Bearing Witness in the Face of 'Overwhelming Evil': the Role of The

Bearing Witness in the Face of ‘Overwhelming Evil’: The Role of the Buenos Aires Herald During the Argentinean Dictatorship

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Lisa Dieckman, B.A.

Graduate Program in Latin American Studies

The Ohio State University

2019

Thesis Committee:

Ana Del Sarto, Adviser

Abril Trigo

Terrell Morgan

Lisa Dieckman

2019

Abstract

The Buenos Aires Herald has a rich history in Buenos Aires, Argentina as a longstanding English-language newspaper that actively bore witness to the repression of the

1976 to 1983 military dictatorship. In production since the 1800s and the sole English- language newspaper from 1959 until its closure in 2017, the Herald provided news, community updates, and credible journalism to the English-speaking community in

Argentina and the world. The Herald is survived by its human rights legacy during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1976 until 1983, Argentina was under the control of a military dictatorship, characterized by state-sponsored terrorism and the severe repression of human rights. For the eight long years of the dictatorship, the majority of the Argentinean press failed to report on the human rights abuses taking place, instead reporting the official position presented by the military or not reporting on the events at all. However, one newspaper in particular consistently reported the truth of the events taking place throughout the entirety of the dictatorship. The Buenos Aires

Herald was able to document the repression and state-sponsored terrorism taking place during the dictatorship while most other papers were censored and forced into silence. As an English-language newspaper, the Herald occupied a unique space. Managed by mostly

British expats in Argentina and owned by a company in the United States, the Herald had the support of the British government and certain protections and freedom that

Argentinean papers lacked. Under the guidance of editor Robert Cox, this freedom was employed to cover the disappearances and killings taking place at great length, saving many lives along the way and making the repression known throughout the world. This

thesis creates a space for understanding the capacity of the press to serve as a witness to repressive historical events. It introduces new primary source materials on the

Argentinean dictatorship in the form of archives from the Herald and interviews conducted with individuals who wrote for and read the paper. Using these primary sources and theories on witnessing through traumatic events from authors including Dori

Laub, Shoshana Felman, and Diana Taylor, I argue that the Buenos Aires Herald played a key role in bearing witness to the atrocities taking place during the dictatorship. By listening to the stories of those who disappeared and recording their names and tales in the paper, the Herald’s staff actively documented the state-sponsored terrorism taking place under the military government.

Dedication

Dedicated to the hard-working staff of the Buenos Aires Herald who diligently put their lives on the line to bear witness to those suffering violence and repression at the hands of

the military government.

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Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without the encouragement, support, and guidance of many important individuals. First, to the members of my thesis committee,

Abril Trigo and Terrell Morgan. Thank you for your diligence in recommending background readings, reviewing drafts of my thesis, and initiating thought-provoking discussions about this work. To my adviser, Ana Del Sarto. You were the first professor I met during my visit to Ohio State and I have enjoyed working with you ever since. Thank you for sharing my passion for this research and advising me every step of the way. To

Megan Hasting, for your encouragement, support, and guidance throughout the Master’s program. It has been a joy to both work alongside you and learn from you.

To the Tinker Foundation, for generously providing the financial support necessary to spend two weeks researching in Buenos Aires. With my flight, housing, and food budget secured, I was able to throw all my energy into the research process.

To my fiancé, Brad. You have been there since day one of this research, and well before that. Thank you for always providing a listening ear, supporting me during my research in Argentina, and being the best partner I could ask for. To my parents, Craig and Lindy. Thank you for always being there for a chat on the phone or a visit home when I needed to unwind and for always having my back, especially during my solo travels for this research.

To my interviewees for opening up your homes to me and speaking about incredibly personal and difficult topics. Thank you for your honesty, openness, and hospitality. To the staff at the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires.

Thank you for granting me access to the archives and locating volume after volume of

old Herald issues. Finally, to Robert Cox. Your leadership of the Herald through some of the darkest days has constantly inspired me. I cannot fully express my admiration and respect for you and I hope that this work does your story justice. Thank you, for everything.

Vita

2013 ……………………………………….... Rolling Meadows High School

2017 ………………………………..………... B.A. Global Studies and Spanish, North Central College

2017 to 2019 ………………………………… Graduate Assistant, Center for Latin American Studies, The Ohio State University

2017 to 2018 ………………………………… University Fellow, The Ohio State University

2018 to 2019 …………………...……………. Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow, The Ohio State University

2017 to present ……………………………….. M.A. Latin American Studies, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Latin American Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Dedication ...... iii Acknowledgments ...... iv Vita ...... vi List of Figures ...... ix Epigraph ...... x Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Argentinean History ...... 7 Chapter 2: Background on the Buenos Aires Herald ...... 13 2.1: Basic Background ...... 13 2.2: Legacy During Military Years ...... 14 2.3: Avoidance of Censorship ...... 17 2.4: Profile on Robert Cox ...... 20 2.5: Closure of the Buenos Aires Herald ...... 23 Chapter 3: Literature Review ...... 26 3.1: The Buenos Aires Herald ...... 26 3.1.1: Nos/Otros y la Violencia Política ...... 26 3.2: Argentinean Press & Censorship ...... 28 3.2.1: Nos/Otros y la Violencia Política: Buenos Aires Herald/El Día/La Prensa (1974-1982) ...... 28 3.2.2: The Sound of One Hand Clapping: A Preliminary Study of the Argentine Press in a Time of Terror ...... 29 3.3: Witness and Testimony ...... 31 3.3.1: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History ...... 31 3.3.2: Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” ...... 33 Chapter 4: Methodology ...... 37 4.1: Introduction ...... 37 4.2: Review of the Buenos Aires Herald ...... 37 4.3: Interviews ...... 38 4.3.1: Contacting Interviewees ...... 38 4.3.2: Interview Questions ...... 39 4.3.3: Interview Format ...... 40 4.3.4: Transcription Process ...... 43 4.3.5: Coding Process ...... 44 4.4: Archival Work ...... 45

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4.4.1: Finding the Archives ...... 45 4.4.2: Archive Selection Process ...... 45 4.4.3: Working with the Archives ...... 47 Chapter 5: Archival Findings ...... 49 5.1: Chaos Before the Coup ...... 50 5.2: A Coup, and the Month that Followed ...... 51 5.3: The Buenos Aires Herald Grows Concerned ...... 53 5.4: Visible Disappearances and Examples of Habeas Corpus Writs ...... 58 5.5: Robert Cox is Arrested ...... 61 5.6: Robert Cox and Family Exiled ...... 64 5.7: The Buenos Aires Herald Covers the Move to Democracy ...... 74 5.8: Robert Cox Returns; Military Leaders Put on Trial ...... 76 Chapter 6: Interview Findings ...... 79 6.1: The General History of the Buenos Aires Herald and the Press in Argentina ...... 79 6.2: Readership of the Buenos Aires Herald ...... 82 6.3: Closure of the Buenos Aires Herald ...... 84 6.3.1: International Print Media Trends ...... 85 6.4: Human Rights Abuses ...... 86 Chapter 7: The Act of “Bearing Witness” Through the Buenos Aires Herald ...... 91 7.1: Introduction ...... 91 7.2: The Buenos Aires Herald as Testimonio? ...... 92 7.3: The Buenos Aires Herald as Witness (Performing the Act of ‘Witnessing’) ...... 98 7.3.1: The ‘True’ Witnesses ...... 99 7.3.2: Witnesses Who Listen ...... 101 7.3.3: The Responsibility of Witnesses ...... 104 7.3.4: Witnessing from Within the Conflict ...... 106 7.3.5: Witnessing to Share Testimonies ...... 108 7.3.6: Witnessing (and Listening) to Create a Record ...... 109 7.4: The Challenges of Witnessing ...... 113 Chapter 8: Conclusion ...... 118 Bibliography ...... 121

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Herald headline announces the coup; March 24, 1976 ...... 9

Figure 2: Interview Participants ...... 43

Figure 3: News headline announces the new censorship imposed by the military government ...... 54

Figure 4: Headline begging for help in locating missing Uruguayan children ...... 59

Figure 5: Headline announces the arrest of Robert Cox...... 62

Epigraph

Let us tell tales. Let us tell tales – all the rest can wait, all the rest must wait. Let us tell

tales – that is our primary obligation. Commentaries will have to come later, lest they

replace or becloud what they mean to reveal.

Tales of children so wise and so old. Tales of old men mute with fear. Tales of victims

welcoming death as an old acquaintance. Tales that bring man close to the abyss and

beyond – and others that lift him up to heaven and beyond. Tales of despair, tales of

longing. Tales of immense flames reaching out to the sky, tales of night consuming life

and hope and eternity.

Let us tell tales so as to remember how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming

evil. Let us tell tales so as not to allow the executioner to have the last word. The last word belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness to capture it, shape it, transmit it and

keep it a secret, and then communicate that secret to others. [emphasis added]

- Elie Wiesel, June 1974 “Art and Culture After the Holocaust” lecture

Introduction

In times of repression under authoritarian states, a voice that speaks truth to power is crucial to the protection of human rights and the preservation of life. Under totalitarian and dictatorial regimes, truth is quashed, speech is silenced, and those who dare speak out are repressed. However, such regimes continue unchecked unless there are those willing to report the truth, loudly, boldly, and relentlessly. As Elie Wiesel, a writer, political activist, and Holocaust survivor, noted in his June 1974 lecture on “Art and Culture After the Holocaust,” we must tell tales during such times of repression. It is only through telling and re-telling tales that justice is possible, and truth is preserved for the next generations. Telling tales is necessary to remind us “how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming evil” (Wiesel). Those who survive this evil must tell tales because ultimately, “The last word belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness to capture it, shape it, transmit it and keep it as a secret, and then communicate that secret to others”

(Wiesel).

Overwhelming evil. There are no better words to describe the times of government-led repression and state-sponsored terrorism that have occurred throughout history; the evil that Elie Wiesel experienced firsthand during the Holocaust (and later wrote about) is one of the most haunting examples. Survivors such as Elie Wiesel and

Primo Levi have famously told their tales and borne witness to the memories of those who died and could no longer speak for themselves. They told their tales to prevent such events in the future; however, decades later, on the other side of the world, there was once again a need for individuals to bear witness and tell the tales of government repression. From 1976 until 1983, Argentina suffered a military dictatorship that was

marked by thousands of desaparecidos (people who disappeared), underground detention centers throughout the country used to torture subversivos (people suspected of subversive activity), and severe control of the press by the military government.

Under the harsh repression of the Argentinean dictatorship, there were very few individuals who stepped into the role of witness that Wiesel described. Most chose to commit what Dr. Diana Taylor describes as “percepticide,” blinding themselves to the violence all around them by turning inward and refusing to admit to what they may have seen (Taylor xii). “Percepticide” was a crucial act of self-preservation that was committed by citizens, students, journalists, businessmen, and more. To witness the violence that filled the streets and worse, to tell the tales of what was witnessed, put one at risk of being persecuted themselves. Official government communiques ordering censorship of the press were issued almost immediately after the initially bloodless coup in 1976 (R. Cox 9, “One Hand Clapping”). Thousands of journalists were persecuted, questioned, killed, disappeared, or forced into exile for daring to report the “truth” proclaimed by the numerous military leaders. The majority of journalists and papers ultimately chose to follow the “percepticide” committed by most Argentineans in order to preserve their lives, protect their careers, and save their families. Can anybody blame them?

However, some journalists did speak out and tell the tales that they heard. They stepped up and told the tales of what they witnessed. Dr. Dori Laub developed the concept of bearing witness after his own experiences during the Holocaust and later working with survivors. Bearing witness demands that those who experience, survive, or observe violence and repression become active spectators and rather than turn away,

boldly testify to what happened by writing about it, speaking about it, and publicly proclaiming the truth of the situation. Few journalists and periodicals were able to fulfill this role and bear witness to the atrocities of the dictatorship. One paper, La Opinión, was led by Jacobo Timerman and illustrated the danger of bearing witness. After many critical articles and editorials against President Videla in the early years of the dictatorship, La

Opinión was closed by the military in 1977, Timerman was captured, imprisoned, and tortured, and the paper was placed under military ownership for several years (Barrera

70). In contrast, the Buenos Aires Herald was unique in that it remained free, operational, and openly critical of the repression taking place by the military government for the entirety of the dictatorship. As a small, initially unknown English-language newspaper shielded by the protections of the British embassy, support from the owners in

Charleston, South Carolina, and their status as foreigners, the journalists at the Herald, under the leadership of editor Robert Cox, diligently documented the names of the disappeared, exposed the repression of the military government, and saved countless lives.

The Buenos Aires Herald was founded in the 1800s as a means of delivering shipping news to the numerous Anglo-Argentineans working at the port in Buenos Aires

(D. Cox 27). Over the years, the paper grew and delivered news on the railroads, sports, community events, births, marriages, deaths, and politics. Given its humble beginnings and invisibility as one of the only English-language papers in Buenos Aires, nobody could have foreseen the international acclaim that the paper would earn in the years of the dictatorship. Led by Robert Cox, who came to Argentina seeking work as a young journalist in the 1950s and served as the Editor-in-Chief during the early years of the

dictatorship, the Herald consistently bore witness to the atrocities of the military dictatorship by simply reporting the truth (D. Cox 23). The paper and its staff held true to a journalist’s and a paper’s calling – to report the news in a truthful and honest manner.

For Robert Cox and his staff during the dictatorship, this meant documenting the names and stories of the disappeared when few other papers even mentioned their names. They covered secret government meetings on the front pages of the paper, wrote scathing editorials on the abuses of the military government, took meetings with government leaders, and met daily with activist groups such as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to hear their concerns about their disappeared loved ones. Several members of the paper’s staff paid significant prices as a consequence of their work as they were arrested and threatened. Robert Cox himself had to eventually take his family into exile in the United

States after receiving increasingly serious threats from the government. In the face of such persecution, the Herald bore witness to the disappearances and repression that characterized the military dictatorship. By telling the tales they witnessed, the writers held the government accountable, published their crimes on an international level, and created a record to be transmitted to future generations so that nobody would forget the overwhelming evil that took place.

This thesis will examine the legacy of the Herald as one of the only papers to consistently report the truth of the events of the Argentinean dictatorship, especially related to the massive human rights abuses that took place. Research carried out over the course of two weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, funded by a Tinker grant, consisted of gathering archives of the paper and conducting ten interviews1 with individuals familiar

1 Nine interviews were conducted in Argentina and the tenth was conducted over the phone from Columbus, Ohio in September 2018.

with the Herald. I analyzed and studied the archives and interviews through the lens of

Dori Laub’s theory on bearing witness, supported by texts on witnessing from Primo

Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Diana Taylor. In this thesis, I argue that the Buenos Aires

Herald bore witness to the government repression that occurred throughout the dictatorship when few other newspapers would by documenting the names, faces, and stories of the disappeared, demanding truthfulness, accountability, and due process from the government through editorials, and above all, reporting truthfully on the events that took place. By doing their jobs as journalists, reporters, and editors, at great personal risk, the staff at the Herald courageously stood up to the government, preserved the truth of what really took place during the dictatorship, and told the tales of the victims who could not speak for themselves.

This thesis offers a unique contribution to the field of Latin American Studies by presenting new primary source data in the form of interviews from individuals linked to the Herald and an original analysis of archives of the Herald through the lens of witnessing. Additionally, this work preserves the voices of those who read and wrote for the Herald and presents their reflections on the role and responsibility of the press in times of repression, the importance and legacy of the Herald and the state of the press in

Argentina and the world. Finally, I have taken a unique approach in linking theories on witnessing from Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Diana

Taylor. These are distinct texts and authors from different historical periods, tied to different repressive events; however, this work applies ideas from all the texts to a small

English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires, offering a new analysis on the ways in which theories on witnessing can be applied to the case of Argentina.

Chapter 1 provides context for the role that the Herald played during the dictatorship by presenting the history of what took place in Argentina in the years prior to and during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Chapter 2 offers a background on the

Herald: its history, the format of the paper, its legacy, and ultimately its fate after the dictatorship came to an end. In Chapter 3, the literature review introduces key texts on the press in Argentina, the Herald specifically, and theories on testimony and witness.

Chapter 4 covers the methodology for this project, reviewing the research conducted with primary sources in Buenos Aires and the continuing work completed in Columbus, Ohio.

Chapter 5 thematically analyzes the archival findings in the issues of the Herald from the dictatorship while Chapter 6 thematically analyzes the interviews conducted with individuals who read or wrote for the paper. Chapter 7 discusses the role of the Herald during the dictatorship through the lens of Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman’s theory on bearing witness, supported by theories from Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Diana

Taylor. Finally, Chapter 8 offers concluding thoughts and reflections on future research and the importance of the press in the modern era.

Chapter 1: Argentinean History

In many ways, the coup d’etat in March 1976 was nothing new for Argentina; coups had been taking place since the 1930s and many preceded the March 1976 coup.

However, in many other ways, this coup was a shocking disruption that would leave an enduring stain on the country’s history. It ignited an eight-year period of dictatorship, repression, and state-sponsored terrorism, distinct from the previous coups that took place.

In order to fully understand the role of the Buenos Aires Herald during

Argentina’s most recent and repressive military coup and subsequent dictatorship, it is critical to understand the politics and history in the years leading up to the coup. This chapter will present a brief review of the political history of Argentina in the mid to late

1900s, as well as a more detailed study of the history of the military dictatorship in the

1970s and 1980s. The historical transition to democracy will be addressed as well. This historical review will provide a foundation for understanding important events and topics covered in the interviews conducted with readers of the Herald, as well as topics that the

Herald covered under the leadership of Robert Cox.

The presidencies of Juan Domingo Perón marked the beginning of the divisions in

Argentinean society that the military intervention in 1976 sought to address. Juan Perón rose to power in 1945 as President, after previous appointments as the Secretary of Labor,

Minister of War, and Vice President. He entered Argentinean politics as a popular leader focused on turning the working class into a political coalition (James 276). His first presidential term (1946-1955) was marked by his integration of the working class into the political sphere (James 277). “Peronism’s fundamental political appeal lay in its ability to

redefine the notion of citizenship within a broader, ultimately social context” (James

280). Over the course of two military coups, the Peronist party was banned and Juan

Perón was sent into exile until his triumphant return to Argentina and the presidency in

1973.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, various mass movements emerged throughout Argentina, one of which was the Montoneros. The Montoneros were a mass movement with extensive social support, formed from a radical and far-left branch of

Peronism (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 342). The Montoneros had an armed branch that carried out violent operations throughout Argentina throughout these years, including during Juan Perón’s brief return to the presidency in 1973 until his death in 1974

(Nouzeilles and Montaldo 342). Many headlines in the Herald during the months leading up to the military coup in 1976 and the months following covered the violence and terror in the streets of Buenos Aires, such as “Three police murdered” and “Blast rocks army command building.” The Montoneros and a paramilitary group aligned with the Peronist

Right, the Triple A, claimed responsibility for the various murders and bombings that took place throughout the 1970s (Gillespie 377).

In those years following Juan Perón’s death and before the military took over on

March 24th, 1976, Juan Perón’s wife, Isabel Perón, stepped into office. Isabel Perón’s short term as President (1974-1976) was marked by widespread chaos, instability, and political violence. “After Perón’s death in 1974, the rapid deterioration of the economy, the escalation of guerrilla warfare, and the brutal repression carried out by paramilitary groups and the state during Isabel Perón’s administration created a politically turbulent period ending in the military coup of 1976” (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 343).

Argentineans were concerned about Isabel Perón’s weak handling of the economy and her role as an essential puppet. Multiple interviewees noted the concerning role held by

José López Rega, nicknamed El Brujo (The Warlock), who was Isabel Perón’s right-hand man and closest advisor. With an affinity for the occult, López Rega served as her spiritual and political advisor and due to her lack of governing experience and knowledge, essentially ran the government during her brief term as President.

The military coup that deposed Isabel in 1976 came as a sigh of relief to much of the country. The articles in the Herald in the days leading up to the coup have an air of apprehension and anticipation with headlines such as “Thoughts on a four-letter word”

(the word being of course, coup); “Coup rumours persist;” and finally, on March 24th,

1976 in large block letters that could not be ignored, “Tanks roll towards BA.”

