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STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS

The Argentinian
Dictatorship and its
Legacy
Rethinking the Proceso
Edited by
Juan Grigera · Luciana Zorzoli
Studies of the Americas

Series Editor
Maxine Molyneux
Institute of the Americas
University College London
London, UK
The Studies of the Americas Series includes country specific, cross-
disciplinary and comparative research on the United States, Latin
America, the Caribbean, and Canada, particularly in the areas of Politics,
Economics, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Development, Gender,
Social Policy and the Environment. The series publishes monographs,
readers on specific themes and also welcomes proposals for edited collec-
tions, that allow exploration of a topic from several different disciplinary
angles. This series is published in conjunction with University College
London’s Institute of the Americas under the editorship of Professor
Maxine Molyneux.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14462
Juan Grigera · Luciana Zorzoli
Editors

The Argentinian
Dictatorship
and its Legacy
Rethinking the Proceso
Editors
Juan Grigera Luciana Zorzoli
Department of International Research Associate (SOAS)
Development and Postdoctoral Fellow (CONICET)
King’s College London Instituto de Investigaciones en
London, UK Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales
(IdIHCS)
Universidad Nacional de La Plata
(UNLP)
La Plata, Argentina

Studies of the Americas

ISBN 978-3-030-18300-4 ISBN 978-3-030-18301-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18301-1

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 Acknowledgements

The essays in this volume largely derive from presentations at the

Rethinking the “Proceso.” The Argentinian dictatorship in perspective
(1976–1983) Conference held at the Institute of Americas, University
College London, March 24, 2016.
The funding for the conference itself was provided by the Institute of
Americas. Many individuals played key roles in bringing this volume to
fruition: We especially thank Prof. Maxine Molyneux who was more than
generous with her time and advise and Prof. Jonathan Bell director of
the Institute. We also thank several senior scholars who willingly served
as anonymous peer reviewers.
Special thanks are due as well to all of the authors for their profes-
sional work and to all the other participants of the conference who
contributed to the debates reflected in the chapters that constitute this
publication. While gratefully acknowledging the assistance and guidance
provided, we take final responsibility for the book, which necessarily
reflects different views and opinions, and so does not in any way con-
stitute an end to the rethinking of the issues under scrutiny but rather a
summary and an invitation for further developments.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Juan Grigera and Luciana Zorzoli

2 A Foundation of Terror: Tucumán and the Proceso,

1975–1983 23
James H. Shrader

3 Anti-subversive Repression and Dictatorship

in Argentina: An Approach from Northern Patagonia 47
Pablo Scatizza

4 Economic Policy and Global Change: The Puzzle

of Industrial Policy Under the Proceso 67
Juan Grigera

5 Law-Making and Federalism in Argentina’s Last

Dictatorship 93
Alejandro Bonvecchi and Emilia Simison

6 State, Filmmaking, and Sexuality During the Military

Dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983) 123
Débora D’Antonio

vii
viii    Contents

7 Rethinking Trade Unions 147

Luciana Zorzoli

8 Peronism in the Transition and Peronism in Transition:

From the End of the Reorganization Process to the
Peronist Renovation (1981–1989) 173
Joaquín Baeza Belda

9 Malvinas/Falklands War: Changes in the Idea

of Nationhood, the Local and National, in a
Post-Dictatorship Context—Argentina, 1982–2007 197
Federico Lorenz

Index 211
 Notes on Contributors

Joaquín Baeza Belda holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of

Salamanca (Spain). He also has a Masters in Latin American Studies from
the Instituto de Iberoamérica at the University of Salamanca. Belda was
a fellow at the University of Liverpool and was the recipient of a Young
Researcher grant issued by the Junta of Castilla y León. His research
focuses on recent Argentinian history, democratic transitions, and politi-
cal parties.
Alejandro Bonvecchi holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University
of Essex. He works as Adjunct Researcher at Consejo Nacional de
Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Assistant Professor at the
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT). His research has appeared in
Comparative Politics, Journal of Politics in Latin America, Latin American
Politics and Society, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Presidential Studies
Quarterly, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism. He authored the books
¿Quién decide la política social en América Latina? Un estudio de economía
política basado en el análisis de redes sociales. Washington, DC: Banco Inter-
Americano de Desarrollo-David Rockefeller Center for Latin American
Studies Harvard University (Co-edited with Carlos Scartascini and Julia
Johannsen); Los límites de la voluntad. Buenos Aires: Paidós-Planeta-Ariel,
Colección Ariel Historia. (With Marcos Novaro y Nicolás Cherny) and
(Co-edited with Ana Maria Mustapic and Javier Zelaznik) Los legisladores
en el Congreso argentino: prácticas y estrategias, Buenos Aires: Instituto
Torcuato Di Tella, 2012.

ix
x    Notes on Contributors

Débora D’Antonio holds a Ph.D. in History of the University of

Buenos Aires (UBA). There, she also is a professor and researcher
of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Gender Studies (IIEGE) of the
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). She
is an Undergraduate and PostGraduate Professor of the UBA and has
given different seminars in other national universities and ones from the
Southern Cone. She is specialized in the study of the State’s repressive
activity in the recent Argentinian history and its connection between
the studies of gender and sexuality. Also, she is author of the book La
prisión en los años setenta: Historia, género y política (2016) and compiler
of Violencia, espionaje y represión estatal: seis estudios de caso sobre el pasado
reciente argentino (2018) and Deseo y represión: Sexualidad, Género y
Estado en la historia reciente Argentina (2015).
Juan Grigera is Lecturer in the Political Economy of Development at
the Department of International Development, King’s College London.
He completed a Ph.D. from the University of Buenos Aires with support
from the Argentinean National Scientific and Technical Research Council
(CONICET), after being awarded an M.Sc. in Development Studies from
the London School of Economics. Between 2014 and 2017, he was British
Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Americas, UCL.
Federico Lorenz holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (UNGS-IDES)
and a B.A. in History from the National University of Luján. He is an
Associate Researcher at National Scientific and Technical Research
Committee (CONICET) based in the Instituto de Historia Argentina
y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani.” He was awarded a research grant
from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for developing a pro-
ject about Malvinas/Falklands War Experiences through amateur photo-
graphs and war letters. Throughout his career as a teacher and historian,
he has focused in Argentine recent history, such as political violence and
the Malvinas/Falklands War, and the relationship between history, mem-
ory and education. He is a specialist in the social history of the war. He
traveled twice to the Malvinas/Falklands as part of his research about the
memories of the 1982 war. He was Director of the Museo Malvinas e
Islas del Atlántico Sur (2016–2018).
Pablo Scatizza holds a Ph.D. in History from the Universidad Torcuato
Di Tella. He is Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional del
Comahue. He had published several articles about repressive dynamics
 Notes on Contributors    xi

and its modalities, focusing his lens in North Patagonia region. He is

the author of Un Comahue violento. Represión, dictadura y juicios en la
Norpatagonia Argentina (Buenos Aires, Prometeo) and co-editor with
Gabriela Aguila and Santiago Garaño of Represión estatal y violencia par-
aestatal en la historia reciente argentina: nuevos abordajes a 40 años del
Golpe de Estado published by Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la
Educación, University of La Plata.
James H. Shrader teaches courses on modern Latin American history
and International Studies. He holds a M.A. in Latin American Studies
from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of
California, San Diego. His book manuscript The War of Souls: Nation
Building and Violence in Cold War Argentina explores how the coun-
try’s Northwest became a laboratory for social-engineering schemes,
with tragic consequences. He is also working on two future projects
as well. The first will examine the history of Hershey’s company town
in Cuba from its foundation to its eventual decline in the post-Soviet
“Special Period”, while the second will examine the relationship between
Argentina and African Decolonization during the Cold War. He has also
served as a consultant for human rights investigations and is currently
engaged in the digitalization and preservation of historical documenta-
tion from the Cold War.
Emilia Simison is a Ph.D. candidate at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). She received her M.A. in Political Science from
Torcuato Di Tella University (UTDT) and her B.A. from the University
of Buenos Aires (UBA). Prior to MIT, she has been a Ph.D. fellow at
the Argentinean National Scientific and Technical Research Council
(CONICET) working at Gino Germani Research Institute and taught at
UBA and UTDT.
Luciana Zorzoli holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences of the University
of Buenos Aires (UBA) and works as Postdoctoral Fellow from the
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) at
the Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales
(IdIHCS) in the University of La Plata (UNLP). She is also Postdoctoral
Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. Prior to this, she was
Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and Visiting Fellow at
the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Security Zones, Argentina, 1975–1983 52

