Nunca mas in Argentina The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War by John Simpson and Jana Bennet, (Robson Books, £12.95).

IMAGINE an autocratic government determined to terrorise its opposition into submission. This government decides to target one dissident a day. In the still of night the dissident is , abducted. The authorities will deny any knowledge of his whereabouts. He will be savegely tortured, then kept confined for as long as the authorities feel lie might be useful. When he has outlived his usefulness, he will be secretly executed.
If this pattern were to be repeated systematically, implacably, it would take that government close to 25 years to dispose of 9,000 dissidents. That is the number of people who were made. to "disappear", following the pattern I've just described, in just under four years in Argentina, in the mid-1970s.
While this was happening, glimpses of the horror were released by Amnesty International and other human rights organisations. Yet the full import of this campaign of annihilation, known in Argentina as the "dirty war", only became available towards the end of 1984.
One year earlier. Argentinahad returned to elected rule. The new democratic government of President Raul Alfonsin set up a commission, headed by the novelist Ernesto Sabato, to investigate what had happened to the thousands of Argentine "disappeared" persons. The Commission's report, Nunca Mks — (Never again) — filled 490 pages of small print with a catalogue of atrocities which even those "in the know" found shocking.
Now another similarly hefty book — 416 pages — brings the story of the "dirty war" to the English-speaking world. John Simpson (BBC Television's diplomatic editdr) and Jana Bennett (Producer and editor of the day on Newsnight) have built on Nunca Alas and on a few reporting assignments which took them to Argentina and put them directly in touch with some of the actors in this drama.
They have filled in the gaps by drawing extensively on the earlier reports by Anmesty International, and have made an effort to get good advice on the historical background to the "dirty war".
Their book The Disappeared: Voices From a Secret War, is at its best when they report directly. But they have tried to do too much, too quickly.
The "dirty war" did not just happen. It was the culmination of a series of progressively longer and harsher periods of military rule which started back in 1930. The conditions which made the "dirty war" possible took a long time to emerge, in a complex, confusing process which even Argentines and professional Argentine-watchers find it hard to explain cogently.
The authors of this book simply lack the necessary background information. And it shows. The book is riddled with glaring inaccuracies. Some are so trivial as to be merely irritating, like placing the diocese of a courageous, outspoken bishop on the wrong side of the Andes, in neighbouring Chile almost like putting Liverpool on the West side of the Irish Sea. Others, however, make nonsense of the events being narrated, like taking three generals with the same surname and mixing them up in three different ways, or starting the political career of Peron — the central figure of most of Argentina's last 40 years of history — as a leading minister of the government whose overthrow he engineered. Others are inexplicable, like the career attributed to the notorious Alfredo Astiz — of South Geor,gia fame — who starts as a Lieutenant, becomes a full Navy Captain in his twenties, then turns into a Lieutenant-Commander — two ranks down the scale — and finishes back again as a Lieutenant.
Because the facts are not grasped, the explanations are simplistic. The book becomes the tale of a horror which comes across as meaningless and mindless.
Eduardo Crawley