The Face of Juan Mendez

I am myself today, but I am him also, the one called Juan Mendez. Once Juan Mendez lived in Buenos Aires. Probably, I imagine, he took the Retiro-Constitucion line of the subterranean to Plaza General San Martin station, turned the corner to the left onto Maipu and walked past the pink flowered pampas trees, past the gothic grillwork entry gate intertwined with brilliant purple-red blossomed bougainvillea, and looked up at the French baroque apartments with their narrow balconies, bolted shutters, gray mansard roofs.

Now Juan Mendez lives in Washington and works as the Washington director of the Americas Watch Committee, a human rights organization that parallels the work of the U.S. Helsinki Watch, which focuses on human rights abuses by the Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe. So instead of taking the subterranean in Buenos Aires, Juan Mendez now travels on the D.C. Metro from his office to Capitol Hill, where he monitors legislation affecting those areas in Latin America with human rights records needing something more than quiet diplomacy.

When the war of words over the place of human rights in American foreign policy initially erupted, the face of Juan Mendez could have become the human rights activists' secret weapon.

That is because to see the face of Juan Mendez, to see the stark contrast of jet black hair and full mustache in combat with pale olive skin the color of forgotten ghosts, skin as translucent as parchment, is to see the debate over human rights come to life.

To see the face of Juan Mendez is to gaze into dark, deep-set eyes, liquid caverns the color of anger and anguish that spill over into raw shadows, shadows etched long ago into this face by the eaters of persons. To gaze into these eyes is to comprehend the crucial flaw in the Reagan approach to human rights.

For to see the face of Juan Mendez is to see the words made flesh.

In August 1975, the same month that President Gerald Ford was attending a meeting of 35 heads of state in Helsinki to strengthen human rights, a young Argentine lawyer named Juan Mendez, active as a defender of political prisoners, was kidnapped at a bus stop on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. He was waiting to meet a client of his labor law firm.

When the six heavily armed men in civilian clothing surrounded Mendez, handcuffed and blindfolded him, he knew resistance would be pointless. Unlike countless thousands of Argentines before and after him, Mendez understood what was happening as he was bundled into a van and swept away. In Argentina, then and now, lawyers are considered to be accomplices of their clients, simply one more branch of guerrillas (along with psychiatrists, scientists, and journalists) determined to undermine the government.

In a matter of minutes, perhaps no longer than it took Gerald Ford to sign the Helsinki Accords, Juan Mendez became a statistic in Argentina's descent into infamy.

It is April 1981. Juan Mendez sits impassively in the back row of the House Foreign Affairs Committee room, lost in his own interior wilderness, waiting. Others are waiting with him as the hearing room quickly fills to capacity: ramrod-stiff military attaches from the Argentine embassy accompanied by their Washington lawyers and public relations men; representatives from human rights organizations; clergy; a lobbyist from Boeing Aircraft.

What everyone is waiting for begins when the chairman's gavel calls to order the subcommittees on Inter-American Affairs and on Human Rights and International Organizations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The subcommittees' members are here to consider the Reagan administration's desire to cozy up to Argentina, a nation Jimmy Carter considered as much a pariah as Ronald Reagan does Libya, and treated accordingly. In 1978 when Argentines by the thousands were disappearing off the streets of Buenos Aires, Congress cut off U.S. weapons sales and credits to the military dictatorship and denounced the Argentine government as "a gross violator of human rights."

But the Reagan administration feels that the Carter human rights policy failed because it employed "a human rights double standard" that focused on repression practiced by allies like Argentina yet ignored the dangers of Soviet expansionism. The Reagan foreign policy strategists contend that the United States should no longer try to impose its moral values on the rest of the world. We need allies against the Soviets, declare the Reaganites. Accordingly, amends must be made. The congressional hearing was organized to explore revoking the arms embargo.

In many respects, this hearing and its participants are a microcosm of the entire debate over human rights, a debate Judge Thomas Bergenthal, dean of American University's Washington College of Law and the sole U.S. judge on the Organization of American States Court of Human Rights, said "has been, and continues to be, sophomoric."

