Back where my troubles began

The stories he wrote for the Buenos Aires Herald, the only English-language paper in the Argentine capital, had led to attempts on his life, imprisonment, beatings and 18 years of exile.

But his thoughts were not of the military coup which plunged his home country into eight years of brutality - during which time 30,000 people "disappeared". He was remembering his father, who had left Edinburgh for Patagonia in 1928, never to return.

"I was given the option of Buckingham Palace or Edinburgh to collect my OBE," says Mr Graham-Yooll, his accent surprisingly Scottish despite his Argentine upbringing. "My father left Edinburgh in 1928, when he was 21, and he never returned, although he often spoke about coming back. So I chose Holyrood because it was a little private tribute to the old man."

Clearly, his father - who became a strong patriot after emigrating from Leith to Argentina - had a strong influence, and Mr Graham-Yooll’s early memories are filled with snippets of Scottish life, literature and politics recounted to him by his dad and other Scots emigres.

"They were a weird bunch, the Scots," he laughs. "They would farm and work and drink and reproduce down there in Patagonia, and they would still be reading Hugh MacDiarmid and Blackwood’s Magazine as if they were right here in Scotland."

But his father’s nationalist politics caused him some trouble in the days of Juan Peron and his charismatic wife Eva.

"Unfortunately for him, he was an admirer of the Scottish Nationalists," Mr Graham-Yooll recalls. "He joined the socialists, and that ruined him. He was a fruit farmer, and as he didn’t get any subsidies because of his political affiliations, he had to sell at a loss."

A generation later, and politics very nearly brought about Mr Graham-Yooll’s own downfall, when he angered the military leadership with his writing in the Buenos Aires Herald. In 1975, left-wing sympathisers had begun to "disappear". Mr Graham-Yooll’s articles, which had interviews with guerrillas opposed to the military’s tactics of terror, literally put him in the firing line.

In the months leading up to the bloody coup of March 1976, which overthrew Peron’s second wife Isabelita, the leaders of the military could not afford to let such criticism go unpunished.

A cadre of heavily armed guards arrived at the newspaper’s offices, intent on silencing one of their most vocal detractors.

Had Mr Graham-Yooll gone to work as usual that day, he would undoubtedly have been killed, joining those who "disappeared" during the dictatorship of General Jorge Videla. Fortunately, he was with his wife, who had just given birth to their third child, and the raid was foiled.

But he knew it was only a matter of time before another attempt would be made to capture him. Soon afterwards, he was arrested, imprisoned and brought to trial for publishing interviews with guerrillas opposed to the military. He was acquitted, but he was advised by the judge to go into exile.

"They came looking for me with wicked-looking weapons and a car loaded full of guns," Mr Graham-Yooll recalls.

"They came to kill me, but they usually did it by stealth, and they got the timing wrong. As they couldn’t kill me, they put me in prison.

"I was arrested and charged with condoning violence. I was found not guilty, but the judge told me: ‘You had better get out’."

Mr Graham-Yooll took his advice and fled Argentina to seek refuge in Britain, taking advantage of his dual nationality. In London, he continued working as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, forced to write from afar about the brutal regime crushing his country.

He returned to Argentina to report on the Falklands crisis in 1982 - by which time Videla had been replaced as dictator by General Galtieri - but even then it was not safe. He was targeted by a hit squad, and so badly beaten he was left with a faulty kidney.

Ironically, the next time he went back, in 1984, it was with the blessing of the new democratic government. He was given an armed guard to testify in the prosecution of a gangster boss - and the guards were led by the same man who led the patrol ordered to kill him nine years earlier. Mr Graham-Yooll says it was "interesting" to meet him.

He also saw a sea change in Argentine society as it began to emerge from the nightmare now called the "Dirty War".

"It was on its way to being an open society," he says. "I had never seen so much freedom of expression."

In 1994, it was finally safe for Mr Graham-Yooll to return to Argentina, where he was appointed editor-in-chief of the paper where his troubles began. He has also written several books about Argentine and South American history, including Imperial Skirmishes, which examines Britain’s role in its conflicts.