Figure 1: Herald headline announces the coup; March 24, 1976

By many accounts noted in the Herald and personal interviews, the only problem with the military’s intervention on March 24th was that it had come far too late. Compared to

the coup d’etat in neighboring Chile that bombed the Presidential Palace and brought violence to the streets, the military coup in 1976 in Argentina was a bloodless coup that many believed would bring an end to the violence of the years prior. However, it was

“…the beginning of one of the bloodiest periods in Argentine history” (Nouzeilles and

Montaldo 395).

While The Argentina Reader (which has provided much of the historical context for this chapter) describes the actions of the military beginning shortly after the coup as

“…persecution of political dissidents,” the military itself justified its mission as a war against ‘subversives’ and ‘terrorists’ that was necessary to return political stability to

Argentina (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 395). They promised to bring the law, order, and peace that many Argentineans wanted restored after the tumultuous years of the Peróns.

This meant declaring war on the violent activities of paramilitary groups and any

‘subversives’ who were believed to be tied to these groups and their activities. During the dictatorship that lasted from 1976 until 1983, this resulted in a witch hunt as thousands disappeared and “death squads kidnapped union leaders, writers, journalists, students, and political activists” (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 395). The military fought this war for eight long years and “…justified organized repression as absolutely necessary to put an end to guerrilla activity and defended state violence as the only means of guaranteeing political stability” (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 395). Censorship was imposed almost immediately as “The military also sent out instructions to the media prohibiting references to kidnappings, disappearances, police, or security men unless such information was sent out by means of military communiqués” (Park 242). According to some estimates, 30,000 individuals were disappeared during the dictatorship and hundreds went into exile

“…after seeing many of their friends disappear or return to their homes emotionally and physically scarred by brutal interrogations, or after themselves being persecuted and threatened by the military regime” (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 396). These abuses will be covered in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6. During the dictatorship, the military leaders did not shy away from acknowledging much of the violence committed. However, when referencing disappearances, alleged torture, and murders, they always framed them in the context of their war against the so-called “terrorism” of the Montoneros.

In the year 1983, Argentina returned to democracy, which was an originally unintended result of the military’s own actions. In 1982, the military went to war over the

Malvinas/Falkland Islands with Great Britain (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 397). After a parade of presidents, the economy was plummeting, and popular support for the military government was waning. Unions were striking and demonstrations in downtown Buenos

Aires were harshly repressed, which led to further riots (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 397).

To counteract these forces, the military leaders decided that war with Great Britain over the proper ownership of the Islands would win back the support of the public and thus announced the seizure of “the Malvinas Islands from British hands” (Speranza 465).

However, the military greatly underestimated the force and will of Great Britain with regards to the Islands and in only a matter of weeks, the Argentinean forces were defeated (Speranza 465). Finally, in December 1982, after massive protests, the military leaders announced the transition to democracy and officially set a date for elections

(Freedom House).

In 1983, Raúl Alfonsín became the first democratically-elected President of

Argentina since the coup in 1976. He ran on the promise of bringing the junta to justice

through public trials and in 1985, his promise was fulfilled as military leaders were put on trial and held accountable for their crimes against the Argentinean people (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 395). Robert Cox himself testified against the military leaders and noted,

“Following the return to democracy in Argentina in 1983, I was asked by the government to take the stand in a trial that was unprecedented in Latin America. For the first time, a dictatorship was on trial” (R. Cox 12, “The Sound of…”). The trials were preceded by the publication of an official report called “Nunca Más” (Never Again) that included testimonies from survivors and the stories of those who disappeared (National

Commission on the Disappearance of Persons 440).

The brief history presented in this chapter serves as an introduction to some of the crucial issues found in the archives and interviews referenced in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. In addition, the following Chapter 2 will present a detailed look into the history of the

Buenos Aires Herald.

Chapter 2: Background on the Buenos Aires Herald

2.1: Basic Background

The Buenos Aires Herald was a little-known English newspaper for most of its

140 years of publication, with the exception of its years of heightened readership during the military dictatorship. While the Herald never boasted a particularly large readership nor was it ever an economically fruitful paper, it was one of the only English-language newspapers in Argentina throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries and was the only one after the Buenos Aires Standard closed in 1959. The Herald was founded in 1876 by

Scotsman William Cathcart, originally as a single sheet full of shipping information for

British expats working on Argentinean railroads (The Economist). Over the course of 140 years, the Herald changed owners many times but remained an important resource for

English-speaking expats, tourists, and English-speaking Argentineans looking for the news from a different perspective. Interestingly, the Herald conducted a study on its readership at one point and “came to the (perhaps surprising?) conclusion that 70 percent were Argentine, who were obviously fluent in English or learning the language” (Garcia).

As noted in the Buenos Aires Times2, “The Herald translated Argentina all those years, not just for the people outside, but also for many inside the country” (Garcia). The

Herald covered key international events and local news, boasted a comprehensive sports section, announced the births, deaths, and marriages in the local British-Argentinean community, and always included an editorial written (both in English and Spanish3) by

2 The Buenos Aires Times is an English-language supplement in the paper Perfíl. The Times was created to fill the gap in English-language news left by the closure of the Herald. The Times is published on Saturdays and many of the former writers from the Herald contribute weekly. 3 Besides occasional advertisements, the editorial was the only part of the Herald written in Spanish as well as in English. This was a carry-over from the days when Juan Perón was in office and issued a law

the editor-in-chief. For a newspaper that originally began as shipping news to end up being most known for its voice of dissent during the military dictatorship was a surprise to many. In an article upon its closure in 2017, Daniel Politi with the New York Times notes:

Standing up to the junta by publishing information others silenced was an unlikely

role for a publication founded by a Scottish immigrant in 1876 as a single sheet

dedicated to shipping news. For almost a century, the paper focused on

international news to serve its immigrant audience and did little reporting.

This all changed under the guidance of Robert Cox during his time as editor-in-chief.

Following his lead, the Herald took on a new role as a protector and defender of human rights – a legacy that would stick with it through to its closure in 2017.

2.2: Legacy During Military Years

The Herald gained international recognition and attention from the junta leaders by “exposing forced disappearances during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, a chapter of Argentina’s history that other papers whitewashed” (Politi). Under the leadership of

Robert Cox, the Herald quickly cemented its legacy as one of the only newspapers to publish the names of the disappeared, stand with the relatives of the victims, and push for their release. As several tributes have noted, “The Buenos Aires Herald published in

English what the other newspapers cover up in Spanish” (R. Cox, “When Death…”).

According to Graciela Mochkofsky, the Herald not only published information on the human rights abuses of the military government, but it also succeeded in saving lives:

mandating that all opinion pieces in Argentinean newspapers be written in Spanish as well as in English, so that the government would understand what was being written.

While praising the economic plan and other aspects of the military administration,

the Herald published front-page stories about the disappearances. Those articles

saved lives; several people ‘reappeared.’ It was a courageous decision, and the

Herald was mostly alone among Argentinean publications. The government had

issued strict censorship rules, and reporters and editors were among the detainees

and disappeared. (92).

Throughout its history, prior to the military dictatorship, the Herald was known for being moderate in terms of its political views but always had a focus on the importance of protecting human rights. Robert Cox notes that the Herald had developed a reputation during Juan Perón’s first administration, several years before Cox’s arrival in Argentina:

“I saw our role [during the dictatorship] as upholding a tradition that the newspaper had established during the 1946-1955 dictatorship of Juan Domingo Perón…” (“When

Death…”). This remained true throughout the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.

Along with many Argentineans, the Herald initially welcomed the coup that was seen as an opportunity to restore peace and order to Argentina and avoid a civil war under Isabel

Perón (Mochkofsky 92). Robert Cox himself notes, “While generally sympathetic to the military government, the Herald became well-known for its criticism of the methods used against the regime’s opponents” (R. Cox 43, “At Least 10,000”).

In the days following the coup, Robert Cox grew aware of the rumors of kidnappings and disappearances of Argentineans at the hands of the military leaders

(Mochkofsky 92). Under an official decree from the government (the only official measure of censorship ever imposed), newspapers were forbidden from reporting upon

“subversive activity” or “disappearances” unless they had official notice from the

government (Prendergast 614). Robert Cox began to grow suspicious and as the news of disappearances grew, he began to lead the Herald in documenting the various human rights abuses taking place under the government. Through both editorials and news items published daily about disappearances, the Herald “became the most reliable source of information about human rights violations in Argentina” (Mochkofsky 92). Readership reached 20,000 in those years and the newspaper “gained international prestige”

(Mochkofsky 92). The Herald staff courageously wrote countless editorials covering the disappearances of Argentinean citizens and non-citizens, calling upon the government to provide transparency and maintain the rule of law in putting these individuals on trial rather than the extralegal disappearances and killings that had become the norm. An innovative strategy to share the names and stories of the disappeared originated when

“Herald News Editor Andrew Graham-Yooll came up with the idea of having the relatives of the disappeared secure habeas corpus writs so that the reports of kidnappings would have an official source” (Mochkofsky 92) Relatives of the disappeared filled the

Herald newsroom to submit information about their loved ones and to publish their habeas corpus writs, which subsequently filled the pages of the Herald. The Herald would often elevate certain cases, providing daily updates and putting the stories and photos on the front page of the paper, keeping public pressure on the government. Jorge

Fontevecchia, a journalist with the weekly paper La Semana, was kidnapped and wrote about the role of Robert Cox and the Herald in saving his life in the first issue of the

Buenos Aires Times:

…and Cox saved my life because he published news of my disappearance

immediately in the Buenos Aires Herald, causing the American news agencies,

Associated Press and United Press, to reproduce in their English wires the news

that could then be published in many newspapers in the United States, generating

the same wave of international pressure that had already saved Cox himself two

years earlier.

By publishing stories of the disappeared and connecting with international news outlets, the Herald ensured that these stories about disappearances and human rights violations were elevated throughout the international human rights community, drawing negative and unwanted attention to the military government. Although Robert Cox is unsure how many lives he and the Herald saved during those years, there is no doubt that the Herald was instrumental in documenting the abuses committed by the military government and preserving the stories of its victims.

2.3: Avoidance of Censorship

While much of the legacy of the Herald is due to the courage of Robert Cox and everybody on staff who fearlessly put their lives on the line to publish news about the human rights violations committed by the military government, the status of the Herald was instrumental in ensuring it avoided censorship, both by the government officially and via self-censorship. While other papers such as La Opinión (censured and shut down in

1977) published news about disappearances as long as they were able to, the Herald held certain protections that Argentinean papers lacked. It is crucial to note that while the

Herald was not alone in publishing about the disappearances during the dictatorship, it was one of the few newspapers able to continuously publish and avoid censorship largely due to these protections; several of them will be outlined in this section.

First, the Herald was distinct from most other Argentinean newspapers in that it was written primarily in English and thus avoided the attention of the government.

Additionally, as much of the staff were foreigners, they had more freedom to travel to avoid government repression than Argentinean journalists. English-language press throughout Latin America in general often enjoyed more freedom during the 1970s and

1980s, “perhaps partly because their writers could easily take refuge in their home countries” (The Economist). As Marcelo Garcia notes for the Buenos Aires Times, “…the vast majority of the times, the Herald was a pleasant island of freedom, only subject to the angle each of its editors would give the paper in their time.” Largely uninfluenced by whichever government was in power, even when the military government took over in

1976, the Herald had a great degree of editorial freedom. Garcia continues: “There was sometimes a tacit understanding between sources and reporters that the Herald lived in some sort of a limbo not many people had access to, and from where the country’s reality could be dissected in a way that was not possible in Spanish-language papers.”

Second, and more significantly, many of the writers were foreigners, coming from

Great Britain or the United States to work for the Herald and thus had special protections from their respective countries and status as foreigners. In an opinion piece he wrote for the Buenos Aires Times, Robert Cox noted that his life may have been saved by diplomats from the British Embassy who nominated him for a special honor as an “Officer of the

Order of the British Empire,” awarded by Queen Elizabeth II. While Cox was initially reluctant to accept this honor, he was later glad he did. He notes:

Before that, I was a fly, ripe for swatting. Afterwards, I was somebody. Three

little letters, O, B and E, (which stands for Officer of the Order of the British

Empire) acted as a shield when reporters started to disappear in Argentina. I note

today that the latest figure for journalists who were killed outright, or kidnapped

and later murdered, during the 1976-83 dictatorship stands at 172. (“Honour…”)

By being formally recognized for his work at the international level, Robert Cox was awarded a status that most journalists in Argentina did not have. The military government was hesitant to pursue a journalist that was so well-known internationally. Robert Cox also had ties to the United States government and the U.S. Embassy in Argentina – a U.S. diplomat, F. Allen “Tex” Harris, worked closely with Cox and the Mothers de la Plaza de

Mayo to document the human rights abuses taking place (Parker). The US Embassy under President Jimmy Carter lent their support to Cox, allowing him to cover far more than other papers could (Licitra). When Robert Cox was arrested, he believes that being known abroad saved his life. He notes that he was questioned in prison and released –

“Fortunately, by that time, I was well-known enough, I was a liability” (qtd in Parker). In other instances of persecution, he was able to seek refuge at the British Embassy or take a trip to the United States, as an “English national with ties to the U.S. and friends in the

Argentine government” (Parker). A former writer for the Herald, Uki Goñi, noted in an interview that they recognized the privilege that the Herald had in comparison to other papers:

We were in a position then where we were extremely independent, because of a

series of special circumstances, because we had this very brave editor who wasn’t

looking at the bottom line financially and who took it upon himself with the help

of a few others like me to save as many lives as he could using the position he

was in. (Sequeira).

The Herald occupied a very particular space during the military dictatorship, with certain protections and privileges that other papers lacked. These protections enabled Robert Cox to lead the Herald in consistently documenting the stories of the victims of the state-led terrorism during the dictatorship.

2.4: Profile on Robert Cox

While the Herald always centered on human rights as a key foundation of the paper’s values and focus, it cannot be denied that the editor from 1968 to 1979, Robert J.

Cox, was instrumental in publicly holding the military government accountable, documenting hundreds of disappearances, and securing the release of many. His bravery during these years has been documented in multiple published accounts: a book written by his son, David Cox, called Dirty Secrets, Dirty War: The Exile of Editor Robert J.

Cox; a book of his correspondence with his close friend, Harry Ingham, during his exile called En honor a la verdad; and most recently, a documentary film about his role with the Buenos Aires Herald titled Messenger on a White Horse and directed by Jayson

McNamara. He has also been the subject of countless newspaper articles, interviews, and profiles.

At great personal expense, Robert Cox led the Herald in reporting the human rights abuses carried out by the military government. During the years, journalists were frequent targets of the forced disappearances, tortures, and murders carried out by the military government. Some scholars estimate that 400 journalists went into exile and at least 84 were killed (Bustos 156). Robert Cox notes his awareness of the gravity and risk of his work, ever present on his mind: “But by facing every day in Argentina expecting to

be murdered, telling myself that this was exactly how it was going to be, worked for me”

(R. Cox, “When Death…”). He had a reputation for his fearlessness, coming face-to-face with members of the government at several points throughout the dictatorship, including the first president, Videla (The Economist). Robert Cox was a staunch ally of the families of the disappeared and formed an especially close relationship with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo who often filled his office to give him news about their disappeared loved ones.

In fact, when Robert Cox eventually was forced into exile in the United States, this group was among his loudest supporters and remains so, to this day: “The Mothers of Plaza de

Mayo, the human rights group demanding to know the whereabouts of their disappeared children, bid farewell to Mr. Cox with a small ad in the newspaper La Prensa thanking him for ‘making us feel less alone’” (Politi). His reputation was that of somebody who cared about the disappeared and their families and of somebody who was committed to sharing the truth about their situations. Soon after his visit to the Plaza de Mayo where he first met the Mothers and observed the endless lines of families waiting to register their loved ones’ disappearances with the government, knowledge of this reputation spread.

“…word spread that there was an Englishman, an editor at the Buenos Aires Herald, who deeply cared about the missing. Lines then formed early outside the Herald office, too.

Each day, Cox interviewed as many friends and relatives of los desaparecidos as he possibly could” (D. Cox 85-86). Highly aware of the danger of his work, Robert Cox took the burden of writing editorials and news stories about the disappeared upon himself in order to protect his reporters (D. Cox 86, “Dirty Secrets…”).

On April 24th, 1977, Cox was arrested for reporting about the Montonero’s formation of a political party (D. Cox 98, “Dirty Secrets…”). On April 26th, he was right

back to work as he documented the story of his arrest in the Herald. In subsequent interviews and conversations, Cox spoke to the horror of these days spent in prison, noting the swastikas on the wall of the jail cells (Goñi). Despite this brush with danger, he continued to diligently report in the years after his arrest, never backing down. In

1978, he won the Moors Cabot Award, an international prize for journalists, honoring his tireless work with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. According to the Charleston News and

Courier, “Robert Cox was recognized for his unyielding commitment to freedom of the press and human rights, and for his readiness to confront injustice regardless of the risk to his newspaper and himself” (D. Cox 152, “Dirty Secrets…”). He received acclaim from admirers worldwide and the reputation of the Herald grew internationally (D. Cox 152-

153, “Dirty Secrets…”).

The year 1979 was the breaking point for Robert Cox and his family after sustaining many years of threats against them. Cox believed he had been “marked for assassination” and lived under the constant fear of danger (D. Cox 180, “Dirty

Secrets…”). The final straw was when his young son received a threatening letter sent by the military government. Now fearing for his family’s lives on top of his own, Robert

Cox and his wife, Maud, made the decision to go into exile. On December 15th, 1979,

Robert Cox wrote one of the most important editorials of his career, entitled “Au Revoir.”

This was his final editorial prior to his exile, in which he shared his musings upon the state of the press in Argentina, the repression and state-sponsored terrorism that were commonplace, the role of the Herald, and the conditions surrounding his departure. Over the next several days, the Herald was filled with an outpouring of support from families and individuals who expressed their understanding in the Cox family’s decision to leave

Argentina and thanked Robert Cox for the fearless work he did to tell the truth about the military government4 (D. Cox 195-198, “Dirty Secrets…”). The family relocated to

Charleston, South Carolina, where Cox took a job on the editorial staff of the News &

Courier in Charleston (D. Cox 213, “Dirty Secrets…”). “From Charleston, Cox continued to write about Argentina. He never abandoned the families who sought his help” (D. Cox 213, “Dirty Secrets…”). To this day, Robert Cox is still reflecting upon the state of the press in Argentina and advocating for the importance of the press in standing up for human rights.

2.5: Closure of the Buenos Aires Herald

The Buenos Aires Herald had a rich history and an honorable legacy.

Unfortunately, that history and legacy were not enough to sustain the paper forever. In recent years, as more and more people have begun turning to online sources for their news, traditional print media has suffered, and the Herald was no exception. As The

Guardian noted, “The move [closure] comes less than a year after the paper, which once called itself the only English-language daily in Latin America, switched to a weekly print edition, blaming tough economic conditions and a broad shift among readers to digital media.” Most newspapers now have an online version that is often more robust than the print version and it is commonplace for individuals to simply receive their news through snippets on social media rather than sitting down to read a newspaper. With this advent of technology, being an English-language newspaper in a Spanish-speaking country was not enough to sell papers. “As the number of Anglophone immigrants fell, tourists and expats

4 Text from “Au Revoir,” the threatening letter received by the Cox family, and examples of the support from Argentineans upon his departure can be found in Chapter 5.

became the papers’ main readers. English-medium news became less necessary for visitors when the Internet let them browse their hometown papers from abroad” (The

Economist). Additionally, the Herald suffered from “…neglect by a string of owners who seemed to care little about the publication’s history and how it could adapt to the modern world” (Politi). The mismanagement and economic state of the Herald in its final years caused the newspaper to switch to weekly issues and after 140 years of publication, closed overnight on Monday, July 31st, 2017 (The Guardian). The closure of the Herald was sudden. The final issue held no announcement of the impending closure; rather, everything took place overnight. However, while the Herald closed without much of a noise, the cries of acclamation for the paper upon its closure were loud and far-reaching.

Newspapers from around the world wrote editorials and ‘obituaries’ about the legacy of the Herald and the important role it played during the military dictatorship, especially honoring the role of Robert Cox. Papers such as the New York Times, The Guardian, and

The Economist lamented the current state of the press that led to the Herald’s sudden downfall and introduced their readers to the history of the newspaper. The New York

Times notes that the closure “…did not stop the tributes from pouring across social media, or discourage journalists from writing obituaries to the small paper that increasingly seemed a relic of a bygone era” (Politi). Notably:

…one newspaper dedicated a seven-page supplement to the Herald. Another local

paper asked three former editors to write about their experiences at the Herald,

and a former staff member eloquently wrote a back page column about the

paper’s storied history for a weekly.” (Politi).

