Toward a History of the Memory of Political Violence and the Disappeared in Argentina

Abstract

The political violence that Argentina suffered in the 1970s and early 1980s was rooted in the country’s institutional history and the new international context following the end of the Second World War. A dozen military coups were staged in Argentina from 1930 to 1983. The intervention of the armed forces in institutional life came to be seen as natural by broad sectors of civil society and the political community. This together with the influence of nationalist, conservative, and Catholic fundamentalist ideas formed a culture characterized by contempt for the law and rejection of the other and in which resorting to violence acquired a privileged status.1 In the mid-1940s, the emergence of Peronism—a political movement with an industrialist project led by Colonel Juan Perón, which incorporated the labor movement into political life, even if it was in a subordinate role through an alliance between classes—launched a process of polarization that was aggravated in 1955 after Perón was ousted from power and banned from politics. This gave way to a cycle of social unrest and political radicalization fueled by the Cold War and the victory of the Cuban Revolution that included the emergence of Marxist and Peronist guerrilla groups. In that context, the armed forces adopted the counterinsurgency methods employed by the French army in the Algeria and Indochina wars and the National Security Doctrine of the United States, both of which included torture as a key component of military intelligence and the belief that a full-scale war had to be waged against an enemy that could be lurking anywhere in society.2