Fig. 4.1 Gross investment and investment under industrial promotion.
Values are in constant USD of 1960 (Source Author database
and Ferrucci 1986) 80
Fig. 4.2 Investment under promotion per region (Source Author
database and Sottolano and Beker 1986) 81
Fig. 5.1 Budgetary transfers to provinces—Millions of AR$ (in 1976
constant prices) (Source Authors’ elaboration on data
from the Memoirs of the Treasury Secretary [1976–1983]) 114

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Industrial output per region 82

Table 4.2 Main features of population in Tierra del Fuego, by date 83
Table 4.3 Industrial promotion and employment in Tierra del Fuego 85
Table 4.4 Composition of GDP of Tierra del Fuego 86
Table 5.1 CAL recommendation and Junta decision on SR bills 106
Table 5.2 Number of factions, control over ministries
and sub-commissions, bills enacted and significantly
relevant proposals, per presidency (all bills) 107
Table 5.3 Generalized linear models with robust standard errors 108
Table 5.4 Law-making patterns at the CAL 110

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Juan Grigera and Luciana Zorzoli

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 his-
torical knowledge is knowledge of the present’1 to concede that a histo-
riographical revisit of the ‘recent past’ cannot but stem from a specific
political context. The recent radical rethinking in Argentina of its dicta-
torial 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

1 Schmitt, C. (1932). L’epoca delle neutralizzazioni e delle spoliticizzazioni da Il con-

cetto di ‘politico’. In Le categorie del “politico” (1998). Bologna: Il Mulino.

J. Grigera (*)
Department of International Development,
King’s College London, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
L. Zorzoli
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
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Grigera and L. Zorzoli (eds.), The Argentinian
Dictatorship and its Legacy, Studies of the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18301-1_1
2 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

went through in 2001/2002. The latter was key in contesting the dom-
inant 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 con-
tending 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-conven-
tional 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 condemna-
tion 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 pres-
sure and risk. It condemns ‘the two demons’ on the basis of their form,
without distinguishing nor discussing their political and historical content.

2 The Nunca Más (Never again) was the final report by the Comisión Nacional sobre la

Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP) [National Commission on the Disappearance of

Persons] on the crimes of the dictatorship created in 1983 by President Alfonsín (Crenzel
2008). The main body of the report was essentially an account of what has happened from
a judicial point of view and a dissemination of the tasks done by the Commission. The pro-
logue (written by Ernesto Sábato) was particularly renowned.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Finally, a series of challenges to the latter came from the human rights
movement and the political left. They insisted that state responsibil-
ity 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 nar-
ratives 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 cen-
tred around the idea of state terrorism and the reopening of criminal
trials, in a symbolic rapprochement of the state to human rights organi-
sations.3 This realignment allowed (and called) for a rethinking of several
dimensions of the dictatorship that occurred in parallel to the declassi-
fication 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).

3 A symptomatic debate around this shift can be found in the ‘new prologue’ of the

2006 edition of the CONADEP report. The addendum stressed that it is ‘unacceptable to
attempt to justify State terrorism as a sort of game of counteracting violences’ (CONADEP
2006), and the Secretary of Humans Rights declared that ‘the original prologue –of the
Nunca Más- did not reproduce the political philosophy that the State supports today in the
prosecution of crimes against humanity’ (La Nacion May 19, 2006). The reaction against
the publication of a new prologue that introduced state terrorism as the key interpretative
concept was important, even when the older one was also included. More recently, Macri’s
administration gave another twist on the issue, publishing a new version of the Nunca Más
report that has no mention to the 2006 prologue (Pagina/12 June 12, 2016).
4 See for instance Izaguirre (2009).
4 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

A number of classical tenets of the discourse of human rights organi-

sations were revisited under this new reconfiguration of contending nar-
ratives. 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 seten-
tistas (i.e. left-wing militants of the 1970s) and also to some extent of
political activism and armed struggle. A strong identification of the cri-
sis of 2001 with neoliberalism was extensive to framing neoliberalism
as a legacy of the dictatorship and thus opened the space for the vindi-
cation 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 radi-
cal militant past from the very inaugural speech that was centred on the
idea that ‘we are back’ (Montero 2012). This shift made it less compel-
ling 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 ‘revolu-
tionary militants’ during those years would have meant a similar des-
tiny 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 (them-
selves structured around family ties or broad human rights claims with
no references to nor any direct affiliations with political parties or move-
ments), 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 organisa-
tions’ and armed groups’ history, the proliferation of testimonies (includ-
ing 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
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

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 con-
text 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, par-
ticularly 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, tem-
poral 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 reconfigura-
tion 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 min-
ister) and businesspeople and companies as co-responsible for human
rights violations opened the scope of inquiry and historical knowledge
far beyond the military corporation.

5 A lucid summary of the recent research on those topics can be found in the influential

journal Lucha Armada, published in Argentina between 2005 and 2009.

6 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

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 atten-
tion 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 under-
stand the modes the authoritarian regime handled the state administra-
tion, political dissent and economic policy. Critical political economy has
been concerned and contended over the nature of the proceso’s economic
plans and on the ‘historical project’ the dictatorship was set to develop,
showing the structural nature of the transformations it brought. From
a sociological and historical perspective, a detailed inquiry into the role
of subjects beyond ‘the military’ in the dictatorship has been quite pro-
lific, opening new dimensions of the deep roots and legacies of the coup
within the Argentine society, exposing the ‘re-foundational’ action that
the dictatorship carried out on culture, intellectuality, the press, every-
day life or the trade unions among others. Moreover, the opening of
several ‘archives of repression’ made available a wealth of classified
information that allowed for a thematic renewal as well as methodo-
logical reflections on the nature of those sources and the logic behind
them. Similarly, the enquiries into life experiences, political exiles and
key circumstances such as the Malvinas/Falklands war, revitalised the
‘studies of memory’ opening the discussion of how this past was con-
structed, and what had happened with the victims during and after the
proceso. Furthermore, a gender perspective has brought new insights into
the experiences of militants as well as progress in the study of specific
attempts made by the proceso to restructure family, childhood, and gen-
der relations as well as the resistances and displacements it generated.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

In sum, the revitalisation of the field of study has allowed for a renewed,
solid and in-depth understanding of the ‘great transformation’ of
Argentina during the seventies.
With regard to renewal of the debate on the dictatorship from the
perspective of political science, the founding problem revolves around
challenging two widely held ideas of the dictatorship. First that of the
PRN as a monolithic enterprise of the three armed forces, perfectly
structured after vertical rule and with a coherent plan of action at many
levels (military, economic, political, cultural and so on). Second, the
complementary ‘instrumentalist’ interpretation that sought to under-
stand the former as a plan externally dictated (with variations in the
subject, including the US government, the local oligarchy, big busi-
ness, etc.). Early studies such as those of Yannuzzi (1996) or Quiroga
(1994) recently rejoined by Quiroga and Tcach Abad (1996), Quiroga
et al. (2006), Pucciarelli (2004), and Canelo (2008, 2016) among sev-
eral others, accumulated abundant evidence towards their common
theme, that of demonstrating that the PRN was not a monolithic and
uniform enterprise. These studies sought to understand the relation-
ship between the state and civil society by bringing back in the con-
flictual nature of the political system. They interpreted it as a system of
institutional discontinuities, articulated around the alternation of mili-
tary and civilian governments in which the military acted (in 1976 but
also in previous coups) as a political force seeking legitimacy of its actions
through the exercise of power and the alleged legitimacy of its ends (e.g.
to ‘save the homeland from subversion’ or to establish an ‘authentic
democracy’).6
Novaro and Palermo (2003) incorporate the economic and the polit-
ical crisis of the government of Isabél Perón as a fundamental dimension
to understanding the coup of 24 March 1976. In concrete, they con-
tend that this period coalesced the ‘initial consensus’ for military action
and left the political leaders ‘incapable to articulate their own initiatives’,
that is to say, that they were not outside the process but rather without

