the phantom left

[from Jacobo Timerman's Chile: Death in the South, tr. Robert Cox, Vintage, 1987]

The terrorists of the extreme left in Uruguay (Tupamaros), in Argentina (Montoneros), and in Chile (MIR, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left) based their strategy on the achievement of one objective: to make themselves feared as an organically structured army and to appear as an alternative to the military. They realized this objective in the minds of the great majority of the officer corps in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. The intelligence services and the military commanders, to be sure, knew the truth about these phantom guerrilla armies. They nevertheless encouraged the belief that the phantom armies were real, so as to gain support for the conspiracy to stage a coup. In every Latin American coup officers with a vocation for politics play a major role. These officers are precisely those in the intelligence services and those who dominate the high commands. All the intelligence wings of the armed forces in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile knew perfectly well that none of the guerrilla groups had the remotest possibility of constituting an alternative to the military.

So convinced were these terrorists who aspired to be guerrillas that their image was more important than the organization, and even more important than training and supplies of arms, that in some cases they invented imaginary actions they asserted they had carried out. They also claimed responsibility for actions initiated by other groups. The Argentine Montoneros maintained that they had "executed" a police chief and his wife when, in fact, the two were murdered by the chief's rivals in the police force. They attacked a barracks, Monte Chingolo, even though they knew that the army was ready and waiting for them to strike. The result was an impressive massacre of civilians who were caught in the cross-fire.

The pseudo-guerrillas of the left in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina had also convinced themselves – like a neurosis that feeds on itself – that they represented an immovable obstacle in the path of the military and that they would be able to prevent a coup. They did not avert the coup, they did not even delay it – nor did they provoke it. In all three countries there were other motives for the armed forces' taking power – the guerrillas merely provided another pretext. What the violent left did accomplish, however, was to grease the wheels of the killing machine. They wanted to cause panic in the armed forces in order to paralyze them, but the panic they created in the officer corps was just enough to set in motion the most awful killing machine that has been experienced in any of the three countries in the course of this century.

The inexplicable homicidal extremism that took hold among the military in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina is the other side of the coin to the declamatory extremism of the revolutionary left in those countries. The terrorists attacks never posed any danger to the existence of the state or the survival of the armed forces. The insistent declamation began with Commandante Ernesto Ché Guevara in Bolivia, when he forecast "many Vietnams" in Latin America. It reached its height with the blessing Juan Perón gave to the Argentina Montoneros. He made them believe that in every country there was more than one army and that the new army, the guerrilla army, would soon replace the professional armed services.

In general, a political force will always seek to magnify the danger posed by the enemy. It will try to demonstrate that there is not merely danger ahead but that the very existence of society is at stake. Hitler perfected this mechanism with the Jews; Stalin used it against the old Bolsheviks and the dissidents. In a way, although within the limitations set by a democratic society, Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to do the same in the United States.

Yet with the left-wing extremists in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina exactly the opposite happened. They tried to make themselves appear more dangerous than they were. They boasted of their omnipotence, they exaggerated their operational capacity, they intellectualized their phobias, proclaiming a revolutionary military strategy. It was nothing more than a tale told by an idiot. But it was sufficient to motivate the armed forces, themselves victims of the manipulation of their own intelligence services, and it drove them to commit the first acts of genocide in this century in the three most civilized societies of Latin America: Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina.