Military Dictatorship In Argentina Research Articles

Las luchas por las memorias en la escena judicial: Una mirada etnográfica sobre los Juicios de Crímenes de Lesa Humanidad

Desde fines de los anos 1970s, familiares de desaparecidos de la dictadura militar argentina emprendieron acciones politicas para exigir Justicia por las violaciones de los derechos humanos cometidas durante la represion. Con la anulacion de las leyes de amnistia en 2005, quedaron abiertos los caminos legales para la responsabilizacion penal. Desde entonces las narrativas sobre el pasado de violencia entraron definitivamente en escena (y en disputa) en los tribunales del pais. Fundamentado en la investigacion etnografica llevada a cabo en los juicios de crimenes de lesa humanidad, el articulo analiza como las victimas, los agentes del Estado acusados de violaciones de los derechos humanos y los actores judiciales han convertido los tribunales en lugar privilegiado para la afirmacion de sentidos al pasado dictatorial. La propuesta es conducir un analisis de la politica y su simbolismo, que considera sobre todo la dimension afectiva, moral y existencial de la accion humana, para problematizar como la escena judicial se ha transformado en espacio de lucha para la produccion de la verdad sobre la dictadura en Argentina

LITERATURA INFANTIL Y VIOLENCIA POLÍTICA: ITINERARIOS DE LECTURAS SOBRE LAS MEMORIAS NARRATIVAS DEL CONO SUR

?Como cuentan la violencia politica en el Cono Sur los autores que escriben textos para ninos? Para ensayar algunas respuestas sobre la pregunta inicial tomamos como herramientas el abordaje de los estudios de la memoria de Elizabeth Jelin (2002) y la hipotesis de Rossana Nofal (2006), segun la cual el horror de la ultima dictadura militar argentina es comunicable a los chicos por medio de la ficcion. En continuidad con investigaciones anteriores por el campo infantil nos proponemos ampliar las fronteras hacia los textos para ninos del autor uruguayo Mauricio Rosencof y avanzar en sus formas de contar la experiencia concentracionaria

Graphic and political humour in Argentina: from Quino to Página 12

The article analyses the tradition of critical cartoons in Argentina using the lens of Freud’s conception of humour. After the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1983 Rudy and Daniel Paz created a new style that came to be known as “ethical humour”. In their daily cartoon on the first page of the newspaper Pagina 12 they commented on the worst news of the day employing what Freud referred to as the humorous distance. The article proposes a historicised appraisal of humour through an elaboration of the connection between the beginnings of the comic genre and psychoanalysis. I argue that the tiny images in the daily newspapers served as chronicles, in the Benjaminian sense, of those dimensions of social life that tend to go unnoticed by historians; they offered a microscopic, childlike humour as a means of grasping social realities. Graphic humour in these political cartoons and comics in Argentina performs multiple functions: criticizing, conferring voices, generating distance, and helping to live, whilst preserving a profoundly humane dimension.

Fetal Trauma Syndrome by Torture

New clinical description for cases of children of disappeared [1] captive born to mothers under torture, harassment and abuse, as a special form of distress transmitted by the mother. These children had somehow the horror of torture-as state terrorism from their mothers after delivery being separated from them, and delivered by his captors to infertile couples, which generally hide their possible tort origin, especially from 1976 to 1982 period the last military dictatorship in Argentina, legally characterized. Discussed possible inclusion in the existing categories of ICD-10 WHO, making a comparison of possible diagnoses pictures descriptors: as the (F43.1, and F62.0), concluding on the need to apply to new presentation semiological pathognomonic the Persistent Personality Disorders, from within a situation of extreme stress of the mother, recognizable clinical ideosincrasica the child, derived from an original uniqueness pathogenesis. This syndrome has Funcionarios its singular specificity appear as identifier notoriously high sensitivity to detect children who, unaware of their history fetal spent in concentration camps of illegal detentions, whose mothers finished killed after torture. The likely impact of the violent situation in their appropriation, which would determine a new concept of alienated identity, or stolen personality (psycholegal concepts) related to the awareness that parents have their origin in tort is also suggested, that could have affected his upbringing and early education, very different from the usual way adoptions from another source. They have been added to this new confirmatory cases obtained from a current age group of 32-39 years. It has started a campaign of self-detection through the international spread of a self-administered questionnaire. At present the Association of G.a.m.a has-been recovered granddaughter No. 117.

