Ernesto Sabato

Ernesto Sabato (pronounced /sáβato/) (Rojas, June 24, 1911-Santos Lugares, April 30, 2011) was an Argentine writer, painter and physicist. His narrative work consists of three novels: The Tunnel , About Heroes and Tombs and Abaddon the Exterminator . He also stood out as an essayist in books such as One and the Universe, Men and Gears, The Writer and His Ghosts and Apologies and Rejections , in which he reflects on the human condition, the vocation of writing or the cultural problems of the XX century.. He was the second Argentine awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1984) after Jorge Luis Borges (1979).

His long existence led him to be a very present author during the last century and also during the first decade of the present. Although he was prepared to dedicate himself to physics and research in this field, his approach to the surrealist movement, especially to some writers and artists of this current, somehow twisted his destiny and ended up giving free rein to the concern of him as an author. His existentialist vision —reflected in the dark plots of his novels populated by characters lost from their moral values—, his way of presenting ideas and concepts, his rhetorical facility and the wisdom when it comes to entering the psychology of individuals, made him they became one of the great feathers of their time and their country.

In politics, he was president of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) and published a report known by the famous expression Nunca más (also called the Sabato Report). The idea was to try the military juntas of the civil-military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983, the state terrorism that occurred between the 1970's and 1980's, and the disappearance of people that occurred during that time. José Lopéz Rega, former general commissioner of the Argentine Federal Police and leader of the parapolice terrorist group Triple A, was also arrested.

Biography

Early Years

Ernesto Roque Sabato was born on June 24, 1911 in the city of Rojas (Buenos Aires province), the son of Francesco Sabato and Giovanna Maria Ferrari, Italian immigrants from Calabria. His father was from Fuscaldo and his mother from San Martino di Finita, a community of Arbëreshë origin (Albanians from Italy). His family belonged to the middle class and Sabato himself defined it as "classical and hierarchical." About them he declared to one of his biographers: "My father was very severe and I was terrified of him, my mother hid me under the double bed to avoid punishment."

He was the tenth of eleven children and was born shortly after the death of his ninth brother, Ernesto José, Ernestito, for which he bears his name.

His brother Arturo was director of YPF during the government of Arturo Frondizi and Juan became mayor of Rojas.

In 1924 he graduated from the Rojas elementary school and traveled to La Plata where he completed his secondary studies at the National College of La Plata, where he met Professor Pedro Henríquez Ureña, whom he would later cite as inspiration for his literary career, and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. In 1929 he entered the Faculty of Physical-Mathematical Sciences of the National University of La Plata.

He was a militant of the University Reform movement, founding the communist-leaning Grupo Insurrexit in 1933, together with Héctor P. Agosti, Ángel Hurtado de Mendoza and Paulino González Alberdi, among others.

In 1933 he was elected general secretary of the Communist Youth Federation. And in a course on Marxism he met Matilde Kusminsky Richter, a seventeen-year-old student, who left her parents' house to go live with him. In 1934 he began to have doubts about communism and about the dictatorship of Iósif Stalin. The party, which noticed this change, decided to send him for two years to the Leninist Schools in Moscow, where, according to Sabato's words:

It was a place where one healed or ended up in a gulag or in a psychiatric hospital.

Ernesto Sabato.

Before Moscow, he traveled to Brussels as a delegate of the Communist Party of Argentina to the Congress against Fascism and War. Once there, fearing that by going to Moscow he would not return, he abandoned the Congress and fled to Paris. It is there that he wrote his first novel called La fuente muta. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1936 and He contracted a civil marriage with Matilde Kusminsky Richter.

His years as a researcher

In 1937 he obtained a PhD in Physical Sciences and Mathematics at the National University of La Plata. With the support of Bernardo Houssay, he was awarded an annual scholarship to carry out research work on atomic radiation at the Curie Laboratory in Paris. On May 25, 1938, their first son, Jorge Federico, was born. In Paris he came into contact with the surrealist movement and with the work of Óscar Domínguez, Benjamín Péret, Roberto Matta Echaurren, Esteban Francés, among others. This would mark a profound influence on his future works.

During that time of antagonisms, in the morning I was buried between electrometers and testets and night in the bars, with the surreal delusions. In the Dome and in the Deux Magots, alcoholized with those heralds of chaos and misery, we spent hours preparing exquisite bodies.

