Fourteen years ago, after reviewing the manuscript of this novel in a long, emotional session, my adoptive Argentine brother, on whom the character of Martín Segundo is closely based, said, "It's too cruel."

I asked him what he meant by this. He added, "Too cruel to the nation."

He did not wish to say more. He had helped correct some facts on which the fiction is based, and, other than his point about cruelty, I sensed that he did not entirely disapprove. In the Buenos Aires outside, at that time, with the infamous "Ley de obedencia debida" and "Ley del punto final" of the Alfonsín government (1983-89), plus the presidential pardons handed down by the Menem administration in 1989, there seemed little hope of ever renewing the prosecutions of the hundreds of military and police officers most responsible for crimes against humanity during the Argentine dictatorship and "dirty war" of 1976-83. There appeared to be few options left for meaningful actions in pursuit of justice for the tens of thousands of murdered and disappeared, our own two brothers among them.

Even so, my adoptive Argentine family trudged on with their persistent, tireless activities. They continued their efforts with human rights organizations such as the C.E.L.S., for which Papá served on the Executive Board as Treasurer, and with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, of which Mamá was among the founders. They carried on the same as before, even if justice, or closure, might never truly be possible. At the time this novel was first published, Argentina seemed interested only in forgetting its own sad history amid the churning delirium of the Menem government's one-to-one peso-to-dollar economy that fueled what Mamá called an "obscene consumerism" being marketed everywhere by the ideologies of globalization. Issues of human rights asserted little influence during that mad cycle of blind acquisition, government corruption and false prosperity.

In the United States, in 1995, my tour of public presentations and readings of Voices from Silence was dogged by mysterious persons from Argentina who frequently turned up and challenged the book with public questions as to what damage it might be doing to the public relations image of Argentina in the world, and whether or not it was fair or humane to recall the crimes of its military government. The attitude by so many—both abroad and at home—seemed to be a new saying: "There may be thirty thousand disappeared, but there are thirty million Argentines." At an event in New York, a woman actually grabbed the lapels of my jacket and shouted in Spanish into my face, "We must leave this behind us! It's not fair to cause us this pain!"

After a reading in Las Vegas, a man sporting a then unfashionable crew cut and with what I thought was a military bearing uncharacteristic of anyone in that audience approached me afterward and hinted that possible harm might come to me by continuing to read from my novel—very allusively, in Spanish, he said, "Those who write about these things don't last very long." He presented me a book to sign for him, which I did, with some flourish of a conciliatory remark about our mutual desires for a future with peace and justice. Afterwards, I discovered from a clerk that the man had not purchased the book but instead had replaced the signed copy on the shelf and left the store. At another reading, in Orange County, California, a man shouldered through the sparse crowd and stated bluntly that he was from the Argentine consulate in Los Angeles, then he left without another word, his message clear, "You are being watched." I did not then and still don't believe this person was a consular official, but still, who was he? And who had sent him to the reading?

Later, in December of that year, I traveled to Buenos Aires with plans to present the novel at bookstores and to the press. All events were mysteriously cancelled, at the last minute. One bookstore-café owner, a dear old friend, Natu Poblet, took me aside and explained, "It's just not safe now. Why run the risk?"

My scheduled conversation with the English language "Buenos Aires Herald" was conducted not at their offices, but, most strangely, two blocks away, in a seedy beer joint, by David Cox, the son of the very esteemed journalist, Robert Cox, who had suffered greatly for his championing of the truth during the years of the "dirty war" and who later felt forced by an atmosphere of menace against him, and a more general disgust with the progress of the cause of human rights, to leave Argentina for good. No interview nor other mention of my book ever ran in that newspaper. The explanation David Cox gave me for the change in venues for our conversation was that he felt his own life was under threat such that he no longer conducted interviews in the office, nor was he keeping a regular schedule there, because of an investigative story he was working on concerning the 1987 macabre theft from the grave at Chacaritas of the decaying hands of Juan Perón. In sum: at the time of this documentary novel's first publication, threats, menace, conspiracy theories, and echoes of state terrorism still harassed accounts of "the disappeared" and the crimes against humanity committed by the military junta.

