I've Seen This Movie Before

This morning Joseph Horowitz sent me an article from The New York Times, the way a friend sends you something he knows will land. He knows a little of where I come from. He knew this would not read to me as news.

The piece, by Amanda Taub, carries a title sharper than anything I could improve on: "Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R." It reports on a new book by two political scientists, Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf — Making a Career in Dictatorship, from Oxford — and the book has done something most studies of repression never manage. It has named the men who do the dirty work, and explained why they volunteer for it.

The answer is not what we want it to be.

We prefer to believe that torture and disappearance require monsters — fanatics, sadists, true believers in some terrible idea. It is a comforting belief, because most of us are none of those things, and so we imagine we would never have served. The research says otherwise. Working from a remarkable trove of personnel records covering all of Argentina's army officers, Gläßel and Scharpf found that the secret police of the dictatorship — the men of Battalion 601, who ran the kidnappings and the torture and the death flights over the South Atlantic — were drawn disproportionately from the army's underperformers. The mediocre. The career-stalled.

Men who, in an ordinary "up or out" system, were headed nowhere, and who found in the dirty work a detour around their own failure. A stint as a monster could rescue a ruined career. The worse an officer's record, the likelier he was to take the job, and the lowest performers were handed the cruelest tasks.

Not fanatics. Strivers. The frustrated and the passed-over, looking for a promotion.

The authors trace the same pattern through the Nazi killing squads and Stalin's NKVD, and Taub extends it, carefully, toward the present — toward elected leaders who hollow out a democracy by building a "second ladder," a generously funded institution with low barriers to entry and a quiet promise of impunity, designed to attract exactly the people who could not get ahead anywhere else. I will let the reader follow that thread to wherever it leads in their own country. The book's argument does not need me to point.

What I want to say is smaller and more personal, and it is the reason Horowitz sent it to me.

I have already seen this movie.

In 1974 I was very young and I had a Super 8 camera. I did not choose Super 8 for its grain or its nostalgia — those affections came later. I chose it because it was small, and a small camera in Buenos Aires in those years drew less attention than a proper 16-millimeter rig. It let me stand on a street and film what was in front of me without announcing that I was filming. What was in front of me, predictably for an adolescent who thought he had discovered suffering, was human misery — the poverty and the exhaustion that a certain kind of young person mistakes for his own discovery. I recently found one of those first rolls. The footage is exactly what you would expect, and I am putting it here anyway, because it is the literal evidence behind the title of this essay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5ibC7GQRXk

It was around then that I met some of the people working in militant documentary — filmmakers who used the camera the way Gläßel and Scharpf's officers used the secret police, except in the opposite moral direction: as a detour, a way to do something that mattered when the ordinary channels were closed. They were trying to expose the poverty, the exploitation, and the deepening repression, first under a Peronist government already sliding toward terror, and then under the junta that followed. Among them, at the center, was Raymundo Gleyzer.

Gleyzer founded the Grupo Cine de la Base in 1973. He made films of denunciation in a country where, as someone once put it, explaining things to an audience had become a high-risk profession. On the 27th of May, 1976, two years after I was filming misery in the streets with my little camera, a task force took him at the door of the film workers' union. He was thirty-five. He was last seen alive in a clandestine detention center called El Vesubio, in the company of the writer Haroldo Conti. He has never reappeared. He is one of the thirty thousand the dictatorship disappeared.

The men who took him were, if the new research is right, not demons. They were colleagues of the mediocre officers in the data — men advancing their worthless careers.

The others scattered. That is what a dictatorship produces alongside its dead: a diaspora, a generation thrown across the world to begin again with nothing. I would meet them again in the unglamorous early years of exile — Jorge Denti in Mexico, who carried that cinema with him until his death a few years ago; Juana Sapire, Raymundo's partner who alongside their son Diego fund refuge in New York like myself, Diego Mas Trelles in Paris, who lives now in Barcelona. Diego was a very young man with a camera. That was enough. The tyranny put him in prison for it, and I have come to think that prison may be the strange reason he is alive, when Raymundo, who was not caught, is not.

I write about this because the article Horowitz sent me describes, in the cool language of social science, a machinery I watched assemble itself once, in my own city, in my own youth.

And here is the only thing I really know that the data confirms. The machinery does not announce itself with monsters. It does not arrive as a horror film with a villain you can recognize. It arrives as paperwork — as promotions, as a new agency generously funded, as a low bar to entry and a wink of impunity, as ordinary frustrated people discovering that cruelty is, for once, the thing that finally advances them. By the time the disappearances begin, the machinery has been built for months by men who simply wanted to get ahead.

That is what makes the recognition so cold. Not that it looks monstrous, but that it looks bureaucratic. Banal. Familiar.

I have seen this movie before. I know how it opens — quietly, with people just doing their jobs. And I know who does not survive the third act.

I would rather not see it again.

—

With thanks to Joseph Horowitz, who knew I would not be able to look away — and to Amanda Taub, whose article in The New York Times is the occasion for these notes. Gläßel and Scharpf's Making a Career in Dictatorship is published by Oxford University Press.