Congressional hearings frequently resemble theater of the absurd, and this one did not disappoint. The case for repeal of sanctions was argued on behalf of Argentina's generals by Washington lobbyist Joseph Karth, a former Democratic-Farmer-Labor member of Congress from Minnesota.

"And what was Argentina's great crime?" Karth challenged the subcommittees with aplomb as the members nodded profoundly. Human Rights subcommittee chairman Don Bonker (D-Wash.), the only exception to the general torpor, suddenly lurched upright in his chair.

What about the nearly 15,000 men, women, and children who have disappeared since March 1976, Bonker wanted to know.

"Some, no doubt, were killed by their own side or by rival groups and their bodies never found," Karth suggested. "Others emigrated under false names."

Despite audible gasps from the audience, the lobbyist continued his case for the "reasonably enlightened regime." He may have felt insulated from scorn by his $1 million, two-year contract with the Argentine government "to undertake activities toward improving relations between Argentina and the United States."

"They should be encouraged," he urged the subcommittees in conclusion, reminding them that Argentina's human rights record in the last year had gone from "terrible to only bad." Then, as Karth hurled himself through the heavy hearing-room doors, the next witness, the head researcher from the Argentina desk at Amnesty International's headquarters in London, adjusted her microphone.

Patricia Feeney had flown all night from England to testify at the hearings. Amnesty was much alarmed that the United States would consider resuming assistance to the military junta, especially in light of an admission by General Roberto Viola, then president of Argentina: "We don't need arms, but it would be moral reparation."

Feeney might as well have cabled her objections, as her rebuttal to Karth's testimony--that the human rights record in Argentina had not improved sufficiently to reward the country with arms sales--was addressed to a virtually empty dias. It was 5 p.m., and only the two subcommittee chairmen, Bonker and Michael Barnes (D-Md.), were still present. Obviously embarrassed, the chairmen attempted to reassure Feeney that her long trip had not been inconsequential. "The considered opinion of Amnesty International will prove most helpful in aiding the committee's report," Bonker assured her.

But not all that helpful. A month later, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the resumption of arms sales to Argentina.

In February 1981, I was commissioned by a national newspaper to write a story that looked behind the raging debate of realpolitik vs. human rights. Find the proper place of human rights in our foreign policy, the editor said, what it means and why we should care.

In the four months that followed, I interviewed more than 50 experts, filled 33 manila folders to overflowing, recorded 29 hours of interviews and testimony. Various articles, books, analyses, positions were carefully weighed as I listened to the cant of the Right and the cacophony of the Left and tried to make sense of it all.

Then I met Juan Mendez at the Foreign Affairs session on the repeal of sanctions against Argentina. Suddenly I knew the proper place of human rights in American foreign policy, and what I would write.

But it has taken a long time to write Juan Mendez' story, and it has been the most difficult time I have ever had writing. If I am to be faithful to the truth of Juan Mendez, I must be able to report his facts with detachment, with at least as much detachment as he himself possesses when telling his story.

Often journalists will tell you that the highest measure of professionalism is objectivity. Instinctively we adopt a position of "objectivity" to insulate ourselves from being affected by the emotions we confront in others. You should know, as you read this, that "objectivity" has not happened this time.

On reflection, I now know that meeting Juan Mendez the very afternoon I went to "objectively" listen to the case for ignoring human rights was not an accident. What I might have once explained away as a surreal coincidence of irony--the arbitrary juxtaposition of the special with the special interest in the netherworld of a reporter's eight-by-four-inch ruled notebook--I now accept as a mystery of faith. Now I realize that the miasma of the Argentine lobbyist's invocation of realpolitik did more to engrave the face of Juan Mendez onto my consciousness than if the generals and the Reagan foreign policy strategists had used a graver. Meeting Juan Mendez forever changed the polemics of human rights into the personal.

The men who abducted Juan Mendez at gunpoint asked no questions before turning him over to another group. "They claimed to be army, but I'm positive they were Federal Police of the Province of Buenos Aires, intelligence section," he says matter-of-factly.