6 This rested upon the historically constructed principle that accepted the military par-

ticipation in social domination, giving rise to the ‘pretorianization’ of the political system
as was shown by Rouquié (1982). A similar argument for the whole continent has subse-
quently been made by Mainwaring and Perez Liñan (2013).
8 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

alternatives to offer. Moreover, they show that the armed forces did not
break into the political game as a continuation of the experiences of pre-
vious military governments, but rather that by 1976 the military had
matured a critical position on those ‘alternations’ and a growing ‘aliena-
tion’ with the political regime and with society.7
Thus, this leads to the first form of critique of the “instrumentalist
interpretations of the military coup”. This consisted of contesting that
this dictatorship sought to operate a “revolution from above” that dis-
trusted all social sectors (including the big businessmen) seen as partici-
pants in the problems they planned to remedy through a true ‘restorative
crusade’. Hence, the PRN is understood in this revision as the ‘autono-
mous’ product of the military, operating a radical transformation of the
Argentine society.
A different critique of the instrumentalist thesis also to be found in
this literature involves the opposite operation showing that the PRN
was not a sole enterprise of a single institutional subject (the military)
but instead a ‘joint venture’ of several actors of the civil society with
the armed forces. The ‘internal’ discrepancies of the military are under-
stood as the conflictual expression of interests from this broader coalition
(Canitrot 1980a, b). Along similar lines, these studies have documented
the dynamics of political parties and oppositions under the dictatorship.
Against what is commonly believed most of the traditional political par-
ties were not prohibited.8 The political activities of the traditional parties
during all those years and even their executive role in the administration
at the municipal and other levels are just starting to be acknowledged,
even when they were both relevant in collaborating with the administra-
tion and also in expressing and coordinating some dissenting interests.
The consensus of civil society with the dictatorship was, however, one
that could only exist under strict limits. The PRN as a project was not
subject to any political debate and all of these subjects willingly or not
had to agree to it in order to ‘dissent’ without ‘oppose’ (since any oppo-
sition to the dictatorship was indeed illegal and subject to repression).

7 This idea was early presented by Cavarozzi (1983) and can be traced as a pillar of this

approach in more recent studies (Canelo 2008; Quiroga et al. 2006).

8 Even the Communist Party (PCA) maintained its legal status. The exceptions were

those on the radical left, such as the Peronist left, and several Trotskyist and Maoist groups
that were banned.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

These studies also recovered the sometimes faltering nature of the

process. In the economic order due to the inability to control inflation
(despite the aggressive inflation targeting programmes), to the reces-
sionary trend that could not be reversed and to the consequences of the
commercial liberalisation. In the political order there were also early dif-
ficulties: as the ‘empire of death’ produced the collapse of the guerrilla
groups the consensus of ‘annihilation of subversion’ did not give rise to
a new one. These failures resonated within the policy-making differences
of the military, in what has been sometimes referred as the ‘two souls’
of ‘el Proceso’: the ‘nationalist’ and technocratic and traditional liberals
(Canelo 2008) who had opposing views on how to deal with inflation,
liberalisation, privatisations, labour rights or the relationship with civil
society including trade unions, political parties and corporate organisa-
tions. The sum of these multiple difficulties and their irresolution pro-
duced what several authors call ‘the misplacement of a foundational
opportunity’.
In sum, these studies enriched our understanding of the military
actor and called for a renewed awareness of the political dynamics of the
de facto government, capturing the weight of the hesitations, confron-
tations and internal differences in the rhythm and trajectory that it cre-
ated.9 The key findings include the acknowledgement of the constitutive
nature of military fragmentation and repression of subversion as the
umbrella coalescing the civic-military alliance under a partial but unifying
programme. These have recovered the complexities of the political func-
tioning of the government, though sometimes at the risk of blurring and
minimising the agency of the subjects opposing the PRN and the common
denominator of the consistent ‘class offensive’ of the entire experiment.

9 Paradoxically, was in order to avoid that kind of vulnerabilities that the PRN created

a complex scheme of power and institutional cohesion that ended up producing ‘a laby-
rinth’ of mechanisms that made the decision-making processes ‘tortuous, slow and ineffi-
cient’ for the very objectives that the military had proposed, plunging the government into
a state of permanent deliberation (Canelo 2008). One of the key sources that allowed for
a detailed study of those tensions within different sections of the national executive power
and with the provincial powers has been the serendipitous discovery of the archives of state
agencies and ministries, as can be seen in the work is being done with the Comisión de
Asesoramiento Legislativo (CAL) archives. See Bonvecchi and Simison in this volume as
well as Bonvecchi and Simison (2017a, b).
10 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

In some cases, by insisting on the existence of waves, these studies deny

the importance of tides.
The attempt to identify a main objective of the dictatorship has
also guided the debates within political economy, though along
substantially different lines. The debate was conducted under two
alternative assumptions. One stated that the military objective of
‘defeating the subversion’ could not be central to the explanation
of the PRN. These contend either that this had already been accom-
plished when the coup took place in 1976, or that the goal was
achieved quite quickly, or that the armed opposition was never a real
threat to state power, and thus, they could not explain the articula-
tion of the seven-year-dictatorship. A (sometimes complementary)
alternative would point out that the problem is wrongly framed and
should be inverted: instead of taking repression as the main objec-
tive of the PRN, the question is to understand the purpose of this
repression. In other words, repression is not considered a programme
but rather one that articulates state violence as a means towards an
(implicit) end.
An early influential reading articulating a response to this ques-
tion, has been Azpiazu et al. (1986), who understood that the golden
key to understanding the dictatorship was its economic plan, and that
this entailed the dismantling of import-substitution industrialisation
(ISI) and thus a forced deindustrialisation. The PRN was meant to
violently ‘impose’ a new mode of accumulation, one based on finan-
cial speculation and to undermine the historical front of the national
bourgeoisie, manufacturing and the urban working class articulated
by Peronism, thus it constituted a ‘classist retaliation’ against class
aspirations in Argentina. The consequences of this transformation
could be traced in the manifold long-lasting legacies of the dictator-
ship: a regressive income distribution, a new labour market and a shift
in the basis of power of a society that was until then ‘heterogene-
ous on top and homogeneous at the bottom’ and was transformed in
the search of a strengthened social domination (Khavisse and Azpiazu
1983). More broadly, these readings agreed that the dictatorship
inaugurated the neoliberal era in Argentina (continued and aug-
mented particularly in the 1990s) thus pointing towards the blood-
line of violence underpinning the implementation of these projects in
the region.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

