Kidnapped by the Junta

Inside Argentina's Wars with Britain and Itself

Julian Manyon

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781785788536
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

'Heart-thumpingly powerful... history told from the closest and most frightening quarters.' SINCLAIR MCKAY, author of The Secret Life of Bletchley Park 'Shocking, terrifying and revealing. Ground-breaking history, expertly told - a dramatic new insight into the Falklands conflict.' ROGER BOLTON, BBC journalist and broadcaster Forty years on from the outbreak of the war, acclaimed TV journalist Julian Manyon digs down into Argentina's 'Dirty War' and its effect on the Falklands conflict On May 12th, 1982, after the first bloody exchanges of the Falklands War, journalist Julian Manyon and his TV crew were kidnapped on the streets of Buenos Aires and put through a traumatic mock execution by the secret police. Less than eight hours later they were invited to the Presidential Palace to film a world-exclusive interview with an apologetic President Galtieri, the dictator and head of the Argentine Junta.Spurred on by the recent release of declassified CIA documents about Argentina's 'Dirty War', Manyon discovered that his kidnapper was a key figure in the Junta's bloody struggle against left-wing opposition, with a terrifying record of torture and murder. Also in the secret documents were details of the wider picture - the turmoil inside the Junta as the war with Britain got under way, and how Argentina succeeded in acquiring vital US military equipment which made its war effort possible.Published on the 40th anniversary of the Falklands conflict, this book is an extraordinary insight into the war behind the war. Manyon provides a harrowing depiction of the campaign of terror that the Junta waged on its own population, and a new perspective on an episode of history more often centred on Mrs Thatcher, the Belgrano and the battle of Goose Green.

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CHAPTER 1

Swallowed

Amid all the dramas of the career in journalism that I had so much desired, I had not expected to have an hour to contemplate my own imminent execution.

As the car rolled forward at a deliberately steady pace, I lay constrained and helpless on my back in the rear footwell, a cloth over my head blocking almost all vision, a man’s knee jammed against my neck pinning my head against the back of the seat in front and a hard, tanned hand holding an automatic pistol pressed against the side of my head.

The words were in Spanish but even with my fragmentary knowledge of the language I could understand them. ‘Quiet,’ the harsh voice said, and then with a short gesture of the pistol, ‘When we get where we are going, I will kill you with this.’

It was May 12th, 1982, in the age before training courses in hazardous environments and psychological counselling. As I briefly reflected on the mess in which I found myself, only unhelpful thoughts occurred.

I had been close to death before. So determined had I been to become an international journalist that more than a decade earlier I 2had launched myself as a freelance in Vietnam. There, following the American invasion of Cambodia in a battle too obscure for mention in the history books, I had survived the destruction of a Cambodian Army battalion by the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong, as untrained Cambodian youngsters were ambushed and shot down by terrifyingly effective NVA regulars charging with fixed bayonets. As night fell an American airborne gunship trying to save their allies added to the chaos and terror by firing long red streams of tracer fire, which appeared suddenly and silently in the darkness, followed by a deafening roar as the sound of the machine guns caught up. I had saved myself by playing dead while communist troops sprinted past around me, and I found out in that paddy field what it is to tremble uncontrollably. In the end, as dawn broke, I was able to crawl out alive.1

This was different but, if anything, even more terrifying: a slow steady progress through moving traffic in the streets of Buenos Aires as I lay helpless and unable to affect my fate in any way. In the jargon of the Argentinian secret police which I learned later, I had been ‘swallowed’ and ‘walled in’.

There were three men in the saloon car that carried me: the driver, a man in the front seat operating a radio on the dashboard and the man holding the gun to my head who appeared to be their commander. Brief incomprehensible radio messages were occasionally exchanged.

