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"Videla is a moderate, a professional soldier in every sense of the word, a constitutionalist who, while defending that Mrs. Perón should be deposed, wants to leave power in the hands of civilians, if possible." The quotation mark is taken from a report sent by the US Ambassador to Argentina, Robert C. Hill, to Henry Kissinger, on the eve of the coup on March 24, 1976, the beginning of seven and a half years of authoritarian governments in which Videla acted as the first among peers and developed a policy of holy war. Everything sounds like read, right? Wasn't Pinochet famous for being a loyal military man to Allende? Wasn't Franco an almost liberal general whose ambition only Manuel Azaña sensed?

The story is complex and uncertain, especially if emotional and psychological factors are mixed. Were those moderates turned into simple opportunistic autocrats? Were they cynical, were they unfathomable souls? In Videla's case, the doubt is greater, since his life, before the coup, is that of the perfect man without attributes.

Now, 95 years after Videla's birth and seven years after her death, Confesión, the new novel by Argentine Martín Kohan (Anagrama), addresses this elusiveness. Among other things, Confesión reconstructs his childhood in Mercedes, a barracks city, 96 kilometers from Buenos Aires . What do you find that Kohan could be a harbinger of the role of Videla in the 70s? A pulcrísimas ways , an obsessive self - absorption and little else.

For a Spanish reader vaguely familiar with recent Argentine history, Videla is the most identifiable of dictators. More than Admiral Massera and much more than aviator Agosti . What was the reason why Videla stood out? Was he more charisma, was he smarter, was he fiercer?

"None of those things, and that is partly what appealed to me and prompted me to write this novel," explains Kohan, winner of the 2007 Herralde Prize for Moral Sciences. “Videla presided over the first Governing Board in the most brutal years of the dictatorship and assumed his full command responsibility with respect to the actions of State terrorism . But he was not the one with the greatest political ambition, nor the most intelligent, nor the fiercest; All this, for that matter, could correspond to Massera, responsible for the main clandestine center for torture and disappearance of people, the ESMA. Videla offered a severe but correct image, dapper, composed, rigorous. That disturbing combination of righteousness and criminality is what summoned me.

Some facts: Jorge Rafael Videla took his names from Jorge and Rafael, his older brothers who died before he was born. His father was a colonel, the son of a line of provinces with a certain lineage: military, ambassadors, politicians ... His mother, Olga, was a formal bourgeois girl. In his house there was no room for transgression and Jorge Rafael accepted the rules. He studied in Buenos Aires, followed the military tradition, married someone of his class, was a very virtuous Christian ...

Confession is not a history book, it is a novel and in its pages evocation weighs more than information. But, if we search in El dictatador, Jorge Rafael Videla's secret and public history , the biography written by María Seoane and Vicente Muleiro (Penguin Random House), we will not find terror announcements either. Everything interesting happens from the eve of the Coup.

Seoane and Muleiro confirm Martín Kohan's opinion: Massera was, among the military of the Junta, the man of talent for politics as a transaction : he devised bartering, bluffing and adulation to consolidate his power and that of his clientele in the Navy. On the eve of the coup, Massera pressured Isabel Perón to resign, arguing that it was the middle officers who could stand up and then negotiating to guarantee that the Navy would control a third of the ministries . Videla, on the other hand, said that she was only guided by responsibility. More or less, it was true.

No account of dictatorships is complete if it does not include those who fought it. The second part of Confession portrays Operation Pelícano , an attack by the People's Revolutionary Army, which in 1977 accessed the plan of the Maldonado river casing under the city of Buenos Aires . An ERP command went through that secret channel and reached the Jorge Newbery Airport subsoil, where it installed 500 kilos of TNT. The plan was for the airport runway to burst the moment Videla was taking off. The bomb exploded but Videla saved her life by inches.

"It was an almost desperate attempt, although sustained by an incredible optimism today," explains Kohan. “The truth is that, by the time the coup occurred in March 1976, the combat capacity of the armed organizations was practically nullified. From then on, what followed was a policy of destroying all political, social, and cultural resistance; the implementation of State terrorism to paralyze the rest of the population and annul all emancipatory ambitions in Argentine society.

Who were the ERP clandestines? University people, middle class or something else. "They were from a generally good social background (but not necessarily from Buenos Aires) and had a strong ideological formation. In the relationship of their revolutionary project with the popular masses (and in fact: in not having managed to strengthen that relationship) lies one of the keys to defeat. I do not want to simplify the question of social composition in the ERP, there was everything, of course. But it was not a sector that achieved roots in the popular masses, that's for sure ", explains Kohan.

In the last chapter of her book, the story is told of a woman from Buenos Aires, also middle class, who longed for the stability that the military promised , but who was not a cruel person, nor a fearsome fascist. In her dilemma, she ended up becoming an accomplice of the military. "In Argentina, a lot has been thought about all this: the culture of fear, passive complicity, what could or could not be done. But I understand that literature allows a more concrete investigation of how some social and personal mechanisms specifically work, hence my interest".

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