Ernesto Sabato.

In 1939 he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), leaving Paris before the outbreak of World War II. He returned to Argentina in 1940 with the decision to abandon science, but to comply with those who had awarded him the scholarship, he worked as a professor at the University of La Plata, in the chair for admission to Engineering and in a postgraduate course on relativity and quantum mechanics..

At the Curie Laboratory, in one of the highest goals I could aspire to a physicist, I found myself empty of meaning. Beated by disbelief, I continued to advance by a strong inertia that my soul rejected.

Ernesto Sabato

In an interview conducted in 1977 for Televisión Española he stated:

I worked in astronomical observatories... [and they] are full of neurotics. Against what the people of the street can think well, the astronomer is not a man in peace. A man who looks at the stars [does it] because the Earth does not serve him. In general it is an evaded, they are usually neurotic and sometimes even psychotic. They are solitary, they are unjustified with the world astronomers, in general, there may be exceptions. If any astronomer hears me not to be too angry, I am not sure at this height of my life of almost nothing, but they are generally so. They're even misanthropists, and you're looking for what you don't have, I didn't have order and I looked for the order because I didn't have it, and the order par excellence is the order of mathematics.

Ernesto Sabato

Ernesto Sabato in 1945

In 1943, due to an existential crisis, he decided to permanently move away from the scientific field to dedicate himself fully to literature and painting. He defined science as amoral because "it would lead the world towards disaster". He then settled in Pantanillo, in the province of Córdoba, to live in a ranch without water or electricity but devoted to writing.

At the end of World War II, in 1945, their second son, Mario Sabato, was born, who would become a well-known film director as an adult. That same year he settled with his family in Santos Lugares, from where he developed his entire writing career.

Literary career

In 1941 his first literary work appeared, an article on The invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, in the magazine Teseo of La Plata. He also published a collaboration in the magazine Sur by Victoria Ocampo, through the intervention of Pedro Henríquez Ureña. In 1942 he continued collaborating in that publication with book reviews, he was in charge of the Calendar section and he participated in the "Desagrivio a Borges" in No. 94 of Sur . He published articles in the newspaper La Nación and presented his translation of Birth and Death of the Sun by George Gamow. The following year he would publish the translation of The ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russell.

In 1945 he published his first book, One and the Universe, a series of philosophical articles in which he criticized the apparent moral neutrality of science and warned about dehumanization processes in technological societies. Over time he would move towards libertarian and humanist positions. For this work, in the same year, he received the first prize for prose from the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires —granted based on the opinion of a jury made up of writers Francisco Luis Bernárdez, Vicente Barbieri, Leónidas Barletta, Ricardo Molinari and Adolfo Bioy. Casares— and the belt of honor from the Argentine Society of Writers. In 1947, with serious financial difficulties, Julián Huxley intervened to be appointed as director of UNESCO but he resigned after two months.

Ernesto Sabato, along with Ben Molar and Julio de Caro.

In 1948, after having taken the manuscripts of his novel to the publishing houses in Buenos Aires and being rejected by all of them, he published in the magazine Sur El túnel, A psychological novel narrated in the first person. Framed within existentialism, a philosophical current of enormous diffusion in the postwar era, The Tunnel received enthusiastic reviews from Albert Camus, who had it translated into French by Gallimard. Apart from this, the novel has been translated into more than ten languages.

In 1951 the essay Men and Gears was published by Emecé, and a chapter on Physics in the Jackson Practical Encyclopedia. The following year the film El túnel was released in Argentina, a production by Argentina Sono Film, directed by León Klimovsky. In 1953, again under the Emecé publishing house, he published the essay Heterodoxia .

In 1955 he was appointed controller of the magazine Mundo Argentino by the de facto government imposed by the Liberating Revolution, a position he resigned the following year for having denounced the application of torture to worker militants and the executions in June 1956. That same year he presented The Other Face of Peronism: An Open Letter to Mario Amadeo, in which, without abdicating his antipathy towards the figure of former President Juan Domingo Perón, he defended of Evita and her followers; A position that created numerous criticisms from the Argentine intellectual sectors, who were mainly opponents of the overthrown government.

In 1958, during the presidency of Arturo Frondizi, Sabato was appointed director of Cultural Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a post he also resigned the following year due to disagreements with the government.