It is a strong testament to the importance of the Herald during the years of the dictatorship that such a small English-language newspaper, tucked away in Buenos Aires,

Argentina, would reach the corners of the world, garnering farewells from papers including El País in Spain and Le Monde in France (Politi). Without question, the Herald has left an unforgettable mark on Argentinean history and the leadership of Robert Cox has been noted by many. Honored as an “illustrious citizen of Buenos Aires” in 2010, the work he did to lead the Herald in covering the state-sponsored terrorism of the 1970s and

1980s has not been forgotten, even in the face of the closure of the Herald (Greenslade).

Chapter 3: Literature Review

3.1: The Buenos Aires Herald

While articles detailing the surprising closure, history, and legacy of the Buenos

Aires Herald flourished upon its closure in 2017, few works have emerged that study the paper beyond the cursory newspaper articles regarding its closure. The studies that do exist are crucial to understanding the role of the Herald within Argentinean society, as they address the importance of the paper and the way in which it covered the events of the dictatorship. However, they do not make claims about the Herald’s role as it relates to the idea of ‘bearing witness’ to the atrocities that occurred and the responsibility it held in keeping the Argentinean public informed and the government accountable.

3.1.1: Nos/Otros y la Violencia Política

In César L. Díaz’s 2009 book, Nos/Otros y la Violencia Política: Buenos Aires

Herald/El Día/La Prensa (1974-1982)5, he presents an extensive background on the state of the press in Argentina and the history of the military dictatorship. While Díaz focuses on three newspapers that were relevant during the dictatorship (the Herald, El Día, and

La Prensa), his work with the Herald is the most relevant for this research. Díaz is a

Communications Professor with an extensive background in studying the press, specifically in Argentina, as well as the Herald. In the sections focused on the Herald,

Díaz studies the editorials written mainly by Robert Cox because the editorials were the pieces that best reflected the Herald’s position with regards to the military dictatorship

5 Us/Them and Political Violence: Buenos Aires Herald/El Día/La Prensa (1974-1982); (Personal translation)

(Díaz 259). Díaz takes a critical approach, dissecting the headlines and bodies of the editorials in great depth. He also provides context to the Herald regarding its reputation and readership during the dictatorship. He mentions that the paper had a prestigious reputation abroad and references an interview with Robert Cox where he noted that the paper acted as a window to the world and had many subscribers outside of the country.

Therefore, one of the few sources of information from Argentina that the outside world had about the atrocities taking place was the Herald (Díaz 315). In fact, circulation rose drastically after the coup in March 1976, with readership growing from 25,000 to 35,000 in the years following the coup, marking the height of the Herald’s popularity (Díaz 315).

Díaz notes the symbolism of the Herald during the dictatorship: to carry the Herald under one’s arm was a silent symbol of standing against the repression and state-sponsored terrorism taking place (Díaz 315). Many of those individuals carrying the Herald only purchased it in order to read the editorial, written in both English and Spanish (Díaz 315).

Díaz’s work also provides an introduction by Robert Cox, in which Cox discusses the role of the Herald, as he understood it. He positioned the Herald as a symbol of democracy and was committed to making human rights highly visible and returning to democracy (Díaz 257). Cox noted the goal of the Herald during those years as nothing more than to save as many lives as they could by publishing the stories of the disappeared. He specifically calls attention to the importance of the editorials in providing the paper a way to reflect their opposition to the repression carried out by the military government (Díaz 259). Overall, Díaz’s work succeeds in presenting a detailed analysis of the Herald’s specific discourse surrounding the events of the dictatorship and provides key contextual information on its audience and readership. His inclusion of

Robert Cox’s introduction provides a glimpse through the editor’s eyes of the role of the

Herald, which is crucial in framing my study of the Herald’s legacy.

3.2: Argentinean Press & Censorship

The government-imposed censorship and self-censorship that were commonplace during the dictatorship are key in understanding why the Herald was so exceptional in its coverage of the dictatorship. It was largely able to avoid censorship and thus was one of the few newspapers that continuously covered the events of the military dictatorship.

Two key texts provide background information on censorship as it relates to the

Argentinean press and the Herald: Nos/Otros y la Violencia Política: Buenos Aires

Herald/El Día/La Prensa (1974-1982), by César L. Díaz, and The Sound of One Hand

Clapping: A Preliminary Study of the Argentine Press in a Time of Terror, by Robert

Cox.

3.2.1: Nos/Otros y la Violencia Política: Buenos Aires Herald/El Día/La Prensa (1974- 1982)

The state of the Argentinean press both before and during the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 has been the subject of extensive scholarly research. Newspapers and journalists suffered under both government censorship and self-censorship; as such, the

Argentinean dictatorship has been an ideal case study for many scholars studying communication and media studies. Returning to César Díaz’s book, Nos/Otros y la

Violencia Política, the introduction written by Robert Cox reflects on the consequences of censorship on the knowledge that the Argentinean people had about the dictatorship.

This introduction is crucial to this thesis because it echoes many of the reflections

presented by interview participants, which are analyzed in Chapter 6. In his introduction, also noted in Section 3.1.1, Cox mentions that people living in Argentina during the dictatorship only saw what they wanted to see; it was easy to ignore reality because the majority of the press refused to publish information about what was truly taking place

(Díaz 253). Cox accuses the press of suppressing reality during those years (Díaz 253).

He also briefly describes the censorship of the press in Argentina, noting that in the

1960s, the press still operated under self-censorship from the years of Juan Perón and shortly after the coup in 1976, government-mandated censorship was implemented, demanding the press avoid writing about the disappearances and subversives unless explicitly permitted to do so by the government (Díaz 254). Robert Cox’s reflections on the press in this introduction to Díaz’s work are brief but provide a crucial glimpse into his perspective on the role of the press and how that influenced his leadership of the

Herald during the military dictatorship.

3.2.2: The Sound of One Hand Clapping: A Preliminary Study of the Argentine Press in a Time of Terror

While Nos/Otros y la Violencia Política includes Robert Cox’s thoughts as a featured writer for the introduction, many other pieces have been independently written by former Herald writers to reflect upon the press and censorship during the military dictatorship. Robert Cox wrote the report The Sound of One Hand Clapping while he was a Guest Scholar of the Wilson Center in 1980. He presented this paper on August 27th,

1980, during his period of exile in the United States after fleeing the violence threatened against his family from the military government. Under this context, he argues that the failure of the Argentinean press to report openly and honestly about the human rights

abuses committed by the military government ultimately magnified the resulting tragedy of the dictatorship. Here, Cox lays out his philosophy about the role of the press, especially in times of repression, and the importance of telling the stories of those who could no longer speak for themselves. Cox notes the “minimum duty” to keep “the public informed,” which ultimately, he claims, would have kept the most serious of human rights abuses in check (R. Cox 1, “The Sound…”). The press must be ready to support democratic principles when those principles are most threatened (R. Cox 1, “The

Sound…”). Prior to the administration of Juan Perón, Cox argues that the Argentinean press was “the freest in Latin America” but under Perón’s rule, the press began to self- censor and became complicit with various forms of government repression, all the way through the state-sponsored terrorism seen in the 1970s and 1980s (R. Cox 8, “The

Sound…”). In this report, Cox also provides a snapshot of life in Argentina during the dictatorship (up until his exile), detailing the 68 journalists disappeared, the 36 killed, and the hundreds in exile (R. Cox 9, “The Sound…”). By the end of the military dictatorship, these reports increased. With these numbers, Cox presents his main philosophical question around which he centers his report and philosophy on journalism – “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (R. Cox 9, “The Sound…”). For Cox, the answer – silence

– lies in the actions taken by the Argentinean press during the military dictatorship. Cox expresses his frustration with the Argentinean press which, with some exceptions, was largely silent in the face of repression (R. Cox 11, “The Sound…”). Newspapers accepted the official story from the military – that missing people and innocent lives lost were commonplace in wars and that Argentina was indeed fighting a brutal war against the

“terrorism” of groups such as the Montoneros (R. Cox 11, “The Sound…”). Cox

concludes his reflections with a warning for those reading his report: a free press is essential for the proper functioning of institutions and without it, stable democracy is impossible. He argues:

The return of rule of law, for example, depends on a press that will insist that

justice be done. A government without newspapers, without an effective press, is

two severed hands, for without genuine information and without an informed

public opinion, there will be no sounds of hands clapping evermore. (R. Cox 20,

“The Sound…”).

3.3: Witness and Testimony

This thesis will be centered on Robert Cox’s and the Herald’s role as witnesses to the state-sponsored terrorism that took place during the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina.

Dori Laub developed the concept of ‘bearing witness’ that is the primary theory related to witnessing. Texts by Diana Taylor, Primo Levi, and Giorgio Agamben provide support and distinct perspectives on the different ways to bear witness. In this section, I will briefly introduce some of these texts and their roles in supporting the central argument of this thesis; these texts will be analyzed in greater detail in Chapter 7.

3.3.1: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

This book provides the central theory on the concept of ‘bearing witness’ that was developed by Dori Laub as he processed his experiences during the Holocaust and worked with the testimonies of other survivors. In this book, published in 1992, Laub works with literary critic, Shoshana Felman, to study the relationships between literature

and testimony, writer and witness, witnessing and testifying, and writing and reading

(Felman and Laub xiii). While Laub’s conception of ‘bearing witness’ was born out of the Holocaust and the stories of the survivors, the fundamental underlying theory can be applied to any situation of trauma in which there is a necessity to witness events taking place and reflect upon them. In order to best understand the role played by the Herald and Robert Cox, it is crucial to understand the three levels of witnessing that Laub and

Felman develop. First, there is “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience;” second, “the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others;” and third,

“the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (Felman and Laub 75).

The second level takes place between two individuals and involves the process of listening. This level is the level most fitting to understand the role played by the Herald.

While at times, journalists at the Herald (and certainly Robert Cox himself) witnessed repressive experiences themselves, their role was primarily to bear witness to the stories of other victims and share their stories. Laub and Felman describe the act of ‘bearing witness’ as a “testimonial process,” largely taking place between two people:

Bearing witness to a trauma is, in fact, a process that includes the listener. For the

testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and

total presence of an other – in the position of one who hears. Testimonies are not

monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking to

somebody: to somebody they have been waiting for for a long time.” (Felman and

Laub 70-71).

Felman and Laub devote extensive space to analyzing and understanding the role of the listener – the listener is crucial in enabling the testimony of the direct trauma witness

(Felman and Laub 58). This role will be further developed in Chapter 7, with the analysis of the Herald through the lens of Felman and Laub’s work.

3.3.2: Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty

War”

Professor Diana Taylor’s work on witnessing through the lens of performance has been applied to studies around the globe, including South Africa6 and Brazil,7 with her own work focused significantly on Argentina. Taylor’s work on witnessing is unique within this thesis for this reason: while many foundational texts on witnessing focus on the Holocaust, Taylor’s work focuses specifically on the Argentinean dictatorship in the

1970s and 1980s. Taylor is a leading scholar in the fields of Performance Studies and

Spanish; her work deals with themes of memory, trauma, archive, performance, and witness.

Taylor’s ideas on bearing witness are introduced in her 1997 book, Disappearing

Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War. While, as the title implies, this book focuses on analyzing how the military used national identity performatively in order to control the public (Taylor ix), she presents crucial ideas regarding the “politics of looking,” the act of “percepticide,” and the responsibility we all have to bear witness. Taylor asks all spectators to “define their position vis-à-vis spectacles of violence. Are we complicit? Can we work to end violence, or will we go on

‘just looking?’” (Taylor xi). This framework separates the Herald from many other

6 Lambrechts, Lizabe. “Performing the aporias of the archive: Towards a future for South African music archives” 7 Atencio, Rebecca. “Acts of Witnessing: Site Specific Performance and Transitional Justice in Postdictatorship Brazil”

papers that were active during the military dictatorship. While those papers that did not report could be deemed complicit with the state-sponsored terrorism taking place, the

Herald actively worked to end violence through its position. Taylor presents multiple definitions in her book that provide more detail and support to Laub and Felman’s theories in their applications to the Herald. These definitions include: witness/witnessing, listener, and percepticide and I will briefly present these terms here before returning to analyze them in Chapter 7.

Witness/listener: In cases of extreme violence, Taylor argues that bystanders either profit from or unravel from violence. However, there is a third, more active position: witness. Taylor officially defines ‘witnessing’ as the following: “…an involved, informed, caring, yet critical form of spectatorship” (Taylor 25). The witness holds great responsibility and a unique position in the archives of history:

Though neither the perpetrator nor the victim of events, the witness is a part of the

conflict and has a responsibility in reporting and remembering of events. Why, I

wonder, do we not have a word that adequately reflects the position of the active,

yet all too human, see-er? Why is the witness generally depicted as either passive

and disinterested or holy and superhuman? (Taylor 25).

To witness requires a certain level of action; the witness comes from within the conflict and from this position, has a responsibility to act. Witnessing can never be a passive act.

Listener: Tied to this definition of witness is the idea of the listener. An idea originally conceived of by Felman and Laub in Testimony, Taylor unpacks this idea in relation to her work, placing it within the framework of active spectatorship:

…the witness is the listener rather than the see-er. Laub notes that ‘The listener,

therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo […] the listener to

trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through

his [sic] very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself […]

The listener, therefore, has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness

and a witness to himself.’ (Taylor 57).

This framework of witness as listener provides the perfect lens to understand the role of the Herald as it reported during the dictatorship. Taylor pays a great deal of attention to the weight felt by the witness-listener, a fact that has been corroborated through interviews and archival research about the Herald.

Percepticide: The final term that Taylor introduces that is crucial to understanding the role of the Herald in the context of the dictatorship is “percepticide” Those who commit percepticide exist on the other end of the spectrum of the witness-listener, as percepticide involves “the self-blinding of the general population,” which occurred in great numbers during the dictatorship (Taylor 123). Taylor notes that turning away from the violence taking place was akin to colluding with the rampant violence occurring.

During many traumatic situations, witnesses will ‘disappear,’ turning away from what they’re seeing. Taylor asks, “What happens to the ‘witness’ in a situation that forces people to participate in the production of denial? The passerby, the neighbors, could not bear witness; they closed the door, shut the curtains, turned off the light” (124). Taylor notes the intense disempowerment that results from witnessing without being able to do anything, drawing parallels between the experiences of Rigoberta Menchú in Guatemala and Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi during the Holocaust. She argues that watching such

traumatic events is “…the most dehumanizing of acts. To see without being able to do disempowers absolutely” (Taylor 123). How were Robert Cox and the rest of the

Herald’s staff able to work through the dehumanization of listening to the stories of such atrocities and seeing the violence firsthand in the streets in order to finally bear witness through the stories shared in the pages of the paper?

Chapter 4: Methodology

4.1: Introduction

In order to best understand the history and enduring legacy of the Buenos Aires

Herald, I worked with both archives of the paper and interviews of individuals familiar with it. By engaging with both types of primary sources, I was able to develop a well- rounded picture of how the Herald operated during the dictatorship, as well as how it changed in the years to follow, until its closure in 2017.

4.2: Review of the Buenos Aires Herald

Prior to traveling to Buenos Aires, I conducted an extensive literature review on the background of the Herald in order to determine the audience of the paper, its history, individuals who worked with the paper, and its enduring legacy after it closed. I turned to recent media such as articles from The New York Times, The Guardian, and Reuters that were published in August 2017, as a sort of ‘obituary’ for when the Herald shut down.8

These articles provided me with significant background about the Herald and what it was ultimately best known for – taking a stand against the military dictatorship when few other papers would. The articles also offered context about how the news media outside of Argentina understood this small, mostly unknown Argentinean-British community newspaper. Just a brief glance at newspaper articles about the closure of the Herald confirm that from this perspective, its most noteworthy contribution to journalism has been this strong position on human rights. I used these articles, as well as scholarly

8 Articles include: “Argentine Paper Stood up to Generals, but Succumbed to the Market” (Daniel Politi, The New York Times); “Buenos Aires Herald to close after more than 140 years of publication” (The Guardian); and, “Buenos Aires Herald to close after 140 years” (Reuters).

articles on press and censorship during the dictatorship, to understand who the key players were during these active years of the Herald and to formulate key interview questions for my interviewees.9 Finally, The Argentina Reader provided me with context on the history of Argentina, specifically in the years leading up to, during, and after the dictatorship in 1976 and Dirty Secrets, Dirty War, written by Robert Cox’s son, David, provided me with insight into Robert Cox’s specific position while covering the events of the Herald. These readings offered information about key moments specifically related to the Herald, which guided me to points of interest in the archives.

4.3: Interviews

4.3.1: Contacting Interviewees

My primary motivation for conducting research in Buenos Aires was to interview key individuals who had either read the Herald during the dictatorship or in more recent years, had written articles for it, or who had information and perspectives on the English- speaking community in Buenos Aires. Knowing that the paper was initially founded as a means of distributing shipping news to the community of British railroad workers in

Argentina in the mid- to late-1800s, I understood that the readership stemmed from individuals in Argentina with ties to the local British community. However, as the Herald grew in popularity and in coverage over the years, this readership expanded to include non-British English-speakers living in Buenos Aires, as well as Argentineans interested in the perspective of an English-language newspaper. Therefore, I began the process of

9 Scholarly articles include: “An Enduring Story – With Lessons for Journalists Today” (Graciela Mochkofsky); “At Least 10,000” (Robert Cox); and “Evidence and Absence: Documenting the Desaparecidos of Argentina” (Moira O’Keeffe).

arranging interviews by reaching out to cultural centers that worked with the English- speaking community in Buenos Aires. The two major groups that I reached out to were the Argentine-British Community Council and the Buenos Aires International

Newcomers Group.10 Both of these organizations were able to share my message about my research to their membership and several members from each organization reached out to me expressing interest in sharing their perspective on the Herald. I also posted messages about my research on the Buenos Aires Expats online community and had similar results.11 All nine individuals that I interviewed while I was in Buenos Aires either heard about my work through my messages to one of these three groups or through a snowball method in which someone heard about my project from the groups I contacted and put me in touch with another individual who they thought would be interested.

I had agreements to sit down for an interview with the majority of these nine individuals prior to arriving in Argentina; however, the actual date, time, and location of each interview was scheduled upon my arrival in Buenos Aires.

4.3.2: Interview Questions

I developed a list of interview questions prior to conducting my interviews in

Buenos Aires in order to have a general map of what I hoped to learn from each interviewee. The general interview questions are as follows:

1. How long have you lived in Argentina?

10 These groups can be found online at http://www.abcc.org.ar/ and http://www.bainnewcomers.com/ respectively. 11 This online community can be found at https://baexpats.org.

2. What were you doing during the years of the dictatorship? Were you living in

Argentina?

3. When did you start reading the Buenos Aires Herald? Why did you read it?

4. Was the Herald your primary source of news while you lived in Argentina? If

not, where else did you get your news?

5. What can you tell me about how the Herald covered the dictatorship? What

issues did they focus on?

6. Are there any articles or editorials from the Herald that you particularly

remember?

7. Why do you believe the Herald closed in the summer of 2017? What factors

led to its closure?

8. Did the Herald impact how you viewed the events of the dictatorship?

9. Did the style or coverage of the Herald change over the years following the

dictatorship?

10. What are the more popular news sources in Buenos Aires today?

4.3.3: Interview Format

I kept the initial questions open-ended in order to encourage longer, more reflective responses from interviewees. In her article “The joys and challenges of semi- structured interviewing,” Eike Adams provides an overview of what constitutes a semi- structured interview as opposed to a more traditionally structured interview (administered via questionnaire). In Adams’ view, semi-structured interviews:

…aim to explore in-depth experiences of research participants, and the meanings

they attribute to these experiences. Such interviews are a particularly useful

research tool in situations where little is known about the topic of interest – where

the topic of interest may be particularly sensitive…and where the variability

rather than commonality of responses is the focus. (18).

Two of Adams’ key points were especially salient for the focus and purpose of my interviews. First, the Herald can be a naturally sensitive subject for many of those whom

I interviewed, especially because I was interested in the Herald’s position regarding human rights during the dictatorship. The scars from the eight-year dictatorship still run deep in Argentina and I wanted to leave the interview open for participants to discuss what they felt comfortable discussing, rather than delving into questions that may call upon painful histories and memories. To the best of my knowledge, structuring the interviews in such a way, to feel more like a conversation rather than a volley of questions (Adams 18) had great success in eliciting detailed and nuanced responses.

