An introductory paragraph to the book describes her as the founder of the Centro de Estudios Legales sobre el Terrorismo y sus Víctimas, identified, somewhat awkwardly by the initials CELTyV, which suggests that it may be meant to be a counter to Argentina’s major human rights organization, the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, widely known as CELS.

The book not only caught the eye of Harry. It attracted the attention of Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who specializes in Latin American affairs. O’Grady began her January 3 column with this quotation:

“Those who control the past, control the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

- Big Brother’s party slogan, 1984, by George Orwell

“Justice is not easily secured anywhere in the world,” writes O’Grady.” But in Argentina today it is off limits to even mention in public the victims of the country’s leftwing terrorism in the 1970s, let alone make an effort to win them or their surviving kin a day in court.

“Try it and you are likely to be tarred by the Argentine left as a fascist friend of the former military government. The politically correct know that those who were brutalized by the guerrillas that Juan Perón once called ‘marvelous youth’ are supposed to be erased from the national memory.

“Thirty-five-year-old Argentine lawyer and human-rights advocate Victoria Villarruel is refusing to cooperate.

She has founded Argentina’s Centre for the Legal Study of Terrorism and its Victims with a mission of documenting the thousands of terrorist crimes committed from 1969 to 1979. She believes that shedding light on this dark decade can help secure a more just future for all Argentines.”

Harry was very impressed by the book. I wasn’t. I was put off immediately by one glaring fact. I recognized much of the material reproduced in the book as the very same propaganda that the military intelligence services put out during the dictatorship. I still have some of these devious documents in my possession. The format, typography and material used in the book match them exactly.

I assume that Victoria Villarruel does not know that she is using tainted material. I wonder if she is being used by the kind of people who pollute the Internet with lies and fabrications in denying the crimes committed under the military dictatorship.

After reading the book, I told Harry that it was not worth taking seriously. But O’Grady does take it seriously, even to the point of quoting Villarruel telling her that CELTyV has been able “to name 13,074 victims of the terrorists.” O’Grady does not bother to explain what is meant by “victims.”

Certainly, hundreds of people were killed during the 60s and 70s by scores of terrorist groups. But the highest number of people killed by would-be revolutionaries that I have seen is about 800. I understand that in 1981 the military government placed the number killed by terrorists at around 600.

What I do know is that at the Herald in those days we kept a meticulous account from long before the military coup. Andrew Graham-Yooll began the grisly task, noting in a black book the fatalities in what, in my view, was an underground civil war between the left and the right. What was clear after the military took over was that the guerrillas or terrorists and thousands of people who were not armed were being exterminated like vermin.

I do not think there are any forgotten victims. I have not forgotten them. Anyone who lived through those times could not forget the horrors committed by the ERP (People’s Revolutionary Army) the Montoneros and scores of other terrorist groups. Their atrocities were reported by the media and anyone can look them up today. But they pale in comparison with what came after and that is a story that is still not finished.

It was after the military coup, when the dictatorship set in motion its killing machine that the media stopped reporting atrocities or covered them up. It is only now that more of the hidden truth is being told in the trials that are taking place.

One side of the story was told while it was unfolding and that is the story that Villarreal is retelling and O’Grady is repeating. It is the military’s version, or, put another way, The Official Story.

But it is true that unless a great injustice is redressed, one Official Story will be replaced by another Official Story. When democracy returned, president Raúl Alfonsín ordered the arrest of both the leaders of the military (the nine members of the first three juntas), and seven top leaders of the guerrilla and terrorist groups. President Carlos Menem amnestied them all and today the murderers who acted under the guise of revolutionaries enjoy impunity while the military are on trial.

I don’t think any of the guerrilla leaders were idealists and they weren’t exactly young. But thousands of young people who were idealists and were stirred by the idea of a socialist revolution were led to their deaths and hundreds of idealists who wore a uniform and fought for their country also died.

Orwell’s warning should be heeded. No one must be allowed to control the past, the present or the future. The country’s history has yet to be written - all sides of it.