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Tonight, in this city without altar
I hope the dead souls can see my eyes
and turn my watchful gaze into the flicker of a candle flame
Not the sacrificial spirit money for the ancestors
not the raging blaze that illuminates the cold night
but memory's nakedness
is like a bone that will not decay
Liu Xiaobo 15 Years of Darkness, translated by Jeffrey Yang
The past is a predator
Old Argentine proverb
From 1976 to 1983 the nation of Argentina was ruled by a junta of high ranking military officers who had seized power from the inept and corrupt government of Isabel Peron, widow of Juan Peron. Yes, the same one in 'Evita'. Many in Argentina applauded at the time, including a respected Jewish Newspaper editor named Jacob Timerman who wanted some order in a society increasingly riven by murderous deep political divisions; argentina was already facing down a violent left wing guerrilla threat from an organization that can legitimately be described as terrorist. The response from this new military government was to authorize a policy of kidnap, torture and murder of anyone who participated in, sympathized with or even was unlucky enough to know anyone suspected of left-leaning activities against the state. This included Mr Timerman.
He survived, but most of the people they took - without any legal justification at all, of course - were never seen again, and thus a new word entered the lexicon, first in Argentina and then the world: The Desaparecido, the disappeared one. The word has most emphatically not disappeared from the discussion of the depths that a police state, or military state, can sink to.
The war against left wing terrorism came to be known as La Guerra Sucia, the dirty war. It is estimated that by the time the war came to an end in 1983 with the replacement of the Junta by a civilian elected government, up to 30,000 people had been disappeared.
Not that anything like that could ever happen here . . .