If the economic plan is at the core of these readings, the one proposed
by Adolfo Canitrot (1980a, 1981) had social discipline at centre stage.
Repression and the end of ISI were subsidiary to the main objective of
eroding the livelihoods and institutional means of the popular sectors
(and businessmen alike) to avoid the return of the social upheavals of the
past decades. Both were enabling conditions of the profound political
reform that articulated the PRN.
A revision of these thesis and a novel contending reading of these
issues within political economy, proposed that the dictatorship was the
vehicle of a profound capitalist restructuring in line with the global
transformations stemming from the end of Bretton Woods (Piva 2012;
Bonnet 2007; Grigera forthcoming, some antecedents can be found in
the works of Adolfo Gilly and Eduardo Lucita). This line of thought
criticised the politicist and nationally centred tones of the previous for-
mulations while agreeing in an interpretation of the military repression
as a mode of disciplining the working class and debilitating its institu-
tions under the umbrella of a struggle against communism and subver-
sion. By bringing the crisis of 1973 back in and the major shifts in the
world order after the end of the Golden Age of capitalism, this reading
highlights the international context and offers a detailed map of the
social subjects involved in the restructuring. By pointing out towards the
importance of the shifts in the international order the long-lasting effects
of the PRN become more apparent and also less voluntaristic: in a way
the PRN was the vehicle of a specific capitalist form of transformation in
Argentina, one that had a world scale. It closed the ‘historical cycle’ of
ISI and populism in a particular way, but it has to be acknowledged the
cycle was closing worldwide.
In sum, the political economic studies of the PRN have insisted on
the need to explain the plan of the dictatorship beyond repression and
have produced several alternative explanations.
From within sociology and history (profoundly intertwined in
Argentina’s academic traditions), the renewal has also been impressively
diverse and spread out. A bird’s-eye view of this rethinking could be
summarised along the lines of a reconstitution of the variegated roles of
different sectors of civil society. The running theme has been rethink-
ing the image of a passive social body that was homogeneously victim-
ised. These studies have shown a spectrum of consensus and dissent
that goes from civilian direct involvement in the repressive system to
passive support of it and also different forms of opposition. The studies
12 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

of co-responsibility and consensus within civil society (beyond the role

of political parties already mentioned) have brought to light the inter-
twined nature of the PRN.
In what regards to the repressive system, the role of ‘necessary col-
laborators’ to perpetrate human rights violations, illegal appropriation of
property and companies and several felonies has been probed in the cases
of sections of judicial system, the medical and other professionals and the
collaborating institutions such as the Obispado Castrense of the Catholic
Church or different national and international companies. Many of those
findings were used to bring new actors to the strand (Verbitsky and
Bohoslavsky 2013), as the trial against Ford Motors Argentina has shown.
The role of specific institutions has also been re-discussed, those regard-
ing the Catholic Church being a prolific example. The pioneer studies of
Mignone gave place to a wealth of studies on the multiple ties between the
Catholic Church and the armed forces. A stream of research has empha-
sised the organic relationship between integralism, Catholicism and the
Argentine Church, and its peculiar intertwining with National Security
Doctrine and French colonialism at the root of the ‘dirty war’, thus suc-
cessfully establishing a blood thread between integralism and genocide
(Obregón 2005; Verbitsky 2010; Mallimaci 2012; Bilbao and Mendoza
2016). Beyond the debates on the importance of the repression of small
sections of the church and allegations of the subordination of the Church
to the state (Dri 2011; Morello 2015; Catoggio 2016), these studies have
shown extensively that the Catholic Church was a key player of the PRN.
In the case of business involvement in the repression, the declassifica-
tion of archives has shown a complicated plot of businesses who paid for
undercover agents, handled personal information and even built deten-
tion places within the factories and workplaces on top of what was an
emphatic public support of the PRN in terms of social repression and
disciplinarian plans (see the joint report made by the Ministry of Justice,
Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales and Facultad Latinoamericana de
Ciencias Sociales 2016). Research has also been significant in the exam-
ination of what had happened within those workplaces and trade unions
more broadly even when a new synthesis is still pending, as is discussed
in Zorzoli’s chapter in this volume.
Beyond the repressive system itself, the rethinking has probed valu-
able in challenging the assumption that the PRN had no consensus
and that the details of the repressive system were not widely known. A
varied type of sources extensively documented knowledge of what was
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

happening was not absent, and further inquiries must be made regard-
ing the degrees of consensus of ‘the great majority’ that in O’Donnell’s
(1984) terms ‘patrolled itself’ (see for instance Horowicz 2012; Águila
and Alonso 2013). The Malvinas/Falklands war was the peak of consen-
sus and support, to which we turn below.
Another dimension of this revision has been that of ‘daily life’,
including the state administration of ‘ordinary circumstances’ during
those years both in Argentina and abroad. This includes among others
the administration of state-owned companies, state employers and state
policies regarding health, education, cultural ‘promotion’ and regional
and international relations among others. Private daily life has also been
subject of research considering experiences such as those of urban mid-
dle classes, working-class communities, as well as youth and women
(Caviglia 2006; Cosse et al. 2010; Manzano 2014; Lvovich 2017). The
‘cultural programme’ of the PRN, an ambitious plan of cultural change
with the participation of several intellectuals and the Church has also
been documented (Invernizzi and Gociol 2007).
There are a number of other topics that have seen a revitalisation and
rethinking (e.g. regional cooperation in the repressive plans, political
exiles, new human rights movements, transitional justice, the legacies of
the transition, etc.), but there are yet another three that could not be
missing from this overview: the Malvinas/Falklands war, those regard-
ing memory and the epistemological issues regarding methods, validity
and scope of the recent past and the visibilisation of gender relations as a
fundamental dimension to understand the dictatorship and the tensions
handed down by the terror.
In the case of the war, it cannot be underestimated the degree of
taboo and silence associated to the dynamics, civil support and outcome
of the war that left more than 650 deaths in 1982 after 74 days of con-
flict. After a number of polemics contemporary or close to the events
(e.g. Rozitchner 1985), such scholar production had a gap, and most of
the studies regarding the conflict were done disconnecting the issue of
Malvinas/Falklands from the history of the PRN. The recent rethinking
has re-centred the analysis recovering both the long-term dispute over
sovereignty and the particular circumstances of the war within the PRN
(Guber 2001; Lorenz 2006; Palermo 2007).
The recent past, as a topic of specific inquiry, had a major growth
in Argentina in the last few decades. The peculiarities of a past that
seems to have no end has been analysed for its epistemological and
14 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

methodological challenges, including the strong links this imposes (and

imposed) between academic studies and political and judiciary issues
(Jelin 2002; Franco and Levin 2007; Mira Delli-Zotti and Pedrosa 2016;
Águila and Alonso 2017; Pittaluga 2017). The topics involved are vast,
but a dynamic core of this perspective can be found around the issues of
memory, reparation policies of the victims and representations of the past.
In case of the gender dimension, there are key issues that have been
recently revised and others recently developed anew. From the early anal-
ysis of the role of families and women in public discourses (Filc 1997;
Laudano 1998) and the classic inquiry about the attempt to discipline
gender relations by the PRN reinstalling traditional patriarchal values, the
research has now led to a rethinking on the scope of sexual changes in
the sixties and seventies, opening a cross-examination of the whole period
(Andujar 2009). Making visible women’s agency during those years is also
a major breakthrough in an academic community that has been reluctant
to incorporate a gender perspective and make visible women participation
and experiences (Andújar et al. 2005; Beguán 2006; Grammático 2012;
Nassif and Ovejero 2013; Oberti and Pittaluga 2016). The study of gen-
dered violence during the PRN is also opening the scope to research on
the practices of the (terrorist) state (Balardini et al. 2011).
In sum, a profound and broad rethinking took place, challenging and
complicating the idea of a dictatorship that was a monolithic, purely
vertical enterprise, with an explicit coherent plan of action that was car-
ried out behind the back of civil society solely by the armed forces. The
effects and legacies of that experience were, as well, more complicated to
grasp that those immediately obvious. These constitute usual contentions
made by the social sciences on common knowledge, and in a way, this is
what the new situation after 2001 both allowed and called for thanks to
the relaxing of some taboos and the state’s ‘use of the past’, including
the memory of human rights violations.

Structure of This Book

This concise summary of key ‘landmarks’ of how the perception, the
knowledge and even the topics of research addressing the 1976–1983
dictatorship have been changing in the last few decades is enough to
show that a single edited collection could not do justice to represent all
of these vast and diverse developments. Under this common concern, we
have however reunited a number of fundamental pieces of this puzzle.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

In the opening chapter, James H. Shrader confronts studies that

have privileged class or political identity as the overarching category of
analysis in the country’s recent history. Focusing on the role played by
racism, patriarchalism and national building strategies in the violence
applied during the years of the dictatorship—and the years preceding
it—Shrader’s chapter submerges into north-western Argentina’s coun-
tryside, to unravel how terror and modernisation was woven since the
so-called Operativo Independencia in the province of Tucumán. As
he shows, Tucumán was transformed into a laboratory of state terror-
ism before 1976 and in this capacity is a showcase of much of what
had happened in the rest of the country after March 24. The author
has found that modernisation, anti-Peronism and Cold War policies for
the region are combined with particularities in the foundation of ter-
ror in the region that are by themselves a new landmark in the studies
of Argentine history.
The following chapter is also located in a peripheral area of Argentina,
particularly neglected in the history of the last military dictatorship, the
Patagonia region. By altering the scale of observation, Pablo Scatizza
inquiries about the particularities of the repressive system outside of
major urban centres, showing that there were outstanding degrees of
autonomy and an unexpected dynamic between local and national secu-
rity forces in Northern Patagonia. The chapter shows that the way in
which detention centres worked and the experiences of the victims in
small towns require a renewal of the analysis, acknowledging that they
did not have the same logic as the iconic concentration camps (such as
ESMA). The understanding of those dynamics in concentration camps
and non-conventional centres opens an area of research dealing with
both military interactions and the issues of vicinity with terror, consensus
and memory of the civil society.
The next two pieces depart from the discussion of the repressive sys-
tem and deal with the political economy of the PRN. On Chapter 3, Juan
Grigera discusses the economic policy of the dictatorship and attempts
at bridging the gap between the studies within the tradition of political
science and those of political economy. The chapter discusses the puzzles
that industrial policies pose to the interpretations and makes an effort
to show the tensions that constituted the policy-making process and the
often under-analysed constraints of national states. By unravelling these
factors, the analysis of policies frequently cited as contradictory (such as
industrial policy) the proposal shows that the basis for a rethinking lies in
16 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

bringing back in the international context, the capitalist need of restruc-

turing (e.g. understanding regional industrial policies as subsidies for a
‘spatial fix’ rather than ‘developmentalist attempts’) and the shifts in local
balance of forces in the new context.
Chapter 4 analyses the management of political agreements and
dissent within the frame of the dictatorial experience. The archive
of the Comisión de Asesoramiento Legislativo (Legislative Advisory
Commission, CAL) became serendipitously available in 2013, allow-
ing for the chance to understand the functioning of the dictatorship
beyond the repressive facet. The work of Alejandro Bonvecchi and
Emilia Simison aims to build generalisable knowledge beyond the case
of Argentina, allowing for comparisons and theoretical refinement. The
analysis of the policy-making process of the PRN and the legislative insti-
tutions and the functioning of federalism during the authoritarian rule,
they examine the specific effects of the institutional design of PRN. By
focusing on the procedures, they unravel of the who was in charge of
proving the de facto president ‘legislative advice on behalf of the Armed
Forces’. The authors show how the institutional arrangement gave the
CAL the chances to operate beyond the role of a merely consultative
body, modifying and sometimes rejecting the initiatives of the executive
power.
In a fruitful intersection of studies that recover the experiences of
specific state agencies and a gender perspective, this volume includes
in Chapter 5 a piece by Deborah D’Antonio, dedicated to the analy-
sis of gender and cultural censorship mechanisms during the PRN.
In her analysis of the policies of promotion and censoring of cin-
ema, the chapter delves into the (seeming) paradox of a conservative
and catholic military regime financing films that portrayed a complex
configuration of gender and sexuality. The result is a detailed account
of surveillance and control mechanisms in Argentinian cinema in the
period with a lucid analysis of what constituted the state sexual and cul-
tural politics, what were the military regime prospects and how these
subjects were effectively treated.
The following chapter, by Luciana Zorzoli, illustrates a renewal on
a more classic set of studies, in particular, those regarding workers
and trade unions in Argentina. From a critical reading of the state of
art, the author addressed the path of the orthodox union leadership,
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

arguing that the building of different tactics and political standpoints

provides clues to understand both PRN policies for this sector plus
responses and legacies of 1976 within the labour moment. By focusing
on selective repression, promotion and restructuring carried out by
the dictatorship, the chapter shows that a more elaborate image of the
transformations of the world of work is needed. The chapter addresses
in particular the previously understudied strengthening of the ortho-
dox Peronist union leadership and proposes a new synthesis, seeking
to allow us to better understand the social weight that the union lead-
ership held since the democratic restoration of 1983 in Argentina.
It is precisely to this period that the final two chapters move to,
exceeding the institutional temporal scale of the dictatorship. Chapter 7
by Joaquin Baeza Belda offers a novel interpretation of the peculiar tem-
poralities of these years for the Peronist party. The author presents an
inquiry on how the party dealt with repression and political activity dur-
ing and after the 1976 military government, both in the parliamentary
level and acting as opposition and rival of Alfonsin’s presidency between
1983–1989. The formation of an internal tendency (“renovadores”)
opposed to those labelled as ‘orthodox’ shows that the Peronist party
was simultaneously taking part in the democratic transition and going
through an internal one. The chapter shows the many levels of complexi-
ties underpinning the legacies of the dictatorship and the transformations
of political parties having to adapt to a new country.
Finally, the closing chapter presents a reading of how representations
of Fatherland, nation and territory were played in the recent Argentine
history during and after the Malvinas/Falklands of 1982. Federico
Lorenz delves into the difficult and contradictory ways in which the war
experience was assimilated by the country. The chapter explores the con-
tradictory tensions on how those fallen in action and the survivors have
been and could be added to the ‘national pantheon’ accommodating at
the same time the fact that the decision to violently act on the claim of
sovereignty was politically motivated by a bloody dictatorship.
In sum, the collection offers a wide representative sample of the
profound rethinking of the experience of the dictatorship done in
Argentina. We hope that it will contribute to a better understand-
ing of how the social perception and the academic knowledge of the
authoritarian past has been rapidly changing and invite for further
renewals. By examining the production in and on Argentina, we also
18 J. GRIGERA AND L. ZORZOLI

expect for comparative research to be updated using the Argentinean

case to help to rethink other experiences in Latin America and beyond.
The meaning of ‘Post dictatorship Argentina’ has been that while the
institutional form of dictatorship has ended in 1983, the ‘innumerable
resonant effects in the present’ had not. Rethinking has been a systematic
effort to contribute to understanding and closing this legacy while seek-
ing for justice. We hope this volume contributes to the continued efforts
in all of these directions.

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 CHAPTER 2

A Foundation of Terror:
Tucumán and the Proceso, 1975–1983

James H. Shrader

In a subtropical region beset by poverty, labor conflict, and political

violence, Argentina’s ruling military junta inaugurated four model towns
in bearing the names of fallen soldiers killed in a counterinsurgency
program known as Operation Independence. The towns, built with
forced labor on illegally expropriated land, were the culmination of a
nation-building program that sought the annihilation of subversives and
the socioeconomic conditions that they allegedly exploited. As in South
Vietnam and Algeria, these strategic hamlets were more than tempo-
rary concentration camps to separate peasants from a rural insurgency.
They were instead permanent dwellings to control a rural population
seen as dangerously susceptible to Marxist subversion and to modern-
ize them through constant surveillance and forced relocation. Each ham-
let featured a grid layout with streets named after fallen military officers,
a plaza with a water tank that doubled as a watchtower, and a show-
case factory. Forgotten until recently, they were the culmination of the
armed forces’ desire to weave terror and modernization together in a
bid to reorganize Northwestern Argentina’s countryside. The strategic

