The Argentinian Dictatorship and its Legacy

Rethinking the Proceso

Juan Grigera, Luciana Zorzoli, Juan Grigera, Luciana Zorzoli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030183004
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030183011
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the renewal of academic engagement in the Argentinian dictatorship in the context of the post-2001 crisis. Significant social and judicial changes and the opening of archives have led to major revisions of the research dedicated to this period. As such, the contributors offer a unique presentation to an English-speaking audience, mapping and critiquing these developments and widening the recent debates in Argentina about the legacy of the dictatorship in this long-term perspective.

© The Author(s) 2020

Juan Grigera and Luciana Zorzoli (eds.)The Argentinian Dictatorship and its LegacyStudies of the Americashttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18301-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Juan Grigera¹ and Luciana Zorzoli²

(1)

Department of International Development, King’s College London, London, UK

(2)

Research Associate (SOAS) and Postdoctoral Fellow (CONICET), Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (IdIHCS), Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), La Plata, Argentina

Juan Grigera (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Luciana Zorzoli

Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The Challenges of State Narrative Shifts

There is no need to agree with Carl Schmidt that ‘from Hegel on, and in the best fashion Benedetto Croce, they made us realise that every historical knowledge is knowledge of the present’¹ to concede that a historiographical revisit of the ‘recent past’ cannot but stem from a specific political context. The recent radical rethinking in Argentina of its dictatorial experience between 1976 and 1983 speaks at the same time of the outcome of new sources, archives and a new generation of researchers and of the impact of the profound social and political crisis the country went through in 2001/2002. The latter was key in contesting the dominant narrative of the self-nominated Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (PRN, the name of the dictatorship chose for itself) and in bringing to the fore the legacies it left to the democratic period opened in 1983. A realignment of the official narratives followed this under the years of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner that created turmoil (however worthwhile and prolific) in the foundations, roles and relative positions of the contending explanations of the origins, meanings and historical role of the 1976 dictatorship. Thus, the past decade has seen a renewed interest in social and historical research on the period.

In a nutshell, three contending interpretations of the dictatorship competed against each other since the mid-1980s. Each of these in turn roughly corresponded to different social subjects. First, there was the (apologetic) official narrative of the Military Junta and its collaborators who sustained that annihilating the communist subversion had to be done through a ‘dirty war’, due to the characteristics of this non-conventional enemy. In this narrative, that kind of war requirements eventually led to individual ‘errors’ and ‘excesses’, that had to be overlooked in the light of the greater good achieved or sought: saving the nation and its traditional western and catholic values from communism. The national and international denunciations regarding human rights violations had to be seen as well as an ‘anti-patriotic conspiracy’ that was part of the war itself (Canelo 2001; Franco 2002).

In the second term and challenging this first official narrative, there was the ‘theory of two demons’ adopted during the so-called transition to democracy as an explanation of what had happened and a condemnation of the violence of the ‘years of lead’. This formulation was famously summarised in the prologue of Nunca Más,² presenting armed struggle, paramilitary violence and military repression as equally extreme forms of violence against ‘the Argentinean society’ that was thus put under pressure and risk. It condemns ‘the two demons’ on the basis of their form, without distinguishing nor discussing their political and historical content.

Finally, a series of challenges to the latter came from the human rights movement and the political left. They insisted that state responsibility and state crimes could not (and cannot) be compared nor treated as equivalent to any civil form of violence. Furthermore, they denounced that the human rights violations were not the result of errors nor ‘excesses’ but rather a systematic and premeditated plan of terror that included massive killings, kidnappings and the illegal appropriation of babies and kids. It also contended from very early on that the other narratives seek or allow impunity for most of the perpetrators while hiding information about the destiny of the desaparecidos and the kidnapped kids during these years. Moreover, they insisted that these intended to elude social responsibility for the consensus and the civil collaboration with the regime.

If these were the main narratives about the last dictatorship and their relations to different social subjects, it remains to be explained in which ways they were reorganised after 2001 and why. As we understand it, the change was sparked by the official ditching of the ‘theory of two demons’ and the repeal of the amnesty laws in favour of a narrative centred around the idea of state terrorism and the reopening of criminal trials, in a symbolic rapprochement of the state to human rights organisations.³ This realignment allowed (and called) for a rethinking of several dimensions of the dictatorship that occurred in parallel to the declassification of several archival sources, the contribution of new evidence during judicial trials and the new testimonies encouraged by a renewed social context. Moreover, in a significant shift from the previous decade⁴ academic research on these topics was promoted with direct and indirect ways of funding directed to complement, revise and support the novel state-adopted narrative (with room to include challenges to it).

A number of classical tenets of the discourse of human rights organisations were revisited under this new reconfiguration of contending narratives. This was in part as a consequence of the adaptations required by its new role, but also because new challenges could be safely made and heard (with a bigger audience and a self-perception of less fragility) and explored in a revised social and scholar context. Thus, several ideas could be rethought: the profile of the disappeared (challenging the idea that the desaparecidos were all young, ‘innocent’ urban dwellers), the space and geographies of the repression (the assumption that the rest of the country could be assimilated to the experience of repression in Buenos Aires) and the temporalities of repression (revising the thought that the illegal repression had begun with the coup in 1976).

