Argentina Belatedly Celebrates a Journalist Hero

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Time Magazine

Argentina Belatedly Celebrates a Journalist Hero
By Uki Goñi / Buenos Aires Sunday, Aug. 01, 2010

Argentina is finally celebrating an unsung British hero who three decades ago pitted his tiny English-language newspaper against ferocious generals in order to publicize the fact that tens of thousands of people were being made to "disappear" in concentration camps.

When Army tanks rolled into Buenos Aires on March 24, 1976, to depose the constitutional government of Maria Estela Peron (the widow and vice-president of Argentine strongman Juan Peron who had died in office in 1974) London-born Robert Cox was the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, a sleepy, century-old English-language daily with a circulation confined to Argentina's "Anglos," the cricket-playing and tea-consuming descendants of immigrants who had arrived in the late 19th century to work on the country's British-built railroads. The new regime imposed strict press censorship and set up secret death camps in which up to 30,000 mostly young opponents of the regime were eventually "disappeared."
(See how Argentina is haunted by its history.)

The mothers of these victims pleaded for assistance, but none was forthcoming from an Argentine press terrified of military reprisals. In desperation, they turned to the tiny Herald and Cox began publishing stories of the kidnappings on the front page. "I was only doing my job as a journalist," he says. But it proved to be critical because the rest of the Argentine press chose not to bear witness to the crimes. With a populace hungry for news, the Herald's circulation jumped from a few thousand to more than 20,000 copies daily. He managed to save many lives.
(See how Argentina dealt with the skeletons of the junta's "dirty war.")

~snip~
By then, the White House had taken notice of Cox's reporting. U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who took office in 1977, sent his specially-appointed Undersecretary for Human Rights, Patricia Derian, to Buenos Aires to meet with Cox and to demand explanations from the nation's murderous generals. That helped mount international criticism of the junta, helping to isolate it. When the generals lost the 1982 Malvinas war to Margaret Thatcher's British military, which came to oust Argentine troops that had invaded the U.K.'s Falklands outpost, it propelled the regime towards a collapse the year after.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007460,00.html?xid=rss-world&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Fworld+%28TIME%3A+Top+World+Stories%29

[Peace Patriot]

1. My father couldn't write this book because of the guilt he felt at not being able to save more lives

"'My father couldn't write this book because of the guilt he felt at not being able to save more lives,' says David Cox." --from the OP

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This touched me deeply. I have often thought of the grief, pain and mental torture that regimes like the Bush Junta create even in courageous people, and in society's insiders as well as outsiders--for instance, in the U.S. military jag lawyers who tried to stop the Bush Junta's torture. I wonder if some of them feel the same way--they couldn't do enough. I've also thought about the semi-complicit--essentially innocent, but who contribute in some way to atrocities--for instance, young soldiers who were/are involved in incidents that become atrocities. They didn't STOP behavior, they didn't OBJECT to attitudes, that led to atrocities. Their consciences later drive them crazy, because they are not evil people. Or even those who commit atrocities, who also are not inherently bad people, but who have been encouraged by their commanders in Washington, or who break under the pressure of the dreadful situations that their commanders have put them in. They may never recover. They may never be able to face what they have done. (Those who do are particularly courageous.) This kind of carnage is all around us, now--thanks to the Bushites. And even the good suffer--suffer enormously--from what they were unable to do.

Leaders' descents into barbarism--mass murder, unjust war, torture, rape, systematic abuse--INFECT society with a terrible illness. The good and the courageous can never do enough to stop the horrors. This man, Cox, who was so courageous, was also so bothered by all those whom he couldn't save, that he could never write about it. Think about that. Not even years later. Nazism (extreme rightwingerdom) not only acts like a poison, deliberately injected into society, targeting certain individuals and groups for death, it also acts like a disease, randomly infecting the society with fevers of guilt, regret and bad dreams. The survivors' very survival gives them pain.

I feel it myself, now. The Bushites slaughtered a million innocent people in Iraq, and tortured thousands worldwide. Did I do enough to stop this? I'll bet that even those who upended their lives to stop it--people like Cindy Sheehan--feel that they didn't do enough. It is a very, very, VERY difficult problem when your government turns nazi. Not doing enough could eat you alive, forever. Those who depend on you, those whom you love, are important, too. How much do you sacrifice? How far do you go? If you draw a line somewhere, is that okay--when others are being tortured and sent to their deaths? How far can you go, and WHAT can you do? What would be effective? What is possible?

Very difficult questions. Robert Cox never stopped asking them, good journalist and good person that he was. The rightwing terror in Argentina haunted him to his death. That is a very painful truth--all the more painful given the U.S. complicity in those horrors.

But all we can do--whatever our regrets--is to learn from our failures and try to bring our deepest human values--peace, justice, fairness--and smarter action to the current struggle against nazism, the one in our society, which is on-going. More wars are planned, believe me, and yet more injustice and horror--in addition to the "mop-up" in Iraq and the raging disaster in Afghanistan. Our corporate rulers and war profiteers have learned that they can do what they wish, with our money, and our government and its war machine. They now control the vote counting system, in addition to the media and both political parties. There is no obstacle to their continued use of the U.S. war machine to their purposes. No individual can solve this problem. No one journalist. No one activist. It can only be solved by a general awakening of the American people and a collective effort--a peaceful, and strategically smart, uprising. This has occurred in many countries in Latin America--including Argentina (the restoration of democracy, the revolt against "neo-liberalism"). We should look to them for models, for lessons and for hope.