J. H. Shrader (*)
Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 23

J. Grigera and L. Zorzoli (eds.), The Argentinian
Dictatorship and its Legacy, Studies of the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18301-1_2
24 J. H. SHRADER

hamlet program was a monument to state terror and the culmination of

anti-Peronist and anti-communist ideologies that framed the population
as both dangerous and unworthy of basic rights and protections.
Operation Independence was the first chapter in a saga of forced
disappearances and mass terror that cost the lives of thousands of
Argentines from 1975 until 1983. Beginning more than a year before
the March 1976 coup d’état, Operation Independence challenges how
historians frame the parameters of what the dictatorships labeled “The
Process of National Reorganization,” a euphemism for its state ter-
ror campaign (hereby simply referred to as the Proceso). With its use of
forced disappearances, clandestine torture centers, and the imposition
of a climate of terror against the population, the counterinsurgency
program exhibited many of the same characteristics that would become
emblematic of the dictatorship’s rule. The army’s campaign sought the
destruction of social movements, the harsh disciplining of labor, and the
annihilation of a progressive culture that military officers and civilians
alike saw as anti-national, anti-Western, and anti-Catholic. In Tucumán,
the army focused not only the destruction of armed revolutionary organ-
izations like the PRT-ERP and the Montoneros, but also student move-
ments and the sugar labor confederation FOTIA. Birthed in a nominally
democratic period, Operation Independence transformed Tucuman into
a laboratory for a much larger tragedy.
Yet while Tucumán foreshadowed larger horrors to come, it also
diverged in significant ways. The state terror campaign targeted the
rural population in a far-reaching manner unlike elsewhere in Argentina.
Those with little to no political activism were more likely to be disap-
peared than in Buenos Aires or Córdoba. The armed forces maintained
a stricter control of the population’s movements and interactions.
Surveillance was extensive, and the countryside experienced the effects
of an internal passport system that severely inhibited the movements of
rural Tucumanos and undermined their sense of community. The armed
forces sought not only the annihilation of political culture and identi-
ties, but also the re-ordering of the province’s socioeconomic landscape
and living conditions in a manner unlike anywhere else. Therefore, while
there were similarities to the national Proceso, there were striking con-
trasts that warrant further attention.
This essay argues that Operation Independence was a practice of
nation-building through mass murder and modernization unique to
Tucumán. It was the culmination of two decades of discursive and
 2 A FOUNDATION OF TERROR: TUCUMÁN AND THE PROCESO, 1975–1983 25

institutional violence directed at the province’s population due to its

labor militancy, historic support for Peronism, seeming likeness to Cuba,
and perceived cultural pathologies. It was reflective of long-standing
fears of mass politics and the allegedly barbaric “other Argentina” that
had existed since the civil wars of the nineteenth century, when essayist
Domingo Sarmiento framed political conflict as a contest between civili-
zation and barbarism, and which had gained renewed urgency following
the rise of Peronism. In 1975, when the army launched its counterinsur-
gency operations, it did so in the belief that it was on the only institu-
tion capable of extending civilization to the periphery and uprooting the
causes of subversion.
This essay also argues that regionalist racism played a significant role
in the intertwined campaigns of state terror and modernization. The way
the military viewed Tucumanos conformed to long-held views of non-
white Argentines as threatening “others” lacking both political agency
and modernity. An examination of a racializing ideology in Operation
Independence is not only important for understanding the depth of per-
secution that occurred in the province, but also for recognizing the per-
sistence of racism in Argentine society well into the twentieth century.
Until recently, studies of Argentina traditionally privileged class (and to
a limited extent, gender) as the overarching category of analysis in the
country’s history. While the historiography of the nineteenth century
has placed considerable importance on the role of race in nation-state
formation, from long civil war to the invasion and genocide against the
indigenous peoples of Patagonia in 1879, the historiography of race in
twentieth-century Argentina inadvertently accepted at face value the
country’s claims to whiteness due to the massive waves of European
migrants that entered its ports at the close of the nineteenth century. A
new wave of historians has challenged the overarching emphasis on class,
arguing that race has continued to shape Argentina, particularly during
critical points, such as the rise of Peronism (Milanesio 2010; Alberto and
Elena 2016). This essay will thus contribute to the new historiography of
race in Cold War Argentina.

Nation Building, Anti-Peronism, and the Cold War

Nation-building projects in Argentina grew from domestic fears of
Peronism filtered through a Cold War prism. With its support base of
internal migrants from the “colonial” North (comprising the provinces
26 J. H. SHRADER

north of Córdoba to those that bordered Bolivia and Paraguay), the

mass movement’s threatening rise fueled a rebirth of Sarmientian notions
of “two Argentinas,” one cosmopolitan and predominately European
(white), and the other allegedly “feudalistic” and Latin American (non-
white). This other Argentina became known as the “Interior” in the
public sphere, a transformation that grouped culturally and geographi-
cally distinct regions under a vague moniker that had more to do with
racial-encoding than any other organizational logic. It therefore served a
useful shortcut to explain developments in Argentine society that seem-
ingly ran contrary to the country’s imagined liberal tradition. Rather than
an expression of socioeconomic disparities and a closed political system,
Juan Domingo Perón’s appeal was rooted in the persistence of a pre-mod-
ern culture that conditioned inhabitants to follow demagogic “caudillos”
(Svampa 1994, 314–344). These racializing fears received further impetus
following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Castro’s victory against the Batista
dictatorship was the third successful peasant revolution in twentieth-cen-
tury Latin America, and its turn to socialism in 1961 generated paranoia
that communist organizations were fomenting revolt in regions with high
rates of poverty and illiteracy. Anti-Peronist and anti-communist dis-
courses thus shared a cynical fear of the masses, whom they articulated as
the greatest threat to liberal democracy and Western civilization.
With the countryside occupying the focal point of Cold War anx-
ieties, the doctrine of modernization ideology became the language of
anti-communist salvation. Originating in the US social sciences and think
tanks, its acolytes similarly saw the world as divided between “modern”
and “feudal” halves, with the Third World occupying the decidedly infe-
rior one (Latham 2000). In the global context of the Cuban Revolution,
the acceleration of decolonization in Africa, and the escalation of the
Vietnam War, its ideologues not only offered a stark binary vision of the
world, but also paternalistic prescriptions to save it, most notably the
reorganization of rural social structures through the forced introduc-
tion of modern capitalism. To prevent a communist victory, leaders in
the First World were tasked with the mission of guiding and accelerat-
ing the Third World’s transition from “feudal” to modern. Originally, its
defenders saw this process occurring in stages, but the perceived commu-
nist threat in the Third World resulted in a morphing from the stages of
development to one that emphasized violent, transformative shocks.
In Argentina, modernization ideology found a receptive audience
through university exchanges and the efforts of American institutions
like USAID and the Alliance for Progress. Following the election of
 2 A FOUNDATION OF TERROR: TUCUMÁN AND THE PROCESO, 1975–1983 27

Radical politician Arturo Frondizi in 1958, the Argentine government

committed itself to fusing the two Argentinas through a variety of infra-
structure projects, literacy campaigns, and the transplanting of modern
factories to underdeveloped regions. The government’s commitment
to modernization ideology was strong enough to produce a separate
agency tasked with this goal: The National Council for Development
(CONADE), which was charged with planning the most ambitious and
transformative of the government’s goals (Healey 2003). In advancing
these pharaonic building projects, politicians and policy advocates often
justified them by racializing Argentines in the north as a security threat
due to their high levels of poverty and illiteracy. Underdevelopment, in
turn, came to infer not only a lack of industrialization and infrastructure,
but also social anarchy, with racial and class undertones.
Fears of the imagined Interior penetrated the armed forces and
inspired officers to look at nation-building as an important pillar of
its new counterinsurgency practices. While liberal thinkers sought to
uplift the populace and protect democracy, right-wing officers disa-
vowed democracy as both dangerous to Catholic values and unattaina-
ble given Argentina’s socioeconomic and cultural context. Following
Castro’s promise to export armed struggle, officers spoke of the North’s
population in particular as a security threat and advocated policies that
would eliminate subversion and extend modernity beyond Buenos Aires
Numerous essays in the military periodicals Revista del Círculo Militar
and Revista Escuela de Guerra Superior—both policy advocacy publica-
tions that circulated widely among active and retired military officers—
advocated that the army prepare for a new type of warfare, one which
not only required training for combat against irregular units operating
within inhospitable terrain, but also one that required the use of psy-
chological warfare (state terror) and civic action (development) to win
the support of a population whose loyalties and very agency they called
into question. Yet the military did not see psychological warfare and civic
actions as practices only restricted to a counterinsurgency campaign, but
rather pillars of a much larger nation-building program in underdevel-
oped zones. The military exploited the North’s underdevelopment as an
indictment against liberal democratic regimes, and thus positioned itself
as the only institution within Argentine society capable of saving both
the “Interior” and, by extension, the country itself.
Two publications in Revista del Círculo Militar illustrate the preoccu-
pation with subversion in the North. The first, authored by Lieutenant
Andrés Rebechi in 1962, offers a contradictory vision of Argentina.
28 J. H. SHRADER

