"An excellent analysis of Argentine guerrilla movements in the 1960s-70s based on a wide range of printed sources and extensive interviews with members of the groups. Rather than describing all the activities of the various groups, this study attempts toexplain the rationale for their behavior"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
This riveting analysis of the aftermath of Argentina's massive disappearances uncovers a dynamic of trust and betrayal that has driven relentless confrontations between the state, the military, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives about how to remember, mourn, and punish atrocities committed against fellow citizens.
For decades, Argentina's population was subject to human rights violations ranging from the merely disruptive to the abominable. Violence pervaded Argentine social and cultural life in the repression of protest crowds, a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign, massive numbers of abductions, instances of torture, and innumerable assassinations. Despite continued repression, thousands of parents searched for their disappeared children, staging street protests that eventually marshaled international support. Challenging the notion that violence simply breeds more violence, Antonius C. G. M. Robben's provocative study argues that in Argentina violence led to trauma, and that trauma bred more violence. In this work of superior scholarship, Robben analyzes the historical dynamic through which Argentina became entangled in a web of violence spun out of repeated traumatization of political adversaries. This violence-trauma-violence cycle culminated in a cultural war that "disappeared" more than ten thousand people and caused millions to live in fear. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina demonstrates through a groundbreaking multilevel analysis the process by which different historical strands of violence coalesced during the 1970s into an all-out military assault on Argentine society and culture. Combining history and anthropology, this compelling book rests on thorough archival research; participant observation of mass demonstrations, exhumations, and reburials; gripping interviews with military officers, guerrilla commanders, human rights leaders, and former disappeared captives. Robben's penetrating analysis of the trauma of Argentine society is of great importance for our understanding of other societies undergoing similar crimes against humanity.
This social and cultural history of Argentina's "long sixties" argues that the nation's younger generation was at the epicenter of a public struggle over democracy, authoritarianism, and revolution from the mid-twentieth century through the ruthless military dictatorship that seized power in 1976. Valeria Manzano demonstrates how, during this period, large numbers of youths built on their history of earlier activism and pushed forward closely linked agendas of sociocultural modernization and political radicalization. Focusing also on the views of adults who assessed, and sometimes profited from, youth culture, Manzano analyzes countercultural formations--including rock music, sexuality, student life, and communal living experiences--and situates them in an international context. She details how, while Argentines of all ages yearned for newness and change, it was young people who championed the transformation of deep-seated traditions of social, cultural, and political life. The significance of youth was not lost on the leaders of the rising junta: people aged sixteen to thirty accounted for 70 percent of the estimated 20,000 Argentines who were "disappeared" during the regime.
Nationalism has played a uniquely powerful role in Argentine history, in large part due to the rise and enduring strength of two variants of anti-liberal nationalist thought: one left-wing and identifying with the “people” and the other right-wing and identifying with Argentina’s Catholic heritage. Although embracing very different political programs, the leaders of these two forms of nationalism shared the belief that the country’s nineteenth-century liberal elites had betrayed the country by seeking to impose an alien ideology at odds with the supposedly true nature of the Argentine people. The result, in their view, was an ongoing conflict between the “false Argentina” of the liberals and the “authentic”nation of true Argentines. Yet, despite their commonalities, scholarship has yet to pay significant attention to the interconnections between these two variants of Argentine nationalism. Jeane DeLaney rectifies this oversight with Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina. In this book, DeLaney explores the origins and development of Argentina’s two forms of nationalism by linking nationalist thought to ongoing debates over Argentine identity. Part I considers the period before 1930, examining the emergence and spread of new essentialist ideas of national identity during the age of mass immigration. Part II analyzes the rise of nationalist movements after 1930 by focusing on individuals who self-identified as nationalists. DeLaney connects the rise of Argentina’s anti-liberal nationalist movements to the shock of early twentieth-century immigration. She examines how pressures posed by the newcomers led to the weakening of the traditional ideal of Argentina as a civic community and the rise of new ethno-cultural understandings of national identity. Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina demonstrates that national identities are neither unitary nor immutable and that the ways in which citizens imagine their nation have crucial implications for how they perceive immigrants and whether they believe domestic minorities to be full-fledged members of the national community. Given the recent surge of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, this study will be of interest to scholars of nationalism, political science, Latin American political thought, and the contemporary history of Argentina.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume's collaborators--experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters--explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Strikingly, in every case, various forms of democratic erosion long preceded the final democratic breakdown. Although no single causal factor emerges as decisive, linking together all of the episodes, some important commonalities--including extreme political polarization, explicitly anti-democratic political actors, and significant political violence--stand out across the cases. Moreover, the notion of democratic culture, while admittedly difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, may play a role in all of them. Throughout the volume, the contributors show again and again that the written rules of democracy are insufficient to protect against tyranny. While each case of democratic decay is unique, the patterns that emerge shed much light on the continuing struggle to sustain modern democracies and to assess and respond to the threats they face.
