Abstract
During the most recent military dictatorship in Argentina, torture committed in pozos (clandestine detention centers) was not only aimed at obtaining information but at getting prisoners’ self-narratives in accordance with the executioners’ rules. As a consequence, torture involved the establishment of a certain regime of truth. Although this regime was necessarily authoritarian, it did not include passive descriptions (DuBois 1990). DuBois defined torture as the ultimate domination of bodies and – above anything else – ideas. From this point of view, torture did not limit itself to the extermination of enemies. On the contrary, it tried to impose a particular interpretation of history; that is to say, a particular “truth” in the struggle for understanding. Taking into account the undeniable disparity between the number of combatants and the number of people imprisoned and tortured during the military government, DuBois’ thesis brought to the foreground the enormous social cost of establishing “truth”. If archaeology has the potential to reveal the traces of state terrorism, and dictatorship depends on torture as the guardian of a certain regime of truth, then it is possible to ask: What is the relationship that archaeology establishes between truth and self-narrative?
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