"There was no interrogation without torture, other than name, address, and what I had been doing at the bus stop. Then they stripped me naked and tied me very tightly, spread-eagled on top of a table, with a lot of strain, very much stretched out. And they applied an electrical prod on me and a lot of heavy blows with fists and kicks. One electrical prod that they use (they have two kinds) is a traditional cattle prod. It's supposed to be less painful. I've never tried it; the one they used on me is a more sophisticated instrument. It produces a buzz and can be regulated. It's much more manageable. At the beginning the shocks were much less painful than they were towards the end." He speaks in a flat monotone, totally devoid of any emotion, slowly, so that you will not fail to understand. Juan Mendez could be giving a history lecture, and in a way he is.

"And they applied it to the most sensitive parts of the body, the genitals, inside of the mouth, the back of the head, all over actually. Generally the prod doesn't leave marks unless they are in a hurry and are careless about it. But in my case they were rushed. Also, I had five sessions the first day, lasting about a half hour each. I never lost consciousness."

He pauses. What information, Mendez is asked, could have been so vital to the military that they would do this? "During the torture they specifically interrogated me about my contacts with my clients. But more than anything else they wanted information about how I and the other lawyers in my group filed writs of habeas corpus so quickly for the other political prisoners. How did we get this information that somebody had been detained? How were we organized, and who were the other lawyers doing this kind of work? They knew some of the names but not all. They didn't know where our offices were or our homes."

At one point a few years ago, Mendez explains, there were no attorneys available in Argentina to defend political prisoners because all the lawyers themselves had been arrested. Mendez tells of how the older attorneys, "the first generation of lawyers," disappeared or were killed, and how it fell to young lawyers like himself to pick up where their mentors had left off.

And so Mendez and 13 contemporaries formed an underground network to assist people, free of charge. While attempts were made to keep "a low profile," it was not low enough. Of the original group, by Mendez' count, seven "disappeared," one was assassinated, two are in exile, and the whereabouts of four are not known.

Mendez might still be in prison today had it not been for the actions of one man 21 years ago, who ironically had been tired of and frustrated with individual protest.

In 1961, a London lawyer named Peter Benenson picked up his morning newspaper and read an account of two Portuguese students who had been arrested in a restaurant and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment. Their crime was that they raised their glasses in a toast to freedom. Benenson, a former defense counsel for political prisoners in Spain, Hungary, and South Africa, decided he had had enough.

He wrote an article on forgotten political prisoners, "An Appeal for Amnesty," that appeared in the Observer of London and Le Monde of Paris on May 28,1961. In his appeal Benenson urged governments around the world either to release the people they held imprisoned or give them a fair trial. He also encouraged readers to channel their own "sickening sense of impotence" into a common action to free those whom Benenson called "prisoners of conscience." Within a month Benenson received more than a thousand offers to help; within six months he announced the formation of a permanent international movement now known as Amnesty International.

In the 21 years since, Amnesty International has developed a membership of more than 250,000 in 134 countries, working on behalf of those who have lost everything but hope. In 1977 Amnesty was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Amnesty's focus remains its original one--the status of individual prisoners--and since 1961 the group has been successful in improving conditions for more than half the political prisoners whose cause it takes up, including the release of 20,000 people in more than 100 countries. Juan Mendez was one of them.

When Mendez was 16, he spent a year living in Illinois as a foreign exchange student. After he was arrested, his exchange family, with whom he kept in touch, offered to help. They contacted Amnesty, and in September 1976, Amnesty adopted Juan Mendez, assigning his case to a group in Sweden which began a campaign of letters and telegrams to Argentine officials.

Because Mendez' family in Argentina had been able to document his case so well with court records and other evidence, Amnesty (which was preparing its first and only mission to Argentina in November 1976) used Mendez as a demonstration case.

Father Robert Drinan, then a Democratic representative from Massachusetts and a long-time associate of Amnesty, remembers the Argentine mission well: "We had a confrontation with all the high potentates; I said that the United States was going to terminate $48 million in military aid unless they shaped up, and they seemed to be impressed. Juan was in prison, and we knew where he was, and then we presented his case--very well documented. Finally they admitted he was detained, but then they launched into this 'Oh, we can't control all the Montoneros, the communists, and the Left.' And of course there was evidence that the leftists were murdering people in the streets, but we said 'Come on, that won't wash with this case. This guy's a lawyer, detained illegally.'