In 1961 he published Sobre héroes y tombs, which has been considered one of the best Argentine novels of the 20th century. It is a novel that tells the story of an Argentine aristocratic family in decadence, interspersed with an intimate story about the death of General Juan Lavalle, hero of the Argentine War of Independence, and with the tears in Argentine history, such as the civil wars of the 19th century until 1955. By 1967 it had more than 120,000 copies sold. The anecdote of this book is emblematic, which according to Sabato himself, was destined to be destroyed by fire like so many other works of his that did not see the public light. His survival, the author himself recounted in an interview conducted by the journalist Joaquín Soler Serrano in a chapter of his program A fondo of 1977, is due to the intervention of his wife Matilde who convinced him to publish it instead of destroying it. In 1964 he had received the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, an order instituted by André Malraux.

When I decided to take it for my novel, it was not, in any way, the desire to exalt Lavalle, nor to justify the shooting of another great patriot as Dorrego was, but to achieve through poetic language what is never achieved through documents of supporters and enemies; to try to penetrate into that heart that houses love and hatred, the great passions and the infinite contradictions of the human being in all times and circumstances, what is achieved by narrower

Ernesto Sabato

The novel also includes the Report on the Blind, which has sometimes been published as a separate piece, and about which his son, Mario Sabato, made a film. In 1965 the album was released Romance of the death of Juan Lavalle; cantar de gesta, with recited texts from On Heroes and Tombs and songs with lyrics by Sabato and music by Eduardo Falú. Another person interested in adapting the novel was Astor Piazzolla, who wanted to compose an opera, a project that finally resulted in an "Introduction", recorded on the album Tango contemporáneo, again with recitations by de Sabato. In that same year in Milan, the book was translated into Italian.

In 1966, Losada publishing house offered Fictional Works, with a prologue by Harley D. Oberhelman. In 1967, On Heroes and Tombs was translated into French as Alexandra, and also into German, with an introduction by Witold Gombrowicz. He continually presented Pedro Henríquez Ureña: essay and anthology , a tribute to his teacher and friend. In 1968 he published Three approaches to the literature of our time at the Editorial Universitaria of Santiago de Chile, while in Copenhagen he translated On heroes and tombs into Danish.

In 1971 he published Political Keys, which includes conversations with the group of El escarabajo de oro and letters between Sabato and Ernesto Che Guevara; he began to collaborate with the newspaper The Opinion. In 1973, he organized his essays on the theme Culture at the national crossroads and won the prize of the Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen in Stuttgart (Federal Republic of Germany).

His next novel, Abaddon the Exterminator, was published in 1974; Autobiographical in nature with a fragmentary narrative structure and an apocalyptic plot in which Sabato includes himself as the main character and takes up some of the characters that have already appeared in On Heroes and Tombs. In that year he received the Grand Prize of the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE).

Ernesto Sabato with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in the magazine Bird of Fire (No. 36) June 1981.

In 1975, Sabato obtained the Argentine National Consecration award. In 1976, he was awarded the prize for Best Foreign Novel in Paris (France) for Abaddon the exterminator, while in Italy he received the Medici prize for best foreign book in 1977 for the same work.. In 1978, he was awarded the Grand Cross for civil merit in Spain. In 1979 he was distinguished in France as a commander of the Legion of Honor.

By the 1970s, Sabato felt that, as a writer, he had said "everything he had to say about the great themes of the human condition: death, the meaning of existence, loneliness, hope, and death." existence of God.” In 1983, as an epitaph, he said: “I am a simple writer who has lived tormented by the problems of his time, particularly by those of his nation. I don't have another title." His retirement from literary activity coincided with the worsening of his vision problems, which is why he stopped reading and writing on medical prescription, to dedicate himself to painting. Despite this, in years Later he continued to publish sporadically.

Work at Conadep and Cervantes Award

At the request of President Raúl Alfonsín, he chaired the CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) between 1983 and 1984, whose investigation, reflected in the book Nunca más, opened the doors for the trial of the military juntas of the military dictatorship in 1985.