Walking through the streets of Buenos Aires that day—that city I loved and still love, in this Argentina I will always consider my second home—it was as if I could still sense on the light breeze off the pampas a distant faint odor of burning tires and human remains that had fueled the dictatorship's crematoriums at the Campo de Mayo detention center two decades before. Even though my book had garnered a very good review by Thomas Mallon in "The New York Times Book Review," followed later by an extensive feature in one of their Sunday editions, then had been selected for the year's end list of recommended books by "The Washington Post Book World," not one word about Voices from Silence was published in the Argentine press for the next eleven years.

The first news of this novel to appear in Argentina was February 26, 2006, in a long feature and interview by the novelist and journalist, Paula Varsavsky, in "Perfil," a popular literary arts publication owned by the "La Nación" newspaper, in which, oddly enough, a comparison is made to books by W. H. Hudson and Bruce Chatwin. The angle of the story is about foreign writers and their views of Argentina, cast just a bit as in a phrase from an old gaucho song, "penas nuestras, vacas ajenas"—the troubles belong to us, the books to someone else. The irony was not lost on me that my voice was the only one of the three that was still alive, and still speaking. Better late than never, of course. And the fact that Voices from Silence found mention at all in the Argentine press is one tiny indication of just how radically the general climate toward issues of human rights and the terrible history of state terrorism there has suddenly changed.

During a six month period from December, 2001, to May, 2002, Argentina suffered an economic collapse unprecedented in the contemporary history of developing economies, with a radical devaluation in its currency (75%), a massive default on the national debt that had fueled the Menem era of consumption and corruption, followed by riots in the streets and runs on the banks until they froze all accounts. This crisis caused 40% unemployment virtually overnight. The election-and/or appointment followed by the quick resignations of four new presidents and their administrations, one after the other, in six short months, passed before a bewildered, desperate Argentine people—like a shabbily staged tango show of seduction and betrayal by its most gaudily posturing political elite.

The illusion of prosperity had ended, caused, at least in part, by International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies—fully backed by the power and influence of the United States government. IMF and World Bank policies amounted to "four steps to economic damnation," as my old friend and alternative journalist, Greg Palast, calls them: privatization (selling out state assets to multinational corporations with all the insider dealing and government corruption that inevitably accompanies that process); capital-market liberalization (in theory allowing free capital flows in and out, but in practice, the flow of capital from Argentina was mainly out, in a very rapid flight); market-based pricing (to promote global consumption, but in essence, this caused sharp price hikes in most public sector services, such as gas, electric, transportation and communications); and step four, "free trade," which is also cynically labeled a "poverty reduction strategy" by the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, theoretically meant to open markets but that instead employed practices that bullied developing nations to tear down trade barriers while industrialized economies still barricaded their own markets against Third World agricultural products, and especially this was the case for Argentina. These draconian policies were enforced by threats of an economic blockade more menacing to the welfare of a people than any conventional military threat.

When various Argentine administrations could no longer sustain this "four step" regimen, a cruel economic blockade is exactly what was imposed. Collapse followed, along with a massive disillusionment, followed by deeply soul-searching questions by the Argentine people concerning their place, their role, their sense of themselves in a greater world society that had not only abandoned them but that seemed to have singled them out for punishment, as if to make a harsh example of Argentina for any other poor nations that might consider not following orders. Even Harvard-trained economist and former Minister of the Economy, Domingo Cavallo—one of the initial architects of the Menem administration's peso-to-dollar privatization policies—asked the question, "Did the IMF and U.S. government seek Argentina's default on all its public debt as actually happened?" His answer is, "yes." Argentina became the whipping boy for the macro-politics of globalization.