"We were there about 10 days and didn't get to see Juan in prison. They were very uptight about letting us in the prisons, kept deferring us, saying, 'Well, we'll think about it tomorrow.' But in the end it worked out." Two months after the Amnesty mission, the military government published a decision to let Juan Mendez go into exile. Today Mendez is a member of the board of directors of Amnesty-USA, one of four former prisoners of conscience on the board.

Three days after Juan Mendez had been abducted, the group that had been torturing him stopped, drove him to another location about 50 miles outside Buenos Aires, and turned him over to the local police, who legalized his detention, charging him with car theft and possession of weapons.

When Mendez was brought before a judge eight days later, he said he had been tortured and asked for a doctor to examine him. The traces left from the electrical prod, the one that wasn't supposed to leave marks, were still there. The judge asked for the government's evidence to be introduced, but the man whose car Mendez had supposedly stolen could not pick him out of the line-up. The weapons, the police told the judge, had been hand grenades, and it had been necessary to explode them. There was no evidence, they told the judge: you'll have to take our word. The judge did not, and ordered Mendez released.

He was not released, however, but held under "administrative detention" for another 18 months. Seven months after the trial, the day of the coup that overthrew Isabel Peron, the army came for the judge who had dismissed Mendez' case. The judge disappeared without a trace.

The discussion of the proper place of human rights in the conduct of American foreign policy has also disappeared. With all the expertise of armed security squads stalking the night, the Reagan administration has successfully abducted the issue off the pages of American publications and out of public debate. But on their way to quiet diplomacy, the Reagan strategists left behind some incriminating evidence. For those wishing to trace the mysterious disappearance of human rights from the American agenda, the trail must backtrack to February 1981, and the 37th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights held in Geneva.

The Human Rights Commission was organized in 1947 as an ancillary body of the U.N. Economic and Social Council, primarily to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a job that took 20 years. Ever since, the commission has been working to implement that document through an annual six-week session devoted largely to the airing of complaints, passing of resolutions and, occasionally, the issuing of censures. It provides a visible public forum for nations to espouse their human rights positions.

Although they are extensively covered in Europe, the annual Geneva proceedings are not widely reported in this country, and what news does sneak into the American press is virtually incomprehensible to those not closely involved in human rights matters. In 1981, this lack of media attention permitted a redirection of American human rights policy that left international human rights activists dumbstruck and Western allies dismayed. It also permitted the Reagan administration, in particular Michael Novak, chief U.S. representative to the commission and resident scholar in religion at the American Enterprise Institute, to offer in retrospect a version of the Geneva proceedings at odds with versions of others who attended the human rights session.

The commission's meetings began just 13 days after Ronald Reagan was sworn into office. It became Novak's job to make the initial presentation of the new administration's views on human rights before an international forum.

There were criticisms--serious ones. A Western diplomat put it this way: "Immediately there was a strong preception at every level that the U.S. had changed its attitudes on certain questions regarding human rights."

The most dramatic example of the radical U.S. shift was the position the U.S., under Novak's direction, took on the United Nations Working Group on Disappearances. The previous year Jimmy Carter's delegation had spearheaded the effort to establish a five-person independent working group to investigate the increasingly spreading phenomenon of worldwide disappearances and issue a public report following that investigation.

Argentina, particularly sensitive about the attention focused on its disappearances, was bitterly opposed to the working group's establishment and refused to cooperate. In early 1981, the working group issued a report that contained information on a number of other countries besides Argentina: Indonesia, the Philippines, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Namibia. Human rights advocates generally agreed that the U.N.'s public report was an effective weapon toward discouraging disappearances, but the working group's mandate was for only one year.

At the February 1981 session, when the French-sponsored resolution continuing the working group was raised, Argentina again was opposed unless all information on disappearances gathered was kept confidential, a constraint which would have prevented the working group from even informing families of the fate of their missing relatives. This restriction was unacceptable to the West, so much so that the working group's chairman, Lord Colville of Great Britain, threatened to resign if the confidential rule was established.

The Soviet Union supported Argentina. Much to the surprise and chagrin of its allies, so did the United States. Western diplomatic sources admitted that while the allies had been expecting a change in the human rights policy under the Reagan administration, it came as a shock that it would begin on a human rights issue as fundamental as disappearances. Equally disturbing was the fact that the change would have the U.S. siding with outlaw nations.