The Architectural History of Disappearance

The architectural history of the clandestine detention and torture center begins when a space selected for its invisibility becomes legible in a landscape. How that visibility is integrated into postdictatorship societies and accounted for historically often becomes a matter of public debate playing out in the press, in local and national calls for proposals for what to do with the sites, and in architectural competitions. In The Architectural History of Disappearance: Rebuilding Memory Sites in the Southern Cone, Karen Elizabeth Bishop argues that the proposals to reappropriate the spaces of disappearance reveal important temporal disjunctions that impede or facilitate the integration of the memory of the disappeared into civil society. Examples of the competing temporalities at work in the construction of memory sites and the productive incompleteness these can provide for are examined in an analysis of proposals put forth to rehabilitate two clandestine detention and torture centers that functioned during the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976–83) and Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90): the space of the former Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires and the former prison camp Tejas Verdes on the coast of Chile.

James Joyce’s Ulysses in Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial

The aim of this article is to analyse the presence of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in Respiracion artificial, the first novel by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia (1941- ). Published in 1980, Respiracion is a fictional representation of a near and tragic past, the last Military Dictatorship in Argentina, but it is also a literary re-assessment of earlier stages in the history of the nation, as well as a metatextual comment on western culture and on Argentine literature. James Joyce’s Ulysses is present in Piglia’s novel mainly through its main character, Emilio Renzi, who belongs to a literary genealogy that can be traced back to Stephen Dedalus and even Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of Stephen Hero. The analysis will focus on the many allusions and quotations of Ulysses in Piglia’s novel with the purpose of showing how they are resignified by Piglia in a different sociocultural context. Keywords: Ulysses; Respiracion artificial; Stephen Dedalus; Emilio Renzi; historiographic metafiction.

‘A Quilt of Memory’: The Shoah as a Prism in the Testimonies of Survivors of the Dictatorship in Argentina

This paper analyses testimonies of survivors of the detention camps operated by the last military dictatorship in Argentina, with special attention to the functions served by the referencing of testimonies of the Shoah (above all in Ese infierno, a collective testimony by five women in dialogue form). The intertextuality herein assumes different functions in the shaping of discourses and representations, whether in the form of a quotation, an epigraph, a metaphor, an endeavour to legitimise what is being said, a comparison, or an effort to incorporate one’s own experience into a narrative of the catastrophe already so well known in human history.

Staging the “Forgotten Genocide” in the Aftermath of the Dirty War: Una bestia en la luna by Richard Kalinoski

The most recent Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983) and the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923) share legacies of state-sanctioned denial and impunity, which have left survivors and subsequent generations grappling with issues of memory and mourning. The intersection of these two collective memories in Argentina, home to a sizable Armenian population, offers a glimpse into how post-dictatorial and post-genocidal memory politics have borrowed from and shaped each other. This article examines the positive reception in Argentina of Una bestia en la luna by the U.S. playwright Richard Kalinoski. While the work treats the struggles of two survivors of the Armenian Genocide and sets its dramatic action in the U.S., Kalinoski’s use of photography to warn against the dangers of silencing memory engages non-Armenian spectators in postdictatorial Argentina.