Lyndon Johnson was often blamed for abandoning Kennedy's vision of development and progress in Latin America in favor of his own domestic concerns: anti-communism and economic stability. Johnson, along with his fellow Texan and chief adviser on inter-American affairs Thomas C. Mann, nonetheless offered a vision for American engagement with the developing world even as congressional funding and public enthusiasm for such programs waned and Johnson's presidency collapsed under the weight of the Vietnam War. This book explores Lyndon Johnson's Latin American policy, from his key advisers to development programs and military interventions, to establish a new perspective on the impact of a complex and controversial president on a tumultuous period in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Demonstrating that much of the negative coverage of their efforts emerged from disgruntled Kennedy loyalists, Tunstall Allcock argues that Johnson and Mann were both New Dealers who possessed a keen desire to operate as good neighbors and support Latin American development and regional integration while dealing with domestic pressure from both right and left. Based on extensive primary research in multiple archives, this much-needed book provides a crucial exploration of how inter-American relations transitioned from the enthusiasm and excitement of the Kennedy years to the neglect and frustration of the Nixon presidency.
This book offers a region-wide overview of the patterns and processes of Latin American history, politics, society, and development. It provides a detailed country-by-country treatment and unique features of all Latin American countries.
This book analyses the punitive crime discourse in the Argentinean press during the 1990s. Fernandez Roich focusses on several features of media discourse during this time, such as: the notion that petty criminals ‘deserve to die' in reference to police brutality and killings, the phenomenon of ‘vindicators’ or how common citizens turned into ‘evil’ modern heroes in the press, and the parallelism between the military discourse under the military regime and the punitive discourse under democracy. In addition, the book also investigates the alleged natural propensity towards breaking the law ingrained within Argentinean culture, the so-called 'viveza criolla' and the well-ingrained idea that to get ahead you have to participate in corrupt practices. Despite the significant scholarly interest in the United States and Europe in the last Argentinean dictatorship (1976-1983), little attention has been paid to the role of Argentinean newspapers in supporting the military coup d’état. The analysis of this media discourse is critical to understanding the support enjoyed by the armed forces in power: the vast majority of the population was not informed about the disappearances or the concentration camps until well into the 1980s. This project provides an in-depth qualitative content analysis of front pages, chronicles, editorials and photographs of Argentinean newspapers before and after the military intervention that will aid scholars of criminal justice and Latin American political regimes understand the impact of the support given to the military government.
As the first decade of the twenty-first century has made brutally clear, the very definitions of war and the enemy have changed almost beyond recognition. Threats to security are now as likely to come from armed propagandists, popular militias, or mercenary organizations as they are from conventional armies backed by nation-states. In this timely book, national security expert Max G. Manwaring explores a little-understood actor on the stage of irregular warfare—the gang. Since the end of the Cold War, some one hundred insurgencies or irregular wars have erupted throughout the world. Gangs have figured prominently in more than half of those conflicts, yet these and other nonstate actors have received little focused attention from scholars or analysts. This book fills that void. Employing a case study approach, and believing that shadows from the past often portend the future, Manwaring begins with a careful consideration of the writings of V. I. Lenin. He then scrutinizes the Piqueteros in Argentina, gangs in Colombia, private armies in Mexico, Hugo Chavez’s use of popular militias in Venezuela, and the looming threat of Al Qaeda in Western Europe. As conventional warfare is increasingly eclipsed by these irregular and “uncomfortable” wars, Manwaring boldly diagnoses the problem and recommends solutions that policymakers should heed.