At the 1982 Geneva session, the U.S. delegation was again headed by Novak with the Reagan administration's new assistant secretary of state for human rights, Elliott Abrams, in attendance. But by this time the death knell for the issue of human rights had already tolled. After the furor created by the nomination of Ernest Lefever as the Reagan human rights guardian, administration officials decided to lie low, downplaying the human rights issue by simply not filling the position.

Finally in December 1981, Abrams, who was already the assistant secretary of state for international organizations, was tapped. Abrams--articulate, persuasive, smooth where Lefever was rough--had all the right answers for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was confirmed with barely a dissenting murmur despite the fact that as Novak's direct supervisor he had been one of the chief policy setters to the 1981 Geneva debacle.

Abrams quickly lulled the human rights constituency as well (which had vociferously rallied together to effectively lobby against Lefever's nomination), telling human rights activists that the administration "had made a mistake" in its initial approach to human rights. Now that he was in charge, Abrams assured them, "things would change."

The change was swift. But it was one of style rather than substance. With the invasion of Poland occurring just weeks before the 1982 human rights session, ideology took center stage. The Reagan administration's focus on the evils of totalitarian (read Soviet) regimes while ignoring the reality of repression experienced in authoritarian (read anti-Soviet) societies by people like Juan Mendez, was seemingly authenticated by the crushing of Solidarity and the imprisonment of Lech Walesa. At the session, distortions caused by the distinctions of ideology assumed their own logic. Thus, when the commission's agenda called for discussion of worldwide torture and mass disappearances, Novak raised with cerebral passion the issue of Raoul Wallenberg's fate at the hands of the Soviets, equating the fate of one man (however much a saint) at the hands of a totalitarian regime with that of hundreds of thousands who perished around the world while living under authoritarian rule.

The same people who put together the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee four years ago launched the Americas Watch. They include Robert Bernstein, president and chair of Random House; Aryeh Neier of The Nation; and former president of the New York Bar Association, Orville Schell. The new group also includes former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Patt Derian, Father Robert Drinan, now president of Americans for Democratic Action, and Arthur Miller.

Vice-Chair Neier explains how the new human rights group came about: "A very large part of our reasoning for forming Americas Watch was our sense that the work we were doing on the Soviet Union and on Eastern Europe was being undermined by the Reagan administration's approach of going easier on so-called authoritarian countries, "friendly" authoritarian countries, while attacking hostile totalitarian countries. It tended to transform the effort to promote human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into a Cold War exercise rather than a human rights effort, and we thought it was damaging our work."

In Argentina the generals come, and the generals go. Since I first met Juan Mendez 21 months ago, there have been three successive generals running the country as president. But some things remain the same. The Falklands/Malvinas crisis now past, Argentina has signaled that it wants to normalize relations with the United States. Things have returned to normal in Argentina as well.

At this writing news comes that Argentine human rights activist Jose Westerkamp was arrested while visiting his son who has been illegally detained without charges since 1976. Two days after Westerkamp's arrest, President Reagan lifted the economic sanctions against Argentina temporarily imposed during the Falklands war.

Mendez says the elimination of the military sanctions (which were ready to be lifted just prior to Argentina's invasion and then postponed) are expected to follow. The Washington lobbyists for the arms merchants and the aviation industry have once again resumed prowling Capitol Hill and paying courtesy calls on the Inter-American desk at the State Department.

Juan Mendez has never before told his story publicly. He feared for the safety of his parents, brothers and sisters, and his wife's mother still living in Argentina. But there is too much silence in Washington these days, Mendez explains, as quiet diplomacy becomes silent diplomacy. And if Mendez remains silent, perhaps he will then be told it never really happened that way, the tearing of the tissue of his life by the torturers. People would tell him after listening to his story that forgetting is all you can do. Pretend it happened a long time ago, to someone else.

But Juan Mendez cannot forget, will never forget.

Nor now, after seeing his face, will I.

Sarah Ban Breathnach was a Washington writer and critic whose work had appeared in The Washington Post and other publications here and in Ireland when this article appeared.