South American Dirty Wars

Abstract

The so-called South American “dirty wars” refer to clandestine practices of state terror undertaken in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s by military governments in Brazil and the Southern Cone. Not all forms of state-directed violence and human rights abuses, widespread in Latin America in these years, fit into the dirty war category. Counter-insurgency tactics employed in countries with sustained rural insurgencies such as Colombia and Peru, though often guilty of practices such as those employed in clandestine state terror, also had a military logic rather than the largely political one of counter-revolutionary state terror. Indeed, none of the South American countries under military rule and subject to the state terror of the “dirty wars” had rural insurgencies of any significance. In the vast majority, the victims of the state terror were not combatants in any military sense but political activists, trade union leaders, intellectuals, students, and others who cannot by any reasonable standard have been regarded as military adversaries. The very term “dirty war” is controversial in this sense. It is an appropriation of the French concept of the salle guerre coined in Algeria, but unlike the anticolonial uprising in North Africa, employed by the South American dictatorships absent any credible military threat, to justify their crimes against humanity as mere acts of war. Rather than divide the South American dirty wars by country, the focus of this annotated bibliography is thematic and offers a review of the literature not just on the state terror but also its causes and aftermath.