Relational Human Rights: Shed‐DNA and the Identification of the ‘Living Disappeared’ in Argentina

Through an ethnographic reading of an Argentine Supreme Court decision I explore the changing nature of the legal subject of human rights in light of emerging technologies. Guillermo Gabriel Prieto was suspected of being a ‘living disappeared’, one of the estimated 500 infants or young children forcibly abducted by the last military dictatorship in Argentina. They were raised by the perpetrators of the crime or their accomplices and kept unaware of their birth origins. The Court's deliberations focused on Guillermo's appeal of a lower‐court decision to carry out an identity test based on his shed‐DNA. The decision demonstrates that while the subject of human rights has often been equated with the bounded individual, new technologies challenge us to reconsider the subject's core characteristics: physical boundedness, autonomy, and individuality. I argue that the ruling offers us an alternative conception of the subject that could become the foundation for a new vision of human rights

El secreto de sus ojos: An Argentine male melodrama

Abstract The award-winning film, El secreto de sus ojos (2009), by Campanella, has been studied as a film dealing with the impunity of the most recent Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983). In this article, I consider El secreto as a melodrama in which male characters are ruled by their feelings. I focus on the leading actor, Ricardo Darín who, in his role as Benjamín Espósito, can be characterized as a fallen man, as he suffers from a trauma that impinges on his emotions, inner circle and ability to perform in the public sphere.

The Federal Republic of Germany and the 1978 Football World Cup in Argentina. Genesis and Deconstruction of a Propagandistic Myth

Did the DFB (German Football Association) support the military dictatorship in Argentina when it organised the 1978 Football World Cup? In German press and sports historiography it is very often said that the political attitudes of the leading representatives in German football were right-wing and therefore the DFB sympathised with the violation of human rights committed by the Argentine junta. This paper will deconstruct this very popular myth and show how left-wing propaganda produced this myth. It also reveals how parts of German sports historiography try to manipulate history and why sports history has become, in part, an issue of broader political and ideological discussions.

Acts of Memory in the Jewish Argentine Cinematic Present

is always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous.-Yosef Hayim YerushalmiIn her text Family Secrets: Acts of and Imagination, Annette Kuhn claims: we take stories of childhood and family literally, I think our recourse to this past is a way of reaching for myth, for the story that is deep enough to express the profound feelings we have in the present.1 Gabriel Lichtmann (b. 1974, Buenos Aires) and Ariel Winograd (b. 1977, Buenos Aires) launched their first feature films in 2006: Jews in Space and Cheese Head-My First Ghetto, respectively. Both Jewish Argentine directors and screenplay writers place their childhood and family memory within a fictional space where, as Kuhn explains, remembering takes place in the present. They are storytellers who utilize memory as their main muse: they shape and reshape this malleable substance until they develop what they recall-not the truth (or what truth represents), but a form of it that embodies the memory. Walter Benjamin states: Memory creates a chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. In the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form in the end. One ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the Oriental ones, have always readily shown.2 Both Winograd and Lichtmann weave their stories based on their own accounts, as well as on those of their families'. They echo events from the past that have made it through different generations and reformulate them in their own storytelling experiences. These experiences are linked to feelings in order to be stored and recalled (and put into language)-eventually becoming a representation of memory.This essay focuses on a younger generation of Jewish Argentine artists who present a type of collective memory removed from storylines based on the traditional narrative within the Jewish community: the Shoah and the most recent military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). Although referring to both major events, Jews in Space and Cheese Head-My First Ghetto seek a space to tell stories related to the memory and identity of this younger generation: as Argentines, they tap into their (and their families') Jewish memory to connect to their Argentine present. Lichtmann's and Winograd's approach showcases the intermingling of their culture/faith with their nationality-both intrinsic and undisputed features of the films' main characters' lives-as a natural consequence of their families' choices.3 These filmmakers' platforms contain versions of past events that involve the usage of remembrance as a connection to the present. Their works contrast with Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida in that Barthes does not want to show us a photograph of his mother as a child, claiming we, as readers, could not grasp the picture's piercing quality.4 In contrast, Lichtmann and Winograd deliberately recreate and display memory, as their films flirt with being part of the archive yet concern themselves with connecting with the present.The articulation of memory begins with the aesthetic proposed in each film. Cheese Head concerns itself with a dose of accuracy, as Winograd transfers details of his own past, such as the brand and color of the family's car and the members of his family's gated community's soccer club (utilizing his own father and uncle in the film), while providing an inner look at the protagonist's puberty issues. Accurately recreating a Jewish gated community in the 1990s in Argentina could make the spectators feel estranged, but the coming-of-age story works as a universal connection to a wider audience. As Tzvi Tal notes, [T]he protagonists are faced directly with the social control mechanism, with discourse, and with ideology, ascribing to them at once an assumed standpoint of innocence. …

