Translated from Spanish by Jonas Konefal 25′. Original with declassified documents here.
Alfredo Bravo was kidnapped September 8th, 1977. Over a ten-day period, he was tortured by Miguel Etchecolatz. On the last day, before a National Executive Power (known in Spanish as PEN) decree that legalized his detention, Ramón Camps warned Bravo not to talk of what happened or he would be found to have committed suicide. In July of 1978, while in liberty but still under state surveillance and restrictions (termed “libertad vigilada”), Bravo narrated with extreme precision his days under torture in a meeting at the United States Embassy. He thanked the diplomatic corps for procuring his release, saying he volunteered his story “to show you what we are fighting for.” In partnership with the National Security Archive and the College of William & Mary, The Provincial Commission for Memory (CPM) now shares pages from the most recent declassification of FBI, CIA, and State Department documents pertaining to the Argentine dictatorship.
Bravo was a socialist and a founding member of the Education Workers Confederation of the Argentina Republic (CTERA). He was also a founder of the Permanent Human Rights Assembly (APDH) and the Deputy Secretary of Education in the Alfonsín administration, a position from which he resigned when the government passed a set of laws that granted amnesty to former human rights offenders of the military dictatorship. Later, Bravo served Buenos Aires as a national representative in Congress, and he was part of the Constitutional Convention of 1994. But above all else, Alfredo Bravo was a teacher.
During the military dictatorship he was kidnapped and tortured. On July 10, 1978, just after leaving prison under libertad vigilada, he emphasized in his conversation with United States Embassy officials that he was no hero, and he had cried out from pain like anyone else. He told his story to “show you what we are fighting for.” While keeping his identity secret to protect his life and his family’s, he hoped that this information would spread in international human rights circles as a condemnation of the abuses suffered in Argentina.
The memorandum prepared by the Embassy is fourteen pages long and summarizes four hours of conversation. It was sent from Buenos Aires to the State Department in Washington. It is now part of the most recent declassification effort for Argentina, which includes 43 thousand pages of documents from American intelligence agencies about the military dictatorship.
In the document, Embassy agents say, “We don’t doubt his story’s account of the immense hardships he experienced during his interrogation. Many of the details in the Bravo report allow us to establish parallels with other interrogation methods and patterns previously reported to the Embassy by other informants.”
With the return to democracy, Alfredo Bravo would again recount the horrors he experienced in front of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) and later the Truth Trials in La Plata, where he was able to point out his torturer, Commissioner Miguel Etchecolatz, before a tribunal. But the first time he reported what happened to him was in the referenced conversation with U.S. Embassy officials.
On September 8, 1977, at about 8 p.m., Bravo was teaching a class at a night school when three men in civilian clothing and showing police credentials came into the classroom and kidnapped him. As he recalls, they took him to La Plata in a Renault 4.
In the conversation with Embassy officials, Bravo, a union leader and human rights activist, details eleven torture sessions. He was beaten, shocked with an electric prod, and waterboarded. There were also psychological torture techniques. He was thrown into trucks with dead bodies and taken to a dump to witness executions, both real and feigned.
In each torture session, Bravo recalled that his torturer referred to him cordially as “estimado Bravo”—“esteemed Bravo.” On September 20th, a decree legalized his disappearance, and he was then officially detained under the jurisdiction of the PEN. Commissioner Miguel Etchecolatz would be the one to formally present him with this decree, and Bravo recognized his voice as that of the torturer who called him “estimado.”
Before being transferred to a prison in La Plata, Bravo was taken before the chief of police of the Buenos Aires province, Ramón Camps. In Camp’s office, Bravo was threatened. Camps said that if Bravo talked, he would be found to have committed suicide. Bravo was then held in a cell that had a noose hanging from a pipe on the ceiling.
Through a cable sent by the Embassy, then National Security Council Director of Latin American Affairs, Robert Pastor, delivered the memorandum to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Bravo was detained for ten days in various detention centers. During that time, he was permanently hooded, naked, and denied food and water. The list of tortures that he experienced and witnessed reads like a guide on cruel and unusual punishment,” Pastor summarizes. And he added his own personal assessment, weighing in, “I believe his story is important as we begin to lay the groundwork for a new strategy to Argentina.”
Long before Bravo came to the Embassy, his case had captured the attention of diplomatic officials. He himself thanked them for their “efforts to achieve his release.” For the Embassy, he was a “case of high interest” and his name appeared in dozens of cables sent to the Secretary of State in Washington about the status of human rights in Argentina and Latin America as a whole.
Interest in the case existed from the moment of his disappearance. Bravo was kidnapped when the dictator and then de facto president Jorge Rafael Videla was visiting Washington to attend the ceremonial signing of the treaty returning the Panama Canal to Panama, in which he was to meet Jimmy Carter.