The social context after 2001 changed the social perception of setentistas (i.e. left-wing militants of the 1970s) and also to some extent of political activism and armed struggle. A strong identification of the crisis of 2001 with neoliberalism was extensive to framing neoliberalism as a legacy of the dictatorship and thus opened the space for the vindication of different resistances and alternative political projects to both. In turn, the presidency of Nestor Kirchner (2003–2007) used this shift as a means to gain political legitimacy, identifying himself with a radical militant past from the very inaugural speech that was centred on the idea that ‘we are back’ (Montero 2012). This shift made it less compelling the need to portray as innocents or depoliticise the disappeared. Depoliticisation was, in fact, itself a legacy of the dictatorship: since any form of defence of the ‘political-military organizations’ or the ‘revolutionary militants’ during those years would have meant a similar destiny as those disappeared, denying or eluding to mention any political activity of the disappeared was a survival strategy for the human rights movement. This continued as a practice of most organisations (themselves structured around family ties or broad human rights claims with no references to nor any direct affiliations with political parties or movements), effectively becoming mainstream until 2001 ( Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Asociación de ex Detenidos Desaparecidos being the best-known exceptions to this strategy). This shift knocked down a taboo and gave place to a systematic reconstruction and rethinking of political organisations’ and armed groups’ history, the proliferation of testimonies (including public figures who embraced and vindicated their participation in armed organisations) and the exploration of new themes such as gender issues, the tense relations with ‘the political and trade union fronts’ and even controversial dimensions such as treason, ‘judenrats’, or execution of defectors.⁵ Similarly, the concept of ‘militant’ partially replaced as identification of the previous ‘young/white/urban/middle-class’ image of the disappeared.

In a similar vein, other constraints stemming from the political context from which human rights organisations were born were revisited. The discussion of human rights violations before the coup of 1976 was usually difficult since these were usually intertwined with denying the responsibility of the armed forces and blaming chaos and ‘disorder’ on Isabel Peron’s presidency (1974–1976) and on the Peronist movement as a whole. Related to this, research has partially addressed another taboo around these issues: that of the role of right-wing Peronism, particularly the paramilitary organisation called Triple A that operated since 1973 having deep roots with the state and with Peronist trade unionism (for revision of the former, see Servetto (2010) and for journalistic and academic accounts of the latter Zicolillo (2013), Carnagui (2013), and Besoky (2016)).

The renewed agenda extended the period under scrutiny and also recovered the role of ‘testbed’ that certain areas such as Tucumán, Mendoza or Córdoba had for the strategy of repression. These different spaces and temporalities also lead to the study of the various modes in which repression was executed and racially targeted (Águila et al. 2016). These helped to rethink the assumptions about the geographical, temporal and quantitative importance of the white urban middle class as the sole or even main target of disappearances.

A final dimension of this rethinking stemming from the reconfiguration of political narratives on the dictatorship in Argentina is that of the role of institutions and civil society during these years, and the impact of this process on the everyday life of the vast majority. The judicial cases against members of the Catholic Church (such as the priest Christian von Wernich) as well as those against Martinez de Hoz (the finance minister) and businesspeople and companies as co-responsible for human rights violations opened the scope of inquiry and historical knowledge far beyond the military corporation.

Overall, the political changes in Argentina after 2001 released space for different alterations in the classical social interpretations of the last dictatorship, including a revision of the profile of the disappeared, a closer look at militant projects and armed struggle organisations and the lifting of some taboos including human right violations before 1976 or the relation of Peronism with armed right-wing groups.

Rethinking Within Academia

The changes outlined above invited rethinking of several key issues within different disciplines of the social sciences and the revisiting of older publications that had less echo when originally published. In what follows, we summarise the most relevant trends, paying particular attention to the developments within Argentine academia.

First, within political science, there was an interest in reconsidering the inside politics of the armed forces, in an attempt to undermine the idea of a monolithic institutional structure and, beyond that, to understand the modes the authoritarian regime ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Foundation of Terror: Tucumán and the Proceso, 1975–1983
• 3. Anti-subversive Repression and Dictatorship in Argentina: An Approach from Northern Patagonia
• 4. Economic Policy and Global Change: The Puzzle of Industrial Policy Under the Proceso
• 5. Law-Making and Federalism in Argentina’s Last Dictatorship
• 6. State, Filmmaking, and Sexuality During the Military Dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983)
• 7. Rethinking Trade Unions
• 8. Peronism in the Transition and Peronism in Transition: From the End of the Reorganization Process to the Peronist Renovation (1981–1989)
• 9. Malvinas/Falklands War: Changes in the Idea of Nationhood, the Local and National, in a Post-Dictatorship Context—Argentina, 1982–2007
• Back Matter