30,000 Missing: The Pope, Argentina And the Dirty War

For all its marriage equality, worker’s collectives, and universal health care, Argentina has problems. Argentina is more than tango and Evita. Argentina, while influenced by foreign governments and bodies such as the IMF, was the master of its own fate. Implying a kind of diplomatic ventriloquism reduces and diminishes the reality of Argentina’s agency within its historical narrative. There’s plenty of scholarship on all those things available written by people more invested in such conversations than I.

Argentina’s history is complex, intensely influenced in modern history by failed neo-liberal policies, and its own internal conflict. There are many works focused in that narrative and historiography, although for a good general text I might recommend David Rock’s Argentina, 1516-1987. You can find a partial preview available on Google Books or cheaply from a bookstore, if not at a university library. Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina, by Javier Auyero is a good look at issues surrounding its modern welfare state. Another interesting text is Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, which includes the interviews of many members of various collectives throughout Argentina—this movement/concept is sometimes called horizontalidad, and it represents a reorienting of power relationships to favor the whole. This is distinguished from ‘vertical’ relationships of power, which are elected/representative and is sometimes hard for people in the United States to understand because of our own internalized relationships with the government and our notions about citizenship.

Understanding the politics of Latin America and Argentina is quite a task—the cycle between radical left and radical right movements is powerful, with some historians implying an unnerving symmetry, suggesting violent acts from either side of the spectrum are equivalent, that the viciousness of the radical right in the Dirty War was somehow a response to a real threat from the radical left. I disagree—unflinching analysis of leftist heroes does not come close to the violence inflicted by the radical right in Latin America, especially Argentina. The radical left in Argentina does not simply engage a reactionary right out of nowhere.

My first encounter with Argentine night (which is what I study, the culture of night) was about the Dirty War. There are any number of people writing about the causes of the Dirty War, but in very simplistic terms, the rise of the radical right during this period in Argentina’s history was caused by a number of things, not the least of which was the death of Juan Peron, the coup d’état that followed in 1976, and the failure of international intervention at various levels. The military junta that established itself after the coup against Peron executed the Dirty War under a program called the National Reorganization Process.

The Dirty War is part of a larger campaign of state sponsored terror throughout the governments of the Southern Cone of Latin America—some of you know this as Operation Condor. Genuine state sponsored terror is not the President coming to take your guns or any other weird ideas people in the United States have about the power of the state. State sponsored terror in Argentina meant the ‘disappearing’ of 30,000 people in the night that the junta found threatening over the course of several years. These people were simply never heard from again, their bodies never found. Many were taken to detention centers where they were tortured and murdered. State sponsored terror means hiding who you are, silencing those things most precious to you just to survive. Destroying books to protect your children because simply owning certain materials made you a threat. Members of the disappeared included people as young as high school students—see Night of the Pencils for more on this—all beaten, tortured, raped, starved, and murdered for protesting the junta.  Argentina is still recovering,still sending people to trial to ease the agonizing scars of the Dirty War. MOREHERE