In 1984 he received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the highest literary award given to Spanish-speaking writers. He was the second Argentine writer to receive this award, after Jorge Luis Borges in 1979. His speech on the occasion of receiving the aforementioned award has been preserved. He also received the Konex Award - Diploma of Merit in 1984 as one of the five best novelists with works published before 1950 in the history of Argentina, granted by the Konex Foundation. In addition, the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires named him an Illustrious Citizen, he received the Order of Boyacá in Colombia and the OAS awarded him the Gabriela Mistral prize. Two years later, in 1986, he was presented with the Grand Officer's Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1989 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in Israel and was named Doctor honoris causa by the University of Murcia (Spain); in 1991 by the University of Rosario and the University of San Luis (Argentina), in 1995 by the University of Turin (Italy) and in 1996 by the National University of Río Cuarto.

Casa de Ernesto Sabato (Santos Lugares).

Last years

On December 21, 1990, at his home in Santos Lugares, he married Matilde Kusminsky Richter "by church." The ceremony was officiated by Bishops Justo Oscar Laguna and Jorge Casaretto.

In 1992 he was invited to the program Fax hosted by Nicolás Repetto broadcast by Canal 13. In that report he told that when he played soccer as a boy he was very violent. And he commented on this sport:

Football is a friendly game because it is universal, it has its great games and memorable. There are moments of real ballet.

I understand the passion in football because passion is violent.

In 1995 his son Jorge Federico died in a car accident. In 1997 he received the XI Menéndez Pelayo International Award from the homonymous University. On September 30, 1998, his wife, Matilde Kusminsky Richter, died and he published his memoirs under the title Before the End and on June 4, 2000 he presented The Resistance in the Clarín newspaper website, thus becoming the first Spanish-language writer to publish a book for free on the Internet rather than on paper. The paper edition was launched on June 16. In 2002 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and the Medal of Honor of the Carlos III University in recognition of his literary merits, as well as the Extremadura Prize for Creation for the best Literary Career of Ibero-American author (Ministry of Culture of the Junta de Extremadura).

In 2004, in an emotional ceremony, he received a tribute from the III International Congress of the Spanish Language in the presence of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and José Saramago. Later, the Royal Spanish Academy also honored him and in 2005 he was distinguished at the National College of La Plata.

On February 11, 2009, the SGAE proposed him for the third time before the Swedish Academy as a candidate for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature together with the Spanish writers Francisco Ayala and Miguel Delibes.

Club Defensores de Santos Lugares, where Ernesto Sabato was veiled.

Death

He died at his home in Santos Lugares during the early hours of April 30, 2011, 55 days before his 100th birthday, due to pneumonia derived from bronchitis that had afflicted him for a few months (he also suffered from serious breathing problems). vision), according to their relatives. The wake was held starting at 5:00 p.m. on the same day at the Defensores de Santos Lugares club, in front of his house at Saverio Langeri 3135. Despite his last request that his remains be buried in the garden of his home and that flower offerings were not sent, he was buried in the Jardín de Paz cemetery, in Pilar, along with his wife and eldest son, after a religious service carried out by Monsignor Jorge Casaretto. His funeral was attended by personalities such as Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, Francisco de Narváez, Graciela Fernández Meijide, Juan Carr, Ricardo Alfonsín, among others.For his part, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sent condolences to the family and a floral offering. His death was confirmed by his collaborator Elvira González Fraga, who declared: "He was suffering for a long time, but he still had some good moments, mainly when he listened to music."

His death coincided with the celebration of the city of Buenos Aires as World Book Capital 2011, and with the development of the 37th edition of the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. A day later he received a joint tribute to him and Adolfo Bioy Casares in the Jorge Luis Borges room, by the Cultural Institute at the Book Fair held in Buenos Aires, and the preparations for the centenary celebrations of his birthday were already underway.

Mural in tribute to Ernesto Sabato (Santos Lugares).

Tributes

The media immediately defined Sabato's death as that of a figure who surpassed literature to become an icon of the democratic return in Argentina. In its digital front page of April 30, the newspaper El País (Madrid) called him "the last classic of Argentine letters" and the newspaper El Mundo (Madrid) called him "the last survivor of Argentine writers with a capital letter".

Ricardo Gil Lavedra ―who was a member of the court that tried the military juntas― said a few hours after Sabato's death: "He was an emblematic personality." León Arslanian assured: "The contribution made by CONADEP was very important and its influence. Some time later, we had the opportunity to talk, his vision was always tragic, it reproduced the horror that somehow he had to comment on ».