But now he’s back in Buenos Aires, life has yet to return to normality, as Argentina still struggles to move on from its brutal past. Hundreds of grieving families are still searching for answers to what happened to the loved ones who disappeared.

"They can account for 1500 killed in 1975, but after 1976 it’s hard to tell how many died," he says. "It was a bloodbath. People were arrested on the streets, or just vanished. In some cases, their bones have been found and mass burials have also been found.

"The huge problem now is that Argentina is in a way denying its past, and yet trying to come to terms with it. We still don’t know, because we haven’t seen any records, how many people were killed or how they were killed. The most recent concern is about what happened to the children of the women who were pregnant at the time. They held the women until they went into labour, then killed them and put the babies up for adoption.

"Because of clandestine reports and witness reports, they have found some of them who were adopted. But there are still several hundred missing."

Mr Graham-Yooll still cannot comprehend the brutality of the dictatorship in targeting women and children. But he likens their actions to Nazi Germany.

"They said: ‘First of all we will pick off the militants, then their sympathisers, then we will pick up the indifferent’. It’s a recipe for terror. They believed, like the Nazis, that the children should not be killed, but given over to people who would give them the proper upbringing."

However, Mr Graham-Yooll and his second wife Gladys have themselves found happiness after adopting a baby boy who was abandoned in the jungle near Paraguay.

Doctors told them he was so premature he may not even survive the journey to hospital in Buenos Aires. But, against all the odds, Matias has survived and Mr Graham-Yooll, who already has three grandchildren, has unexpectedly become a father again.

"He was 15 days old and he had been abandoned by his teenage mother. He was very tiny. He was premature and he was only 2lbs in weight. He was rejecting his food. The doctors gave him only a couple of days to live, but now he is a 22-month-old beautiful boy and has recovered from his early troubles."

Now that Argentina’s economy has all but collapsed, and violent protests have resulted in demonstrators being shot by police, is settling his family in Buenos Aires a decision he will live to regret?

"Argentina has descended into chaos again," he concedes. "I am older now - I know the rules of the game, or the lack of rules. The essence of the instability is corruption. It is very deep-set, deeply entrenched corruption.

"Things you think you can rely on and trust are just not there. You can’t trust the bank, you can’t trust the post office or the people who sell you a house. You can’t trust the politicians, obviously. It’s a friendly society but it lacks strict rules. It’s evil, but it is also attractive to live in a place where you don’t have to live by rules.

"I don’t know where I could go now - it was always home, even in the worst days, and it still is."

Like his father, who dreamed of returning to Edinburgh, Mr Graham-Yooll always felt "a strong pull" to return home: "My father always spoke about going home to Edinburgh, and he died young, so he never did.

"But if you are forced to leave as I was, and forced to stay out because there are several warrants out for your arrest, then it becomes a lifelong challenge to go back."

♦ Imperial Skirmishes, by Andrew Graham-Yooll, is published by Signal Books priced 12.99.

A turbulent history

1946: General Juan Peron wins a free presidential election. He and his wife Eva become hugely popular, especially after an expansion in social services spending. But Peron becomes increasingly repressive towards critics and the Catholic Church.

1955-1972: Peron is forced into exile and a series of unstable civilian and military governments ensue. Any elections that were held found strong support for the Peronists.

1973: Peron is allowed to return to the presidency with his new wife Isabel, known as Isabelita.

1974-1976: Peron dies, and is succeeded by Isabelita. Inflation spirals out of control.

1976: The armed forces overthrow the government in a bloodless coup. But the military junta suppresses left-wing opposition groups and their sympathisers. An estimated 30,000 people "disappear" in the few years following the coup.

1982: The military government, now under General Leopoldo Galtieri, invades the Falkland Islands. The move is a bid to win popular support and divert attention from domestic economic crises.

1983: Presidential elections are held, ending the military rule.

2001: The arrest of Galtieri is ordered by an Argentine judge in connection with the torture, murder and disappearance of leftists in the 1970s.