Epilogue

The victory of the Center-Right alliance that supported candidate Mauricio Macri in the November 2015 presidential runoff elections ushered in a new era in the human rights movement in Argentina. The welter of bills crafted and passed by the kirchnerista legislative majority in the weeks between the election and the December 10, 2015, inauguration of the new president included a little-noticed law creating a bicameral committee to investigate those business accomplices of the dictatorship who had thrived under military rule and cooperated with the activities of the security forces whose murderous tactics fell disproportionately hard on labor activists and the working class generally. Opposed for diverse reasons by the Unión Cívica Radical, dissident Peronists not aligned with ...

Assigning Blame

Unresolved debates on responsibility for the dirty war are clouded by myths and an imperfect historical understanding of the period. The CONADEP truth commission report, for all its ethical worth, simplified history. Historical scholarship, with a few signal exceptions, has been guilty of a failure to confront the moral contradictions inherent in any rigorous analysis of the causes of the violence and the dirty war.

Five Trials

Justice and accountability for the crimes of the military took place first during the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín (1983—89) following the fall of the dictatorship. Five major human rights trials took place in Córdoba during the Kirchner presidencies (203—15) , each with former Third Army Corps commander, General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez as a defendant. The fifth trial, the La Perla—Campo de la Ribera class action lawsuit, was the largest human rights trial to take place in Argentina. Guilty verdicts in all three trials led to lengthy prison sentences, including five life sentences for Menéndez.

Transnational Dynamics

The transnational influences on the Third Army Corps and the military government’s waging of the dirty war drew heavily on French theories of counter-revolutionary war. US influences was considerable but more at the ideological level, inculcating theories of a global Cold War, of a confrontation between east and west. Strictly domestic influences also counted greatly on the military’s institutional culture and the Catholic-nationalist ideas that animated its particular definition of “subversion.”

Threats

The city of Córdoba, site of the 1969 social protests the Cordobazo, encapsulated perhaps more than anywhere else in the country what the military viewed as the subversive influences that threatened the country’s sovereignty and its natural traditions, its cultural identity. A radicalized youth culture, liberation currents within the Catholic Church, and a militant labor movement targeted by the left for recruitment of party activists, collectively threatened the city’s conservative, Catholic culture. The military, Catholic Church hierarchy, business and the Peronist labor bureaucracy all viewed Córdoba as locus of radical ideologies and leftist activism.

Introduction

Argentina’s experience with state terrorism during the 1976—83 military dictatorship is commonly referred to as the period of the ‘dirty war.’ The term dirty war remains controversial in Argentina and is currently rejected by all human rights groups in the country, its use seen as a defense for the military’s crimes and brutal methods. The book employs the term in order to analyze the military’s understanding of war and to explore the military’s institutional culture, beyond the Cold War influences, specifically in the case of Córdoba, Argentina’s second largest city and the site of some of the worst repression and greatest human rights abuses.

Remembering

The construction of memory has comprised a fundamental part of the legacy of post-dictatorship in Argentina. From the Alfonsín truth commission report to the activities of the various human rights groups, to the policies of the Kirchner governments (2003-2015), remembering the crimes of the state terrorism and its victims has been, as with the human rights trials, among the most ambitious efforts in the world to make memory a societal good. There are contradictions in this undertaking however, most visibly in the “imposed memory” of the Kirchner years. Memory as history has been among the greatest of these contractions.

Institutional Dynamics

Responsibility for waging the dirty war in Córdoba rested almost solely with the army’s Third Corps, other branches of the armed forces, unlike the case of Buenos Aires province and the federal capital, played a minor role. The military government compartmentalized the anti-subversive campaign, the Third Corps was assigned the largest and most difficult section of the country. Those conscripts performing their obligatory military service were often themselves victims of the state terrorism. Córdoba’s share of the victims of the dirty war numbered some 1100, overwhelming young and many with a recognized political activism.

Death Camp

Some 400 detention centers existed throughout Argentina during the dictatorship and of these there were half a dozen death camps, including the largest of the interior, La Perla, found on the outskirts of Córdoba. The death camp was the dictatorship’s most emblematic institution. Political prisoners were brought there, tortured, and most were killed. The camp functioned as a site of “waste disposal” a biopolitics different from the Nazi concentration camp. Tensions, cruelty, and occasional acts of heroism and humanity characterized the internal life of the camp.

Dictatorship

The military undertook a thorough militarization of the city following the 1976 coup, not just in waging the dirty war but by taking control of the government bureaucracy and university. Various sectoral interests and institutions (the press, the judiciary, business, the Catholic Church) were complicit in the state terrorism, some actively others through their silence. The army commander, Luciano Benjamín Menéndez consolidated the various intelligence services to monitor and undertake the clandestine war, one that was heavily concentrated in the working class and student neighborhoods.