Bernard-Henri Lévy

It was a heated campaign—and a bitter controversy that separated left and right, political and intellectual leaders and, it goes without saying, the major editorialists of the Western press:  should we boycott the World Cup football tournament, the World Cup of the dictator-generals, the World Cup of Junta chief Jorge Videla, in short, Argentina’s World Cup?  Two years before, on March 24^th, 1976, the three commanders-in-chief of the armed forces had taken power, banishing Isabel Peron and her government.  They immediately installed an ultra-authoritarian, ultra-violent regime marked by mass disappearances and imprisonments.  A total of 300,000 victims.  Videla and his acolytes didn’t even bother to hide the fact that they were counting on the World Cup, on football and its stars, to put their dictatorship with a “human face” on display.  Expert goals and beautiful images.

In Europe, and particularly in France (the Blues had finally qualified for the final tournament, which hadn’t happened for a long time), this Argentine affair rapidly became a real motive for taking sides, for falling-outs, for controversy.  Boycott the dictator-generals’ Argentina?  It was, indeed, an idea not lacking in class.  But this objective was an illusion, and everyone knew it:  nothing ever resists, nothing ever can truly stand up against football, with its power, its economic stakes, and its universal appeal.  Nothing, not even the struggle against a dictatorship, not even the campaign for the most elementary of human rights any more than the mobilization of the mothers at the Plaza de Mayo, before the presidential palace, this famous Casa Rosada, tirelessly demanding information from the Videla dictatorship about their children who had disappeared forever, resists.

Nothing, and yet, to fight.

In December 1977, six months before this Mundial that caused such agitation and emotion, some intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, created COBA (Comité pour le boycott de l’organisation par l’Argentine de la coupe du Monde de football [Committee for the Boycott of Argentina’s Organization of the World Cup Football Tournament]).  Signatures abounded, up to 150,000 in this era when the anti-totalitarian struggle still made possible unexpected, unnatural some said, assemblings and alliances.  Thus Lévy obtained the signature of the communist, Aragon (he had just, by the way, played the role of Paul Denis in Aurélien, the novelist’s famous work, in a French television production) as well as the support of writer-journalist Jean-François Revel, who devoted the latter part of his life to the denunciation of communism.  Those who disparaged the boycott (and COBA) were numerous, powerful and determined, from one end of the ideological and cultural spectrum to the other.  The communist Guy Hermier denounced the manœuvres of COBA, Lévy, and others, claiming that “to propose a boycott of the Mundial amounts to irresponsibility or a trick.”  On the far right, his cause was taken up by Patrick Wajsman, a political pundit who was all for the Argentine Junta, on the pretext that any adversary of the Soviets (as was Videla’s case) becomes ipso facto an ally.  “These Parisian intellectuals, all those on the left who are seeking to carry out a politically-inspired operation, should be denounced,” he stated.

Obviously, Lévy was targeted in everyone’s sights.

Another strategy, to be conducted in parallel with the boycott appeal that, all concluded, was in vain, seemed possible:  to take advantage of football, or the matches and mediatisation, to go to Argentina, to observe, to write, to tell about it in the newspapers.  Use the sport to disconcert a dictatorial system, force a few football stars to take sides in this combat that was both just and legitimate.  As a quasi-debutant journalist, I was charged with this mission by Le Matin of Paris, a leftist daily that had been created a few months earlier.  A few days before leaving, a friend told me that Bernard-Henri Lévy would be the special envoy to Argentina for Le Nouvel Observateur, the big weekly newsmagazine of the French left, and for an American review of the New York and Washington left, The New Republic, and that we would probably be leaving on the same plane.

I did not know Lévy and had no prejudices in his favour or against him.  I had read Barbarism with a Human Face, and the book had seemed to me to represent an important moment in anti-totalitarian thought.  I freely admit, thirty-two years later, that I liked this figure of the intellectual, the Normalian, who refused the comfort and reclusion of the library and went out into the field, in the great tradition of reporters.  All the more so because he bothered people, Lévy, he irritated them, he enraged some of my colleagues who saw in him—ah, the danger of shopkeepers!—a sort of unfair competition.

First encounter on the plane and so, first conversations.  Argentina, of course, what we would do there, how we should go about it.  (He had more experience than did I, here on my first big story.)  We were sure it would be «easy», because there were so many of the media on their guard and so much passion concerning the Junta that Videla and his henchmen wouldn’t dare to repress, arrest, censure, forbid.  How naïve we were.  Attentive reading, pen in hand, of a thick pile of documentation that we hurriedly “forgot” in the Boeing.

An immediate sense of comradery, one that would never leave us to this day, three decades later.

At the foot of the gangway of the plane, on a Friday in June, 1978, three men in civilian clothes scrutinized the passengers.  As we passed, in bad French, one said, “You are Mr. Levy?  Yes?  Then please follow us.»  The agents of the SIDE (secret political police of the Junta) didn’t even look at me.  Journalists didn’t interest them.  On the other hand, an intellectual of some renown coming to practice journalism and the right to inform himself on their soil, just days before the opening of the Mundial, that was manifestly unacceptable and, even worse, to their way of thinking, dangerous.

«Try to alert l’Observateur and the French embassy,» was the sole message Lévy had time to murmur.  They seated him in the back of an unmarked black car with smoked-glass windows.

As soon as I got to my hotel room, I informed Serge Lafaurie, one of the directors of the Obs, and I contacted the French ambassador.  He seemed hardly concerned about Lévy’s situation, nonetheless making it clear that he would “obviously look into it”.  Saturday, Sunday, no news, the diplomat did not deign to answer my calls.  I worked.  First big article in Le Matin on Videla’s Argentina, the impact of the Mundial among the opposition.  And of course I mentioned the arrest of Lévy.

In Paris, Le Monde was the first to react.  A front-page article confirmed  “the incarceration of Bernard-Henri Lévy” as well as an official reaction from the Elysée:  Lionel Stoléru, one of the chief advisors, expressed “the intense concern” of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.  Nothing from Buenos Aires.  Until Tuesday morning, when Lévy reappeared, still accompanied by the men from the SIDE, at the Sheraton Hotel.  (Later we would learn that it was the American embassy, alerted by The New Republic, that had obtained his liberation.)

A brief description of what had happened on the part of Lévy, who had only one thing in mind:  to get rid of the two Cerberuses to get back to the hotel (where he was under house arrest), to investigate as freely as possible, to meet players from the French team and convince them to come forward, and to send his article to the Obs. “I finally realized that I was locked up in an icy room at the police station of Ezeiza.  No violence, no, but humiliations, half-naked body searches every six hours.  And constant verbal threats.”

Lévy would have the chance to tell all that, and many other things, to a few members of the French team (Dominique Rocheteau, Jean-Marc Guillou, Patrick Battiston) and their coach, Michel Hidalgo, who welcomed him at the Hindu Country Club, a chic hotel in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.  Using the emergency exits of the Sheraton, he managed to escape the SIDE gorillas.  “I proposed four things to the French team members,” he recalled.  1) Go to see the mothers at the Plaza de Mayo.  2) Refuse to accept a medal, if ever they are entitled to one, and thus to shake the hands of the Argentine officers.  3) Do not attend any official banquet, so as not to meet officials of the Junta or those with ties to the Junta.  4) Wear a black arm-band during the matches».  They listened politely, retained none of his suggestions, and were eliminated in the first round.

But the essential remained covering this story.  To meet some members of the opposition, some families, and to tell about it.  With the police breathing down his neck.  Not easy.  In a suburb of Buenos Aires, a few moments before meeting an association for the defense of human rights, a car (without any license plates) tried to scare (or to run over?) Lévy.  A few hours later, the government announced that he had been expelled.  Better then to leave for Brazil since the «material» for the report had been gathered.  It would be published in France in Le Nouvel Observateur, entitled «Un hiver à Buenos Aires» [A Winter in Buenos Aires] and in the United States in The New Republic, but also in Italy (L’Espresso) and in Spain (Cambio 16).  Remember these few lines:  «San Justo is a suburb west of Buenos Aires, rundown and desolate, ruined with abandoned lots, scattered with junk and garbage.  Here and there some complejos, improbable structures, half housing projects, half shanty-towns, planted as if by chance between two piles of gravel.  For a long time now, five or six hundred squatters have been living here for better or worse, families of poor workers and the unemployed, surviving on the equivalent of a hundred to two hundred francs a month, but heroically resisting the intrusions of the police.  Last March, for the first time, things got bad and fascism came to the  campamiento.  Until now, journalists don’t seem to have taken any interest.

«Anna M. talks to me.  She’s barely thirty and has a passle of children and a face that is already faded.  She greets us in a little room where the whole family has lived ever since the father disappeared.  ‘One day they came. Not the police, but men in civilian clothes with their faces hidden by ski-masks, breaking in the doors or dynamiting the locks.  Every time, they made the women get undressed, sometimes they raped them, not all of them, just the young ones, but always in front of the man and the children.  They they beat everyone, savagely, as though they wanted to kill us, even the little ones when they cried and they couldn’t raise their hands higher in the air.  And then, when they were done, they took away the man, one each time, twenty-two in all, and it started all over again every day.  I suppose it pleased them to come back and scare us each time.  But for us, it was awful, we ended up waiting for them, like friends or family on a Sunday.  And we wondered if this time it was finished, or if there would be another the next day.  We don’t like the police at the complejo much, but once when a woman went there anyway, to try to get some news, she never came back.  So now, we’re just waiting.  We’re waiting for her to return.  And if you say that, maybe it will help us.’

“These men, these women, where are they today?  Workers, simple people, people of the shadows now, taken away by a private militia, they have gone to swell the ranks of the great army of ghosts that haunt the nights of the fine quarters of Buenos Aires.  Snatched from their homes, their families, their tribes, for all intents and purposes they no longer exist, except, perhaps, registered as numbers, at the bottom of a filthy jail at Sierra Chica or Rawson […].

«Generally speaking, terror in Argentina is not as broadly and indecently obvious as those abroad would willingly think.  It is a system that is infinitely more diffuse, capillary, and compartmental […].

«All that thus seems like a «soft», subtle dictatorship, one that excels in the art of disguise.  It is not surprising that the Junta granted itself the luxury of organizing the Mundial and tolerating the presence of several thousand journalists, since here, they know especially how to make horror discreet, and more and more invisible.

«Until today, Latin America had the lamentable privilege of particularly garish State terror.  Henceforth, with Videla, the continent is modernizing and installing a technology of policing that operates in the shadows, in silence.  It is perhaps this, an innovation in comparison to the long tradition of tropical fascisms, that constitutes all the originality of the ‘Argentine model’.”

Maurice Szafran

Journalist at Le Matin de Paris, then editor of l’Evènement du jeudi directed by Jean-François Kahn, he founded with him Marianne which he became chief editor and, in 2008, the CEO. Writer, he is author of many books – among which : Chirac ou Les passions du pouvoir, (Grasset 1986), Malaise dans la République : intégration et désintégration, avec Anne Révah-Lévy, (Plon 2002), Le Sacre, avec Nicolas Domenach, (Plon, 2003), Off, (sortie prévue 23/02/2011).

Translation by Janet Lizop

Photo 1 : 1978  (c) D.R.
Photo 2 : Plaza de Mayo’s Mothers. Buenos Aires.  (c) D.R.