Emerging from out of this chaos—relevant also to Voices from Silence and its possible significance as a documentary novel—was the election of a new and transformative president, Néstor Carlos Kirchner, May 25, 2003, who brought into his government many former exiles, militants, and illegally imprisoned resistance activists who had years before fought against the military junta responsible for crimes against humanity. Some of the real persons on whom characters in the novel are based are now helping to run the country. In barely five years, Argentina has risen up out of its economic default with renewed strength, and it is seeking out an improved role in global society. The resiliency of its people has been exemplary not for having been punished by the "new world order" but for having survived, and more, for prospering as a symbol of resistance against the wrong-headed and authoritarian policies of globalization. This is in large part due to the impeccable hard work, and vision, of the Kirchner government, my own family and friends contributing to that success. Along with this economic and social recovery, the Kirchner government has brought forward a steady, intractable policy of overturning the unjust amnesty laws and illegal pardons for those responsible for tortures and murders during the "dirty war"—not in any way drawing on motives of revenge, and not for the oft-quoted, unrealistic cliché of "national reconciliation," either; rather they have intelligently utilized the already extant laws and court system machinery that had been repudiated and defiled by the conciliatory—and illegal—actions of the Alfonsín and Menem administrations in the first place.

In June, 2005, the Supreme Court of Argentina overturned the "lay de obedencia debida" and "ley del punto final". President Kirchner vacated the laws a few months later. Then, April 27—just last Friday, as I am at work on this afterword—news broke that the court has reinstated the life sentences of Almirante Emilio Massera, and Teniente General Jorge Rafael Videla, the only two ex-members of the military junta who are still living. It remains unclear if Massera, who suffered a stroke so severely disabling that he persists in a vegetative state, would even be aware of any change in scenery from his luxurious home to a prison cell. Videla is also in failing health. His attorneys will no doubt fight to delay his transfer from house arrest in his posh apartment overlooking the Avenida Libertador and the Rio de la Plata to a small concrete room behind bars, where he has long belonged. Still, for the ex-comandantes, and for the hundreds of former officers of the military and police guilty of human rights crimes, the message is clear: justice is not for the living but for the dead. And the dead, tortured, disappeared by their hands—contrary to what the closing lines of this novel states, written fifteen years ago—will now not be forgotten in their vanished graves. The Kirchner government has been a champion for the cause of remembering the dead and disappeared.

In November, 2005, I was invited by editor Guido Indij of La Marca Editora to attend and write an essay to accompany the ceremony for the presentation of a project and book at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires—the book titled, Memoria en construcción: el debate sobre la ESMA, edited by Marcelo Brodsky, a renowned photographer and human rights activist. The book is a substantial, collage-form text containing photographs of the disappeared salvaged from destruction by a death camp survivor, Victor Basterra, along with selected essays by human rights activists, and colorful images of works by more than thirty leading Argentine artists who responded to the experience of the dirty war and its horrors with their creative imaginations, (much of this art has been collected under sponsorship of the Lannan Foundation into a traveling exhibit titled "Art of the Disappeared" now touring the United States). I had helped to obtain grants to support the book's publication, and my essay was to be put on display in the lobby, and later archived in the collection of any future ESMA project. The ESMA is a vast complex of buildings on fourteen and a half hectares of parklike grounds on the Avenida Libertador that once housed the former Escuela de la Mecánica de la Armada—the Naval Engineering School—that served as one of the most notorious detention centers and death camps of the military junta.