Every interviewee provided me with their perspective, unprompted, on the history of

Argentina as it relates to the 1976 coup and subsequent military dictatorship and many did not shy away from describing their own firsthand or secondhand experiences with the brutalities of the military. Second, I was not focused on quantitatively analyzing the responses that interviewees provided. As Adams states, I was looking for variability over commonality (18). I was interested in uncovering the diverse perspectives that existed about the importance of the Herald rather than quantifying how many participants held a certain view of the Herald. Additionally, since the number of interviews conducted was rather low, there are few significant quantitative conclusions to be drawn. More relevant

for this research proved to be the multiple (slightly varied) re-tellings of the history of

Argentina, which demonstrated how much of history is often subjective and contextual, at least through the eyes of those who lived it.

In total, I conducted ten interviews. Nine interviews took place in Buenos Aires, during my two weeks of active research there in June and July 2018. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview Robert Cox, who has given his permission to be quoted and referenced directly by name throughout this work. We conducted a two-part phone interview in September 2018, while I was in Columbus, Ohio and he was in Charleston,

South Carolina. While I will refer to Robert Cox by name throughout this work, both in regards to his interview for this thesis as well as in connection with other works, the rest of the interview participants will remain anonymous and be referred to by the numerical identifiers seen in Figure 2. Most interviews took place in open, public locations, such as local cafés, restaurants, and parks. The individuals interviewed include: local businessmen from the United States who had relocated to Buenos Aires for work; self- employed expats from the United States; individuals who had been in Argentina for years and considered themselves more Argentinean than British or American; Argentineans who turned to the paper for a different view of Argentinean reality; and, individuals who either wrote for the Herald or were close to those who did. Figure 2 provides the identifiers for each interviewee that will be used to refer to them throughout this thesis, as well as a brief description of their role.

Interviewee Identifier Description

Interviewee #1 U.S. businessman based in Buenos Aires

Interviewee #2 Retired U.S. expat

Interviewee #3 Argentinean reader of Herald

Interviewee #4 Self-employed U.S. expat

Interviewee #5 Argentinean reader of Herald

Interviewee #6 Argentinean-British community center

leader

Interviewee #7 Former Herald editor

Interviewee #8 Close friend of Herald

Interviewee #9 Argentinean reader of Herald

Interviewee #10 Former Herald editor, Robert J. Cox.

Figure 2: Interview Participants

This wide and diverse network of individuals provided a range of perspectives on what happened during the dictatorship, how the Herald was viewed during those years, and what current Argentinean press and politics look like.

4.3.4: Transcription Process

The interviews ranged from 45 minutes to an hour and a half and were recorded, with participant’s verbal consent, on a small hand-held voice recorder. After each interview, I saved the recording to my computer and uploaded it to a secure cloud that only I am able to access. Upon returning to the United States, all ten interviews were

transcribed over the course of approximately one month. Using the Transcribe online software, I personal transcribed every interview.12 One interview was conducted in

Spanish, transcribed in Spanish, and then translated (by me) into English at a later point.

4.3.5: Coding Process

In order to incorporate information from the interviews into the thesis, it was necessary to code the interviews to make sense of their content. The coding process used a very hands-on approach. First, I read through all of the interview transcripts, approximately 295 pages of text, and listed general themes that emerged. Themes include: the general history of the Herald; legacy of the Herald and the work of Robert

Cox; the Herald’s audience; Argentinean politics; reasons to read the Herald; the

Argentinean press; history of the dictatorship; human rights abuses during the dictatorship; the closure of the Herald; the post-dictatorship process and move to democracy; and, Argentinean culture. Then, I selected a color of highlighter or marker to correspond with each theme and by hand, went through the entire transcripts once again, marking each time a theme was mentioned with the appropriate color. Finally, I created a

Word document of all the themes with corresponding quotes from each interview. These themes are analyzed in great detail in Chapter 6 and used for the core argument found in

Chapter 7.

12 This software can be found online at https://transcribe.wreally.com/

4.4: Archival Work

Reading about the legacy of the Herald as it was told through newspaper articles in the United States did not provide me with a sufficient understanding of the history and role of the paper during the military dictatorship. It was only by studying the articles published in the Herald firsthand that I was able to fully understand how the paper covered the events of the dictatorship. By working with the issues of the paper in the archives, I was able to see the Herald as it was printed and distributed to its thousands of readers every day.

4.4.1: Finding the Archives

Prior to arriving in Buenos Aires, I conducted research online to determine where

I could find archives of the Herald. I was unable to find any libraries in the United States that could offer me access to the entire printed collection of the paper. However, La

Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, or the National Library of Argentina, located in the

Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires, has the entire collection of the Herald in its archives. I was given confirmation by email that with my passport, I could gain access to the archives and scan any articles I needed.

4.4.2: Archive Selection Process

As previously stated, I conducted a brief literature review to determine if there were any particularly important articles or editorials that I should scan from the archives.

Aside from seeking out these specific pieces, I worked through the Herald archives chronologically, beginning with the military coup in 1976 through 1983 when the

military dictatorship came to an end. The National Library had each month of the Herald bound in a book, with the original copy of each day’s issue bound together. I was able to request issues one month at a time and it took me the entire two weeks to scan all of the material I required. I skimmed through each month, not reading each article in its entirety, but taking care to scan those with pertinent titles, related to the political and social situation of Argentina. The Herald covered international news, local news, sporting news, the community events of the Argentinean-British community, and much more; thus, I had to be selective in what I scanned and read. I erred on the side of scanning anything that appeared relevant to the dictatorship, political climate, and human rights situation, and being more selective in my reading of these articles upon my return to the United States.

While the Herald included letters from readers and frequent news stories (both from their own staff and from agencies abroad), I was mainly focused on the editorials written by Robert Cox (prior to 1979). Given that the editorials were the section in which the Herald expressed its viewpoints most clearly about the military dictatorship, this approach made the most sense for the scope of this research. There would also occasionally be news updates about disappeared people, in the form of habeas corpus writs submitted, or news stories about those who were kidnapped, and I captured those as well. I began reading issues from early 1976, a couple of months before the coup took place on March 24th, 1976. Reading these editorials and news items gave me an idea of what Argentina was like prior to the military taking power. Reading through papers from the rest of that year, I was able to understand, especially through the editorials, how the climate in Argentina changed from welcoming the junta with open arms, to apprehension

about the rising concerns over human rights abroad. Years 1977 and 1978 were particularly interesting, containing coverage about the escalating human rights abuses, the controversy about the World Cup taking place in Argentina in June 1978, and Robert

Cox’s ultimate departure with his family in December 1979. Reading through the early

1980s, especially the issues from 1983, provided important context about how the Herald was led under a new editor and how they covered the Malvinas War and the subsequent end of the military dictatorship and transition to democracy. The Herald persistently covered the trials of the junta leaders, at which Robert Cox testified, in 1985. Finally, I looked through the 2016 and 2017 issues to get a feel for how the paper was written in its final years, when it transitioned into weekly instead of daily issues, and finally how the very last issue of the paper in early August 2017 appeared.

4.4.3: Working with the Archives

While in Argentina, I organized all of the scanned issues by month and uploaded and backed up the scans to a secure drive that only I can access. Upon my return to the

United States, I began to methodically work through the archives I had collected, analyzing one month’s worth of issues every day. Some copies of the paper turned out to be irrelevant under the scope of this research and I disregarded them. However, for those days that had information pertaining to the dictatorship or human rights, I wrote down the date and a brief summary of the editorial or news item in a notebook and highlighted relevant ideas in the article. In this notebook, I highlighted editorials that were particularly important in that they related back to information gathered in my interviews or information that was especially relevant to my topic. The archives serve as primary

sources that corroborate the information gathered from the books and interviews about the ways in which the Herald covered the military dictatorship during those years.

Archives are analyzed extensively in Chapter 5 and Chapter 7.

Chapter 5: Archival Findings

The archives I studied stretched from March 1976 with the military coup to May

1985 with the trials of the military leaders. This period of time best illustrates the Buenos

Aires Herald’s position on the events that took place during those years and the archives selected are strong examples of the Herald’s legacy as a paper that bore witness to the stories of the disappeared during those years. In order to understand this legacy of standing up for, and protecting, human rights, it is necessary to analyze the stories that the Herald told throughout the military dictatorship.

In this chapter, I will move chronologically through the archives, presenting selected editorials and news articles that best demonstrate the stance of the Herald with regards to the military dictatorship, as well as the myriad of ways in which they covered the events taking place. By taking this chronological approach, one can see how the position of the Herald changed as the events of the dictatorship developed, as well as the new strategies they adopted over time to cover the events taking place. Key topics covered include: the impending coup, the first months of repression, the growing concern of the Herald’s editors, coverage of disappearances, the arrest of Robert Cox, the exile of

Robert Cox, the shift to democracy, and the trials of military leaders. The editorials and news pieces that have been selected best demonstrate the Herald’s position as a witness to the repression and state-sponsored terrorism carried out by the military government. It is important to note that while Editor-in-Chief, Robert Cox was responsible for writing many of the daily editorials, he spoke as a voice for the Herald as a whole, reflecting the position of the paper in his daily writings.

5.1: Chaos Before the Coup

As noted by numerous scholars, the coup that took place on March 24th, 1976 in

Buenos Aires, Argentina was welcomed by a significant portion of the Argentinean population. This topic was briefly explained in Chapter 1 but to provide a brief review, there was significant chaos under the president, Isabel Perón. There was violence in the streets every day, the armed branches of guerrilla groups were active and violent, and terrorism was widespread. The government had lost its grip on power, the economy was failing, and there was widespread recognition of Isabel Perón’s failures as President. Not only was the mistrust in Isabel Perón widespread, but the talk of a military coup was also present throughout society. Argentineans believed that a coup was imminent, and they were ready to welcome it. As many scholars and interview participants have noted, coups were rather commonplace in Argentina during the 20th century and would frequently usher in a military government that took control, restored order to a previously chaotic situation, and exited, leaving room for a new democratically elected government. The impending coup in 1976 was believed to be no different. One editorial from the week prior to the coup, on March 16th, voices the general sentiments of the public, noting that the recent violence against top members of the military was intended to provoke a coup, an action that would be welcomed by the majority of the people. In his editorial “The people will vote again,” Robert Cox notes, “If both the government and congress fail to find a solution that will stop the country sliding into chaos, then the armed forces will find that they have a mandate from the people.”

A few days later, in a piece appropriately titled “Thoughts on a four-letter word,”

Robert Cox mused on the inevitability of a coup, remaking that people have begun taking

bets on when the coup will finally take place. He even notes that “I understand that some newspapers have had their headlines – even whole front pages laid out – set up in print for weeks now.” Throughout most of society, there was no question that a coup was soon to come.

Finally, just one day before the coup took place, the Herald reported on the meetings taking place between Isabel Perón’s cabinet and the military leaders, including

Lieutenant Jorge Rafael Videla (who, the very next day, would go on to become the new president of Argentina). In his editorial for that day, “Mainly a question of law and order,” Robert Cox reflects on the violence that had taken Argentina by storm in the last years of Isabel Perón’s presidency, noting that there were “40 political murders in one week.” He argues further that Argentina has suffered from a “breakdown of law and order” that only a military coup and change in government can restore.

5.2: A Coup, and the Month that Followed

On Wednesday, March 24th, 1976, the Herald published its daily issue. Splashed across the front page, likely echoing the headlines of papers throughout Buenos Aires, the

Herald announced the long-awaited arrival of the coup and the fall of Isabel Perón’s government in an article titled “Tanks roll toward BA.” That day’s edition detailed the events of the remarkably bloodless coup, Isabel Perón’s removal from office, and the early steps taken by the military leaders. In Robert Cox’s editorial for the day, “The death of a government,” he commends the military leaders for their patience and notes the hope that he feels for the future of Argentina. This tone of hopefulness and gratitude towards the military set the tone for the month to follow, in which the Herald wrote largely

positive pieces about the new military government, expressing their relief that order had been restored and their hopes that the military would soon usher in a peaceful return to democracy. The Herald expressed a need to give the military the time and space necessary to restore order in Argentina, as did many other papers in those days. At the conclusion of his editorial for the day, Robert Cox notes:

But a new hope is born with this predictable, inevitable death [of Isabel Perón’s

government]. It is that the new government will be able to guarantee the basic

requirements of civilized society – honesty, decency, concern for human life and

the will to uphold the law and justice – that will make it possible to rebuild

democracy once again, this time on firmer foundations.

The Herald consistently voiced its desire for a return to democracy and simultaneously expressed its desire to give the military a chance to make that happen.

In the articles throughout the first month of the coup, several key phrases emerge that provide insight into the position of the Herald and its staff in the early days of the military government. These phrases, taken from editorials and news articles, refer to this period hopefully with phrases such as “fully justified,”13 “democratic-minded dictatorship,”14 “a government that intends to protect its citizens,”15 “cautious acceptance,”16 “sense and sensibility,”17 and “heartening mandate.”18 These phrases paint an accurate picture of how the Herald wrote about the military dictatorship throughout its

13 “A long, hard road ahead” (Antonio Rodríguez Villar, 3/25/76) 14 “No illusions” (Robert Cox, 3/26/76) 15 “In place of fear” (Robert Cox, 3/27/76) 16 “Hope springs eternal etc.” (Robert Cox, 3/27/76) 17 “Cleanliness at the top” (Robert Cox, 3/28/76) 18 “But it isn’t spring” (Robert Cox, 3/30/76)

first month and reflects the larger sense of hope and optimism that was felt in Buenos

Aires during that period.

The articles and editorials in the pages of the Herald the day after the coup are equally as important as those that appeared the day of the coup, as they capture the initial reaction of the staff members as the early policies of the military were established. It is noted that borders, banks, and schools were closed, and censorship was imposed but

Argentineans continued on with their daily lives (R. Cox, “New leadership…”). (It is worth noting that censorship was “officially” lifted the day following the coup, on March

25th, 1976.) The coup is noted as having “good press abroad” and throughout the following days, more and more nations would recognize the legitimacy of the government (R. Cox, “The coup of…”). In an editorial aptly named “So far, so good,”

Robert Cox predicts that the military government can expect the cooperation of the citizens in restoring order to the country and in overcoming the daunting “moral, economic, and social decline of the past year and a half.” However, as the editorials and news articles in the Herald would soon indicate, cooperation was quickly exchanged for the repression of the citizens and the moral, economic, and social decline began.

5.3: The Buenos Aires Herald Grows Concerned

The hope and relief that the Herald felt with the arrival of the military coup and accompanying fall of Isabel Perón’s government quickly dissipated as reports on censorship, disappearances, and abuses at the hand of the military began to surface. The legacy of the Herald as a paper that fought back against censorship and stood up for those being abused by the military government began, visibly, exactly one month after the coup

first took place. The first official form of censorship, after the initial (and brief) period of censorship imposed the day of the coup, took the form of an official communique issued by the military, explicitly forbidding the printing of any ‘subversive’ news. Few newspapers published this warning from the government, but the Herald did, with an accompanying editorial, as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: News headline announces the new censorship imposed by the military government

The most important part of the communique from the government, at least from the Herald’s perspective, is the final piece that forbids the mention of “kidnappings and disappearances.” It logically follows that this would be a largely unnecessary statement, unless there had already been news or reports of kidnappings and disappearances that the government wished to silence. The government noted that this was “not to be interpreted as a step towards total censorship” but the Herald certainly took it to be a warning about censorship and from this issue on, continually expressed the importance of a free press to report on the events taking place in Argentina. In his editorial for that day, Robert Cox issued his first explicit critique of the military government, establishing a line of

questioning and critique that he would continue throughout his years as editor. He suggests:

It is also difficult to counter malicious leftwing propaganda if the press covers up

instead of reporting terrorism. If there is even a hint of a cover-up of the

unnmentionable things that went on under the past government, the image of

decency and moderation that the Junta has rightly earned is placed in peril. (“Out

of…”)

In no uncertain terms, the Herald and its editorial team stood firmly opposed to censorship and was one of the first and few papers to do so.

In the following days and weeks, the editorials and articles (mainly the editorials written by editor-in-chef Robert Cox) establish the Herald’s position on several key topics: censorship (as previously mentioned), the role of the press (especially under times of repression), and human rights (especially pertaining to the disappearances). Numerous articles between April and May 1976 touch on these topics; I will highlight several of the most impactful here.

In Robert Cox’s April 24th, 1976 editorial, “A shared responsibility,” he introduces his view of the role and responsibility of the press, independent of the government. After reflecting upon the newly-imposed censorship and refuting several of the government’s reasons for doing so, he concludes with a warning to the military government and his philosophy about the press. He forewarns, “If this latest measure [of censorship] results in the suppression – which, judging by past experience, will rapidly become known (probably in the form most unfavourable to the government) – then the government will have made a mistake which we will all live to regret” (“A shared…”).

Continuing, he argues that “The press cannot be expected to renounce its responsibility to the public. It has a duty to report the news…The people have a right to know what is going on” (“A shared…”). He suggests that the government should support the press’s ability to keep the public informed and that the suppression taking place must cease, immediately.

A few days later, Robert Cox continues this line of thinking, expanding his musings on the role of the press to include the role of the press in dictatorial states. He reflects upon the arguments made by many scholars in the field of communication and censorship studies who note that a free press is essential to democracy and crucial under repression. In his editorial “Security and tactics,” Cox argues:

A responsible, reliable, free and independent press becomes even more necessary

in times like these when there is no congress to stand up for human rights

cases…The public needs the reassurance that only a free press can give that the

unmentionable things that occurred under the ousted government will not be

allowed to happen again.

This position that the Herald, and especially Robert Cox, establish regarding the responsibility of the press largely explains why the Herald reported on all of the events of the dictatorship in the face of censorship, government threats, severe repression, and state-sponsored terrorism. The press has a responsibility to provide the truth to the public, especially when there is no democratic government to do so. This philosophy provides the framework for understanding the entirety of the Herald’s role of bearing witness to the atrocities of the military government.

There are multiple important news articles and editorials throughout May 1976 that cover disappearances of children, journalists, and other individuals. In order to not repeat all of them here, I will focus on the case of Haroldo Conti, one of the first highly- visible disappearances covered by the Herald, in order to provide an example of the swift action that the Herald took in reporting on disappearances at the hand of the military government in its early years. On May 7th, 1976, in a small column of text, the Herald presented the story of a missing novelist, Haroldo Conti (“Novelist missing”). The way in which they did so would become a model for their continued coverage of disappearances throughout the dictatorship and the format that led to the successful ‘reappearance’ of multiple individuals. Originally suggested by Andrew Graham-Yooll as a means of documenting the disappeared and reporting on it, family members filed habeas corpus writs to make official note of a loved one’s disappearance and the Herald subsequently reported upon these filings. In this case, Haroldo Conti’s sister filed a habeas corpus writ.

The column in the Herald, titled “Novelist missing,” mentions that the writ was filed and provides biographical information about Conti, including his age, birthplace, and career.

It concludes with the details of his disappearance. This is the formula that appears in the majority of the columns that are found in the Herald about the disappearances.

A few weeks later, on May 21st, 1976, Robert Cox wrote a crucial editorial about the Herald’s coverage of Mr. Conti’s disappearance, contrasting it with the coverage (or lack thereof) found in most other newspapers. In this editorial, “Black and white,” he notes that “The Herald was the only newspaper to publish a report about the seizure of

Mr. Conti, a leading writer, by five armed men on May 5.” Only two other papers similarly covered disappearances throughout May (La Opinión and La Prensa) and

Robert Cox remarks that “It is no coincidence that the three newspapers which showed most concern about the atrocities committed under the now universally condemned regime of Mrs. Perón should continue to show preoccupation about human rights”

(“Black and white”). He concludes, imploring all the press to take a similar approach:

Let us all, then, distinguish right from wrong, regardless of our political views and

let us stop behaving as if we are still afraid that in addition to the terrorists (who

we have been fighting for a long time) we have to continue to ponder the

possibility of those Ford Falcons without number plates drawing up outside our

doors. (“Black and white”).

Not only was the Herald actively fighting back against the censorship imposed by the military government, but they were actively condemning and criticizing the other papers that fell silent under the censorship.

5.4: Visible Disappearances and Examples of Habeas Corpus Writs

In this section, I am going to highlight several highly-visible disappearances that the Herald covered; either those of noteworthy individuals or disappearances that have been referenced in the interviews I conducted. These also serve as additional examples of how the Herald presented habeas corpus writs. An example of the coverage of a disappearance that Robert Cox has personally made reference to is that of several disappeared Uruguayan children in late May 1976. The disappearance of these children was first reported by the Herald on May 27th, 1976, but on May 28th, 1976, the Herald presented the story of the children’s disappearance by featuring it prominently on their

front page with photos of the children who first went to the Herald for their assistance, as seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Headline begging for help in locating missing Uruguayan children

The grandfather filed a habeas corpus writ for his daughter and her three children, which the Herald noted. However, his daughter was later found dead and he continued his search for his grandchildren. By featuring the news of their disappearance on the front page of the paper, the Herald is making a plea to its readers that they simply cannot ignore. No other paper featured this story as prominently as the Herald did, and Robert

Cox has stated that the Herald’s prominent and consistent coverage of these disappearances was instrumental in finding the children. Two days later, on May 30th,

1976, the Herald reported, with a welcome change of positive news, that the children had been located and reunited with their grandfather (“Missing children…”). This day’s edition also included a powerful editorial by Robert Cox, “Three young lives saved,” in which he reflected upon the role of the press in securing the children’s safe return. He remarks upon the “happy ending” and notes that it should inspire hope. He does not

directly accuse the government of anything, but rather thanks them for their swift response to the coverage from the Herald. However, he does reiterate the importance of a free press in guaranteeing future happy endings, noting that “One lesson, therefore, is the value of a free press. It not only keeps the people informed. It keeps the government informed” (“Three young…”). This was an approach commonly used by Robert Cox in his editorials. Instead of directly accusing the military government explicitly, he reiterated the need for a free and vigilant press to keep the government both accountable and informed of the events taking place in the country.

Throughout March and April 1977, a year after the coup, the Herald covered the disappearances of many journalists. Throughout the entirety of the military dictatorship, it is estimated that there were 84 journalists killed and 400 that went into exile, fleeing the persecution of the military government (Park 242). The Herald consistently covered the disappearances of their fellow journalists. After presenting multiple habeas corpus writs and repeatedly covering the disappearances of his colleagues, Robert Cox penned a powerful editorial about Buenos Aires’ status as the “kidnapping capital of the world,” noting that this nickname has remained after Isabel Perón’s administration (“Kidnapping and…”). In this editorial, he questions the military government’s approach to governance, arguing that “…it is difficult to understand why law and order has not been restored in areas in which national security is not at stake. Yet once again, the country is gripped by a psychosis about kidnapping (R. Cox, “Kidnapping and…”). He directly references the number of journalists being persecuted: “Over the past few weeks, a succession of journalists have been abducted, intimidated, and – in the majority of cases – freed on the condition that they leave the country and suspend publication of their periodicals” (R.

Cox, “Kidnapping and…”). This explains the high numbers of exiled journalists during the years of the dictatorship. It also begs the question of why the Herald was able to avoid censorship and persecution from the government, which has been explained in

Chapter 2. Robert Cox concluded his editorial here, noting “Immediate action is called for to defend the country’s reputation in the eyes of the world and restore confidence at home” (“Kidnapping and…”).

This is just a small sample of how the Herald, mostly through Robert Cox’s editorials, covered the disappearances of individuals throughout the dictatorship. While

Robert Cox and his team loudly protested these disappearances, especially those of their colleagues, and wrote about their kidnappings when few others would, they were unable to completely avoid persecution themselves.

5.5: Robert Cox is Arrested

While Robert Cox and the Herald had great success in avoiding direct censorship and persecution by the government for the first year of the dictatorship, this impunity did not last forever. While the Herald initially enjoyed the protections of the British

Embassy, their publisher in Charleston, South Carolina, and the general disinterest of the military government, their consistent criticism of the dictatorship caught up with them.

On April 23rd, 1977, readers of the Herald woke up to the news, splashed across the front page, that the editor-in-chief, Robert Cox, had been arrested. Following the pattern used with many other disappearances, the Herald’s staff included a large photo of Robert Cox, along with significant information about the circumstances of his arrest (“Herald editor held…”).

Figure 5: Headline announces the arrest of Robert Cox.

By publishing the news of his arrest in such a highly visible manner, international news outlets that repeatedly looked to the Herald as a critical source of accurate information about the situation in Argentina picked up the news of his arrest and covered it as well. Lots of noise was being made about Robert Cox’s arrest in an effort to prevent his total disappearance. Robert Cox was arrested for violating laws about covering the news of subversive activities, specifically after he wrote a piece on the collaboration between the Montoneros and the Peronists.

The noise made by the Herald was successful because just a day later, on April

24th, 1977, the front page reported that Robert Cox had been freed from prison (“Herald editor charged…”). The Herald, specifically Robert Cox himself, announced that he had been freed from prison, remarking on his delight that “the due process of law has been observed,” something he had criticized the military government for ignoring many times before (“Herald editor charged…”). Robert Cox would further reflect on his experience in the next day’s editorial; however, on April 24th, the Herald’s staff released an editorial that was written while Robert Cox was in prison and further cemented their views on the

role of the press and the persecution of Argentinean journalists (“Freedom of…”). They argued that in arresting Cox, the government had made a “grave mistake” and “reacted in the worst possible way, by arresting a man who cannot be suspected of any sympathy with terrorism” (“Freedom of…”). They reiterated the position taken by the Herald against the government’s repression, something that Cox would reflect upon further the next day, and argued that if the military government wanted to protect its reputation around the world, they must consider the highly public ways in which the Argentinean press was treated (“Freedom of…”). The Herald used this argument to push back against the military government frequently, appealing to their desire to have a positive image around the world, one that would only be possible through a free press. In their editorial on “Freedom of the press,” the staff notes:

The detention of the Herald editor for committing what might be regarded as a

misdemeanor but could never be interpreted as a crime will do the government

nothing but harm, not merely because of the damage it will do to the country’s

reputation in the world at large, but because it will sap some of the spirit of the

Argentine press, a press that must be free and unafraid if it is to serve the country

as the government insists it wants to.

Robert Cox’s editorial on April 25th, 1977, the day after he was released from prison, continues on this topic.

In Robert Cox’s editorial about his arrest, he provides a forceful defense of the

Herald’s historical position as a protector of human rights (“On trial”). He notes that when he was arrested, he went on trial to defend “this newspaper’s unfaltering championship of freedom of the press and its unswerving condemnation of violence” and

that the Herald itself was on trial, not just Cox himself (“On trial”). Cox defended his coverage of the guerrilla activities, detailed the circumstances of his arrest and conditions of his release, and pushed back against the legitimacy of the law he allegedly broke (“On trial”). He reiterates a constant theme throughout the editorials and articles appearing in the Herald about the importance of the rule of law, confirms the Herald’s political stance as being “a liberal newspaper – liberal without political overtones,” and finally concludes with a reiteration of the importance of the free press, arguing that “Although the Herald editor was in court on Saturday alone, he was surely representing the entire free press of

Argentina, indeed all the press of the free world” (“On trial”). There is no doubt that the

Herald fought to cement its legacy as a paper that relentlessly and tirelessly stood for justice, rule of law, and the freedom of the press throughout its history, and especially throughout the military dictatorship. However, even though he was released from jail,

Robert Cox would eventually have to face the consequences of his bearing witness to the atrocities of state-sponsored terrorism.

5.6: Robert Cox and Family Exiled

Fast forward two and a half years after Robert Cox’s arrest to one of the most consequential events (producing one of the most powerful editorials) that the Herald covered throughout the military dictatorship and likely the entirety of its history as well.

After avoiding disappearance and serious persecution following his arrest in 1977, the military government finally decided that they had enough of Robert Cox’s coverage of the military dictatorship and issued a direct threat to his family. This kicked off a powerful series of articles, editorials, and letters to the editor throughout the month of

December 1979. This series of events has been mentioned in every work covering the

Herald, as Robert Cox’s entire decision and process of going into exile with his family in the United States was transparently covered in the Herald. The first news of the threat and of Robert Cox’s impending exile appeared on December 4th, 1979 in a reprint of a news piece from Noticias Argentinas that noted, “The director of the English-language

Buenos Aires Herald, Robert Cox, said last night that he will leave Argentina soon with his wife and five children owing to the recurrent death threats against his family”

(“Herald editor…”). Robert Cox noted that a letter had been addressed directly to his son, threatening him and the family and he had finally determined that the severity of the threats was sufficient enough to require going into exile. The article notes that he would be leaving for England on December 16th for a one-year leave of absence; however, he ultimately settled in Charleston, South Carolina with his family for the rest of the military dictatorship (“Herald editor…”). A threat against Robert Cox and his family was seen as an affront to the entirety of the Herald staff and two days later, in his column “As I see it…,” James Neilson (who would become the editor of the Herald in Cox’s absence) remarked upon the perceived absurdity of the threats against the Herald due to its status as a “small newspaper with a reduced circulation written in a language understood by a minority in Argentina” (“Who’s afraid…”). He notes that:

In most parts of the Western world, a newspaper with such unexceptional

principles would attract little notice and arouse few passions. Here, however, it

has sung some people to such fury that they are evidently willing to contemplate

murder to silence it. Who are these people? Why are they so frightened of us?

(“Who’s afraid…”).

Clearly, the Herald’s coverage had rattled the military government to the point that they were no longer going to tolerate it.

On December 7th, 1979, Robert Cox presented a full account of the events leading up to his decision to take his family and go into exile (“The facts…”). He documented the various times he suspected he was being followed, the conversations he had with his wife about their concerns, and their growing desire to go into exile to protect their family

(“The facts…”). Threatening telephone calls were arriving at both their home and the offices of the Herald (“The facts…”). Ultimately, they made their decision to leave on

November 20th, 1979, when his ten-year old son, Peter, received a threatening letter signed by the Montoneros but immediately suspected to be from the government.19

(Frequently, the Montoneros would send letters that appeared to be from the government and vice versa. This was a well-known tactic throughout Argentina during the military dictatorship and even the years spent under Isabel Perón.) This letter was analyzed sufficiently by the Cox family and the Herald staff to determine that it was worth going into exile over. To fully portray the gravity of the situation that drove the Cox family into exile, the text of the letter appears below. It can also be found in the book Dirty Secrets,

Dirty War, an account by Robert Cox’s son, David, about their family’s life during the dictatorship:

Dear Peter: We write you this letter because we know that you are

worried about the things that have happened to the papas and grandfathers of

some of your friends, and you are scared that something like that could happen to

your ‘daddy’ and you… But we do not eat little children for breakfast.

19 A powerful account of these events can be found in David Cox’s book, Dirty Secrets, Dirty War.

Considering the fear that we know all of you feel and the scare you had

when your parents began packing their bags and moving you out of the city, and

because journalists of high quality like your ‘daddy’ are more useful to us alive

and ‘speaking out,’ we have decided to send you this little note of advice.

For that reason and in consideration of the peculiar work of your ‘dad,’

we would like to offer him (and all of you) the option to seek exile due to the risk

of being assassinated by the Videla dictatorship. You, Peter – like Victoria,

Robert, David, and Ruth – can choose what you want most and propose it to your

‘daddy’ and ‘mummy.’ You can sell your house ‘Victoria’ in Highland Park, sell

what does not belong to your grandfather Agustin Daverio, sell the two cars (the

Peugeot and Dodge) and use that money to buy half a dozen new ones in any

country, and go to work in Paris with Rosenblum at another, bigger ‘Herald’…

Or, you can all stay and die fighting for liberty, for human rights, at the

request of the good friends of the dictatorship… We prefer the first option and we

want to believe that you, your brothers, the friends of your Dad (Freeman,

Friedman, etc.) and your uncles that are waiting for you to spend a Merry Xmas

in England prefer the same thing.

A great revolutionary greeting from friends of your papa – the

Montoneros.

Due to the significant amount of personal information contained in the letter, the direct threat to one of their children, and the clear understanding that it was a message from the military government, the Cox family made the difficult decision to leave the country.

Robert Cox has remarked publicly multiple times that he had put his life on the line many

times to bear witness and report the truth about human rights abuses in Argentina; however, when it came to his family, he could not bear to put them in danger and ultimately made the decision to leave the country.

This leads to the editorial that has been noted to be the best, and most difficult, piece of writing that Robert Cox had ever done. In his editorial from December 16th,

1979, the day that his family finally went into exile, Robert Cox wrote his famous editorial “Au revoir.” Due to the significance of this editorial for its remarks on the responsibility of the press and the work of the Herald, I am including it here, in its entirety. I have added some emphasis, in bold, to particularly impactful lines:

I shall be only too glad to say goodbye to the 1970’s – an appalling decade for

Argentina and the world. But I am immensely sad as I say ‘au revoir’ to Argentina. But it is ‘au revoir’ and not goodbye.

I am leaving today with my family for a sojourn abroad. We do not know how long we will be away; but we do know that we will be back. And our return will be in a new decade – one, I am sure, that will see the beginning of a new era for Argentina.

It is ironic that we are leaving because of a silly – although sinister – threat addressed to my young son Peter. The threat – a particularly nasty letter composed by someone who must be very sick – came to me on the heels of a number of disturbing events. Although I would not claim to be among those in Argentina who have received the most threats – a friend, the late Heriberto Kahn, who was the greatest journalist this country has produced, once received three in a day. But I have received enough to be able to weigh the risks involved in ignoring them. Being threatened is a ludicrous,

ridiculous experience. The best response – perhaps even the best security measure – is to laugh off the menace. It is like being in a very bad film. There is the crude note – pasted letters cut from a newspaper, usually. There is the sophisticated letter, typewritten, well- phrased – a murderous heart beneath well-tailored clothes. Then there is the direct, spoken threat. And in this situation, again, you feel like an actor in a bad movie. A bit- part player with his back to the camera, facing the gangster smile and the throw-away line: “…I’ll have you put away forever…”

The letter sent to my young son was hand-written – the letter was researched, drafted, and penned by people who have had no reason to doubt their impunity. It came directly from Argentina’s heart of darkness. It came from that shady area of national life that nobody challenges and few people talk about.

At first, I could see no reason behind the letter. It did not scare me, although I was sickened by the thought of people who have so departed from humanity that they choose children as their victims. I was not surprised, either. The greatest atrocities of the terrible decade of the seventies have been committed against children. But over the past few days I have discerned an evil design behind the letter – coming on top of intensified intimidation and hostile propaganda. The idea, I believe, was to try and discredit the

Herald. The plan almost achieved its object. Rather than subject my children to the inevitable publicity resulting from a direct challenge to the group threatening us, I thought it would be better to leave Argentina in the wake of a brief and undramatic explanation of the causes of our departure. It was quite by chance that the threats against us became public knowledge. I am glad, now, that they did because, despite the pain of the past weeks, we, in my family as well as in the wider circle of friends (many of whom

we knew nothing about) have seen the shadows over Argentina lift. We have seen and felt the real country – the people who are not afraid; the people who will not give into lawlessness; the people who have stood up to be counted.

The greatest difficulty for a journalist working in Argentina over the past ten years has been to tell people what they didn’t want to hear and point out what they didn’t want to see. Terrorism, to begin with, was only a minor problem – ‘a police matter.’ We were all supposed to look the other way. When we had to look terrorism in the face, it had taken on the proportions of a giant monster. The reaction of almost everyone in Argentina came too late.

So it has been with what we call, ambiguously, ‘the other terrorism.’ It, too, has grown to monstrous proportions. It has frightened people out of their minds. And with the country shadowed by terror from both sides, people have preferred to be blinkered. Some tragically mistaken people even believe that one form of terrorism can protect them from the other.

I believe the moment has come – far too late, because the list of victims of ‘the other terrorism’ is saddeningly long – when we will see the beginning of a reaction to terror tactics, regardless of their origin. The awakening of Argentina to the simple truth that what was wrong yesterday is wrong today must come with compassion and concern.

The press must begin to tell people the truth. The relatives of disappeared people cannot be ignored as if they were lepers. We must face the reality of the cruelty of the past decade in order to bring about a change in the 1980’s. We must care about all the victims of the war that we must bring to an end. The threats against me, which I believe have made me a liability to the Herald, came from people who want to keep Argentina in

the grip of darkness. But I have been enormously heartened by the response of Herald readers and of my colleagues, who have lit torches to lead the way to the new era.

I hope to be writing regularly from abroad. I will be writing to all of you who have written to me. I thank you all, particularly those of you who have addressed messages or drawings – and even gifts – to my children. I apologize for the incoherence of this message of leavetaking; but my feelings are chaotic. I can express only a tongue- tied love – an inarticulateness born of the grief of parting. The Herald will continue to tell it as it is. There seems no point in trying to tell it as it was.

This letter largely speaks for itself. It is clear that Robert Cox was reluctant to leave Argentina and his work with the Herald, but ultimately, his responsibility to protect his family was too great to be ignored. The masterpiece of this editorial lies in its ability to make reference to the history of repression in Argentina, the persecution of the press, the failures of the press to cover the events of the dictatorship, the legacy of the Herald in doing so, the circumstances of his exile, and the future of the press in Argentina. He also makes very direct ties to the idea of “percepticide” established by Diana Taylor; these connections will be explored further in Chapter 7. Robert Cox left Argentina the same day this editorial was published. However, his legacy followed him.

In the days that followed the Cox family’s departure, the Herald was filled with letters to the editor that reflected upon the legacy of the newspaper, especially Robert

Cox’s role, in bearing witness to the stories of the victims of the military dictatorship.

The quotes that follow are from various letters to the editor that best exemplify the significance of the Herald and Robert Cox in Argentina during the dictatorship.20

• “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am, not for the Cox family, but for

Argentina…It continued to print the stories its largely business-oriented public

would have preferred to ignore…So, I will miss you and I’m very much afraid

I’m also going to miss the kind of Herald you put together…In no inconsiderable

measure, thanks to that article [“Misuse of State of Siege” 10/21/71], I was let out

of jail. You had once again prodded the proper conscience into uneasiness”

(Roberto Roth, December 6th, 1979).

• “The Herald was the only independent newspaper in the country as long as you

were at its head…More than ever today, we are grateful for and value your lesson

in civic courage” (Horacio Ménde Carreras Jr., Martin R. Villagrán; December

7th, 1979).

• “I can only add that in the past four years, I was able to live in a sort of oasis in

my country thanks, fundamentally to reading the Herald every day…I agree with

what Ernesto Sábato said in the sense that the newspaper you edit – the Herald –

is the only newspaper in Argentina with civic courage and exceptional valour”

(Lucia Parnes, December 7th, 1979).

• “You have done more than your share; it is now up to the more enlightened

members of government, press, political parties and citizens at large to continue

the good work you courageously started” (E. Vera Villalobos, December 11th,

1979).

20 All quotes have been copied verbatim as they appeared in the newspaper.

• “…I read the Herald with great pleasure for the last 10 years…every day!...You

always have been frank, but never aggressive, you always fought for more

humanity and open dialogue, you always demonstrated courage and

responsibility and last but not least you always have been fair…Thank you for all

you have done for us. Come back soon – we, and this country need people like

you” (Harald Erichsen, December 11th, 1979).

• “I deeply regret your leaving. We mothers will continue to count on your

support” (Beatriz Dyszel, December 11th, 1979).

• “I want to express my admiration for your having the courage of your convictions

in defending justice and law with clarity and wisdom” (Jaime F. de Nevares,

December 11th, 1979).

• “It is a dark hour for Argentina if you, who have always been a champion of the

values which I feel to be the best for the survival of humanity in this funny world,

and which our present authorities also profess to support, should find it necessary

to leave…May you soon return. And long may you continue to speak out for

civilization’s two most prized and precious possessions – truth and liberty” (Roy

H. Gooding, December 13th, 1979).

• “He [Robert Cox] has always excelled in balance, intelligent thought and positive

thinking in his articles. His was one of the very few voices which at all times

defended the exercise of justice within a legal framework” (Anonymous,

December 13th, 1979).

• “I feel obliged as an Argentine to write to you to express my solidarity with your

attitude and my sincere sorrow and shame that events like those which have

decided you to leave have occurred in my country…Our country is not going to

enjoy true peace until we all acknowledge our mistakes, try to amend them and

give satisfaction to those who have suffered from their consequences” (Roberto

Van Gelderen, December 14th, 1979).