On Meerapfel's <em>My German Friend</em>

On Meerapfel's My FriendMy Friend. Directed by Jeanine Meerapfel. 2012. Argentina-Germany: Malena Filmproduktion/Ricardo Freixa/Geisendorfer Film- und Fernsehproduktion/ Cine Postproduction/Torus Film/Westdeutscher Rundfunk-WDR, 100 mins.My Friend (El amigo aleman), an Argentine-German co-production by filmmaker Jeanine Meerapfel, is a love story between the daughter of Jewish refugees and the son of a Nazi officer who immigrated to Argentina. Sulamit Lowenstein (Celeste Cid) and Friedrich Burg (Max Riemelt) begin their lifelong romantic relationship as adolescent neighbors in a wealthy area of Buenos Aires before the coup d'etat that deposed President Juan Peron (in office 1946-1952, 1952-1955, 1973-1974) in 1955. During Peron's first presidential term, both Jews and Nazis migrated to find shelter in Argentina. Ashamed once he discovers his father's true identity as a former SS officer, Friedrich severs his family ties. Despite his romantic relationship with Sulamit, he moves to Germany, seeking to understand his father's past.After receiving an academic scholarship to pursue a university degree, Sulamit also moves to Germany, much to her family's disappointment. Upon reuniting with Friedrich, she realizes that their relationship is not his first priority; he is instead dedicated to political activism in the student movements of the 1960s. Driven by revolutionary ideology, Friedrich returns to Argentina and joins a guerrilla group during Argentina's military dictatorship (1976-1983); he is arrested and sent to Rawson prison in Patagonia. With the return of democracy in 1983, Friedrich is liberated from jail and establishes himself in Patagonia, where he works with the Mapuche indigenous community. Years later, Sulamit, an independent woman in her forties with an academic career in Germany, travels to Argentina and then makes the trek to Patagonia to reunite with Friedrich.As in her earlier movie The Girlfr iend (La amiga, Argentina-West Germany, 1988), Meerapfel includes several biographical elements in My Friend. Meerapfel was born in 1943 in Argentina, where she lived until 1964, when she moved to Germany, the same country from which her parents escaped from during the Nazi regime. My Friend examines the challenges encountered by second-generation Holocaust survivors and addresses the experiences confronting the children of the perpetrators. Sulamit and Friedrich's relationship and lives are influenced by the way in which they relate to their forebears' past. Friedrich is driven by radical ideology that stems from a need to understand his father's deeds. He seeks to reconcile and repair the past through political activism and community engagement. Sulamit takes a more personal approach to overcoming her traumatic family history. Her actions are fueled by concrete and pragmatic interpersonal motivations-in particular, to establish a meaningful relationship with Friedrich.The fact that Friedrich is a Nazi officer's son does not actually constitute an obstacle for Sulamit, despite her parents' initial distress at the very idea of a German friend. (Sulamit's relationship with Friedrich, however, is accepted by her family years later.) Sulamit consciously chooses Friedrich with full awareness of his family's past and without assigning him the moral burden of his father's deeds. Her sense of identity transcends the confining forms of membership in traditional categories of national, religious, or ethnic identification. …

Genetics and human rights. Two histories: Restoring genetic identity after forced disappearance and identity suppression in Argentina and after compulsory isolation for leprosy in Brazil.

