< 'El Juicio (The Trial)' details the 1976-'83 Argentine dictatorship's reign of terror

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

In 1985, the leaders of an Argentine military dictatorship, after briefly granting themselves amnesty, were convicted by a new civilian government of crimes against humanity. This weekend at the Berlin Film Festival, a video record of that trial will be shown to the public for the first time. NPR's Bob Mondello was recently in Argentina and brought back the story behind the documentary "El Juicio," "The Trial." A word of warning - his story contains details of violence, brutality and sexual assault.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Standing beneath the birch and flowering jacaranda trees at what used to be ESMA - E-S-M-A, the acronym in Spanish for the Navy School of Mechanics - it's not easy to picture the horrors that took place here. In the 1970s and '80s, ESMA was a secret detention center for a right-wing military regime brutally engaged in eliminating dissent. The gruesome nature of its time as one of many torture and execution sites was exposed in trial testimony two years after the end of the dictatorship.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "EL JUICIO")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: The documentary "El Juicio" is composed entirely of video shot during those courtroom proceedings. Five hundred and thirty hours were filmed by Argentina's public television. Because the military was still feared, a copy of the recordings was secretly stashed half a world away in Oslo, where the tapes sat in Norwegian government vaults for more than two decades. They have never been publicly broadcast, not even during the trial.

VERONICA TORRAS: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: "News programs could show three minutes of courtroom images back then but without sound," says Veronica Torras, executive director of the human rights consortium now entrusted with the videos. Her organization, Memoria Abierta - Open Memory - is charged with making the trial videos available to the public.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "EL JUICIO")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: As part of that mission, the group co-produced the documentary "El Juicio." I'm speaking with director Torras in Memoria Abierta's offices at the former ESMA.

TORRAS: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: "What is now a museum of memory," she says, "was then a site of state terrorism where civilians were held without charges, tortured, then flown far out over the Atlantic to be thrown alive from what were known as death flights."

TORRAS: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: It's disconcerting to realize how close victims at ESMA were to the society they'd been snatched from. Just across a busy highway are shops and apartment buildings. Still, the film has witnesses detailing all sorts of atrocities - teenagers swept up on what was called the Night of the Pencils for serving on high school student councils.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "EL JUICIO")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: Sixteen-year-olds...

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "EL JUICIO")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: ...Fifteen-year-olds facing unspeakable violence, torture, rape, murder, remembers a lone survivor. Because of a face-obscuring over-the-shoulder camera angle required by the court, you know he's crying only from the shaking of his torso. Another witness speaks of expectant mothers imprisoned until they gave birth, then executed, their babies handed off to military families. Because their captivity was never acknowledged by the regime, the victims were known as the disappeared. And as the editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald told the judges...

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "EL JUICIO")

UNIDENTIFIED NEWSPAPER EDITOR: But as soon as somebody disappeared, everybody said he, she must be a terrorist. I had continual meetings with the minister of the interior. He always complained that publications in the newspaper were counterproductive, suggesting, indeed, that if I did publish these reports, the people who had been kidnapped might never appear again. So instead of stopping the killing, they tried to stop people reporting the killing.

MONDELLO: While these videos haven't been seen by the Argentine public, the film's damning testimony is a matter of public record. Newspapers offered transcripts of the trial in 1985 - not as visceral, perhaps, as hearing the voices of victims. But Torras, translated here by her colleague Alejandra Pavicich, remembers the effect that coverage had on her family when she was a child.

TORRAS: (Speaking Spanish).

ALEJANDRA PAVICICH: I remember that I used to read the newspaper together with my grandmother at that moment. There were several that were covering what was happening in the trial. She remembers that her grandmother was just now realizing what would happen during dictatorship thanks to what she read in the newspapers about the trial.

MONDELLO: Tens of thousands of people disappeared. How is it possible that people didn't know what was happening?

TORRAS: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: The reason this is tough to answer has to do with what Torras hopes releasing the tapes will rectify. People in big cities, she says, saw the military in action, knew about the disappearances and detention camps. But in rural areas and the south, where her grandmother lived, the repression was more hidden. And 40 years later, its savagery is becoming a distant memory, especially for a generation that wasn't alive at the time, a generation that can, in the trial tapes, hear the prosecutor conclude his summation with nunca mas, never again...

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "EL JUICIO")

UNIDENTIFIED LAWYER: (Speaking Spanish).

MONDELLO: ...And watch the crowd's explosive reaction wipe the smiles from the faces of the former dictator and his generals. Memoria Abierta hopes to keep that memory potent through broad access to the trial videos. The group will soon be making them available on demand. The Berlin Film Festival's premiere of "El Juicio" is a first step. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HIMNO NACIONAL ARGENTINO")

CHARLY GARCIA: (Singing in Spanish).

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