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.
Argentina’s Missing Bones is the first comprehensive English-language work of historical scholarship on the 1976–83 military dictatorship and Argentina’s notorious experience with state terrorism during the so-called dirty war. It examines this history in a single but crucial place: Córdoba, Argentina’s second largest city. A site of thunderous working-class and student protest prior to the dictatorship, it later became a place where state terrorism was particularly cruel. Considering the legacy of this violent period, James P. Brennan examines the role of the state in constructing a public memory of the violence and in holding those responsible accountable through the most extensive trials for crimes against humanity to take place anywhere in Latin America.
This book presents an intellectual genealogy of the "Dirty War" in Argentina. It focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea in modern Argentine political culture, including the connections between fascist fascism, populism, antisemitism, and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence, its networks of concentration camps and extermination.
Under violent military dictatorship, Operation Condor and the Dirty War scarred Argentina from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, leaving behind a legacy of repression, state terror, and political murder. Even today, the now-democratic Argentine government attempts to repair the damage of these atrocities by making human rights a policy priority. But what about the other Dirty War, during which Argentine civilians--including indigenous populations--and foreign powers ignored and even abetted the state's vicious crimes against humanity? In this groundbreaking new work, David Sheinin draws on previously classified Argentine government documents, human rights lawsuits, and archived propaganda to illustrate the military-constructed fantasy of bloodshed as a public defense of human rights. Exploring the reactions of civilians and the international community to the daily carnage, Sheinin unearths how compliance with the dictatorship perpetuated the violence that defined a nation. This new approach to the history of human rights in Argentina will change how we understand dictatorship, democracy, and state terror.
Dictatorship in South America explores the experiences of Brazilian, Argentine and Chilean experience under military rule. Presents a single-volume thematic study that explores experiences with dictatorship as well as their social and historical contexts in Latin America Examines at the ideological and economic crossroads that brought Argentina, Brazil and Chile under the thrall of military dictatorship Draws on recent historiographical currents from Latin America to read these regimes as radically ideological and inherently unstable Makes a close reading of the economic trajectory from dependency to development and democratization and neoliberal reform in language that is accessible to general readers Offers a lively and readable narrative that brings popular perspectives to bear on national histories Selected as a 2014 Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE
Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The material, visual, narrative, and pedagogical interventions it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. Two theoretical principles structure the book’s approach to cultural recall: the first follows from an understanding of memory as a social construct that is always as much about the past as it is of the present; the second from the observation that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. These principles guide the study of iconic sites of memory in the city of Buenos Aires; photographic essays about the missing and the dictatorship’s legacies of violence; documentary films by children of the disappeared that challenge hegemonic representations of seventies’ militancy; a novel of exile that moves recollection across national boundaries; and a human rights education program focused on memory. Understanding recollection as a practice that lends coherence to disparate forces, energies, and affects, the book approaches these spatial, visual, and scripted registers as impassioned narratives that catalyze a new attentiveness within those they hail. It suggests, moreover, that by inciting deep reflection and an active engagement with the legacies of state violence, interventions like these can help advance the cause of transitional justice and contribute to the development of new political subjectivities invested in the construction of less violent futures.
On August 3rd, 1976, in Córdoba, Argentina's second largest city, Fr. James Week and five seminarians from the Missionaries of La Salette were kidnapped. A mob burst into the house they shared, claiming to be police looking for "subversive fighters." The seminarians were jailed and tortured for two months before eventually being exiled to the United States. The perpetrators were part of the Argentine military government that took power under President General Jorge Videla in 1976, ostensibly to fight Communism in the name of Christian Civilization. Videla claimed to lead a Catholic government, yet the government killed and persecuted many Catholics as part of Argentina's infamous Dirty War. Critics claim that the Church did nothing to alleviate the situation, even serving as an accomplice to the dictators. Leaders of the Church have claimed they did not fully know what was going on, and that they tried to help when they could. Gustavo Morello draws on interviews with victims of forced disappearance, documents from the state and the Church, field observation, and participant observation in order to provide a deeper view of the relationship between Catholicism and state terrorism during Argentina's Dirty War. Morello uses the case of the seminarians to explore the complex relationship between Catholic faith and political violence during the Dirty War-a relationship that has received renewed attention since Argentina's own Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis. Unlike in countries such as Chile and Brazil, Argentina's political violence was seen as an acceptable tool in propagating political involvement; both the guerrillas and the military government were able to gain popular support. Morello examines how the Argentine government deployed a discourse of Catholicism to justify the violence that it imposed on Catholics and how the official Catholic hierarchy in Argentina rationalized their silence in the face of this violence. Most interestingly, Morello investigates how Catholic victims of state violence and their supporters understood their own faith in this complicated context: what it meant to be Catholic under Argentina's dictatorship.
Covering the entire sweep of Argentina's history from pre-Columbian times to today Lewis outlines the connections between the colonial era and the 19th century, and focuses closely on the last three decades of the twentieth century, during which Argentina dealt with the legacies of Peronism and of military dictatorship, as well as establishing a stable democracy.
This book is the first written by an insider about the tragic outcome of Argentina's human-rights trials. Jaime Malamud-Goti was one of two advisers asked by President Raul R. Alfonsin to organize the trials. This was not an assignment without risk: Malamud-Goti received constant threats. But did the trials further the cause of democracy - as the prosecutors so fervently had hoped? Even though he was an architect of the proceedings, Malamud-Goti argues that they did not. In fact, he says, they may have contributed to the new mode of authoritarianism and bigotry now rising in Argentina. What most profoundly interests Malamud-Goti is that his nation persists in turning logic on its head: multitudes of Argentineans respond to authoritarianism by playing political and judicial hardball - inciting a response in kind. They are playing a game without end. Game Without End is an honest attempt to express deeply assimilated experience - the effort of a scholar who, while serving as secretary of state, encouraged his compatriots to turn over a new leaf but who, by his own assessment, failed. Returning to Argentina later as a Guggenheim scholar and a MacArthur peace scholar, Malamud-Goti researched much of this book in Buenos Aires, where he interviewed former opponents, a few of them in military prisons. He hopes that other nations, struggling to make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, can learn from Argentina's experience. In a passionate foreword his late wife, Libbet, draws particular attention to former Yugoslavia.