Over the past three decades, there has been an accelerated development of genetic technology, leading to its use in human genetic identification for many purposes. Additionally, it has been made explicit that identity is a fundamental human right. A number of historical circumstances have connected these developments. Personal identity is increasingly associated with the preservation and defense of human rights and is a tool to repair the violation of these rights, particularly the right to identity. In this article, we report the use of genetics to support the right to identity in two historical circumstances. First, we report the search, localization, DNA testing and genetic identification of 110 individuals who were appropriated as babies by the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983 in the context of savage repression and egregious violations of human rights, including forced disappearance and suppression of identity. Second, we report on the repair of right-to-identity violations of hundreds of individuals that occurred during the process of compulsory isolation of patients with leprosy in Brazil through the Program "Reencontro", which has led to the genetic identification of 158 pairs of individuals who previously did not have proof that they were siblings. The high value placed on genetic identification by victims of identity suppression did not counter the prevailing view that genetic factors were not more important than other factors (social, emotional, educational, cultural, spiritual) in determining the complex phenomenon of personal identity. The use of genetic identification as a tool to redress and repair human rights violations is a novel application of human genetics for the benefit of mankind.

Violência, trauma e frustração no Brasil e na Argentina: o papel do historiador

Partindo do pressuposto de que a violência é uma das principais chaves analíticas dos chamados "eventos traumáticos" do século XX e do fato de que a ditadura militar argentina (1976-1983) foi extremamente violenta, o artigo sustenta que, embora a ditadura militar brasileira também tenha sido muito repressiva, a noção de frustração, antes que a de violência, é a mais adequada ao seu entendimento. Tais questões, inevitavelmente, remetem às dificuldades vivenciadas pelo historiador em sua relação com os temas tabu, sensíveis ou traumáticos, para as quais o artigo apresenta, ao final, uma proposta de equacionamento.

Represión estatal entre las filas del catolicismo argentino durante la última dictadura militar. Una mirada del conjunto y de los perfiles de las víctimas

This article examines state repression against Catholic priests, friars, nuns, seminarians, and bishops who were victims of state terrorism during the last Argentine military dictatorship. The hypothesis of this study is that links can be established between the profiles of victims and the modes of repression to which they were subjected. These links allow an advance in understanding a rationalisation of repression that administered differential modes according to the status of each victim. Despite belonging to a common institution, the Catholic Church, these individuals received a dissimilar treatment from the military power. The visibility and anonymity varied according to the institutional position of each within the wider Church, its hierarchy and organisational structure.

Presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2012

Presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2012 Elizabeth Page (bio) Laudation by María Jesús Gil, President of the Hans Christian Andersen Jury 2012 Mr. President, Distinguished Laureates, Most valued Hosts and Sponsors, Esteemed Guests: As the President of the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Awards Jury, I am very proud to be here, in London, to introduce the winners of the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen medals – María Teresa Andruetto and Peter Sís. As soon as the Jury selected the winners, I informed to the patron of the Awards, Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, who has kindly granted me permission to extend Her heartiest congratulations to the two winners today. I send our gratitude to Her Majesty for Her patronage of these awards. I would also like to express my gratitude to this year’s Jury that I have had the honour to preside. Working with these ten distinguished experts in literature for children from five continents, has been an extraordinary experience for me. Many of them are with us this evening. Allow me to recognize them and their fantastic job: Anastasia Arkhipova from Russia; Françoise Ballanger from France; Ernest Bond from USA; Sabine Fuchs from Austria; Ayfer Gürdal Ünal from Turkey; Jan Hansson from Sweden; Eva Kaliskami from Greece; Nora Lía Sormani from Argentina; Sahar Tarhandeh from Iran, and, Regina Zilberman from Brazil. Elda Nogueira, representing IBBY and IBBY Executive Director Liz Page also attended as ex officio non-voting Jury members. As President of this Jury I want to express my gratitude all of them. Click for larger view View full resolution María Jesús Gil (photo by Doris Breitmoser) The Jury spent more than nine months studying the books and dossiers of [End Page 87] candidates nominated from 32 countries. In behalf of IBBY, I thank you for your dedication. Furthermore, I would especially like to thank Mr Kang, the CEO of Nami Island Inc., the sponsor of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards, for the generous support of this the most prestigious award given to the creators of children’s literature. I thank him also for his inspiring words that he just shared with us. I also warmly welcome the Minn family who are here from Nami Island. And now, in the name of IBBY and of Jury, it is my privilege and pleasure to briefly introduce you to our 2012 winners whom we are honouring this evening. It is very easy to say: “briefly introduce”. But, in fact, it is a hard, almost impossible challenge. How to reduce to five or six minutes the enormous work of our talented winners, two artists of the stature of María Teresa Andruetto and Peter Sís? However, let me make the attempt, relying on the indulgence of the winners. Both of them have in common an ability that is very deep, sincere, and intelligent. Both of them have lived through great difficulties during their lives. Maria Teresa Andruetto experienced the consequences of the military dictatorship in Argentina. Peter Sís was born in the former Czechoslovakia – on the Red side – the Communist side – of the Iron Curtain. However, they have overcome all the difficulties in their paths and, through their work have, by making an ever-lasting contribution to children’s literature, given children and adults the message that we must aim for a better world. The winner of the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Medal for writing is María Teresa Andruetto from Argentina. María Teresa Andruetto was born in Arroyo Cabral, Córdoba, Argentina. She is the daughter of an Italian immigrant who arrived in Argentina after the Second World War, but she did not begin to write until the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina. She writes without having in mind if her books are for children or for adults. In her book Hacia una literatura sin adjetivos/ Towards a literature without adjectives she asks herself: “To write for children or just to write?” In the same book she says: “A writer is a person whose more pure pleasure is to find among thousand of words, the words.” The building of individual and social identities...