One thing was very clear: the men who had seized me and who now held my life in their hands were professionals in the art of kidnapping. In the early afternoon, together with the other members of our British television team, I had emerged from the Argentine Foreign Ministry after a failed attempt to interview Minister Nicanor Costa Méndez, the Oxford-educated civilian described by some as 3the ‘evil genius’ of the military regime. Costa Méndez, who walked with the aid of a stick, had been angered by the press of journalists and my insistent questions and brushed us off with an infuriated wave of the hand. Minutes later, as we stepped into the tree-lined square outside the handsome colonial-style building and got into our car, I was suddenly swept up in a series of events that seemed to happen in slow motion but in reality occurred at lightning speed: another car, which I remember as being grey in colour, cut in front of us forcing us to stop and disgorged strongly-built men clad in sharp suits. They seized me with firm hands while shouting, ‘Police!’ Suddenly I was looking up at trees we had been passing and, before I could make any real attempt at resistance, I was propelled into the back of their vehicle. A pistol was pressed against my head. I had no idea what was happening to the rest of the team. I just knew that they weren’t there.

The doors slammed shut and in a motion that immediately terrified me, the men produced what appeared to be custom-made leather thongs with which they expertly tied the door handles to the door locks in this pre-electronic vehicle. As I dimly realised amid the shock and mounting panic, this made it virtually impossible for me or any other victim, no matter how desperate, to kick open a door. It was a practised routine which these men had clearly carried out many times before.

The car, built by the Ford factory in Argentina, was called a Falcon, a solid, practical model that was already notorious as the vehicle of choice of the secret police. It moved quietly through the streets which despite the war with Britain were choked with traffic. As was their aim, the kidnappers had achieved complete control. Resistance was beyond my power and would, in any case, have been futile and probably fatal. From beneath the cloth covering my 4head I caught occasional glimpses of the upper storeys of some of the buildings we were passing, the fine old ones in the centre, then more modern structures as we began to move towards the outskirts of the city.

Suddenly I saw gantries carrying familiar yellow signs advertising the Lufthansa airline and realised that we were passing the international airport where we had arrived some ten days before.

‘Look,’ I said in broken Spanish-English to the man holding the gun to my head, ‘In my pocket I’ve got dollars. Please take the money and throw me out here.’

No word came in reply but I felt a horny hand force its way into my trouser pocket searching for the money, some $800, which he silently removed. Without the slightest change of pace, the car rolled on. When I made another attempt to speak I was silenced with a slap. Then, as our car seemed to move through traffic, my knees were struck with the pistol butt to make me pull them down beneath the level of the window.

But as my kidnapper scrabbled for the money he had given me a brief glimpse of his face. I was too frightened to look at him calmly with a view to recall but something remained lodged in my memory all the same.

295 Notes

1. The destruction of the Cambodian Army battalion I was accompanying took place on November 23rd, 1970 near the town of Skoun, north of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. United Press International reported on the battle and my escape on November 24th.

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CHAPTER 2

War

In May 1982 the eyes of the world were fixed on events taking place at one of the most remote and obscure points on the planet. So little-known were the Falkland Islands that some of the British servicemen hastily dispatched there had initially believed that they were being sent to islands north of Scotland rather than to the middle of the South Atlantic. Even the then Defence Secretary, Sir John Nott and the Chief of the General Staff, Lord Bramall, later confessed to similar ignorance when they both told a seminar in June 2002 that at the outset they had had no clear idea of exactly where the islands lay.1

In my case, though claiming no greater knowledge, I was at least in the right continent when the crisis erupted in late March. Together with a crew from Thames Television’s current affairs programme TV Eye I was filming a report on the elections in war-torn El Salvador, the second time I had been sent to that beautiful, unfortunate land on the north-west coast of Latin America. Our team included cameraman Ted Adcock, a dashing figure and winner of awards for his work, soundman Trefor Hunter, quiet, reserved and highly professional, and our producer, Norman Fenton, a canny, 6bearded, Scots-accented veteran of the television industry. Together we filmed blown bridges and murder victims lying in the street and took cover as an election office came under fire. Then came a telephone call from our Editor in London.

