Last Dictatorship In Argentina Research Articles

Молодежная политика аргентинской вoенной хунты как часть глобальной консервативной реакции

This article examines the youth policy pursued by the mili-tary junta as part of the general authoritarian strategies used to control public life and to shape mass worldviews during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). Applying Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, the author analyses the interaction of military authorities with young people. Particular attention is paid to generational conflict and conservative ideology opposing changes in youth culture. The article also shows how the complex socio-political processes of the last dictatorship in Argentina were linked to the global conservative reaction observed in different countries in the 1970s. The topic touched upon by the author allows for a better understanding of authoritarian practices used to shape social norms, especially when influencing young people.

They Live: Violence, Horror and Spectres in Four Contemporary Argentine Films

Abstract In the Argentine film The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza, Lucrecia Martel, 2008), the protagonist Vero is haunted by the possibility of killing someone in a hit-and-run. Although hinting at the crimes committed during the last dictatorship in Argentina, The Headless Woman refers more to a mechanism of the past that is transformed and updated within contemporary society. In this essay, Martel’s film acts a starting point in the exploration of recent Argentine films that deal with spectres from the past that pervade everyday life in the present: Clementina (Jimena Monteoliva, 2017), One Sister (Una hermana, Sofía Brockenshire and Verena Kuri, 2017) and The Returned (Los que vuelven, Laura Casabé, 2019). In a decade in which we can notice a remarkable growth of the horror genre in Argentine cinema, these films embrace several codes and characters from the horror genre to approach the Argentine reality. The author discusses how these filmmakers adopt similar aesthetic features from the horror genre to invoke and address the violence that permeates Argentine society today, with special attention devoted to ghosts, a key figure to understand an ongoing history of brutalities that usually go unresolved.

Apropiación, Not Kinship

This article discusses how resignifications of the human rights NGO Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo contributed to transformations of post-dictatorial culture. For decades hegemonic media and perpetrators engaged state terror’s reasoning to confront Abuelas’ call for “restitution” of the children who “disappeared” during the last dictatorship in Argentina. Drawing on both the junta’s self-appointed role of saviors and the benevolence of nurture, Catholic couples had thus rescued children from irresponsible “subversive” parents. In their struggle against state terror Abuelas’ metaphor apropiación resignified nurture as violence, pushing politico-cultural change towards a universal right to identity.

Archaeo-Becoming, Zarankin-Centrism and Contaminated Presents

Some time ago Cristóbal Gnecco and Henry Tantalean had the provocative idea of encouraging a reflection about the way archaeologists and non-archeologists change their lives by working and existing together. This encounter between people is not considered important, or material for analysis for archaeology. However, they are “contaminants” (in the sense of both being affected by one another). In the specific case of Antarctica, these other “actors” are non-human (there are no native people – besides the researchers and logistic personnel). Animals, things, light/darkness, cold, snow, landscapes, etc., are the “actors” with which we interact. It is from this contact through time, that we change them and ourselves as well. This “contaminations” end affecting the histories we build and the way we do it. At the same time, I have asked myself several times: where in our academic texts are the experiences that marked us? The adventures? The sadness? The smiles and spilled tears? Another issue in my history as an archaeologist was the work at concentration camps from the last dictatorship in Argentina. The people I have met, the materiality from these places of destruction, affected and changed me. It is in this sense that this work is a personal self-reflection of my affective and transformative “relationship” with these two themes in which I have been working during the past 20 years.

Using already-solved cases of a mass disaster event for prioritizing the search among remaining victims: a Bayesian approach

This work presents a new method for assisting in the identification process of missing persons in several contexts, such as enforced disappearances. We apply a Bayesian technique to incorporate non-genetic variables in the construction of prior information. In that way, we can learn from the already-solved cases of a particular mass event of death, and use that information to guide the search among remaining victims. This paper describes a particular application to the proposed method to the identification of human remains of the so-called disappeared during the last dictatorship in Argentina, which lasted from 1976 until 1983. Potential applications of the techniques presented hereby, however, are much wider. The central idea of our work is to take advantage of the already-solved cases within a certain event to use the gathered knowledge to assist in the investigation process, enabling the construction of prioritized rankings of victims that could correspond to each certain unidentified human remains.

El nunca más de la violencia sexual contra las mujeres. La oportunidad (perdida) en las transiciones políticas

Nunca más se refiere al intento de nombrar el horror y la atrocidad, como en el caso de Auschwitz o el “Nunca Más” del informe sobre la desaparición forzada durante la última dictadura en Argentina. Se sostiene que, al ser la violación sexual un acto atroz, la justicia transicional, entendida como la búsqueda de la no repetición de la atrocidad, estaría normativamente comprometida con su no repetición, al igual que lo está con la no repetición de la tortura o de la desaparición forzada.