Messages related to the writer's experiences, memories and phrases were quickly reiterated on social networks. The most recorded and reproduced a few minutes after his death was his prayer: "Life is so short and the job of living is so difficult, that when one begins to learn it, one has to die."

On June 24, 2011, commemorating the writer's birth, the city of Buenos Aires honored him with a series of activities organized by the Buenos Aires Ministry of Culture and fragments of his books were read in various entities and in the Torre de Babel (by Marta Minujín); In addition, his son, Mario Sabato, announced the remodeling of his father's residence to later be converted into a museum, which was inaugurated in 2012. As a tribute, the Buenos Aires Ministry of Culture placed a large photo of the writer, reproduced on a canvas 88 meters wide by 34 meters high, on the facade of the Del Plata Building at Cerrito 211.

On September 19, 2014, after three years of delays due to lack of funds, the Sabato family finally reopened the writer's home as a "living museum" dedicated to remembering his life and work. The visits are on Saturdays at 3:00 p.m., and are in charge of the writer's grandchildren and Sabato himself, who appears on screens placed in the different rooms recounting anecdotes and describing each one. To book, write to 11 36149927

In 2016, the Deliberative Council of Tres de Febrero approved the change of name of Saverio Langeri street, where the house-museum is located, to that of Ernesto Sabato.

Activism and political ideology

In his youth, Sabato was an activist of the Communist Party, where he became general secretary of the Communist Youth Federation. Later he would move away from Marxist communism, disillusioned by the course that Stalin's dictatorship had taken in the Soviet Union.

A detractor of Peronism, Sabato was one of the first to provide an interpretation of the government of General Juan Domingo Perón after the overthrow of his second government, which was published under the title The Other Face of Peronism in 1956. In this essay, Sabato harshly criticized Peronism:

The engine of history is the resentment, which, in the case of Argentina, accumulates from the Indian, the gaucho, the gringo, the immigrant and the modern worker, to form the germ of the Peronist, the main resentful and forgotten.

Ernesto Sabato

The unknown colonel Perón, whose star began to rise on the horizon saw clear that the age of the masses had come to the country. And both his learning in Italy, his natural tendency to fascism, his infallible smell for demagoguery, his suitability to intuit and awaken the worst passions of the crowd, his own experience of social resentment - natural son as it was - and therefore his understanding and valuation of resentment as the primordial resort of a great mass movement, and finally his absolute lack of escrúpulos; all the training

Ernesto Sabato

Despite his criticism of the Peronist movement and Juan Domingo Perón, Sabato praised Eva Duarte, declaring that she was the "authentic revolutionary". Later, Sabato did not want to republish The Other Face of Peronism; and by 1987, when the Complete Works of him” were published, he made sure in the preface that this essay would be published in a new volume of political writings, which to this day has not been published.

Ernesto Sabato

Regarding the so-called Liberating Revolution that overthrew Perón in 1955, Sabato expressed in correspondence that he exchanged with Ernesto Che Guevara:

When at a time when the revolution of 1955 occurred I saw modest servants crying silently, I thought (at last) that the trees had prevented us from seeing the forest and that the angry texts in which we had read about chemically pure revolutions had prevented us from seeing with our own eyes a dirty revolution (as always the real historical movements) that was tumultuously developing before us.

Ernesto Sabato
Holy Places, February 1, 1960

When General Onganía overthrew President Illia, Sabato applauded saying:

We must have the courage to understand that they have ended up in institutions where no one believed seriously. Do you believe in the Chamber of Deputies?

Ernesto Sabato in magazine People of 28 July 1966

This statement was not a small thing coming from a recognized intellectual, since the Onganía dictatorship was particularly ferocious against writers and scientists, leaving for the memory of Argentines the Night of the Long Canes, an attack on the University of Buenos Aires that forced dozens of the best academics in Argentina into exile. Sabato did not say any of this, despite the fact that he had free access to newspapers and microphones.

During the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón, Sabato felt threatened by Triple A. However, he was not intimidated by it and published the essay Our time of contempt, in addition to various newspaper articles published abroad in which he denounced the military repression. According to Ángela Dellepiane in her research for UNESCO, the newspaper La Razón of May 20, 1976 and La Opinión of May 21 ―still directed by Jacobo Timerman― They give direct testimony from the writer about what happened. "There is another thing that anguishes me and that I felt obliged to raise: the witch hunt." In relation to the cases of Antonio Di Benedetto and the architect Jorge Hardoy, Sabato expressed: "...gave names of people who honor the country and who have suffered expulsion from their workplaces and even detention."