He begins his essay with the trope of a race-less country of immigrants,

valorizing its religious and racial homogeneity. Such a statement, of
course, ignored the country’s Jewish, Protestant, and Muslim communi-
ties, as well as its mestizo, indigenous, and Afro-Latin populations. The
importance of the essay is the author’s own contradiction of this state-
ment through a racially encoded analysis of Argentina’s regional diver-
sity. Surveying the landscape of the Northwest, he presents an ecological
portrait of its mountains and forests, which present the “best facilities
for logistical installations, points of resistance, and, in general, tactical
actions.” More important is his representation of the inhabitants. For
Rebechi, the most vital terrain is the people whose frozen culture, high
rates of illiteracy, and admiration for caudillos all render them prone to
communism:

Popular support could be especially notable in the aforementioned regions

where diverse and propitiatory circumstances intersect […]: high levels of
illiterates in comparison with other regions, extremist ideologies of years
past that perhaps have still not been uprooted [Peronism], and something
which is particularly important he custom of our people to sympathize
with leaders who in practice are communist instructor. It is undoubtable
that the inhabitant of those zones will admire the man that maintains an
iron, cruel discipline over his men, remaining fearless in the face of dan-
ger while his strong, dominant personality maintains the unity of his gang.
He should be the first in danger, in suffering, in privations, to be admired.
These qualities have hardly changed since the epoch of Quiroga, Güemes,
or Paz. (pp. 81–82)

There are several important points to emphasize in this passage. The

first is the link between illiteracy and ideological extremism. The sec-
ond point is the phrase “extremist ideologies from years past that per-
haps have not been uprooted,” a clear reference to Peronism, and the
underlying concern is its persistence in regions like the Northwest whose
legibility is beyond the knowledge of the state. Echoing Sarmiento’s
Facundo, the author recycled the cultural critique of the region’s cau-
dillo-peón relations. The inhabitants’ misery and nineteenth-century
cultural backwardness conditioned them to support dominant person-
alities like Perón or Castro, men whose tendencies mimicked those of
Quiroga or Güemes. Despite his vision of a race-less Argentina, the logic
of his representation is eminently racial, as the regions he analyzed were
 2 A FOUNDATION OF TERROR: TUCUMÁN AND THE PROCESO, 1975–1983 29

predominately mestizo and indigenous. Regionalism was thus a coded

racial language, and one which became intertwined with political and
national security concerns by 1962.
Other authors, however, were more explicit in their fears. Lieutenant
José Felipe Marini’s 1965 essay for Revista Militar made an explicit con-
nection between region, race, and subversion. Ignoring their immense
differences, the author identifies key underdeveloped zones whose
race and culture render their inhabitants susceptible to communism:
Guyana, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil’s Northeast, and,
finally, Argentina’s Northwest. “Moreover, in these zones,” he wrote,
“there are populations with a low standard of living, of a hardened core
with a marked predominance of Indians and mestizos who are vulnera-
ble to socioeconomic, populist propaganda due to their set of values.”
According to the author, a region’s stunted economic and cultural
development rendered their inhabitants easily susceptible to subversive
forces emanating from urban centers, namely the unions and universi-
ties. Marini proposed two solutions that would later be seen during the
Onganía regime: regional development of the Northwest, and a purge of
the universities’ Marxist professors and students (pp. 114–115).
Such views had predominantly domestic roots, but French training
missions played an important role as well. Historians have written exten-
sively on the influence of veterans of the Algerian War on the Proceso,
arguing that during the fifties and early sixties, the French armed forces
played a considerable role in the transmission of tactics and values that
formed the bedrock of state terror (Mazzei 2002; Peries 2009; Guerrero
Velásquez 2011; Brennan 2018). Equally important in this history are
the French interpretations of mass rebellion. In telling the histories of
the Vietnamese and Algerian uprising, they relied upon the familiar
racial narrative of the culturally backward mass manipulated by foreign
agents. In translations of books and periodicals, as well as essays in the
ESG’s own series, they disseminated this notion widely among their
Argentine audience. General Henri Navarre’s 1956 Agonie d’Indochine,
which appeared in 1964 under the title La guerra en Indochina (pub-
lished by the Círculo Militar), attributed the Vietminh’s success to its
“mystic” racial and national ideology, that effectively “brainwashed” a
receptive population living in conditions of misery (pp. 61, 69–70). Jean
Nougués thus attributed the combination of poverty and a demographic
“explosion” as the causes of revolutionary conditions in Algeria.
30 J. H. SHRADER

Argentine perceptions of anti-colonialism in French territories had

already crystallized in 1959, when Alicides López Aufranc wrote that the
roots of the “subversive war” resided in Algeria’s fragmentation and eco-
nomic underdevelopment, which divided the colony between the mod-
ern, capitalist littoral and the backward, isolated Muslim interior: the
base of the FLN, an analysis with shades of the “two Argentinas” thesis.
What most worried French and Argentine officers were the new tac-
tics of revolutionary war. Seeing conventional warfare as outdated after
the development of nuclear weapons, they warned of a new age of impe-
rialism in which the communist bloc gained territory through the sub-
version of Western civilization. This warfare, which relied upon guerrilla
tactics and the insertion of agents within a sympathetic population, ren-
dered conventional tactics and training obsolete. In its place, the armed
forces would engage in a counterrevolutionary war that not only stressed
the training of special forces for irregular combat, but also what instruc-
tors often referred to as psychological warfare—a blend of torture (never
outwardly acknowledged though always implied), civic action (the con-
struction of schools, hospitals, and roads), and economic moderniza-
tion. While the first pillar was intended to uncover sympathizers and fifth
columns, the second and third were intended to win the support of a
population that officers saw neutral at best. Nation-building was equally
pertinent. In 1960, Nougués saw economic development in Algeria’s
interior—at the direction of the armed forces—as essential for victory
(pp. 186, 199–200).

