2023-10-08 08:10:06
The authors Martín Malharro and Diana López Gijsberts, in The great graphic media in Argentina and their editorial policy during 1976-1983, affirm that in 1978 two World Cups were played: the soccer one and the political one. The military regime used the success of the cup as a political victory. He tried the same strategy years later, with Malvinas, although with a different outcome.
The ultimate objective was to remain in power. And for that they had to show a united country and dispel the growing doubts, both inside and outside the country, about what was happening in Argentina.
The results of that attempt to cover up the crimes of the dictatorship with the fervor of football were twofold. On the one hand, they did their job and stifled questions – albeit only briefly – and therefore perpetuated the regime. However, a “b side” cannot be ignored, forgotten at times. And because of the World Cup, because of the arrival of journalists from all over the world to Argentina, the complaints of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo began to be heard abroad.
Frits Jelle Barend and Jan van der Putten are two of the Dutch journalists who contributed to this task, interviewing the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and asking Videla about the disappeared. Both reporters are visiting the country, within the framework of the 40th anniversary of uninterrupted democracy in Argentina, and they remember those days.
Awareness. Barend and Van der Putten’s alibi to get to Argentina was the World Cup, although both had already heard about the dictatorship. “We knew what was happening,” they say. The information had reached their ears and they were determined “to fulfill our duty as journalists” and “to tell about the missing” even if that meant putting their own lives at risk.
“That was not a normal interview. I didn’t ask questions, they spoke directly,” recalls Jan van der Putten. The video report on the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, made by the journalist on the first day of the World Cup, is one of the most outstanding audiovisual documents of the time. Even today it is used in schools to tell the story.
In that tape you see and hear Marta Moreira de Alconada Aramburú, and so many other mothers desperate to give their testimony: “We just want to know where our children are. Alive or dead, but we want to know where they are. We no longer know who to turn to. Consulates, embassies, ministries, churches, everywhere the doors have been closed to us. That’s why we beg you, you are our last hope. Please help us! Help us, please! “They are our last hope.”
The mothers had long lists of names of the missing that they showed to the journalist. In those years, making a report and interviewing people who disappeared on public roads was a revolutionary act. Although there were media outlets that denounced the atrocities of the dictatorship, they were either clandestine or used various strategies to avoid censorship, expropriation or kidnapping. Recording an interview in the Plaza was unthinkable.
“Many of my friends disappeared forever,” says Van der Putten. His last night in Argentina he went to dinner with his friends and colleagues. “I told them: ‘You have to get out of here too, because this is too dangerous.’ One agreed with me. The other one doesn’t. ‘Worse than now it’s not possible,’” Van der Putten remembers telling him.
“I managed to get out. And there I read the news and, very young, I could see the news in which they said that both were missing,” he says. “We had arranged that we were going to call each other every two or three days, to stay in touch. But never again.”
“I believe that nothing happened to us because we were foreigners, so that other international organizations would not get involved. The Dutch government said that, if something happened to us, the final between Argentina and Holland would not be played,” he says.
“It was known that Argentina was on its way to Chile with Pinochet, or worse. Indeed it was worse. Then I returned to Argentina during the Malvinas War and saw the beginning of the end,” the journalist recalls.
At the time of the Malvinas War, the regime had lost followers and the economy was falling. The dictatorship intended to improve its image by presenting a triumphalist painting of the Malvinas. That strategy, which had worked in the World Cup, failed enormously with the Malvinas.
World. “The World Cup was not for football, but to defend Videla. The same operation was done at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games,” declares journalist Frits Jelle Barend.
The World Cup started on a Thursday at 4 pm: same day and same time that the Mothers get together. To this day they meet on Thursdays. That custom began in 1977, a year after the coup d’état, and a year before the World Cup.
In 1978, therefore, the routine meeting to ask for their children was already known. “Who thought that the Cup would start at that time? The decision was made because they did not want journalists to go to the Plaza de Mayo to interview them,” says Barend. The regime called them “crazy mothers,” a way of discrediting their requests.
“I decided I didn’t care about going to the stadium. “I was going to go to the Plaza,” says Barend. “At 3:30 the women began to arrive… One, another, twenty. I approached them and said: ‘I’m a journalist from Holland and I want to know your stories. What happens to their children, to their husbands, to their parents?’”
“They all had something to tell. They told me: ‘Please! Write about my son, name my father, tell about my uncle. Please! Please! “Write!” she says. “They gave me letters, phone numbers. It was very impressive, I will never forget those five important minutes in my life. After a few moments some men came to speak ill of them and I confronted them. I told them women weren’t crazy. And then I never saw them again,” says Barend.
The journalist returned to his hotel. “I wasn’t afraid, but he was worried,” he admits. He asked his partner to please sleep in the same room as him that night: “I wanted him to be next to me when it happened, when they kidnapped me.”
That night nothing happened. Days later, he ran into a woman he never saw again. “The girl approached me and she told me to be careful, that ‘they’ read my articles. I don’t know what happened to her,” he says.
Videla. Frits Jelle Barend and Jan van der Putten interviewed the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo on the first day of the World Cup. The last one, Barend faced evil face to face.
The journalist posed as a Dutch soccer player to interview Jorge Rafael Videla at the celebration dinner after the Argentine victory in the ’78 cup.
Videla was sitting in the center of a long table. Barend pretended to be part of the squad to enter the room; They were happy to receive Dutch. Once inside, he put aside his mask. The journalist approached Videla from behind, while the diners remained seated. “I took out my tape recorder and said something like this:
—I am a journalist from Holland, congratulations on your World Cup.
—Ah! Thank you thank you very much.
-I have a problem. Where are the missing people?
-Sorry?
—There are many people missing. I went to Plaza de Mayo, I spoke with the Mothers.
-No no. Are lies.
-They are not lies.
—In your country there was also a war.
—You know, my whole family died in Auschwitz.
-Those things happen.
“After five minutes, people came and asked me to please leave it, because they wanted to eat,” he says.
Barend was ready to leave Argentina. “I preferred to go to Chile with Pinochet than continue with Videla,” he says. He got on the plane. They asked him to come down. And then he came back up. He never knew what happened during those hours of waiting, he never understood why they took him off the plane.
This week Barend returned to Plaza de Mayo. “To me, those women are heroes,” she says. “I just did my duty. Between life and death there is no objectivity. It’s one side or the other,” adds Jan van der Putten.
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