Dictatorship

On May 19, 1976, the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla starred in a lunch with a group of Argentine intellectuals, including Ernesto Sabato, Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Esteban Ratti and Father Leonardo Castellani. Of all, only Father Castellani made reference to the dictator of the disappearance of Haroldo Conti and asked about his situation. After the meal, Sabato told the press:

"Borges and Sabato together for the first time", cover photo of the magazine PeopleNo. 499, February 13, 1975.

It is impossible to synthesize a two-hour conversation in a few words, but I can say that with the president of the nation we speak of the culture in general, of spiritual, cultural, historical and linked to the mass media. [...] There was a very high degree of mutual understanding and respect. At no time did the dialogue descend to the literary or ideological polemic. Nor do we incur the sin of falling into banality. Each of us has, without hesitation, its personal conception of the topics addressed.[...] General Videla gave me an excellent impression. This is a cult, modest and intelligent man. I was impressed by the range of criteria and the modesty of the president.

Ernesto Sabato

The writer Osvaldo Bayer points out that with the advent of democracy, Sabato tried to justify that visit to support Videla as a claim for his disappeared colleagues. The other diners denied Sabato's version and reported that the writer's only proposal was the creation of a television censorship commission.

This episode brought him numerous criticisms in the following years ―as it happened with other media figures who openly supported the dictatorship, such as Mirtha Legrand (television presenter) or Juan Manuel Fangio (director of the Mercedes Benz company in Argentina responsible for delivery of trade union delegates)― in similar cases. Among his detractors was the writer Osvaldo Bayer, who accused Sabato of "being part of Argentine hypocrisy". In exile, Osvaldo Bayer recounted how Sabato supported the dictatorship by promoting the 1978 World Cup in various media. An article in the German magazine Geo-Magazin stands out, in which he described Argentines as "the skin color of Europeans" who "eat like Italians and dress like Englishmen." The Argentine intellectual whitewashed the horrors of the dictatorship at the same time that he left Argentine refugees in Europe in a bad light.

The continuity of Martinez de Hoz no one questions, but neither does anyone support with greater religiosity than Lieutenant General Videla. Exactly that: with a true act of faith towards the management of the minister, which expresses, more than a political act, virtually religious support.^{[chuckles]required]}

Ernesto Sabato, interview in the newspaper La Nación.

In 1979, Sabato published Apologies and Rejections, seven lengthy essays on the ills of education, in which he challenged the censorship imposed by the military dictatorship in Argentina. On the other hand, on August 12, 1980, the newspaper Clarín published the request in which it asked for the fate of the Argentine citizens who disappeared during the military dictatorship, with the title: «The list is published of the disappeared The whereabouts of the same should be reported": Ernesto Sabato was one of the 175 signatories.

Conadep

Ernesto Sabato gives President Raúl Alfonsín the report of CONADEP, known as Never again..

Once the military dictatorship ended, Ernesto Sabato chaired the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, CONADEP, a commission in charge of investigating the human rights violations that occurred in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 at the hands of the aforementioned military dictatorship. This investigation and subsequent report were captured in the overwhelming book Nunca Más, which contains testimonies of the disappearances, torture and deaths of people during the military dictatorship. CONADEP verified that "there were 340 clandestine detention centers" throughout the entire Argentine territory, where torture and executions took place. The report also included a detailed description of the torture methods.

On September 20, 1984, Sabato delivered the commission's report to President Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín. That day, human rights organizations called a rally to support the ceremony, which was attended by about 70,000 people. The Peace and Justice Service (SerPaJ) led by the Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH), the Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights (MEDH), the Argentine League for Human Rights, and the of Man (LADH) and the Family of Detainees Disappeared for Political Reasons (FDDRP) group.

The report echoes what is called the theory of the two demons, which links acts of violence and terrorism perpetrated by the Argentine state with violent acts perpetrated by guerrilla organizations (such as the Montoneros and the ERP). The following sentence by Sabato in the prologue to the report is representative of this prevailing vision during the trial of the boards:

During the 1970s Argentina was convulsed by a terror that came from both the extreme right and the extreme left [...] to the crimes of the terrorists, the Armed Forces responded with an infinitely worse terrorism than the fighter, because since March 24, 1976 they had the power and impunity of the absolute state, kidnapping, torture and murdering thousands of human beings.