Tucumán as a Cold War Laboratory

In this context, Tucumán quickly became a vital laboratory for
nation-building projects. In 1946, the province had been key in the
election of Juan Domingo Perón, delivering 70% of its votes in favor of
the politician. Following his election, the new Peronist state created the
labor confederation Federación de Obreros Tucumanos de la Industria
Azucarera (FOTIA), which linked 55 unions across the province.
Peronism quickly established deep roots in Tucumán because it offered
both labor rights and political power to once marginalized mill workers
and cane cutters (Gutiérrez and Rubinstein 2012). Equally important,
Perón’s government transformed Tucumán into a showcase for its plat-
form of economic nationalism. The state subsidized smaller mills and
promoted the expansion of sugar cultivation by expanding the eligibility
 2 A FOUNDATION OF TERROR: TUCUMÁN AND THE PROCESO, 1975–1983 31

of small-landholding peasants and promising credits. Finally, Peronism

expanded the state to a region, where sugar mills and latifundios exer-
cised near total political and social control, and where many workers not
only lacked basic protections.
The 1955 coup d’etat against Perón and the triumph of the Cuban
Revolution four years later explain Tucumán’s centrality for counterrev-
olutionary politics. The province’s historic identification with Peronism
and its likeness to Cuba—due to its sugar industry, large peasantry, and
subtropical terrain—transformed it into a laboratory to uproot what lib-
eral and ultra-nationalist thinkers saw as fertile ground for Marxist revo-
lution. These schemes included the division of the province into military
zones under Plan CONINTES (Salas 2003), the introduction of mech-
anized cane harvesters to phase out the rural proletariat who had been
the base of Peronism, and the importation of French-Algerian refugees
to modernize and effectively “whiten” the province (Shrader 2019). Yet
Tucumano workers, peasants, and students had consistently frustrated
both civilian and military attempts to de-peronize the province’s soci-
oeconomic structure and thus its political identification. In 1959, the
FOTIA successfully resisted Frondizi’s declaration of a state of siege and
forced the mills to the bargaining table. Two years later, sugar workers
and small-landholding peasants—historic rivals—formed an alliance to
press the provincial government for an accord on pay and cane prices. By
1964–1965, both left-wing Peronist and Marxist labor activists and uni-
versity students were gaining power within unions, overthrowing aging
ortodoxo leaders in favor of clasista ones who argued for the nationaliza-
tion of the mills.
Efforts to reform the province culminated in the crucial year of
1966, when the armed forces overthrow the democratically elected gov-
ernment of Dr. Arturo Illía, the third coup d’état in just eleven years.
Following an historic collapse of the world price of sugar coupled with
a record production in Tucumán, the industry faced a crisis as suddenly
bankrupt mills could neither pay their workers nor the smaller produc-
ers. Employees seized factories and took hostages while radical left-wing
organizations like the Revolutionary Workers’ Party gained control of
unions and a seat in the province’s Chamber of Deputies. Nationally,
headlines cast the province as a “time bomb,” a “powder keg,” and
the “Little Cuba.” Amid a political deadlock, events in Tucumán aided
anti-democratic forces in Argentina and further undermined the legiti-
macy of a government that came to power due to the proscription of
32 J. H. SHRADER

the Peronist Party. The crisis in Tucumán seemingly represented much of

what so threatening about the “other Argentina”: mass revolt, poverty,
and backwardness.
In the aftermath of 1966 coup against President Arturo Illía, newly
installed dictator General Juan Carlos Onganía made Tucumán a show-
case for the regime’s so-called Argentine Revolution, by pledging to
“sanitize” the sugar industry and diversify the province’s economy. This
entailed the sudden and violent forced closure of 11 of the 27 ingenios,
the importation of modern factories, and the forced migration of nearly a
quarter of million Tucumanos to Buenos Aires and Patagonia. Ostensibly,
the aim of what became known of the project was the concentration of
the sugar industry in larger producers (both mills and latifundios) and
the insertion of the province into the international citrus and soy mar-
kets. On a deeper level, military and civilian planners sought not only
the economic transformation of the province, but its cultural transfor-
mation as well. Through modern capitalism and infrastructure projects,
it was hoped Tucumanos would gain political agency, saving themselves
and by extension Argentina itself from Peronism and Marxist subver-
sion. “Operation Tucumán” was above all a nation-building project,
and while it failed to transform the province into what the armed forces
dreamed as a pole of prosperity, it nevertheless illustrates the concern
with the “Interior” and the centrality of the province in the right-wing
imagination.
Though Tucumán receded in importance following the failure of
Onganía’s development project, the 1969 Cordobazo labor revolt, and
the rise of urban-based guerrilla movements, it regained its centrality for
the armed forces in the early seventies following Peronism’s return to
power. First, the 1974 appearance of a rural insurgency by the Workers’
Revolutionary Party (PRT-ERP) recast rural Argentina as a Cold War
battleground once again. The concentration of its forces in the provinces
gave the army an opportunity to score a significant defeat of the armed
left that previously eluded it. Second, a month-long strike that same year
by sugar workers not only paralyzed the sugar industry, but also revealed
the seeming inability of recently widowed-Isabel Perón’s inability to
maintain order in the country. A month prior to the presidency’s issu-
ance of the “annihilation” Decree 261 in February 1975, the military
high command had already issued its own orders for the destruction of
left-wing organizations in the province. For the generals, the province
represented the danger of Marxist subversion, from the “takeover” of the
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ATHENS
athirst
athletes
athletic
athletics
Atkins
Atkinson
Atlanta
Atlantic
atlas
atlases
Atlin
atmosphere
atmospheres
atmospheric
Atoka
atoms
atonement
atrocious
atrocities
attach
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attachment
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attack
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Attel
Attempt
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attention
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Attila
attired
Attitude
attitudes
Attorney
attorneys
attract
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attribute
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attributes
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Atua
Atuans
Au
Aubrey
Auckland
auction
audacious
audacity
Audencia
audible
audience
audiences
audiencia
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audrocratic
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augmented
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AuGUST
Augusta
Auguste
Augustin
Augustine
Augustinian
Augustinians
Augustus
Aumale
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auspices
Austin
Austral
Australasia
Australasian
AUSTRALIA
Australian
Australians
Austria
Austrian
Austrians
Austro
Auteuil
authentic
authentically
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authenticity
author
authorise
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authoritative
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Authority
Authorization
authorize
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authorship
autocrat
autocratic
autographs
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Autonomistic
autonomists
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autonomy
autorité
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autumn
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auxiliaries
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avidity
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Avondale
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axes
axiom
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Ayr
AYRES
ayuntamiento
Ayuntamientos
Ayutla
Azcarraga
Azim
Aztec
Aztecs
b
babblings
Babel
babes
Babi
Babnyanes
Babuyan
Babylon
BABYLONIA
Babylonian
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Baca
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Bacoor
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BACTERIAL
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baggage
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bags
Bahadur
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Bahr
Bai
Baikal
bail
Bailiff
Bairam
Bait
BAJAUR
baked
Baker
bakers
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Balabae
Balance
balanced
balances
balconies
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Balearic
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Baler
bales
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Balinians
Balkan
Balkans
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ball
ballads
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balloon
balloons
ballot
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ballots
Balmaceda
Balmoral
BALTIC
Baltimore
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Balupiri
Balæna
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band
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Bandajuma
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Bandora
Bands
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Banffy
Bang
Bangkok
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BANK
banker
bankers
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banknotes
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bankruptcy
bankrupts
Banks
banner
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bannermen
banners
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banquet
banquets
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Bar
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barangay
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BARBADOS
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Barbarity
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Barbour
Barcelona
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Barents
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Barima
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barkeepers
Barker
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barley
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Barnard
barnyard
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Barometer
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Baroness
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Barrages
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barricade
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Barrios
Barrow
Barry
bars
barter
Barth
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BARTON
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basely
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Bashi
Basilan
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basilicas
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basins
basis
basket
baskets
Basle
Basques
Basra
Bassorah
bastards
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bastion
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Batag
Batan
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batches
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Bates
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battalion
battalions
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battered
batteries
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Battery
Battle
battlefield
battlefields
battles
battleship
battleships
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Bautista
Bavaria
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Bax
BAY
Bayard
bayonet
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bayonets
bays
Bazaar
bazaars
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Be
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Bear
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Beast
beastliness
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Beatification
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Beaurepaire
beauties
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beautifully
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Beaver
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Bechuana
BECHUANALAND
Beckham
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Bed
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Beernaert
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Belgians
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Belgium
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belief
beliefs
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Bell
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belligerence
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bells
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belt
Bench
benches
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benediction
benefactions
benefactor
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benevolence
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Bengal
Benguela
Benguet
Bengula
benignity
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BENIN
BENJAMIN
Bennet
Bennett
Benson
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Benué
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Berar
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Berda
Berdrow
Beresford
BERGENDAL
BERING
Berkeley
BERLIN
Bermuda
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Bernadottes
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Bernard
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Berry
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Bessemer