal flight. It is the flag of my homeland, born of the sun, which God has given me. And then: the eagle is flag.
We know this: the use of national symbols was stifling during the dictatorship. They took over those symbols as they took over homeland. They used those symbols for fear and to adorn death. They believed and said they were the homeland. And in a deep, lacerating, conflicting way, they were. Because if Germany played its ethical and cultural destiny in Auschwitz and can only recover by reflecting on the causes of that barbarism and the conditions for not repeating it, we play our ethical and cultural destiny in ESMA, and thinking and writing and living will only be possible at the cost of understanding such horror as a symbol of homeland, as a fracture that occurred among us, in the middle of our culture, and that will become unrepeatable if once and again we look at ourselves in that abyss, if we assume that it happened here, in the country of the flag, in the country of the sweet song “Aurora”.
There were victims and perpetrators, and the philosophy, literature must be on the side of the victims, always. But when a country produces Auschwitz, when a country produces ESMA, it does not go ahead by simply saying it was them. It is not about relieving the criminals by saying we all were. It is about facing the density of the event. There is no return. There are no societies of good and bad. When there was something like ESMA, it only remains to ask: how, why, for what and now what. And the answer includes us all.
Released march 25, 2000. Reproduced in Hacer Memoria May 26, 2022
[1] . Spanish acronym for Navy Mechanics School (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada).
[2] TN: Word game combining the drug pentothal (a rapid general anesthetic) and naval for the application on those who were still alive but were going to be thrown over from a plane into the river.
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