‘The Indian’ and ‘Politics’. Transgressive Indigeneities in Political Activism before and after State Terrorism in Argentina

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate the modes in which transgressive Indigeneities folded in the so-called indio político (the figure of the Indian as activist) inhabit the politicisation of the Indigenous in Argentina. For this purpose we dwell on the circumstances and effects of self-recognition, recognition and misrecognition of the indio político along the curve of indigenous politicisation that goes from the seventies to the present. In particular, we focus on the discourse of an indigenous political organisation during the conjuncture of social and political mobilisation that preceded the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983), on one hand, and on the discourses and performances during the trials of State terrorism (ongoing since 2003) in a context characterised by de-indigeneisation, on the other. We conclude with some remarks on the contextual modalisations of the transgressive subjectivities we call indio político.

Control Mechanisms: Pornography, Theatre and Subversion in Santa Fe Province during the Last Argentine Military Dictatorship

This paper examines a case of cultural repression during the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). It studies actions carried out by law enforcement officers in response to a denunciation against a group of teachers in a small town in Santa Fe that had participated in a play characterised as ‘pornographic’, and who were finally accused of left‐wing propaganda and ‘subversive’ activities. This case offers an opportunity to review the relationship between immorality, pornography, communism and ‘subversion’. Since the Cold War, these issues have been used in Latin America to construct an internal enemy and create governmental mechanisms and regulations for detecting and controlling its actions, and penalising the population in general.

Memorias, olvidos y silencios en las propuestas museográficas en el espacio de memoria “La Perla”

El artículo analiza el proceso de selección y consagración de memorias en un caso particular: el del Espacio para la Memoria que funciona en lo que durante la última dictadura en Argentina (1976-1983) fue el Centro Clandestino de Detención (CCD) conocido como “La Perla” en la provincia de Córdoba, Argentina. El mismo analiza las funciones que fue asumiendo el lugar: CCD, cuartel militar, espacio de memorias, y los valores que diferentes grupos y el estado le adjudicaron a lo largo de su historia. A partir de allí, aborda las propuestas elaboradas para su institucionalización como espacio de memoria, la elaboración del guion del museo de sitio y las muestras exhibidas, profundizando en el juego de memorias, olvidos y silencios que configuran un relato sobre el pasado reciente. A partir de la microescala del caso específico, el artículo busca contribuir a pensar problemas más generales relacionados con la encrucijada entre estos espacios, las memorias que proponen y sus modos de representación cuando se anclan en materialidades.

The Crimes of the Last Dictatorship in Argentina and its Qualification as Genocide: A Historicization

The last military dictatorship in Argentina was characterized by gross and systematic human rights violations. After the restoration of democracy in 1983, President Raúl Alfonsín put the military juntas on trial. Criminal prosecution of the abuses was later halted through laws and decrees. In 2003, under the Néstor Kirchner administration, the trials were resumed and some of the sentences incorporated the idea that the crimes had been committed in the framework of genocide. This article reconstructs the history of the uses and re-significations, furthered by local and transnational actors, of the category of genocide and the ways in which it was incorporated to characterize the crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship. I argue that the use of this category shows the long presence of the Shoah paradigm in the country and the adoption of the international framework of human rights by actors involved in pro-accountability and memorialization processes.

Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno by Mariela Méndez

Reviewed by: Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno by Mariela Méndez Ashley Brock Méndez, Mariela. Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno. Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2017. 312 pp. Crónicas travestis traces a novel genealogy between the journalism of Alfonsina Storni (Argentina, 1892-1938), Clarice Lispector (Brazil, 1920-77), and María Moreno (Argentina, 1947-), focusing on the subversive engagement of all three writers with the conventions of the women's column and drawing connections between this body of work and Moreno's post-dictatorship journals alfonsina and El Teje. Méndez argues that, by introducing the genre-bending fluidity of the crónica, writing under multiple (sometimes gender-crossing) pseudonyms, and subtly parodying the prescriptions of the rigidly normative genre of the columna femenina, Storni, Lispector, and Moreno each destabilize gender binaries while laying bare the constructedness of gendered identity. In this way, Méndez reads these key figures in twentieth-century Latin American proto-feminist and feminist journalism as anticipating theories of gender performativity (Judith Butler), cross-dressing (Marjorie Garber), and queer temporality (J. Jack Halberstam). Méndez is not the first to associate these trailblazing women writers with a subversively feminist political project; she acknowledges a debt, for example, to the work of Gwen Kirkpatrick and Francine Masiello. The originality of Méndez's study lies in its engagement with contemporary queer theory as well as in its comparative nature. The connection between the two Argentine writers is well-established [End Page 415] (Moreno invokes Storni in calling the feminist journal she launches in 1983 alfonsina), but as Méndez points out, Storni's journalism receives far less critical attention than does her poetry. Clarice Lispector's journalism has been similarly overshadowed by her renowned fiction. Moreover, reading the Brazilian author alongside her Spanish American counterparts remains a rare comparative move. It is one that proves fruitful for Méndez, whose study not only moves between Argentine and Brazil but also unites several distinct historical moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Méndez's analysis encompasses Storni's columns "Feminidades" and "Bocetos Femeninos" (in La Nota and La Nación, respectively, 1919-21), Lispector's columns "Correio Feminino-Feira de Utilidades" and "Só para Mulheres" (in Correio da Manhã and Diário da Noite, respectively, 1959-61), and Moreno's columns "La Mujer" and "Señores" (in Tiempo Argentino, 1982-86), as well as Moreno's writing in the journals alfonsina (1983-84) and El Teje (2006-10). Diligently attending to the historical and cultural specificities that make the context in which each author worked distinct, Méndez identifies compelling commonalities between them. She points, for example, to how all three writers entered the public space of journalism at times when the prevailing ideology (often linked to the state) sought to usher women back into domestic roles and regulate their bodies. This reactionary ideology rears its head not only in moments associated with conservative politics, such as during the last dictatorship in Argentina, but also in moments of rapid modernization and progressivism, such as the 1920s in Argentina, the late 1950s in Brazil, and Argentina's return to democracy in the 1980s. Crónicas travestis unfolds over four chapters, the first two building the case for comparison among the women's columns authored by the three writers in question and the last two analyzing Moreno's post-dictatorship journals as the most overt expression of a radical gender politics that has its roots in these earlier columns. The first chapter focuses on the difficulties and discomforts each author faced as a woman occupying public space and the common response of creating a multiplicity of public personas (some of them male) behind which to hide and between which to move. Méndez argues that, for these writers, the mask becomes a political praxis that troubles the possibility of fixing identity and questions notions of authority and authorship (97). Chapter two analyzes how Storni and Lispector queer the genre of the women's column through rhetorical cross-dressing, by which Méndez means not only writing in a...

Cautivos de los Discursos: Parodia de la Novela Histórica Post-Dictatorial en El Placer de la Cautiva de Leopoldo Brizuela

After the fall of the last dictatorship in Argentina, the historical novel has undergone profound transformations encouraging literary critics to associate it with the process of the redemocratization of the region. Indeed, the genre can be seen to express an important political dimension promoting democracy, diversity, and inclusion. It can, on occasion, rewrite national history and include new and often unorthodox perspectives on the past, thereby rescuing traditionally marginalized groups from oblivion. However, the fictionalization of history and the transformation of its discourse are formulated from a perspective deeply rooted in modernity, and the democratic project extrapolated from these novels is limited, therefore, to a mere reorganization of traditional discourses that persistently excludes groups of non-European heritage from the national project. The short novel El placer de la cautiva by Leopoldo Brizuela, analyzed in this article, offers a parody of the genre that draws on the disconnect between the democratic dimension of historical fiction and the ongoing marginalization of indigenous peoples in Argentina.

“El hombre del año 2000”. Actores, discursos y políticas hacia la infancia durante la dictadura (1976-1980)

Este artículo se propone reconstruir un conjunto diverso de iniciativas, representaciones y redes de actores vinculado a la infancia que tuvo lugar durante la última dictadura argentina (1976-1980). Por un lado, analiza la conexión imaginaria existente en esos años entre los niños, el futuro y la tecnología, que era compartida por actores variopintos. En relación con esto, para la dictadura, la infancia representaba un campo potencial de incertidumbre que era necesario controlar y dirigir. Por otro lado, el trabajo estudia la conmemoración del “Año internacional del niño” de 1979 dando cuenta de las influencias internacionales de la Iglesia y también de UNICEF en la realización del evento. También muestra la diversidad de actores y de propuestas hacia la infancia que tuvo lugar en el espacio público en los años más represivos del terrorismo de Estado.