Ernesto Sabato's text about "terrorists"

Over the years, almost all human rights organizations defended and sponsored the report Nunca Más in its continuous reissues. Some authors consider that time seemed to enhance the virtues of the report, very possibly due to the profound effect it caused on Argentine society in the years after its disclosure.

The report Nunca más was going to open the doors for the trial of the Juntas of the military dictatorship. Later, Sabato publicly condemned the two hundred and eighty pardons granted in 1989 to civilians and soldiers involved in torture, deaths and disappearances during the period of the dictatorship in Argentina.

Last years

In his latest writings and public appearances, he stated that he considered that "it is from an anarcho-Christian attitude that we will have to guide life".

I'm an anarchist! An anarchist in the best sense of the word. People believe that anarchist is the one who puts bombs, but anarchists have been the great spirits like, for example, Lion Tolstoi.

Ernesto Sabato

Although I was an activist communist, anarchism has always seemed to me a way of achieving social justice with full freedom. And I value Christianity Gospel. This century is atrocious and will end atrociously. The only thing that can save it is to return to poetic thought, to that social anarchism, and to art.

Ernesto Sabato

After his defection from state socialism, Sabato generally advocated a society based on individual liberty and free association, on cooperatives in science and the economy, and on political decentralization.

The formidable crisis of man, this total crisis, is serving at least to reconsider the models. And it is no coincidence that in different parts of the world, another type of socialism, closer to the one who preconceded Proudhon, or the one who in our times have held noble and lucid spirits such as Mounier, between Christians and Bertrand Russell, among the Agnostics. [...] A socialism that respects the person, that ends with alienation and consumer society, that ends with physical misery but also with the spiritual, that puts technique and science at the service of man and not, as is happening, man at the service of those. A decentralized socialism that avoids the turbulent evils of the superstate, the secret police and the concentration camps [...]

Years before his death, he joined the long list of prominent Latin American figures who expressed their support for the independence of Puerto Rico through their adherence to the Panama Proclamation unanimously approved by the Latin American and Caribbean Congress for the Independence of Puerto Rico held in Panama in November 2006.

Works

Novels

• 1948: The tunnel
• 1961: About heroes and graves
• 1974: Abbot the exterminator

Essays

• 1945: One and the Universe
• 1951: Men and gears
• 1952: Heterodoxy
• 1956: The other face of Peronism
• 1956: The Sábato case: torture and freedom of the press. Letter open to General Aramburu
• 1963: The writer and his ghosts
• 1963: Tango, discussion and key
• 1967: Pedro Henríquez Ureña
• 1968: Three Approaches to Literature
• 1974: Eduardo Falú
• 1975: Letter to a young writer
• 1976: Dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges
• 1976: Culture at the national crossroads
• 1979: Apologies and rejections
• 1979: The books and their mission in the liberation and integration of Latin America
• 1985: Never again: report of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP)
• 1988: Between letter and blood
• 1990: Dear and Remote Boy
• 1998: Before the end
• 2000: Resistance
• 2002 The horizon before the abyss
• 2002 Confessions of an old writer
• 2004: Spain in the newspapers of my old age

Anthologies

• 1967: What is existentialism?
• 1967: National Thought and the Encyclical Popularum Progressio
• 1969: Itinerary
• 1969: The political convulsion of our time. Confrontations and coincidences of a dramatic selection of texts, phrases, quotes and aphorisms
• 1971: Political keys
• 1973: Culture at the national crossroads
• 1974: Living pages
• 1975: Anthology
• 1981: The Robotization of Man and Other Pages
• 1982: Total birth
• 1985: Pages of Ernesto Sábato
• 1986: Sábato: culture and education
• 1989: The best of Ernesto Sábato
• 1995: Ernesto Sábato: painting

As an anthologist

• 1999: Tales that passionate me 1
• 1999: Tales that passionate me 2

Complete Works

• 1966 Fiction works
• 1970 Rehearsal works
• 1997 Complete works. Tests
• 1997 Complete works. Narrative

Predecessor: Rafael Alberti

Miguel de Cervantes Award 1984

Successor: Gonzalo Torrente Ballester