Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number by Jacobo Timerman

Author:Jacobo Timerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

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A woman doctor is dragged by her hair, hands tied behind her, through the long corridor of a city hospital in Buenos Aires. The man dragging her is fat and dressed in civilian clothes. At a particular moment her legs are also bound, she’s covered with a blanket, placed on a stretcher, and put into a small truck. About fifteen armed men participate in this procedure.

They arrived in three automobiles, entered without any identification documents, asked for the place where the doctor practiced her specialty, psychiatry, and then took her away. No one questioned that group of men as to who they were or whom they represented. No one intervened on behalf of the doctor. The hospital authorities, other professionals, nurses, patients, everyone knew what was going on.

During the first months after the armed forces’ seizure of power in Argentina, no sector of the population suffered more from the wave of kidnappings and disappearances than psychiatrists. The intelligence services of the armed forces had reached the conclusion that psychiatrists knew many behind-the-scenes details about subversive urban guerrilla activities, and that the mission of certain psychiatrists was to bolster the spirits of guerrillas when they were depressed as a result of the hardships of clandestine life.

By what process does an intelligence officer in the Argentine armed forces arrive at the conviction that a psychiatrist with a patient linked in some way to subversive activity is privy to the guerrilla activities of that individual and his entire group?

The world of the Argentine armed forces is a closed, hermetic structure. Most of the officers’ wives are the sisters or daughters of men in the military. Nearly all are related, and whenever there’s a military regime, the civilians who participate are mostly relatives of the military or individuals who have frequented military circles, in precise anticipation of that moment when the armed forces will take power. In Argentina, a show of deference to the military has for fifty years been almost a political career in itself, yielding juicy benefits whenever a military coup takes place.

This pattern has separated the military from the most elemental currents of modern life, and has instilled in them a series of fantasies about the true meaning of the scientific, moral, literary, and religious elements that mankind has incorporated into its normal daily existence in recent decades. The ideology motivating the Argentine military stems more from a notion of the world they reject than from a world they would like to attain. They would be unable to pinpoint or outline the reality they care to see materialize in Argentina, but could quickly describe what it is that they hate. If asked what they want, their answer will be: a decent country, respectful of family life and patriotism. But ask them what they don’t want, and then you’ll be able to understand their view of the world and the difficulties they encounter when they must govern in accordance with such hatreds. On the other hand, as in every totalitarian mind, hatreds

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