Graphics of absence: image, representation and memory on the Desaparecidos (missing people) of the last dictatorship in Argentina

Graphics of absence: image, representation and memory on the Desaparecidos (missing people) of the last dictatorship in Argentina

Hablar desde el silencio: El silencio como verdad en las narrativas de mujeres sobrevivientes

A partir del estudio de testimonios y entrevistas personales con ex detenidas-desaparecidas de la última dictadura militar en Argentina sostengo que, si bien todos los testimonios del horror están impregnados por la presencia del silencio, los testimonios de sobrevivientes argentinas que comienzan a surgir masivamente desde los noventa contienen dos aspectos fundamentales que los distinguen de otros. El primero es que sugieren una diferencia importante entre dos tipos de silencio, uno mudo y el otro elocuente. Y el segundo es que llaman a un interlocutor capaz de escuchar sus silencios elocuentes. De este modo los silencios en estas narrativas testimoniales no encubren una verdad, sino que son ellos mismos la verdad. La mujeres asociadas históricamente con el silencio, se presentan como las indicadas para hacer de este no lo opuesto al lenguaje, sino el lenguaje mismo como lenguaje del trauma, invitándonos a leer el silencio, a descifrarlo, a leer más allá de las palabras, a entrenar el oído para escuchar "los indicios" de la verdad, aceptando la imposibilidad de capturar el significado de estas experiencias del horror en su totalidad. Sin embargo, esta imposibilidad no implica una parálisis, un punto final, sino que llama a la necesidad de “trabajar” ese silencio, agregándole valor, con el fin de transformar tanto la identidad de la víctima como la de la sociedad misma, creando oyentes empáticos y nuevos modos de ciudadanía.

Beyond Suffering

The vexed question of how to represent atrocity and the effects of that representation takes a turn in Lucila Quieto's photographic account of the politically disappeared of the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-83), which offers some innovative attempts to resolve aesthetic issues and atrocious absence. Quieto was born after her father Carlos Alberto Quieto was kidnapped by military forces on August 20, 1976. She has been a member of the Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS, Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence). Her photography series Arqueologia de la Ausencia (Archaeology of Absence, 1999-2001) is a collection of thirty-five constructed photographs in which the adult children of the disappeared were invited to create the photograph they never had: a portrait with their missing parent. What began as a personal exercise in postmemory for Quieto and her friends has moved into the Museo de Arte y Memoria, La Plata, as part of Argentina's uneasy commitment to memorialize the state-sponsored atrocity of the last dictatorship. Quieto describes her work as a search to heal the absence of those who and says she was inspired by her own need to have photographs of herself with her father. (1) The photography series was created by asking each of the participants to select a photograph of their disappeared parents from their family album. Quieto projected the image onto a wall, asked the adult child to join their parents in the projected image, and recorded their interactions in a new photograph. Quieto is not trying to show absence, but rather the search for healing from that absence, and the possibility of finding an encounter with the absent parent. Quieto's intention appears to be a personal search for resolution, but her work may also be considered using Jacques Ranciere's concept of the political potential of art to recast the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms. (2) Quieto has created an experience in opposition to the accepted order of what can be seen, and who can speak about state atrocity. In Argentina, attempts to bring visibility to those who were disappeared by the state during the last dictatorship are continual. Ana Longoni recently examined the aesthetic strategies of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) in their fight to restore visibility to the disappeared. (3) Every week during and since the dictatorship, the Madres walk in a procession around the Plaza de Mayo, wearing photographs of the disappeared or holding them aloft. In doing so, they came to realize that being seen as mothers offered a different reality than that presented by the dictatorship. They continue to bring the hidden atrocity into public view and into the context of the family. Through disappearances, the military dictatorship prescribed ways of seeing, ways of saying, and ways of being. Like the early aesthetic interventions of the Madres, Quieto's photographs challenge that hegemonic perception of reality both by restoring visibility and individual identity to the disappeared, and developing the individual and the community identities of the HIJOS. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This process of disappearing can be understood as an extreme example of Ranciere's notion of the police order, controlling what can be seen and therefore said about it. (4) From 1976 until 1983, political opponents of the dictatorship literally disappeared as their bodies were dropped from helicopters into the River Plate. Official traces of their identities were often erased and their apartments were emptied of their belongings, leaving nothing of them to be seen. Along with invisibility came an attempt to rewrite their histories. To explain the disappearances, the dictatorship suggested the victims had probably gone to Cuba or had killed themselves. …

Additional approaches to DNA typing of skeletal remains: the search for "missing" persons killed during the last dictatorship in Argentina.

DNA typing techniques are among the most advanced tools for human identification and can contribute to the identification of poorly preserved skeletal remains. Ten thousand people are thought to have been killed during the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) and there are few official records on the identity of the victims or the location of burials. A mass grave containing 340 skeletons was excavated using archeological methods. A small number of individuals was identified by traditional forensic methods and one family group by mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis. Due to the lack of antemortem physical information on many of the victims, the application of molecular methods is imperative to speed up the identification process. We have tested two molecular screening methods, Y chromosome-specific short tandem repeats (DYS19, DYS385, DYS389 I, DYS389 II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393) and amplification of autosomal microsatellites using nested primers. These methods can complement solely matrilineal mtDNA sequence data in the identification of "missing" persons.