It was a world in which God too had turned his back. When Lieutenant Laborda, as a twenty three year old military officer, told a priest of his involvement in killings, there were no words of reproach, no advice to desist, merely an assurance that he would be ‘rewarded for destroying the enemies of Christ.’

In one part of a Navy establishment the 1978 Argentinean world cup football team led by Daniel Passarella were preparing to become national heroes to the accolades of an adulating media. In another, hidden from public gaze kidnapped victims were expiring from the effects of prolonged electric shock torture. In the media world few apart from Jacobo Timerman were courageous enough to raise the issue. By the time Argentina had defeated Holland to become world champions, Timerman too had been silenced; imprisoned and his paper La Opinion, closed down. It had committed a capital sin. In his words, ‘it used precise language to describe actual situations so that its articles were comprehensible and direct.’ Power crazed totalitarians simply fear plain speaking.

The childless rich stood to gain considerably from the repression. While Timerman was battling bravely against the odds, Ernestina Herrera de Noble, who before her 2002 arrest for child theft owned Clarin, Argentina’s biggest selling daily paper, was claiming that her first ‘adopted’ child landed on her doorstep in 1976, to be followed by her second ‘adopted’ child in 1978. If lightning found difficulty striking twice in the same place, the abducted children of the disappeared seemed to manage it quite easily. For some in the newspaper world truth seems not to strike at all.

While the children of many Argentinean citizens found their way as coveted trophies into the homes of the rich and senior army officers their parents ended up drugged and drowned in the River Plate. Pregnant women were detained until ready for caesarean section. When Ronald Reagan’s ‘majestic general’, Leopoldo Galtieri died last year Laura Bonaparte, one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group formed during the dictatorship years, observed ruefully that he went ‘without telling us where they hid the bodies of our children.’ Her husband, three sons, and three other relatives, all disappeared. But even Galtieri failed to prevent 75 children of dirty war victims being identified and reunited with their biological families.

The voice of Jacobo Timerman, if not a solitary sound, was certainly a minority one. Even after the military junta collapsed there was still a pervasive reticence to confront the issue. On the 28th anniversary of the military coup President Kirchner asked for ‘forgiveness for the shame of a democracy which stayed silent on these atrocities during the past twenty years.’ Today in Argentina imposed silence has been deprived of much of its potency. Voices seemingly rise in proportion to the fall of the iconography of the military regime.

In March Argentina's Defence Minister clambered up an improvised ladder and removed portraits of Videla and Bignone from the entrance hall of the military training college in Buenos Aires. It was a sign that Argentina far from erasing the past was casting serious aspersions on its glorification. The week that the portraits came down, President Nestor Kirchner opened the Navy School of Mechanics to the public. He signed a bill which transformed the one time murder site and torture chamber into a 'museum of memory' dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights.

Now almost 100 military personnel languish in prison, availing of conditions immeasurably better than those they had custody over. Most of them have been detained since Kirchner became president and promised to vigorously prosecute those who engaged in human rights abuses. This is so different from the stance taken by the elected government of Carlos Menem who absurdly pardoned the military.

While the armed forces have displayed a certain willingness to deal with the past, not all in its ranks approve. When Navy chief Jorge Godoy apologised for the reign of terror an admiral and several high-ranking officers walked off in disgust, probably to nodding approval from Henry Kissinger, a Jew who disgracefully supported terror perpetrated by the most emphatic anti-Semitic regime since Hitler’s Germany.

Nevertheless, with Kirchner putting it up to the military at home and confronting the International Monetary Fund on the international front, hopes are growing in Argentina that the darkness is finally slipping into abeyance.