Mike Townson was a man possessed of a curious charisma with his stocky, overweight frame and heavy lips. He had always reminded me of a tribal chieftain making his dispositions from the substantial chair behind his desk. Now his instructions were brisk and to the point. Some Argentines had landed on a British-owned island called South Georgia. It was becoming an international crisis. We should leave El Salvador immediately and head for Buenos Aires. ‘Try to keep out of trouble,’ he said helpfully.

We had no idea how British journalists would be received in Argentina and it was agreed that our team would split up and make our way there by different air routes, in my case via Miami and Santiago in Chile. In fact, even though our journey took place just as Argentine troops were landing on the Falkland Islands, we experienced no difficulty with passport control or customs in Buenos Aires and were soon reunited. Following journalistic instinct, we quickly boarded yet another aircraft and flew to Comodoro Rivadavia, a southern oil town in Argentina’s tapering cone that ends near Antarctica and one of the key locations from which the invasion of the Falklands was being staged. There we had our first brush with the reality of trying to cover events in a country with which Britain was now effectively at war.

Within a few minutes of our arrival in the somewhat barren settlement, we were arrested by secret policemen dressed in plain clothes and equipped with pistols and walkie-talkies. They told us that Comodoro Rivadavia was now a military zone and escorted us to a local hotel where, as soon as we checked in, all the telephones were 7cut off to prevent us making outside calls. We were then told that we must leave the area by 10am the following day. Early next morning, in our desire to get at least a few images from the trip, we attempted to film a view of the ocean, looking in what we imagined was the direction of the Falkland Islands, and were immediately arrested by armed soldiers. Fortunately they were appeased by our promise to leave the town and we were permitted to return to the local airport, where we saw exactly why security was on such high alert. The runway was now lined with troops with their packs and rifles waiting to board C-130 transport aircraft for their flight to the Falklands. It was visual evidence that the Argentine Junta had no intention of backing down and was instead doubling up on its bet of seizing the islands.

We were able to fly back to Buenos Aires and in retrospect had been extremely fortunate. A few days later, three other British journalists, Simon Winchester of The Sunday Times and Ian Mather and Tony Prime of The Observer, ventured even further south and were also arrested. However, they were charged with espionage and spent the next twelve weeks as the war was fought sharing a cell in an unattractive Argentine prison which also housed thieves and murderers. It has occurred to me to wonder whether the relative ease of our own return to the capital produced in my case a certain over-confidence that contributed to our later near-disaster.

With the clarity of hindsight we were dangerously naive. Reporting on a war from the enemy’s capital held obvious perils, but even as the British task force assembled and set out we were among those prey to the widespread belief that this confrontation would end without serious bloodshed. Our first days in Buenos Aires only served to strengthen the sense of unreality.

Even as the crisis gathered pace the Argentine capital remained a captivating city which symbolised the country’s extraordinary 8history: the elegant centre with its fine French-style neo-classical buildings, punctuated by florid Art Nouveau masterpieces, all products of the astonishing building boom between 1880 and 1920 when Buenos Aires was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world and Argentina, fuelled by its vast agricultural hinterland, seemed destined to become one of the world’s richest countries.

It was a land originally seized by Spanish soldiers and fortune-hunters who had exterminated or driven out most of its indigenous Amerindians – now just 2% of the population – and was then filled by waves of European immigrants ranging from Italian slum-dwellers to English landowners, Russians trying to escape Tsarism or revolution and yet more Spaniards, often peasants fr...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• About the Author
• List of illustrations
• 1: Swallowed
• 2: War
• 3: End of the Road
• 4: Dictator
• 5: Dinner with the Junta
• 6: Secrets
• 7: Executioners
• 8: ‘A world so terrible that it is difficult to imagine’
• 9: Americans Divided
• 10: Flight of the Condor
• 11: Weapons for Lives?
• 12: Follow the Money
• 13: Children of the Disappeared
• 14: Hubris and Fear
• 15: Murderer Turns Art Lover
• 16: The Gamble that Failed
• 17: Fall of the ‘Dirty Warriors’
• 18: The Long Wait for Justice
• 19: Open Wounds
• 20: The Struggle to Forget
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright