In between torture sessions they left me hanging by my arms from hooks fixed in the wall of the cell were they had thrown me.
Sometimes they put me on the torture table and stretched me out, tying my hands and feet to a machine which I can’t describe since I never saw it, but which gave me the feeling that they were going to tear my body apart.49
Afterwards they beat me with sticks and a hammer which they used to smash my fingers whenever my hands were on the floor. They undressed me and tied my hands and feet to a bed frame they called a “grill.” For what must have been an hour they applied electric current to the most sensitive parts of my body: genitals, hips, knees, neck and gums.50
I was arrested on 15 October 1976 by an army unit, which surrounded and raided my mother’s house, where I was living. Jorge Armando Gonzalez was arrested with me. We were tied up and blindfolded, then I was suspended from a tree with my hands tied behind me and beaten from noon until evening. I could hear my mother’s screams as she begged them not to kill me. I could also hear them hitting Gonzalez. At one stage they filled a container with water, hung him up by the feet and submerged him head first. That was repeated several times.51
Women were interrogated in the same manner. They were stripped naked, laid down on the bed, and the torture session would begin. With women, they would insert the wire (to give electric shocks) in the vagina and then apply it to the breasts, which caused great pain. Many would menstruate in midtorture.52
Even in a murderous system, the devaluation of victims and the violence inflicted on them can vary in degree. Consistent with the military’s ideology and prejudices, communists and Jews were the most horribly treated. Examples are provided by Amnesty International:
On approximately November 1978, an active member of the Argentine Communist Party aged about 40 was kidnapped Several officers and junior officers tortured him savagely.... In the words of a special task force officer: “We killed him before the order came from above (i.e., from superior officers) that we were to let him go without touching him.”53
And about the torture of Jews:
The situation of these prisoners was particularly difficult.... From the moment they were kidnapped until they were included in a transfer they were systematically tortured. Some of them were made to kneel in front of pictures of Hitler and Mussolini, to renounce their origins and humiliate themselves... .In the words of a Federal police officer nicknamed “Padre,” “In here, some people are mercenaries and others aren’t; but we are all fascists.”54
Jews were made to shout “I love Hitler"; they had swastikas painted on their backs; they were especially humiliated in many ways.
All kinds of torture would be applied to Jews, especially one which was extremely sadistic and cruel: “the rectoscope,” which consisted of inserting a tube into the victim’s anus, or into a women’s vagina, then letting a rat into the tube. The rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the victims internal organs.55
Christian teachings about Jews and Christian anti-Semitism were influential in Argentina as well as Germany. Nazi propaganda and practices, which increased anti-Semitism worldwide, had especially strong effects on the Argentine military. The fascist inclination of military leaders had long been evident: some of them provided their troops with fascist and Nazi reading materials.56
Prisoners for whom their captors had no further use were usually “transferred” – strangled, dynamited, or shot, sometimes after being forced to dig their own graves. Their killing was sometimes made to appear as a shootout between guerrillas and security forces, but there is overwhelming evidence that this was a deception. Many prisoners were injected with sedatives and dropped into the ocean from helicopters.57 Prisoners allowed to survive were often left to be “found” by an army or police unit, officially imprisoned, charged, and, because there was no evidence against them, released.
The selection of victims: ideology, self-interest, caprice
Individuals were defined as subversives or enemies of the state if they showed the slightest sign of either liberalism or concern for the poor. For example, people were abducted and houses destroyed in March 1976 after residents of a housing area demonstrated to get legal recognition as a housing community. Two years later again several people were kidnapped when a mass was called to celebrate the freeing of a woman abducted in 1976.58 Others were kidnapped because of their association with social welfare institutions. Still others because prisoners who were tortured gave their names to gain some reprieve, or by mistake because of similarities in names. Military conscripts suspected of leftist sympathies disappeared.
Prisoners were tortured in response to world events that upset perpetrators.
We would be beaten up and tortured for the slightest transgression of certain rules of the detention camp... .Any event related to repression outside the pozo, the death of a soldier, a gun battle, a politically significant act, events occurring in other parts of the world such as the advances of the Sandinista revolution, constituted a motive or pretext for intensifying the repression.59
Pregnant women, while usually tortured, were often allowed to live until they delivered the baby. Often the perpetrators then gave the baby to childless military or other ideologically reliable couples who would raise the baby with the right world view. It is a curious comment on ideological fanaticism that apparently the Montonero guerrillas engaged in a similar practice. When members were killed, they refused to release their children to grandparents, who might raise them with the wrong ideology.60
Although the military claimed to be defending Christianity, priests, nuns, and seminarians were among those kidnapped, tortured, and killed. The following gives a clue to the motives of the perpetrators:
The