At the National Library presentation, November 18, 2005, Victor Basterra appeared for the first time in more than a decade. Basterra is the heroic inmate-trustee who had done forced labor at the ESMA detention center, his job there to keep archives and files under the brutal treatment of the naval commanders. He had, at great risk to his life, managed to secret away photographs and documents, many with names and descriptions, thus saving from destruction evidence of hundreds of victims who had been tortured at the ESMA then drugged and sent off on the dictatorship's notorious night-time flights from which they were pushed out of airplanes, still living, high over the waters of the South Atlantic. Basterra spoke movingly about the possible construction of a lasting memorial to "the disappeared" out of the abandoned structures of the ESMA, and of the symbolic "recovery of memory" such a project signifies. His appearance, and the standing ovation he received before such a packed public forum and the press, is a significant marker of the sea change in Argentina's national conscience. Estela Carlotta, founder of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, also presented, along with human rights activist Horacio González, and the painter Luis Felipe Noé represented the silenced artists of his generation. The focus of the presentation was not merely a celebration of the book edited by Brodsky. The speakers also debated the possible approaches to constructing an appropriate memory to "the disappeared" from the ESMA, and what to do with the ESMA complex itself, the physical structures, and the real estate, among the most commercially valuable parcels of land in the whole city, which had become the object of much acquisitive lobbying of government officials by developers in past years—the struggle over how much of the site to preserve in the public domain for a memorial is still an ongoing issue.

The debate over what to do with the ESMA raises questions which go to the very essence of what it is to construct any such memory—is memory an act of recovery, preservation, or recreation? Should it be more about education? Is it all four operations at once? Is a memorial to be a living, active construction? Or is it to be something kept passively on display, as in a natural history museum—composed of preserved objects, as would be a mountain of discarded shoes, or walls made of photographs of the dead, or yellowing identity cards and death camp documents under glass, with heaps of excavated bones, like a kind of entombment of many memories made from fixed things, artifacts and images displayed so that, in some way—perhaps impossibly—they combine to represent the impact of such a devastating human tragedy? What, really, is the nature of this memory? What can be made of it so that future generations will most effectively comprehend the history of the disappeared?

Such questions affect the ESMA, and ongoing work on the Parque de la Memoria along a strip of river bank on the Costanera, near the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where the city, private foundations, human rights groups and the survivors continually debate its qualities as a public and meditative space, and where the enlarged photograph of my brother Álvaro looks off toward the cityscape he passionately loved from an immense blue banner among the ranks of hundreds of faces of the disappeared. These questions about the nature of memory will seek out their answers in physical constructions soon enough, though perhaps not until many of us who lived through the horrors and claim them as our own are gone from the world.

Books—at least a hundred of them so far, if we count memoirs, journalism, poetry, and novels ranging from the grittily realistic and to the astonishingly fantastical—books must make the most deeply significant contributions to this complex and ever fathomless project of remembering, for is not what writing, in essence, always about the active creation and recreation of memory? My hope for many years has been that the mnemonic purpose in writing Voices from Silence along with its qualities as living story—intended from first conception as a documentary novel, as art of witness—would help the book to survive the capricious market forces of a contemporary publishing scene in which so many valuable books are consumed then discarded, treated as if the literary enterprise itself were as readily perishable as any seasonal fruit. My hope for this book is that it can find its proper place within the larger project of a historical, and necessary, memory. For many years, I felt that memory would be discarded, and, along with it, this book, among the many books. Now I don't believe this will happen. I have renewed faith in a growing human consciousness that wherever there is a crime against humanity it belongs to us all, and we must all be responsible. We choose either to turn away from or to face that crime directly then respond, and propose, and act, no matter under what flag we chanced to be born. Crimes against humanity are ever present in our collective consciousness. Our responses as individuals—what finally we choose to do or not to do—forms a significant element in determining the nature of our characters. The degree to which we assume responsibility will shape the way future generations will perceive us and judge us, and will determine how much they will value or diminish over time our ever more estranging and distant presences—how it is we once walked on the earth—and the words we leave behind. Death is a horizon, and a horizon is merely a limit to what we can see. Every human failing, every such terrible fall, should form a pretext for further existence. The degree to which future generations will recover and make use of this memory as a pretext for change will help to shape also the quality of their humanity. The story continues. There can be no ending. Voices from Silence will remain at least one small part of a new certainty: the story of the disappeared, and of my brothers, will be remembered.

—March-June, 2007: Las Vegas, Hong Kong,
Mendoza, Buenos Aires