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A film that looks for the shades of grey

McNamara’s documentary tells the epic story of a decent journalist with nuanced approach

By Sebastián Lacunza
Editor-in-Chief

Some things you might have read in the Herald in the first years of the dictatorship:
“The day after the July 9 Independence Day celebrations finds Argentina so much better off than this time last year that it would be hard to believe.” Followed by lines of praise for the economic situation. “Foreign visitors ask each other in amazement: Where’s the crisis? ... There is only one blot on this panorama of things which seem to be fine and improving — Argentina’s image in the world. Powerful interests might be distorting the fact but people are mysteriously disappearing. The flow has slowed down to trickle but has not dried up completely. We have repeatedly said that until (the disappearances) have been reduced to zero, we cannot say that everything said (abroad) about us is a lie.” This editorial of the Buenos Aires Herald, headlined “The day after July 9”, published on July 10, 1977, closes with the demand that despite the “unanimous support for anti-terrorist policies,” human rights be respected (this text and those which follow come from the Emilio Mignone archives).
Only a month after the text quoted above (on August 12, 1977), the main front-page headline over four columns announced: “The APDH seeks to investigate the disappearances.” These were times in which almost all the press was denouncing an anti-Argentine campaign, inventing “terrorists killed in shootouts” and faking stories of children “abandoned by the extremists.”
The Herald was then edited by Robert Cox, who was born in London in 1933 and came to Argentina in 1959. As the denunciations of human rights violations grew in scale and intensity, the editor would dig deeper. Since all doors were closed to them — those of the government, the media and the Church — the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo came to the Herald in procession. Sometimes there were so many of them that the Herald editor had to bring the meeting to order by standing on his desk. Cox would handle each of them, case by case, with extraordinary skill. The visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was a good occasion to give the missing faces and names on the front page of his newspaper, a method which served to save lives. In other cases, always in agreement with their families, prudence prevailed when broadcasting an illegal arrest might accelerate a final disappearance.
On December 18, 1979, the Mothers bade Cox farewell via a newspaper ad (the journalist had been banished into exile along with his family): “Robert Cox, the decent journalist, the man of integrity. Thank you for having been one of the so very few journalists who showed through their professional work their understanding of our pain.”
After having supported — like almost all the press — the military coup of March, 1976, Cox soon learned of the disappearances of members of Anglo-Argentine families. On the morning of July 4 that same year, the journalist went to the San Patricio church in Belgrano R, where a few hours previously a death squad had wiped out five members of the Irish Pallottine religious order. From there he went to the United States Embassy where the Independence Day reception was being celebrated. He took advantage of that occasion to upbraid the military top brass for the massacre (David Cox, Guerra Sucia, Secretos Sucios, Sudamericana, 2010).
Cox was (and remains today) a liberal (in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term) journalist very much in the middle of the road with childhood memories of Nazism, while Andrew Graham-Yooll (born in the southern suburbs in 1944), who had key contacts with human rights organisations and leftist groups, had already gone into exile. There were no secrets.
Tackling the role of the Buenos Aires Herald in the times of dictatorship invites some dangerous temptations. One of them would be to limit the narrative to goodies and baddies, omitting all personal factors and the tensions and the back and forth of a small newsroom in extreme circumstances.
Another alternative would be to force the facts to resurrect the “two demons” theory so much in vogue with the intellectual circles surrounding President Mauricio Macri. This theory would pretend that in the 1970s this country underwent a war between two terrorisms, one the state and the other Marxist-Peronist, and that both are comparable and should be judged by the same yardstick. The manual of this theory states that on every occasion an atrocity in the Esma Navy Mechanics School is named, equal time should be given to a kidnapping ordered by a Montonero leader. This vision, which falsifies the facts and ignores the judicial evidence which has piled up in Argentine courtrooms as to a systematic plan to eliminate dissidents orchestrated by the dictatorship, also presupposes an innocent society trapped between two demons. Yet neither one side nor the other is free from the political agenda of those who seek to exploit today what happened in the 1970s, not to mention complicities.
Messenger on a white horse, the work of the Australian journalist Jayson McNamara, manages to steer its way through the risks of making a documentary which does not dodge the shades of grey but goes out in search of them. The result is a complex narrative, which respects the facts but at the same time remains moving because the pain of the victims is there and because what Cox achieved during the dictatorship was genuinely an epic. To such a degree that Herald articles are cited to this day as judicial proof when trying crimes against humanity and Cox’s figure conjures enormous respect among human rights organisations, including those with profound ideological differences with the former Herald editor.
The documentary of McNamara — an sensitive reporter who was a Herald staffer in recent years — pays due tribute to the moral valour of an editor who seemed almost bewitched by Jorge Rafael Videla and José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, only to transform himself in a matter of months, into an implacable accuser of their atrocities and, some further years down the road, of their economic disasters. And when ordered to apply the brakes (former Navy Admiral Emilio Massera could not tolerate the final paragraphs which saw a “blot” in a crystal-clear horizon), Cox only accelerated at the cost of being stigmatised by his colleagues and his Recoleta neighbours. McNamara finds the human face of Cox and of many of those whom he helped and who accompanied him in those years and at the same time provides a historic testimony with valuable documents.
We are talking of the moral valour of a person — Cox — who rose up against state terrorism. I would like to add some lines here about his valour as a newspaper editor. Cox’s denunciation of human rights violations confronted him with one of his publishers, co-owner Kenneth Ruggeroni, a fervent admirer of Massera’s methods, who took advantage of the editor’s departure into exile to wipe his name off the masthead. And not just that. There were also many readers who would never have wanted their newspaper to fall “into Communist hands” and made their views known via letters to the editor. Cox opted for respecting facts over convenience.

@sebalacunza

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