• “I’m sorry, for Argentine women, that you are leaving…You have the right and

the obligation to defend your family against the threats which have become a way

of life in the world but in this year of your absence, we will truly know the

meaning of the saying that goes, ‘parting is a little like dying.’” (Sara Rioja,

December 14th, 1979).

• “One may or may not agree with the Herald’s editorials, but the editor’s courage

at all times and his gallant attitude of allowing opinions contrary to his own to be

expressed in the Herald well deserve respect” (Malena Gainza de Etchebarne,

December 19th, 1979).

• “…one of the very few journalists who showed, through his professional work,

an understanding of our pain and made us feel less alone” (Mothers of Plaza de

Mayo, December 19th, 1979).

These quotes speak for themselves. The Herald stood out among other Argentinean newspapers during the military dictatorship, with Robert Cox at the helm. His voice would be greatly missed.

5.7: The Buenos Aires Herald Covers the Move to Democracy

The years between 1979, when Robert Cox went into exile, and 1983, when democracy was ushered in, consisted of the similar line of criticism that the Herald had

become known for, this time under the leadership of James Neilson. As it became known that democracy would soon be restored in Argentina, the editorials became sharply and outwardly critical of the military government, repeatedly drawing attention to the high numbers of disappearances and reiterating the role of the press in holding the government accountable. In an editorial from January 23rd, 1983, James Neilson writes in a similar tone as Robert Cox, regarding the importance of the freedom of the press to the restoration and preservation of democracy:

Understanding the importance of the written word (and freedom to write it) as a

guarantee for the freedom of the individual and the people as a whole is the mark

of a mature and democratic society…The freedom to express ideas through the

mass media is, next to the free vote, the greatest source of power at the disposal of

the people, with which to defend themselves against dictatorial abuse. (“Freedom

and…”).

Two days later, Neilson took an even more explicitly critical approach, directly calling out the military government for their role in the numerous disappearances throughout

Argentina. This is one of the harshest editorials written with regards to linking the military government to the human rights violations committed under their leadership (“A haunting…”). Neilson notes that many Argentineans are hoping that the military government would find a solution to the numbers of disappeared people; however,

“…this hope appears to be growing more and more empty as the days pass without any concrete move by the country’s military rulers to take responsibility for what has been their greatest moral, political, and social failing in seven years of rule by military force and military decree [emphasis added]” (“A haunting…”). He continues, noting

that the incoming civilian governments will have to deal with the problem of the disappearances and concludes, blaming the armed forces once again: “The problem of the

‘missing,’ which was created by the armed forces, promises to continue to haunt them for some time to come, no matter what kind of government the country has from the end of this year onward” (“A haunting…”). It is clear here the stance that the Herald held with regards to the disappearances, the end of the military government, and where blame should lie for the atrocities committed during the dictatorship. With the return of democracy coming soon, there was greater freedom in their ability to openly critique the government. There were fewer disappearances and threats to journalists in those years.

Finally, on March 1st, 1983, the Herald jubilantly announced the date chosen for the elections for the new civil government (“It’s official…”). They reported that elections would be held on October 30th, 1983, and a democratically elected civilian government would take office on January 30th, 1984 (“It’s official…”).

5.8: Robert Cox Returns; Military Leaders Put on Trial

Throughout the duration of the military dictatorship, the Herald maintained the position that justice and democracy needed to be restored, and as the years progressed, it became clear that a crucial part of justice included putting the leaders of the military junta on trial. The newly-elected president, Raúl Alfonsín, ran on a platform that promised to put the military leaders on trial for the abuses they had committed during the dictatorship and he stuck to his promise once elected. The trials took place throughout April and May

1983 and the Herald covered the trials in great depth throughout these two months.

Former editor, Robert Cox, returned to Argentina from his exile in the United States to

testify. In a very literal manner, he bore witness and gave testimony about the stories he told of the disappeared. The Herald reported on April 18th, 1985 that 2,200 witnesses had been called to the trials, including Robert Cox (“2,200 witnesses…”). That is 2,200 individuals fulfilling their responsibility to bear witness to what they saw, heard, or experienced. He noted, on the importance of the trials, “…it’s so beautiful to know that

Argentina once again has justice…all of us now have to do our best to make sure that trial is irreproachable” (“Former Herald…”).

The Herald diligently covered the proceedings of the historic trials throughout these two months. They covered the main events that took place, as well as related events throughout Buenos Aires and Argentina. For example, the issue from April 23rd, 1985 makes reference to a military leader, Italo Luder, who had been on trial and the various military orders that were given during those years (“Luder…”). This coverage was typical of the Herald during these two months. Daily issues included information on who testified, what events were they testifying about, what took place during their testimony, and what was next. This issue also included pertinent information about human rights marches taking place alongside the trials, as “Over 30,000 human rights supporters marched through downtown Buenos Aires streets yesterday to demand the trial and punishment of those military officers who illegally kidnapped and killed during the so- called dirty war against subversion” (“Over 30,000…”). After a long period of repression marked by individuals being reluctant to actively bear witness to the atrocities taking place, the mass numbers protesting and marching in the streets, finally, against the government is significant.

To conclude with the analysis of the Herald’s coverage of the trials, it is crucial to study how they covered Robert Cox’s testimony because it demonstrates the weight that was felt by Cox and the entire staff as they reported (and bore witness to) the atrocities of the military dictatorship. On Saturday, April 27th, 1985, the Herald reported that Robert

Cox had begun testifying but “was excused after less than half an hour because of extreme mental and physical exhaustion” (“Court adjourns…”). Cox testified that he had difficulty sleeping upon returning to Argentina and was haunted by the many terrible experiences he had witnessed; he was granted a reprieve until the next Monday when he would continue his testimony (“Court adjourns…”). Indeed, on April 30th, 1985, the

Herald reported about the rest of Robert Cox’s five-hour testimony in which he spoke to the threats he had witnessed and received from the government as well as his first-hand meetings and experiences with the government in those years, especially President Videla

(“Cox resumes…”). Robert Cox’s testimony, just one of thousands received during this two-month period, marks a bookend to his coverage of events taking place in

Argentinean history. From his arrival in the 1950s, through the guerrilla violence and warfare that characterized the Perón years, through the oppression of the military dictatorship and the ushering in of justice under Alfonsín, it is clear that Robert Cox played a significant role in leading the Herald as a paper that bore witness to the stories of the victims of the dictatorship. The archives offer great insight into how the Herald did just that.

Chapter 6: Interview Findings

Throughout the two weeks I spent in Argentina, I conducted nine interviews21 with a wide range of individuals about their experiences reading the Buenos Aires

Herald. Many of the interviews touched on a number of important topics including: the history of the Herald and the state of the Argentinean press, the Herald’s readership, closure of the Herald, and the human rights abuses and repression under the dictatorship.

These topics will be analyzed in this section in order to introduce interviewee perspectives on the general background of the Herald and the dictatorship. Chapter 7 will analyze interview responses more specifically related to how the Herald bore witness during the dictatorship. The list of general interview questions can be found in Chapter 6.

6.1: The General History of the Buenos Aires Herald and the Press in Argentina

There was little variety in the responses regarding the history of the Herald.

Participants addressed the beginnings of the paper, what it generally covered, and the various sales of the newspaper that took place throughout the years. Several topics stand out for their descriptions of the uniqueness of the Herald.

First, the Herald was rare as it was one of the only English-language papers in

Argentina, in addition to The Standard. A former editor for the paper noted that “The

Herald was actually the more American of the two newspapers. And even back then.

Even though it was mostly British ownership” (Interviewee #7). An Argentinean businessman noted that “The only two English papers were The Standard, which closed

21 One additional interview was conducted in the United States. For more information, see Chapter 4: Methodology. A brief description of the interview participants may also be found in Chapter 4.

in ’58, and then the Herald” (Interviewee #9). Numerous participants made reference to this fact that the Herald was “the principle longstanding, sustainable, English-language newspaper” (Interviewee #1). This is significant because it establishes one of the key reasons why the Herald is important as an object of study. In addition to its often- referenced position as a paper that took a bold stand against the dictatorship, the Herald stood out within the English-speaking community in Buenos Aires as one of the only

English-language newspapers at that time.

Second, there was a widespread recognition of the Herald’s political leanings.

This was a question I made a point of asking every interview participant since the other leading papers during the years of the dictatorship in particular all had fairly well-known and established political leanings. In those years, according to communications scholar

Jerry W. Knudson, “Clarín, La Nación, and La Prensa had joined with the government to form Papel Prensa” and “Thus, the three major papers of Argentina had a direct interest in the survival of the military regime” (100). These papers were all regarded as being more conservative. Conversely, I was told repeatedly by interviewees that the Herald always took a balanced and neutral stance. One Argentinean reader remarked that “It was neutral in the sense that it didn’t side with any particular party, voters, or anything like that. But they were not partial in the sense that they would denounce the actions by the military during the dictatorship. And it’s pretty objective” (Interviewee #5). Another participant, an expat from the United States, said that the Herald “wasn’t a political newspaper” (Interviewee #1). Rather, it was established as a paper for shipping news in the 1800s and in the years that followed, it became principally known as a community newspaper.

Many participants also spoke to me about the Argentinean press in general. I asked every participant what the most popular newspapers in Argentina were and where they went for their own sources of news. Most participants referenced La Nación as one of the largest papers in Argentina, described by a British-Argentinean as a “national right newspaper” (Interviewee #6). The same interviewee, who leads a community center in

Buenos Aires, provided a helpful breakdown of the current news in Argentina:

You’ve got La Nación, sort of in this order. For amount of readers, Clarín is the

most popular one. Middle class, low middle class, Clarín. La Nación, higher

class. Perfíl is a mixture of both. Um, and then you’ve got others. Página Doce’s

more a leftist…it always has been. More leftist paper…The national newspapers

are Clarín, La Nación, and to some extent, Perfíl, in those places where we’ve got

some pockets of British community…Anglican, Anglo-Argentine community.

(Interviewee #6).

Others noted similar trends, adding that Clarín and La Nación were notorious for simply supporting whatever administration was currently in power, and failing to hold them accountable. This was particularly present during the dictatorship, as Robert Cox stated:

…nobody thought it would be a good idea to publish what the government didn’t

like. So you had the end of real journalism in a way. The media tried to get in

with whatever government was around. And they, to begin with, nobody wanted

to talk about what was going to happen in Argentina. (Robert Cox).

English-language newspapers are now scarce in Argentina, a fact lamented by many interviewees. The Herald was the only English-language paper after The Standard closed in 1958, and no papers stepped up to fill that gap after the Herald closed. One United

States expat explained that “… there is a small community of English-language writers that basically shuffle around and write different things and some of them write in Spanish also. Like everyone else, they’re just trying to make a living” (Interviewee #4). One former Herald employee noted that the Bubble is an English-language paper that is exclusively online and popular among younger people in Argentina (Interviewee #7). The only other English-language option – which only those with very close ties to the Herald seemed to be aware of – is the Buenos Aires Times, an English-language supplement that is included in the Saturday issues of Perfíl. One Argentinean participant, who has extensive knowledge of the press in Argentina, mentioned that many “ex-Heraldites” write for the Buenos Aires Times, both in print and online, which curiously still uses the same typeface as the Herald (Interviewee #5).

While the scholarly information available about the press in Argentina provides important context for the position of the Herald throughout Argentinean history, these comments from interview participants are crucial in providing perspective to this conversation. From these participants, it is revealed what papers were the most prominent, through their eyes, what the perceived political slant of each paper was, and where the Herald stood in the midst of all of the predominant Argentinean newspapers.

6.2: Readership of the Buenos Aires Herald

Three major topics of conversation throughout the interviews were related to the readership of the Herald, its legacy, and the reasons to read it. In this section, I will discuss the readership, as the legacy and reasons to read the Herald are closely tied to the theories of bearing witness analyzed in Chapter 7.

Most interview participants noted that the Herald was a strong paper with a limited reach. One former writer informed me that the height of the readership was approximately 40,000 people throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Interviewee #7). This readership grew after The Standard closed in 1958 when the Herald suddenly had the

English-speaking market to themselves. Many expats argued that the primary audience of the paper was the expat community; however, those outside this community noted that the paper was originally intended for the Anglo-Argentinean community and that established community continued to be its primary readership, even after work with the railroads and shipping companies slowed.

This readership expanded beyond the English community to Argentineans who spoke English as well. One former writer even noted that while the Herald was targeted at English-speakers in Argentina, many who read it were Argentineans looking to improve their English (Interviewee #7). The readership grew within Argentina, and the world, as its editorials gained more and more recognition. An Argentinean law from the

Perón years dictated that all editorials in papers must be published in Spanish, even if the paper is an English-language paper (presumably so the government would fully understand what the editorials discussed) (Interviewee #7). While initially perceived as a form of censorship under Perón, this law helped grow the Herald’s audience as many

Spanish-speakers would buy it “just for the editorials” (Interviewee #7). Additionally, the news covered in the paper was often shared internationally, especially during the military dictatorship when there was heavy repression of the press in Argentina. However, in subsequent years, the readership began to decline and eventually, despite its legacy from the years of the dictatorship, the Herald could not be saved.

6.3: Closure of the Buenos Aires Herald

The Herald closed on July 31st, 2017, after 140 years of publication. Much of my original interest in the newspaper stemmed from this contrast between a paper that was widely-recognized for its legacy during the dictatorship and a paper that was unceremoniously closed, taking even its own staff by surprise. I made a point of asking every interview participant about the closure of the paper and many of them brought it up before being asked. It is worth noting their responses here to understand how the paper with a readership of 40,000 around the world vanished practically overnight.

To summarize the Herald’s closure, one U.S. expat remarked that “It vanished with hardly a ripple” (Interviewee #4). There were no announcements prior to its closure and a former staff member even remarked that he “…went to work on July 31st [2017] and was turned away from the newspaper” (Interviewee #7). He told me that the paper was precarious in the 1950s but survived throughout the 1976-1983 dictatorship

(Interviewee #7). It had a few scares in the early 2000s with changes in ownership but adapted; towards the end, it was published only once a week and then closed a year later

(Interviewee #7). Many participants read the Herald in its final years and spoke about the perceived decline of the writing style and content. One expat reflected upon the fact that most of the writers in the final years spoke English as a second language and “it [the paper] was very much given to basic grammatical errors. You know, there vs. their vs. they’re… they just didn’t care enough to hire people who spoke English as a first language to do the writing” (Interviewee #4). As a paper that prided itself on being one of the sole English-language papers in Argentina, this is a significant critique. Other readers had critiques along similar lines, adding that the journalistic standards themselves “were

pretty low” and there was just “superficial” coverage of the daily news (Interviewee #2).

One Argentinean, well-versed in the habits of the Argentinean press, remarked that “the

Herald started the same kind of decay as the rest of the country” and succumbed to what the majority of Argentinean papers had already become – ceasing to be an “independent medium” and simply becoming “a branch of the government” (Interviewee #5). As all of this took place, advertisers withdrew, the paper was sold several times to multiple different owners, and it reportedly lost all of its influence both abroad and in Argentina.

While the Herald itself had a rather shocking, and for those who read it, devastating decline, it was not lost completely. As mentioned previously, the Buenos

Aires Times has done some work to fill the gap left by the Herald. Whether this supplement began as a way to continue and honor the legacy of the Herald or as a way to fill the English-language paper gap remains unclear. However, as one former writer stated, “That’s really what remains of it in the point of view of living. It goes on living and all the former editors who are alive…I think we are alive for some strange reason.

Some write very regularly, I write occasionally” (Robert Cox). Clearly, the Herald was important enough to its community of readers in Argentina and throughout the world that it was revived in this weekly supplement.22

6.3.1: International Print Media Trends

It is worth noting that the closure of the Herald is not entirely indicative of problems solely with the Herald itself; its decline and inevitable closure did not take place in a bubble. Scholarly research indicates that print newspapers are in decline

22 The Buenos Aires Times can be accessed online at http://www.batimes.com.ar/.

throughout the world. Hsiang Iris Chyi and Ori Tenemboim speak of a “death narrative” that is common throughout discussions about print newspapers (1). A study of young adults’ avoidance of daily print newspapers revealed that they often shy away from the print media due to reasons including: “lack of time; use of other media; accessibility; format,” amongst others (Zerba 598). Lack of time and accessibility are reportedly the driving reasons. Readers find it difficult to access print newspapers in comparison to online newspapers or other sources, especially with the flourishing of news via social media (Zerba 599). More environmentally-conscious individuals also cite the print news media as being “a waste of paper,” noting that “‘On a computer, you don’t have to do anything, just minimize the box, or just exit and you’re done’” (qtd. in Zerba 603).

Furthermore, online news is available instantly to follow breaking stories and it is far easier to multitask when reading news online or through social media as compared to print media (Zerba 603). This decline in print media has become a global trend. The

Herald closed when the owners no longer cared to invest in advertising funds to support the paper; however, it was also a victim of this larger global trend shifting towards more instant, succinct online news. It is quite paradoxical that the Herald was at the height of its readership during the dictatorship. While most other papers self-censored or were censored by the government, in many ways, the Herald only grew stronger under the dictatorship as it diligently bore witness to the repression taking place.

6.4: Human Rights Abuses

The final theme from interviews conducted that I will address is that of human rights abuses. Reading about the abuses reported in the archives of the Herald is vastly different than reading the testimonies of those who survived them. However, the

perspective of those who lived in Argentina during those years and witnessed the violence of the dictatorship on a regular basis also provides an important perspective.

While most of my interviews also provided significant insight into Argentinean politics, the post-dictatorship process, and Argentinean culture, I will be focusing here on the human rights abuses of the dictatorship, as this thesis is primarily concerned with the ways in which the Herald covered these events as a form of witness.

There is little analysis to be done here. Rather, I will let the horrors of the stories shared with me by interview participants speak for themselves. One Anglo-Argentinean community leader spoke to the small infractions that would result in violence, even against children:

Here we had cases of people drugged and thrown into rivers. Um, well, mass

graves, things that…they’re terrible. Really terrible. Children that were in La

Plata I think it was, they were fighting. They were, I don’t know, 16 years old.

And they were protesting because they wanted to get cheap tickets on the bus.

They disappeared because they were asking for… (Interviewee #6).23

A United States expat who had met with Robert Cox spoke to what life was like inside the police stations for those who were detained, recounting a story that Robert Cox told him:

He said that in ’76, he was arrested by the dictatorship. They took him to the

police station, stripped him naked, threw him in a cell. Um, and he said, this is the

kicker. He said there was a Nazi flag on the wall. Full on, WWII era, Nazi flag

with the swastika, up on the wall in the police station…It’s possible that it was

23 The 1986 movie, La noche de los lápices [Night of the Pencils], is based upon these events.

there as an element of psychological warfare. Shock and disorient people to make

them talk. Stripping people naked before… (Interviewee #4)

Others spoke to the numbers of disappeared people, a point of contention in Argentina to this day. Even amongst my rather small sample of interview participants, I heard a wide variety of responses. One United States expat told me that “There are 30,000 people disappeared. The conservatives try and deny it, but yeah, that’s the official number.

About 30,000. It’s like the Holocaust. There will never be agreement” (Interviewee #4).

An Argentinean citizen told me that since:

…The military destroyed all of the evidence, finding a number [of disappeared]

has been an issue. 30,000 is a very large number and 8,000 is also very large

but…either of the two is an atrocity. It’s terrible. Therefore, there isn’t agreement

on this. The guerrillas say 30,000 while those who know and have good sources

of information would say 8,000 to 10,000 and well, there’s never agreement. I

personally think that 30,000 is invented. (Interviewee #3).

A former writer for the paper mentioned the official report that was issued after democracy had been restored, as evidence for the number of disappeared:

There’s something called CONADEP, the Commission, and they came out with

nearly 9,000 names. So there are at least 9,000 and they could’ve missed a few,

but I don’t really see it being 30,000. That’s their report. So it’s almost 9,000.

It’s…I don’t know, 8,900 and something. Very close to 9,000, just under.

(Interviewee #7).

Finally, one United States businessman reiterated that whatever the true number of disappeared were, it is a horrifying statistic: “It’s about 10,000. 30 was the…the civil

rights, you know…They were never able to find more than 10,000 disappeared, which is terrible” (Interviewee #1).

