A Note on Rodolfo Barra and Human Rights Hypocrisy
There’s a fluttering in the Argentine and international human rights dovecotes about the appointment mentioned below.
Sixty years ago Barra was indeed a member of Tacuara, an organisation of mixed socialist, fascist, extreme nationalist, militant Catholic, and antisemitic views. There are pictures of him going around from that era giving the Nazi salute. He’s since apologised for what he says were teenage excesses. Today there’s no doubt that he’s ultra-conservative, ultra-Catholic, ultra-nationalist but he’s not a Nazi.
What’s really objectionable about Barra’s appointment is not his very distant past but rather that President-Elect Milei picked a menemista fossil for this important position, a man whose opinions on personal rights are not in tune with the times, to put it mildly.
However, there’s a problem with the Argentine human rights community shouting about his Nazi past. It’s that Tacuara and similar groups were a seedbed for men who went on to become leaders and activists of revolutionary left peronismo in Montoneros, an organisation that shared its ideology in all essentials.
The guerilla-terrorist group went to fight first against the government of Perón’s successor, his widow Estela Martinez de Perón, then against the military dictatorship that seized power on March 24, 1976 and eventually destroyed it. Many Argentine human rights activists,and progressives now view Montoneros through rose-tinted spectacles; “Sure they made some mistakes, they went a bit overboard on the violence maybe but with the best of intentions, they were young idealists who wanted a better, more just world”, is the gist of it.
Many Montoneros who survived the dictatorship went on to become loyal menemistas and later kirchneristas, stout defenders of human rights. No one asked any of them for an apology for any aspect of their pasts, and the older ones were never criticised for membership of or association with Tacuara.
They are not the only ones to have had bloody stains on their CVs washed away by the cleansing waters of kirchnerismo. Gerardo Martínez is today the boss, and I mean that in the Sicilian sense, of the UOCRA construction workers union. During the 1976-83 dictatorship he was a civilian employee of Batallion 601 of the Argentine Army, a key intelligence gathering unit for the mass killings by the state of those years. But he’s all in favour of human rights now so it’s totally fine,
César Milani was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s favourite general and during her presidency he became head of Argentina’s armed forces. His past participation in human rights abuses as a subaltern during the dictatorship was never held against him, indeed was regarded as being somewhat in his favour as it made him a sinner who had repented. He was later charged with participation in a disappearance but acquitted despite evidence against of a similar quality to that which resulted in the convictions of hundreds of his ex-comrades for similar offences. It wouldn’t do to have a pro-human rights officer rotting in jail.
Horacio Verbitsky is today a renowned journalist. As a young man, he was a Montoneros intelligence officer, during the dictatorship he worked for the Argentine Air Force. Despite never having given a clear account of how he combined these two roles he’s now regarded as something of a sage on issues of human rights.
The only Argentine human rights people with the moral standing to criticize Barra’s appointment on grounds of his Tacuara past are those who have taken an equally firm position on the recycling into respectable public life of both ex-Montoneros and collaborators with the dictatorship who now have the required opinions.
Let me know if you hear of any.