A Matter of Interpretation

Horacio Verbitsky is, in a way, Argentina's Mike Wallace -- an aggressive, powerful, and determined investigative reporter, respected for a consistent string of major stories. You'd think they'd see eye to eye. But at the moment, Verbitsky is at odds with Wallace over a curious footnote to perhaps the most sensitive issue in Argentina.

Verbitsky, who writes a weekly political column for the left-leaning newspaper Pagina /12, stunned his readers in March with a story detailing the confessions of a former lieutenant commander in the Argentine navy, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo. As part of the military's war waged on leftist guerrillas from 1976 to 1983 -- the so-called "dirty war" -- Scilingo admitted that he was directly responsible for the deaths of thirty political prisoners who were thrown out of airplanes as part of the larger plan to rid the country of what the military considered to be subversives. Scilingo told Verbitsky that as many as 2,000 of what Argentinians call "the disappeared" died this way -- drugged, stripped naked, and tossed alive into the Atlantic Ocean.

Verbitsky's story opened up a wave of new criticism against Argentina's president, Carlos Menem, for the way the government had handled military officers accused of participating in the dirty war. In 1990, in a controversial move, Menem pardoned military officers and others accused of human rights abuses during that period, arguing that it was time for Argentina to move on, away from this painful part of its history.

 The Scilingo story also caught the attention of the U.S. media, including 60 Minutes, which flew Wallace to Buenos Aires to interview Scilingo and President Menem. Afterwards, Verbit-sky obtained a videotape of the Menem interview -- "We have no idea how he got it," says producer Bob Anderson -- and published a transcript of it in Pagina /12 on April 2, the same day 60 Minutes aired its segment.

 Near the end of the interview, Menem said something to Wallace that 60 Minutes did not include in its piece, but which Verbitsky and Pagina/12 thought was very significant. According to a videotape of part of the interview that was shown on the TELEFE television station in Buenos Aires, Menem described his own knowledge of something similar to the awful scenes that Scilingo had described. The president, who was a dissident himself during the dirty war, held as a prisoner on a ship, told Wallace, in Spanish, "And through the window of the ship, we could see with my companions how they brought in long lines of prisoners with their faces covered. And the cries of terror in the hold of the ship because of the tortures. Many were tortured for a long time and thrown out into the river. This is not something I was told about. This I have lived." esto lo vivi was the headline in Pagina /12; "This I have lived."

Menem's words raised a question that resonated throughout Argentina. Do the words add up to something that Menem ought to have divulged before? If he had personally witnessed dirty-war atrocities and never gone public with them until 1995, Menem would be open to serious criticism. After the Pagina/12 piece, the president said that he had not actually seen people thrown into the river. The Buenos Aires Herald quoted 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt as backing up the president. Wallace and Anderson, for their part, although they do not challenge Verbitsky's transcript of the interview with President Menem, both told cjr that they did not understand Menem to mean that he had personally witnessed any deaths. About Verbitsky, Wallace suggested, "He doesn't like Menem."

With 60 Minutes in his corner, meanwhile, President Menem called Verbitsky a "terrorist with a pen." Verbitsky, furious, says his reputation has been damaged. "The trust of the public is my only asset," he says.

Part of the heat surrounding the incident stems from the fact that Menem was running for reelection at the time the 60 Minutes interview was broadcast. He eventually won reelection, avoiding a runoff, with 49.67 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile the "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo," a group of women whose children are among the disappeared, continue to march in protest in the main government square in Buenos Aires each week, waving signs that read, "We don't want the list of the dead. We want lists of the assassins of our children." They have been marching in that square, and waving such signs, for nearly two decades.

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