I was surprised, while conducting these interviews, with just how many participants knew somebody who had been kidnapped, arrested, or disappeared, or had come face-to face with the violence of the dictatorship. One Argentinean citizen worked with a man who had been arrested and managed to come back from the police station alive, a rather rare event. His story is as follows:

…they burned his hand with the picana so that he would know ‘This is what

happens if you lie.’ This was a promise not to divulge what had happened. To

shut up…Anyways, they interrogated him. He was with a group and well, at

night, he was kidnapped. They threw the bodies of the tortured people next to him

and he was blindfolded. He didn’t know what was going to happen because the

technique of the military was to torture so that the victims would scream and

everybody else would hear it. (Interviewee #3).

Almost forty years after the end of the military dictatorship, these memories still remain fresh in his mind. Others discussed the constant, daily violence, whether it was seen in the streets or in the newspapers. From another Argentinean, “…you saw a lot of violence everywhere. And I mean, you read the papers and uh, there were killings every day”

(Interviewee #5). One Argentinean businessman noted the regular appearance of bodies throughout Buenos Aires, and the strange reality of walking past torture centers every day:

But so many people had been killed. I mean, I’ve seen corpses. I used to have a

factory in town, and we had probably the second or third biggest torture center,

just a few blocks away. I never knew. I knew the police were there, but

afterwards, I found out it was a huge torture center. (Interviewee #9).

Finally, Robert Cox spoke to the horrendous abuses committed against pregnant women and children during those years:

I mean, the thing that always comes back to me all the time that, among the

prisoners, they had young women who were pregnant, so they said ‘Ok…’ so, the

young women would have to give birth in these appalling terrible places, you

couldn’t even call them prisons, and then they would kill the mother and give the

baby away. Who would imagine that could happen? But you go back into history

and you do find that’s one of the elements of certain kinds of power structures.

Also, you have to realize that when people started to realize that this regime was

capable of doing that, it was then that people started to take human rights

seriously. To think that before, people would laugh at the idea of torture. But that

didn’t come out until much later on. It wasn’t known for a long time. (Robert

Cox).

The gravity of the violence that took place during the military dictatorship cannot be fully understood through these interview excerpts nor can it be understood by sitting across from interview participants and seeing the pain in their faces and voices as they recount what they witnessed. However, during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, Robert Cox and the Herald worked daily with the stories of victims and survivors of the state- sponsored terrorism, sitting across from them, listening and witnessing to what they had experienced, and sharing it with the world. Chapter 7 will explore the work of the Herald and Robert Cox through the lens of theories related to testimonio and bearing witness.

Chapter 7: The Act of “Bearing Witness” Through the Buenos Aires Herald

7.1: Introduction

The concept of “witnessing” has deep ties to trauma studies, memory studies, performance studies, human rights, law, history, and anthropology. It originates in many works that attempted to understand the role of survivors and witnesses to trauma during the Holocaust, primarily research from Dori Laub, but can be applied in many situations of extreme violence, repression, and trauma in which there are survivors and bystanders who observe and “bear witness” to the events that took place. Witnessing is tied to the concept of testimony, in that both incorporate the writing about, or documentation of, traumatic events in order to provide a voice for an otherwise voiceless group and provide representation for the group. The genre of testimonio, distinct from “testimony”, is distinctly Latin American, while the act of “witnessing” was born out of the events of the

Holocaust, with a multitude of applications since.

I argue that by listening to the stories of the victims and survivors of the military dictatorship and sharing their stories through articles and editorials, the staff of the

Buenos Aires Herald, as led by Robert J. Cox, served as some of the only witnesses to the events of the military dictatorship (and previous governments), providing a valuable and reliable account of the repression and state-sponsored terrorism that took place during the

1976-1983 dictatorship. While the framework of testimonio is often applied to situations of writing about repression in Latin America, I argue that the role that the Herald took is more aptly understood as an act of witnessing rather than creating a narrative of testimonio. In this chapter, I will construct this argument by first analyzing the

foundational theories on testimonio and establishing that the Herald did not serve as testimonio. Then, I will analyze the key texts and theories on the act of witnessing, using articles gathered from the Herald archives and information from the interviews I conducted, in order to attest to the role that the paper played as a witness to the repression of the military dictatorship.

7.2: The Buenos Aires Herald as Testimonio?

There are many parallels between the concepts of “bearing witness” and giving a testimony, which is related to the Latin American genre of testimonio. In many situations it is only through bearing witness to an event or a trauma that one is able to produce a testimony. Due to the links between these frameworks, I find it essential to untangle the two here and establish that while the Herald served as a form of witness to the events of the dictatorship, the writing itself is not testimonio. In this section, I will address the genre of testimonio rather than testimony, due to its ties to Latin American narratives, and establish that the Herald is not an example of testimonio as defined by literary criticism, cultural critique, and cultural studies. In order to define testimonio, I will use the works of

George Yúdice and John Beverley, two primary scholars in the field.

Separate from works that discuss the idea of testimony as a legal construct,24 the concept of testimonio is a Latin American genre of narrative that emerged in the late

1950s and early 1960s and has remained popular ever since (Beverley 9, “La voz…”). In

1957, the Argentinean journalist Rodolfo Walsh wrote a book called Operación Masacre,

24 In their book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub refer to testimony in a legal context, called upon “when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt, and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question” (6).

which detailed “the illegal detention and execution of several workers” after a failed counterrevolution by Peronist militants (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 333). Critic Angel

Rama has “called Walsh’s nonfictional account the first political testimonio in Latin

America” (Nouzeilles and Montaldo 333). The 1980s and 1990s saw a boom in revolutionary testimonios from Central America and the Southern Cone, such as

Rigoberta Menchú’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú or Ariel Dorfman’s La muerte y la doncella. In his article “‘Through All Things Modern:’ Second Thoughts on Testimonio,”

John Beverley offers a specific, framing definition of testimonio:

By testimonio, I understand a novel or novella-length narrative told in the first

person by a narrator who is also the real-life protagonist or witness of the events

he or she recounts. In recent years it has become an important, perhaps the

dominant, form of literary narrative in Latin America. (1-2).

From this definition alone, it is clear that the Herald never functioned as a true, Latin

American testimonio – it was a daily newspaper with no capacity as a literary narrative and it was certainly not novel-length. However, due to the significant overlaps between testimonio/testimony and “bearing witness,” it is worth elaborating on what constitutes a testimonio for Beverley and Yúdice, and why the Herald does not fulfill these requirements.

Yúdice elaborates on Beverley’s work, offering his own definition of testimonio:

“many types of discourse, from oral and popular history, that try to give a voice to those without a voice” (207, “Testimonio y…”).25 This concept that Yúdice offers at the end, of giving a voice to those without, is significant within the field of testimonio, suggesting

25 Personal translation from Spanish: “muchos tipos de discurso, desde la historia oral y popular, que procura dar voz a los ‘sin voz’” (207).

that testimonios can serve as the voice for an entire collective. For both Yúdice and

Beverley, this collective is a subaltern group26 that does not have representation or a constituted identity (Yúdice 17, “Testimonio and…”). These ideas of the subaltern and identity are crucial to understanding testimonio. Returning to Yúdice’s definitions, he also establishes the goal of testimonio, as he sees it: “The objective of testimonio is to describe the reaction of the people to this disguised representation as a recovery of their awareness…The testimonio, in turn, must produce in the reading public a reflection on what the agents felt in front of the reaction of the people” (211, “Testimonio y…”).27

Similar to the idea of the subaltern that both Beverley and Yúdice discuss, Yúdice argues that the testimonio speaks for the people as a whole. As a newspaper, the Herald never made any over-arching claims of speaking for a subaltern group of people. Rather, as a politically neutral newspaper, it must speak for everyone, from all political sides.

Certainly, many of the articles that the paper shared were focused on defending the human rights of the people the government was repressing; however, there was no central goal to speak for them during those years.

Another central piece of testimonio is the idea of identity-formation for a collective. Yúdice establishes these ideas, arguing that:

…testimonial writing may be defined as an authentic narrative, told by a witness

who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g. war, oppression,

revolution, etc.). Emphasizing popular, oral discourse, the witness portrays his or

26 John Beverley offers a definition of “subaltern” as: “that which is not only outside the state, but also constitutively opposed to the state in some sense or other” (Beverley 108, “Subalternity and…”). Ileana Rodríguez also expands on this definition, arguing that the subaltern is tied to ideas of the “disenfranchised community” (Rodríguez 5). 27 Personal translation: “El objetivo del testimonio es describir la reacción del pueblo ante esta representación disimuladora como recuperación de la concientización del pueblo…El testimonio, a su vez, debe producir en el público lector un reflejo de lo que sintió el agente ante la reacción del pueblo” (211).

her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective

memory and identity.” (17, “Testimonio and…”).

Furthermore, “…testimonial writing is first and foremost an act, a tactic by means of which people engage in the process of self-constitution and survival” (Yúdice 19,

“Testimonio and…”). The Herald did not actively participate in “self-constitution” or identity-building processes, nor did it work to present a collective memory. While the paper did emerge from the dictatorship with a distinct identity and legacy of being a paper that stood up for human rights and bore witness to the tales of the victims of the dictatorship, this was never the explicit intention of the staff. Additionally, writing articles and editorials every day was certainly not an act of survival for Robert Cox and the rest of his staff; rather, this very act of writing put them in danger every single day.

Yúdice argues that testimonio, as an identity-building process, is part of a movement – testimonial writing constitutes its own form of social movement” (21,

“Testimonio and…”). While the Herald relentlessly covered social movements in

Argentina (and around the world), such as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and their search for their children, the paper in and of itself was an observer to these movements rather than part of the movements themselves. Robert Cox met with many of the Mothers and reported their stories; however, the paper remained distinct and separate from the movement.

Returning to the idea of the subaltern, as noted in Beverley’s studies of testimonio, there are specific understandings of who narrates a testimonio: “the narrator of the testimonio is not the subaltern as such, but rather more like an ‘organic intellectual’ from the group or subaltern class, who speaks to (and against) hegemony through this

metonymy in their name and in their place” (9, “La voz…”).28 Without question, the writers of the Herald were not a part of a subaltern class, especially those writing the editorials and the management staff back in Charleston, South Carolina. Rather, one of the suggested reasons why the paper avoided total censorship and persecution of its writers is because it held significant power compared to other papers at the time. This is due to the language the paper was written in (English – thus avoiding the scrutiny of the government who, often times, could not be bothered to read it), the protection from the

British Embassy in Argentina, and the support from U.S. management. Therefore, even if the Herald was writing for the representation of a subaltern group (something it happened to do at times), the writers themselves were not part of that group.

There is one final criterion that establishes the fact that the Herald was, in many ways, antithetical to what Beverley and Yúdice describe as testimonio: the relationship between testimonio and the truth. In “Testimonio y concientización” (and referenced by

Beverley in “La voz del otro: Testimonio, subalternidad y verdad narrativa”), “Testimonio does not respond to the imperative to produce the cognitive truth – nor to undo it – its modus operandi is the communicative construction of a solidary and emancipatory praxis” (Yúdice 216).29 Even if the Herald matched the definition of testimonio for all other factors (which it does not), this one idea would be enough to prove that the paper does not fit the concept of testimonio. The Herald and its writers were committed to

28 Personal translation: “…el narrador del testimonio no es el subalterno como tal, sino más bien algo así como un ‘intelectual orgánico’ del grupo o la clase subalterna, que habla a (y en contra de) la hegemonía a través de esta metonimia en su nombre y en su lugar” (9). 29 Personal translation: “El testimonio no responde al imperativo de producir la verdad cognitiva – ni tampoco de deshacerla – su modus operandi es la construcción comunicativa de una praxis solidaria y emancipadora” (216).

telling the truth above all else and saw this as one of their primary responsibilities. As one interviewee remarked on Robert Cox’s commitment to the truth:

Bob is the perfect newsman…he believes in investigative reporting and in telling

the truth. Bob was very harsh and hard on Montoneros and ERP, but he became

harsh on the other killing too. In other words, there were dead on both sides and

well, he’s a perfectly independent person. (Interviewee #8).

In many ways, its commitment to the truth was what set the Herald apart from other newspapers during the dictatorship. The paper reported, ceaselessly, on the state of affairs in Argentina and the world, while many other newspapers covered up the truth of what the military government was carrying out. Another interviewee, Robert Cox himself, remarked on the press’s role in securing justice and truth: “…in abnormal times, journalism becomes even more important because it starts to take up the role of the, you know, that justice should be doing. Protection of people. It has to take over because the people aren’t getting any protection from the government” (Robert Cox). There is a significant disconnect between testimonio and how the Herald’s staff viewed their relationship with the truth. This relationship is in many ways what led to the Herald’s legacy as a defender of human rights and a witness to state-sponsored terrorism. It reported on the events of the dictatorship, truthfully, when few others would. Testimonio does not demand the same level of absolute truth but rather focuses on communication that relies upon solidarity and emancipation. Responsible liberal and investigative journalism, as the Herald was, can call upon emancipatory practices and promote the solidarity of oppressed people but must remain objective and truthful by its very nature.

7.3: The Buenos Aires Herald as Witness (Performing the Act of ‘Witnessing’)

While the Herald and its editorial staff did not fulfill the requirements of a testimonio, it did fulfill a crucial role during the military dictatorship: that of witnessing and listening to the stories of the repressed. The human rights abuses that were witnessed by writers for the paper and the stories of the disappeared that Robert Cox heard were meticulously documented throughout the pages of the Herald as a means of bearing witness to the events of those years. I will use four key texts, supported by the interviews

I conducted with readers of the paper, to establish the position the Herald held as a witness to the events of the military dictatorship: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992); Diana

Taylor’s Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty

War (1997); Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986); and, Giorgio Agamben’s

Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998). These four texts all develop the concept of the “witness” or the “listener” and the act of bearing witness to create a testimony or share stories. Supplemented by statements about the Herald taken from the interviews I conducted, the paper is well-established as a witness during the dictatorship, as Robert Cox and other staff used the Herald’s position to establish the truth of the events taking place. First, I will use the texts by Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben to introduce their conceptions of the limits on witnesses. For Levi and Agamben, the only

‘true’ witnesses are those who experience events firsthand, by suffering and dying in the events being witnessed. In the case of the military dictatorship, the only true witnesses were those who were disappeared or killed and ultimately unable to publicly bear witness to what happened. This inability to witness creates the need for the types of witnesses that

Dori Laub and Diana Taylor describe – individuals who have a responsibility, as spectators or listeners to events, to bear witness to what happened and create a record of those events. Laub and Taylor define this sort of witness, discuss the responsibility spectators have to bear witness, and describe the importance and results of bearing witness.

7.3.1: The ‘True’ Witnesses

The term ‘witness’ appears extensively throughout scholarship related to the

Holocaust, especially in works by Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Dori Laub. Both

Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben establish a very precise definition of ‘witness’ that, during the Argentinean dictatorship, only the disappeared or dead were able to fulfill.

In his 1986 The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi, who survived the

Holocaust, defines the true witness, or the testigo integral, in the context of the

Holocaust. “I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses…We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom” (Levi 83). Levi only sees the true witnesses as those who did not return from the event they experienced. “Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance” (Levi 83-84). Only those who faced repression head-on and did not come back from it are able to fully witness what happened. Giorgio Agamben echoes these ideas in his 1998 Remnants of Auschwitz: The

Witness and the Archive as he describes the ‘true’ witnesses: “The ‘true’ witnesses, the

‘complete witnesses,’ are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness”

(34). He offers the example of those who died in the gas chambers in the Holocaust, noting that these were “events without witnesses” because “it is impossible to bear witness to it from the inside – since no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice – and from the outside – since the

‘outsider’ is by definition excluded from the event” (Agamben 35). For Agamben, as for

Levi, in the case of Argentina, the ‘true’ witnesses would be the disappeared and those who died. Not even those who reappeared would be considered ‘true witnesses’ because they survived the traumatic and repressive event. Only those who disappeared are ‘true witnesses;’ however, since they are gone, they are incapable of fully bearing witness to what took place in the form of a transmitted testimony.

Agamben does include a space for survivors to bear witness to repression. He associates witnessing with remembering and applies the concepts of legal testimonies

(Agamben 26). He defines testimony as being connected to issues of legality and identifies two words for witness in Latin (Agamben 17). The first is ‘testis,’ which

“…signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party” (Agamben 17). The second word is more accurate for work on bearing witness, which is ‘superstes:’ “a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it”

(Agamben 17). This definition opens a space for individuals who have lived through repression and can still bear witness to what they experienced, even if they are not the full ‘true’ witness as Agamben and Levi define. Following this definition, the Herald, specifically its writers, are considered witnesses because they experienced this repression

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and state-sponsored terrorism during the dictatorship firsthand, lived through it, and have stories to tell. Stories they must tell.

Levi acknowledges this space and responsibility for those who did survive – to speak on behalf of those who cannot, the true witnesses. Levi himself is part of this group: “We who were favored by fate tried, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate but also that of the others, indeed of the drowned; but this was a discourse

‘on behalf of third parties,’ the story of things seen at close hand, not experienced personally” (84). Without explicitly mentioning journalists, Levi paints a picture of the situation of the writers for the Herald during the dictatorship. By the mere fact of living in Buenos Aires during the dictatorship, and especially by being journalists critical of the government in those years, the writers (and the paper itself) survived the dictatorship, which does make them witnesses tasked with the responsibility to recount their fate and that of the drowned. Those who survived are able and required to bear witness and record what happened for those who died or disappeared and were unable to. Levi argues that bearing witness to the truth of what occurs in traumatic events is crucial in preserving the memory of what happened: “It is natural and obvious that the most substantial material for the reconstruction of truth about the camps is the memories of the survivors” (16).

While the Herald and its staff are not considered by Levi to be true witnesses, they can witness by way of their own survival and have a responsibility to do so.

7.3.2: Witnesses Who Listen

Diana Taylor’s 1997 Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in

Argentina’s Dirty War approaches the concept of ‘bearing witness,’ specifically in

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Argentina, through a lens she defines as “politics of looking.” As Taylor notes, “My goal is to examine the politics of looking, ‘just looking,’ dangerous seeing, and percepticide in order to make active spectators or witnesses of us all” (xii). In Taylor’s framework, the need for individuals to bear witness comes from the failure of others to do so. She argues that the general population in Argentina committed “percepticide,” a necessary act to shield themselves from the atrocities taking place around them as “…spectacles of violence rendered the population silent, deaf, and blind” (123). Taylor defines the act of

“percepticide” as follows:

The military spectacle made people pull back in fear, denial, and tacit complicity

from the show of force. Therein lay its power. The military violence could have

been relatively invisible, as the term disappearance suggests. The fact that it

wasn’t indicates that the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned

by means of the spectacle. People had to deny what they saw and, by turning

away, collude with the violence around them. (123).

Many Argentineans and Argentinean newspapers committed this “percepticide,” leaving few who were actually willing to bear witness to the repression. In Robert Cox’s farewell editorial, “Au Revoir,” he calls attention to Argentineans who have “preferred to be blinkered” and notes that the greatest difficulty for the press has been telling people

“what they didn’t want to hear and [pointing] out what they didn’t want to see.” For

Taylor, those who did witness participated in “…an involved, informed, caring, yet critical form of spectatorship” (25). As Levi and Agamben also established, the witness comes from within the conflict (one who survived) and is tasked with a very specific responsibility:

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Though neither the perpetrator nor the victim of events, the witness is a part of the

conflict and has a responsibility in reporting and remembering of events. Why, I

wonder, do we not have a word that adequately reflects the position of the active,

yet all too human, see-er? Why is the witness generally depicted as either passive

and disinterested or holy and superhuman? (Taylor 25, emphasis added).

To be this sort of witness is to be an active witness, with a responsibility to both report and remember.

In Laub and Felman’s work on witnessing and testifying during the Holocaust, they develop this form of active spectatorship that Taylor later applied to Argentina.30 In their 1992 book, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and

History, (which was often cited by Taylor in her later work), they introduce the idea of bearing witness through listening, which precisely defines the role that Robert Cox and the Herald played as witnesses. They define this role as follows:

The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo […] the

listener comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through

his [sic] very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself […].

The listener, therefore, has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness

and a witness to himself. (Felman and Laub, 57-58).

The majority of the time, the writers for the paper did not directly experience trauma as people who disappeared did but rather listened to those who had experienced or witnessed trauma and repression for themselves. The very actions taken by Robert Cox in leading the Herald to report on the disappearances stem from his position as a listener.

30 More information about the history of Dr. Laub’s ideas on bearing witness may be found in Chapter 2.

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By listening intently to the stories of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and others who came to him, he bore witness directly to the trauma they had experienced. He, and other writers for the paper, also became witnesses themselves on the occasions when they were arrested or forced into exile.