Quando il giornalista dŕ lezioni allo storico. Chiesa e dittatura argentina raccontati da Verbitsky

Horacio Verbitsky is a journalist, but his investigation about the military dictatorship in Argentina gives the opportunity to consider the importance - and the challenging perspective - of journalism in order to study contemporary history. The opening of some Church archives in Buenos Aires and the democratization of political and military power offer the occasion for this wide reconstruction about the relationship between Catholic hierarchy and military government.

Farewell to the Man in the Red Beret, Enter the Man in the White Silk Mitre: ‘There is a Crack in Everything, That's How the Light Gets in’

This essay examines the legacy of the late President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frias. Shortly after the death of President Chávez, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected the 266th and current pope of the Catholic Church and took the name, Francis. The essay contrasts the demonization of Hugo Chávez by the Western corporate media with the adulation of the newly elected Pope. The author recounts his work in Venezuela building socialism as part of the Bolivarian Revolution initiated by the Chávez government. The Bolivarian Revolution has been a powerful challenge to the catastrophe of finance capitalism and has helped Venezuela's poor tremendously. The author then discusses the traditional role of the Catholic Church in Latin America to protect the class of wealth and property. He notes the controversy surrounding the role Pope Francis played during the days of the military dictatorship in Argentina where the Pope was serving as a bishop of the Church. Some reason to be optimistic about the new pope is contained in the view of liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, and the author ends his commentary with this note of optimism. Chávez's legacy, however, is already assured, at least among the poor and the powerless of Las Americas, who will continue to revere him as a popular saint.

Argentina’s former secret detention centres: Between demolition, modification and preservation

This article addresses the architectural debates surrounding three Argentinian memory museums: the Rosario Memory Museum, the People’s Memory Centre ( El Pozo) and ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics). The sites of these museums were used as secret centres of illegal detention, torture and death during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, known as the Process of National Reorganization (1976–1983). The author first examines the specific symbolic dimension of secret detention centres as the material spatial embodiment of the terrorist state. The sites are then discussed in terms of their preservation, modification or destruction as the proposals advanced by the various human rights groups are compared. She argues that the debates surrounding sites like these tend to be a consequence of larger political and social tensions in the public sphere, and that, as sources of conflicting national collective memories, they may be seen as offering alternative spaces to those created by globalization and neoliberalism.