In that context, the reports sent by the Embassy link Bravo’s kidnapping to the rivalry between Videla and Massera. In a report on Latin America from September 29, 1977, the title of the Argentine situation is “Problems in the Junta,” and it informs, “Rumors label Bravo’s disappearance as an attempt to embarrass the President on the human rights issue precisely at a time when he was endeavoring to improve the country’s image.”
Almost a month after that report, on November 21, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Efforts Patricia Derian, Ambassador Raúl Castro, and political advisor Tex Harris met with the copresident of the ADPH Emilio Mignone and Augusto Conte-Mac Donell. The conversation memorandum reads, “The assembly is convinced that Mr. Bravo’s capture by security forces was triggered by the Permanent Assembly’s open letter to President Videla which Bravo signed, calling for a return to legal procedures.” It later highlights another set of comments by Conte: “President Videla said then that the Argentine government was planning to stop illegal actions, but this unfortunately had not taken place. For example, in the detention of the Permanent Assembly’s Co-President Bravo, the government has refused to act against those individuals who illegally captured him and has instead, covered the matter up by placing Mr. Bravo under executive detention.”
In a report from that very November about the status of human rights in Argentina, the embassy mentions the Bravo case as an “important demonstration of the futility of the present habeas corpus proceedings.”
Immediately after Bravo’s kidnapping, the ADPH presented a petition of habeas corpus that the courts rejected based on information from the Army that formally denied that Bravo was detained. However, a week later, when Bravo’s “reappearance” was announced. It was declared that he had been detained under the order of Suárez Mason, Chief of the First Army Corps.
Alfredo Bravo was detained by the PEN for ten months. In the meeting at the Embassy, he described the prison conditions as severe. Still, regarding the torture he suffered, he mentioned that he had heard in the La Plata prison “stories paralleling his own and worse.”
“We are awed by Bravo’s report that he stood up to the brutal interrogations and denied substantial amounts of information to his interrogators which he knew to be true. We do not know what to make of this and at present can only say that Bravo indeed must be an extraordinary man,” commented the Embassy, concluding the memorandum of the conversation.
On June 16, 1978, Alfredo Bravo was given conditional freedom. Information about his release was also included in a June 28 weekly Embassy report about the status of human rights in Argentina. The report finds some things worth mentioning about the military dictatorship, among those being the release of Bravo and the invitation for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to visit the country.
These communications occurred in a special context. Argentina was hosting the 1978 World Cup, and for the military government, it was an opportunity to present a positive image of the country to the outside world, hiding the state’s crimes before constant international pressure brought on by the reports of human rights violations.
This situation didn’t escape the Embassy’s attention. In the same June report that indicated notable improvements, the Embassy warns, “We will be better able to assess the impact of these steps after termination of the artificial environment created by the World Cup soccer competition, during which the security apparatus has been treading very lightly.”
Both in prison and in freedom, the military junta granted Bravo the option to leave the country. He declined twice. According to the terms of his probation, Bravo was not allowed to return to his job as a professor in public institutions. He couldn’t participate in his union nor in human rights activities. However, even when under surveillance, he continued his activism.
In the archive of the Intelligence Directorate of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police (DIPPBA), which the CPM also manages, there is a record of his activities after his release. The DIPPBA noted his participation in the Permanent Commission in Defense of Education and the Argentine Association of Comparative Education. Also on file is his signature of an April 14, 1981, public request in Clarín, an Argentine magazine, to demand that the lists of the disappeared be made public and that those detained be granted liberty.
The DIPPBA files classify him in the category of student and subversive criminals, and Bravo himself was the subject of three separate reports. The last of these is from 1994, showing how even under democracy Buenos Aires intelligence continued to surveil him. The files also illuminate some of his then more recent organizing, mentioning that he was part of the CPM’s anti-police brutality efforts.
After an agreement in 2019 between the National Security Archive and the College of William & Mary, the CPM manages the archive of the 43,000 pages from 4,900 documents declassified by the United States. This September 11, on Argentine Teachers’ Day, we are sharing, for the first time, the documents from Bravo’s case as an homage to this honest and dignified teacher and leader. The Embassy’s reporting on the situation confirms these as attributes he had his whole life.
Alfredo Bravo died May 26, 2003, at 78 years old. The tortures over those eleven days of interrogation in 1977 left him with long-term physical effects.
This work is part of collaborative efforts between the CPM, the College of William & Mary, and the National Security Archive, with the objective of disseminating in Argentina and the United States content from declassified files. The team that worked on this case includes:
William & Mary Professors Silvia Tandeciarz and Maria Celeste Cabral
William & Mary Students Grayson Cox, Julia Kun, Megan Leu, Max Minogue, Johanna Weech, Rebecca Weinberg, Idan Woodruff, Caroline Brown, Meg Cuca, Jasmine Howard, Mackenzie Krol, Lorena Meruvia, Sean Doyle, Soleil Ephraim, Benjamin Hotchner, Kirsten Magaard, and Emma Manring
National Security Archive’s Director of Southern Cone Documentation Project Carlos Osorio
CPM Teams