The majority of this thesis has been dedicated to covering the ways in which

Robert Cox and the Herald listened to those who witnessed trauma during the military dictatorship. It is through Felman and Laub’s work, supported by Taylor’s applications of their theory to Argentina, that the specific role of the Herald becomes clear. The rest of this chapter will link these theories to the work carried out by the staff of the Herald.

7.3.3: The Responsibility of Witnesses

As Taylor describes in her definition of the witness, “the witness is a part of the conflict and has a responsibility in reporting and remembering of events” (25). Robert

Cox and the rest of the Herald staff took this responsibility to report and remember very seriously. As the only English-language newspaper in Argentina during the dictatorship, the Herald and its staff had a significant responsibility to fulfill what they saw as the primary task of a newspaper: to report the truth. The work they expected of themselves is the same responsibility of a witness. In that way, by fulfilling their responsibility as reporters, the Herald staff was also fulfilling its responsibility as witnesses. In our interview, Robert Cox spoke firsthand to the responsibility the paper had to report the truth and bear witness to the repression occurring; during the dictatorship, this meant reporting on the disappearances that other papers covered up:

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[What were you most proud of as a journalist?] The lives we saved. Completely,

absolutely, nothing compares. And the fact that we reported. I’m not that crazy

about opinion because, you know, opinion is nice to read but the reporter is the

important person. The one who really reports…We are very proud of the fact that

we managed to report very difficult situations. As a result of that, we managed to

save lives, which is very very important. And I think that we helped to bring

Argentina back to decency again because it was an indecent time, in every sense

of the word. Appalling things were being done that should never ever be

forgotten. (Robert Cox, emphasis added).

He continued at a later point, discussing the important role of the press and the responsibility the press has to document the truth:

If journalists don’t do their jobs and report, people don’t know what’s happening

and they have no say in their government. They have no say…In abnormal times,

journalism becomes even more important because it starts to take up the role of

the, you know, that justice should be doing. Protection of people. It has to take

over because the people aren’t getting any protection from the government.

(Robert Cox).

In the eyes of the Herald’s staff, their primary responsibility as a paper was one that most papers in those years shirked: to report the truth of the ongoing repression. The lives that were saved, the accountability demanded from the government, were consequences of the staff doing their jobs. Three different interview participants spoke to the truthful reporting of the paper as being a primary motivator to read it:

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• “Because when these chaps wrote, they wrote true things” (Interviewee

#6).

• “To see the important news. I knew that they had an independent point of

view and it was worth it to know it” (Interviewee #3).

• “Because the Herald readership had been loyal to the paper because of

true reporting and good quality and all that” (Interviewee #5).

None of the interview participants indicated that they read the Herald because it was one of the only papers to bear witness to the violence of the dictatorship or that it was the one of the few papers to publish the names of the disappeared. While both of those facts are true, they went to the paper for its truthful reporting, which served as a form of bearing witness as a listener, according to Felman, Laub, and Taylor. Truth may be dispensable to the idea of testimonio, but it is a fundamental component of bearing witness.

7.3.4: Witnessing from Within the Conflict

Another crucial component of bearing witness as Felman, Laub, and Taylor describe is for the listener/witness to be “a part of the conflict” (Taylor 25). It is impossible to separate the Herald from the conflict that engulfed Argentina during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Members of its staff were kidnapped.

Robert Cox was arrested, questioned, and forced into exile. Members of the staff repeatedly met with families to learn about their disappeared loved ones. Writers for the

Herald listened, witnessed and reported from their distinct positions within the conflict, as Anglo-Argentineans who walked the streets of Buenos Aires daily, past underground detention centers, as Anglo-Argentineans who knew people who had been disappeared.

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They were able to listen and bear witness from within this place. For example, one interview participant spoke to the personal threats against Andrew Graham-Yooll, a highly influential writer for the Herald who has since authored several books about his experiences during those years:

…because of the threats in the 1970s, Andrew Graham-Yooll left. With his whole

family. The threats became graver. He has firsthand accounts of his encounters

with the military. In one case, I don’t know if you’ve seen it…they kidnapped him

and couldn’t kill him because he was very important. They left him naked in the

street. (Interviewee #3).

Another interview participant expanded upon this, referencing the trials experienced by

Robert Cox and another editor, James Neilson, as well:

Then there are also people who were there and uh, resisted the dictatorship, and

even at the risk of their lives, which is, for example, Bob Cox. And uh, what’s his

name, James Neilson. And to a lesser degree, Andrew-Graham-Yooll. Bob Cox

did have to leave the country and I’m not sure about uh, Graham-Yooll. But they,

they were uh, pressured, by all means, you know. (Interviewee #5).

The news stories that appeared in the Herald during the years of the dictatorship, that covered bombings, disappearances, torture, killings, economic failure, government cover- ups, etc., were often times the result of the writers’ firsthand interactions with the violence of these events. The writers were able to bear witness, not only because they had listened to those who had survived such events, but because they themselves were an active part of this conflict and history.

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7.3.5: Witnessing to Share Testimonies

In their work, Felman and Laub reference the idea of testimony, related more to the legal sense rather than the Latin American genre of testimonio. For Felman and Laub, testifying is linked to witnessing and is equivalent to taking the witness stand – “To testify is always, metaphorically, to take the witness stand or to take the position of witness insofar as the narrative account of the witness is at once engaged in an appeal and bound by an oath” (204). They argue that the listener enables this testimony through their relationship with the trauma witness:

The listener, therefore, has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness

and a witness to himself. It is only in this way, through his simultaneous

awareness of the continuous flow of those inner hazards both in the trauma

witness and in himself, that he can become the enabler of the testimony – the one

who triggers its initiation, as well as the guardian of its process and of its

momentum. (Felman and Laub 58).

Robert Cox led the Herald to do just this – listen to the witnesses to trauma and repression and record their words, their stories, their please – their testimonies. By doing so, the Herald bore witness to the trauma they had experienced. One interview participant reiterated this point, arguing that “…The Herald began to realize that open war was taking place against the guerrillas when they began to collect testimonies of people who went to all of the newspapers, not only the Herald. No other paper would give a voice to those who were going to die” (Interviewee #3). The Herald was one of the few to enable the testimony of the trauma witnesses, by being active listeners and witnesses to their stories. According to one Argentinean interview participant:

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People were giving information to the Herald because nobody else would print

the disappearances. So, the only way you could get someone to print it was the

Herald. Even though nobody else would do it. They went to him [Robert Cox],

hoping [he would tell their story]. And he did. Had it been an Argentine

newspaper, he wouldn’t…he probably wouldn’t have done it. But being in an

English newspaper, it had small circulation and he was a British citizen…it gave

him some sort of protection. (Interviewee #9).

Clearly, Robert Cox and the Herald were the most available mechanism for individuals to share news about the disappeared during the time of the dictatorship. They were able to tell their stories publicly when few other papers, and certainly not the government, would do so. Through the habeas corpus writs, the numerous articles, and the harsh editorials found in the pages of the Herald, it served as a conduit for the testimonies of those impacted by the repression of the military government.

7.3.6: Witnessing (and Listening) to Create a Record

Although Felman and Laub never explicitly connect their theories on witnessing and listening to the role of journalists, several of their arguments clearly establish the role of journalists such as Robert Cox and papers such as the Herald as listening and producing an important record of the truth. They note that:

The listener to the narrative of extreme human pain, of massive psychic trauma,

faces a unique situation. In spite of the presence of ample documents, of searing

artifacts and of fragmentary memoirs of anguish, he comes to look for something

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that is in fact nonexistent – a record that has yet to be made. (Felman and Laub

57).

The listener to the witnesses who experienced trauma are thus responsible for creating this record. Felman and Laub continue, “The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (57).

While the primary responsibility of Robert Cox and the entire staff at the Herald was to write and document the truth every day, that only came after extensive listening. It is only through listening that journalists gain information and the truth, and this was no different during the Argentinean dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Cox was one of the only journalists to actually listen to those who were suffering under the dictatorship and the numerous interviews I conducted reinforce this.

The best example of the listening to create a record that was performed by Robert

Cox and the Herald is their connection with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo who were advocating for the return of their disappeared sons and daughters. Turned away by the government, the Mothers went to the Herald with information on their loved ones, one of the only papers that would record their stories. Numerous interviewees shared this information and two quotes in particular stand out. From a former editor:

They [human rights groups] gave us information. I mean, the Mothers came to the

Herald and gave us names all the time. Because they did their Thursday march

and I think…Robert Cox started going to those and talking to them and then they

came to the newspaper which was only three blocks away. (Interviewee #7).

From a close friend of Robert Cox, when asked about examples of the paper’s legacy:

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Well, fundamentally is when Bob Cox hears of the Madres who were walking

around the monument in Plaza de Mayo, you know. When Bob starts having

contact with the Madres and the Madres start coming into the Herald. Because

they weren’t being heard by the government. And the other newspapers kept their

hands off, and Bob would sympathize with them and publish. This was, you

know, publish about the disappearances. I can tell you, I used to go to the Herald

after my office hours and when the door of his office, which was always open,

when it was closed, it was because he was with the Madres inside. (Interviewee

#8).

Here, it is evident that the Herald existed as a space in which victims of the military repression could come to find a listening ear in editor Robert Cox and someone who would record their stories. His office provided a space not otherwise available to voice their concerns about their disappeared loved ones. He listened to their stories and the names, faces, and stories of their loved ones appeared throughout the pages of the

Herald. They were able to testify to what had happened to their families through the reporting of Robert Cox and the Herald.

The Herald created a record of the disappeared that otherwise would not have existed. There was a specific process to this record creation that one interview participant described:

The Herald’s role was principally in identifying the disappeared people, by

actually printing a list saying, ‘Here’s a name, here’s their address. Where is this

person? This person has been disappeared. Here is person #2.’ A list of up to, I

don’t know, in the hundreds, I guess. But without knowing exactly what this

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person did. Because they were a disappeared person. Because this person did not

receive a fair trial, so they demanded the habeas corpus for this person and said,

‘If this person did something wrong, then ok. Put them on trial and charge them.’

And the military is saying, ‘We did that. Look where we are now. It brought us to

where we are now.’ That’s what Cox did. He identified these people and took a

stand and brought it to the attention of the international community. (Interviewee

#1).

Through his role as a listener to the trauma experienced by many Argentineans when their loved ones disappeared, Robert Cox was able to bear witness through the Herald by creating a permanent, highly visible record of the disappeared, thoroughly documenting the atrocities committed by the military government through his truthful reporting. Laub and Felman’s work is focused on the Holocaust, which had many listeners and witnesses.

They describe the many ‘outsider-witnesses’ who existed during those years, which perfectly summarizes Robert Cox’s (and the Herald’s) role when documenting the events of the dictatorship:

During the era of Nazi persecution of the Jews, the truth of the event could have

been recorded in perception and in memory, either from within or from without,

by Jews, or any one of a number of ‘outsiders.’ Outsider-witnesses could have

been, for instance, the next-door neighbor, a friend, a business partner,

community institutions including the police and the courts of law, as well as

bystanders and potential rescuers from other countries. (Felman and Laub 81).

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As listeners to the stories of those who experienced repression, Robert Cox and the

Herald existed as outsider-witnesses who were able to preserve the truth of events that took place from outside the actual repressive situations.

7.4: The Challenges of Witnessing

There are immense challenges inherent in bearing witness to violence. In fact, the act of bearing witness to such events is often so daunting that the population commits the

“percepticide” that Diana Taylor defined and chooses not to witness (Taylor 123). Taylor asks, “What happens to the ‘witness’ in a situation that forces people to participate in the production of denial? The passerby, the neighbors, could not bear witness; they closed the door, shut the curtains, turned off the light” (124). It is far easier to turn away and self-blind than it is to continue to actively watch and bear witness.

Bearing witness can often take place through the writing process and as Taylor notes, “Writing about the disappeared and tortured, as well as writing on the writing about them is as difficult as it is urgent” (138) There is an inherent tension that exists between writing about atrocities to prevent them from recurring and failing to write about atrocities that are too severe to capture with words:

The difficulty lies not only in navigating the troubled waters between those who,

in the tradition of Adorno, insist that the atrocities committed defy language and

representation and those who insist that only through denunciation, which

necessarily involves representation, can crimes be brought to light and similar

ones avoided in the future. (Taylor 139).

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By writing actively about the repression of the military government, the Herald chose to take the difficult step of documenting the truth to hold the military accountable. Even the

Nunca Más report that was issued after the end of the dictatorship noted the difficulty inherent in writing about the abuses of the military government:

In drawing up this report, we wondered about the best way to deal with the theme

so that this chapter did not turn into merely an encyclopedia of horror. We could

find no way to avoid this. After all, what else were these tortures but an immense

display of the most degrading and indescribable acts of degradation, which the

military governments, lacking all legitimacy in power, used to secure power over

a whole nation? (Taylor 141).

The newspapers that neglected to report on the disappearances, torture, violence, and repression during the dictatorship did so for various reasons; in most cases, however, it was simply easier to commit ‘percepticide’ than to actually bear witness. To bear witness had a significant cost. Writers put their lives on the line and the pressure to report the truth was immense. Robert Cox noted in our interview that, “I was always trying to work out…eventually we just did what we could to save lives. I’d do anything that I could.

And of course, you had to be careful because you could do something that would cause them to kill somebody” (Robert Cox). Reporting the truth, for the writers at the Herald, often meant holding the lives of the disappeared in their hands. Their words, the truth they reported, had the potential to set them free or get them killed. Furthermore, there was significant danger alone in knowing the truth of what the government was doing.

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Robert Cox had extensive knowledge of the state-sponsored terrorism taking place and chose to protect those closest to him. One of his close friends noted in our interview that:

Bob became the referent for these desaparecidos, you see. For their families.

They were looking for somebody to listen to them, and nobody was listening to

them, but Bob was. You know? And besides, I have to tell you this. I knew of

some things that were happening, but very limited because Bob did not want me

to run into any danger. He knew of concentration camps and so forth, but he said,

‘There are concentration camps,’ but he would give me no detail.’” (Interviewee

#8).

Robert Cox knew the risks he was taking in leading the Herald to bear witness. That same friend acknowledged this, noting, “He knew the risks he was taking. Actually, he was just as afraid as any human would be, but he had a tremendous control of his uh, his fears. And uh, he isn’t a fellow who feels himself a hero. He just follows his instincts”

(Interviewee #8). Taylor reiterates these sentiments in the conclusion to Disappearing

Acts: Spectacles of Gender & Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War, cementing the difficulty that is inherent in bearing witness in a long, but powerful, passage on the necessary burden of bearing witness:

Witnessing entails the acceptance of the ‘heavy weight of sorrow,’ and it entails

responsibility. And it’s not without its own risks. Se paga por ver (one pays for

looking). Like others who write against violence, I too have wished for more

options, better scripts, braver interventions. But witnessing, however singular and

limited, is vital. It might help broaden the scope of the possible, expand the

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audience, and allow for a wider range of responses. Thus, I join my perspective to

others’ – internal and external witnesses, historians, researchers, artists – who

have struggled with the problem of documenting and representing violence. My

role in this drama is not to keep quiet, but to be a better spect-actor. For it is

against the diminishment of our complex and interconnected visions that we must

struggle. (265).

Without question, this perspective encapsulates the role of the Herald as a witness to the repression carried out by the military government during the dictatorship. At great personal and professional expense, Robert Cox led the writers of the Herald to document the truth of the military dictatorship in the hopes of, as Taylor argues, “broadening the scope of the possible” (265). The Herald did not just publish the names of the disappeared to report the truth; they bore witness in this way to provoke a certain response and had a specific technique in doing so. A friend of Robert Cox noted in our interview:

Ah, there was a technique though, in the Herald. When anybody was kidnapped

and it went on the front page, Bob was convinced…and this is very important. He

said, ‘The louder the noise, the better the chances of saving the person’… Bob

was loud, yelling, and making all the noise. That saved [Jacobo] Timerman.

Timerman’s life was saved by Bob, in my opinion. Not the only one, others were

saved too. So he was really noisy and when Bob was arrested, they followed his

example and a big picture of Bob as a young fellow, with a present-day picture,

‘Robert Cox Arrested,’ you know, and the paper made a hell of a noise about it.

(Interviewee #8).

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Taylor argues that context matters in witnessing, noting that positions are specific and limit perspective. Witnesses are not capable of seeing everything but rather see “…a function of where we happen to be standing – literally, politically, economically, and metaphorically” (Taylor 261). The writers for the Herald used their unique position as writers for an English-language newspaper, mostly under the radar of the military and protected by foreign powers, to report the truth about what was happening, thus holding the military accountable and making the truth of their repression widely known.

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Chapter 8: Conclusion

While some books and articles on the history of the press in Argentina, especially during the military dictatorship, do cover the legacy and role of the Herald, they are primarily written by former writers for the paper and do not attempt to make many theoretical applications. In this work, I argue that the Herald bore witness to the repression of the military dictatorship. I do so by analyzing new primary source material that I gathered – archives from the Herald and interviews with its readers – through the lens of several key theories on the act of bearing witness. Through this work, I offer a unique perspective on the legacy of the Herald, a paper that played a crucial role during the military dictatorship and remains a shining example of how to bear witness in times of repression and state-sponsored terrorism, even in light of its recent closure.

Naturally, this work was subject to some limitations. In accordance with my budget, I only had two weeks to conduct research in Buenos Aires and therefore focused the scope of my archival research to the years of the military dictatorship, 1976-1983.

Given more time, I would have analyzed articles from earlier in the paper’s history to understand whether or not their position of reporting truthfully and critically on current events and bearing witness to repression was expressed in other times throughout

Argentinean history. From the interviews I conducted, individuals have told me that the paper always held a strong legacy of protecting human rights and took a politically- neutral and honest approach to its coverage; however, with more time, I would have drawn these conclusions for myself in the archives. Furthermore, I would have conducted additional interviews. My interviews surveyed a wide range of individuals with regards to their connections to the paper. Some were former editors or writers, others were recent

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expats who only read the paper shortly before its closure, and others still wrote opinion pieces and read the paper diligently. However, I would seek more diversity in my interviewees, interviewing more Argentineans who read this small English-language newspaper, interviewing more women to balance out the mostly men who were interviewed, speaking with activists such as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and interviewing young people to determine what they read now that there is not a strong

English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires.

Future research would benefit from a comparative study of the Herald to other prominent newspapers that were active during the dictatorship. My study analyzes how the Herald bore witness to the events of the dictatorship; the literature indicates that the majority of papers failed to do so. A future study could compare the ways in which editorials in the Herald covered the dictatorship or called attention to the military leaders in contrast to editorials and news items in other papers. A longitudinal comparative approach could also be taken, in which the ways in which the Herald covered news events in Argentina (and the world) changed under different editors over the years to understand just how instrumental Robert Cox was in leading the Herald to bear witness.

Ultimately, this research calls upon us to question the ways in which the press can use its position and influential role in society to speak truth to power; to bear witness to repression; to tell the tales of those who can no longer speak. The Herald serves as an example of a paper that used its position as a small, English-language paper in Buenos

Aires to bear witness to the atrocities committed by the government, ultimately contributing to bringing international attention to the military dictatorship. By writing truthfully, every day, about what was taking place throughout Argentina, the writers of

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the Herald created an archive that actively recorded the repression occurring. The editorials that questioned the government and demanded justice and due process, especially those written by Robert Cox, gave a voice to the paper and subsequently a voice to those who were, as Levi and Agamben describe, the true witnesses – the dead and disappeared who could no longer speak for themselves. The Herald has etched into the memory of history every event that took place during the military dictatorship. From the names of the disappeared that few others dared inscribe to the historic trials that brought justice to the military leaders, the Herald created a record and a legacy that both honors those who could not speak for themselves and instructs future generations on the value of taking up the responsibility and role of witness in times of repression. Primo

Levi speaks to the ultimate purpose of bearing witness: to prevent future atrocities:

We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experiences, we have

collectively witnessed a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely

because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone…It happened, therefore it can

happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can

happen everywhere. (199).

By bearing witness to the repression and state-sponsored terrorism of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina, Robert Cox and the Buenos Aires Herald have told the tales of the victims who lost their own voices and demonstrated the necessity of speaking out and witnessing during the most extreme repression, to ensure that it will happen nunca más – never again.

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