El Equipo (Quiet Films, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Song for César I kept the TV on KPBS for an interesting if rather disheartening documentary called El Equipo, about a young group of Argentine archaeology and anthropology students who were recruited by an American forensic anthropologist, Clyde T. Snow, for a project to research and identify the remains of the victims of Argentina’s so-called “Dirty War.” This was a particularly brutal campaign of repression and murder carried out between 1976 and 1983 by the military government led by General Jorge Rafael Videla, who took power in 1976 by overthrowing the legal Argentine president, Juan Perón’s widow Isabel. The junta Videla and his military compatriots organized announced a concerted campaign to eliminate all Leftists and Left sympathizers from Argentina, and they killed between 9,000 and 30,000 people. Snow was asked to come to Argentina by relatives of the missing people – Los Desaparecidos (“The Disappeared”), as they came to be known – to search for their remains. He didn’t want to use the established forensic anthropologists in Argentina because they’d worked with the police forces, and the police had been part of the massive repression along with the military. Snow, who had just come off international fame as the anthropologist who had worked with the Chicago Police Department to identify the 28 victims Gay serial killer John Wayne Gacy had buried in a crawlspace under his home, found himself dealing with five student volunteers from a local university, who had their own reasons to hate the regime that until its fall in 1983 (when the loss of the Falklands War with Britain in 1982 led to demonstrations that demanded the return of democratic government) had treated the universities as centers of dissent and forced students to endure full searches of their backpacks and other belongings before they could enter lecture halls for classes. At first he didn’t want to work with them, but he later accepted them as volunteers because there was literally no one else.

The newly elected Argentine president, Raúl Alfonsin, originally promised to bring charges against Videla and others implicated in the mass murders, and Snow and his team of student volunteers helped put the case together. The team’s work helped to win a conviction for Videla and some of his comrades in the junta, and the official verdict blasted the military’s rationale for the violence. It read, “The subversives had not taken control of any part of the national territory; they had not obtained recognition of interior or anterior belligerency, they were not massively supported by any foreign power, and they lacked the population's support.” Then, for political reasons, Alfonsin reneged on his promise to bring the perpetrators to justice, perhaps under fear that the military would strike again and depose him. He pushed through an amnesty law that stood in place until a new President, Nestor Kirchener, took power in 2003. The students organized a nonprofit corporation and continued their work in other countries, including Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and other places where there had been brutal regimes conducting terrorist campaigns against their people. They showed up in some places outside Central and South America, including Iraq – where they investigated Saddam Hussein’s massacres of the Kurds while Saddam was still in power – and Haiti. Snow died of cancer (not a surprise since almost all the surviving footage of him shows him smoking) in 2014 at age 86, but at his request his widow divided his remains into three groups and sent them to be buried in Buenos Aires (at a cemetery that had been a mass burial site for some of the desaparecidos), Guatemala and Kurdistan.

Snow’s death occurs about two-thirds of the way through the documentary, and the rest shows how the student leaders, now middle-aged, continued the organization and their involvement with the work of trying to bring despots who commit crimes against their people to justice. It’s one of those remarkable but also horrifying stories that makes you at once despairing that the human race is so evil they continue committing mega-crimes like this, and affirming that there are also people trying either to stop them or, failing that, at least to bring them to justice and hold them accountable for their acts. I remember seeing the Lifetime movie For the Love of a Child in 2009, about Childhelp International founders Sara O’Meara (Peri Gilpin) and Yvonne Fedderson (Terri Polo) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/03/for-love-of-child-alberta-film.html) and thinking that it was a testament to the best of humanity that something like Childhelp International exists – and to the worst of humanity that we need it. That’s the same way I felt about the organization at the center of El Equipo.