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Constructing Subversion in Argentina's Dirty War Author(s): Mark J. Osiel Source: Representations, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Summer 2001), pp. 119-158 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2001.75.1.119 . Accessed: 07/05/2014 16:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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MA RK J. OSIEL

Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War D u ri n g t he f i n al d e ca d e of t h e Cold War, debates about the massive abuses of human rights in Latin America followed the ‘‘realistic’’ modes of representation that characterize geopolitical discourse. Disagreements often turned on the question of whether or not the guerrilla movements, and the radical left more generally, posed a genuine threat to the ‘‘national security’’ of such countries, understood as their continued membership in the Western alliance. This formulation of the issue—as essentially an empirical question about the objective ‘‘correlation of forces’’—was largely accepted by all parties to the debate, public and scholarly, across the political spectrum. Yet in retrospect, in light of later criminal prosecutions of (and interviews with) Argentine military oYcers, it becomes clear that this formulation was deŽ cient. It altogether ignored the extent to which the ‘‘subversion’’ with which Argentine oYcers were so preoccupied was very much a cultural construction, speciŽ cally, an interpretation of human nature, history, and national identity not entirely amenable to empirical conŽ rmation—or rebuttal.1 It is tempting to dismiss such worldviews as circular. But when seeking to explain the conduct of their adherents, it is well to remember, with Ernest Gellner, that ‘‘from the inside, it does not look like circularity at all; it looks like the consensus and convergence of so many manifest signs and indications, which one would have to be blind or wicked to ignore.’’2 The present article thus aims to explore and partly dislodge our habituation to the rhetorical conventions of geopolitical argument by analyzing atrocity’s perpetrators through a quite diVerent conceptual frame. Geopolitical discourse, no less than social science or human rights reporting, can fairly be described as secular, rational, and emotionally restrained. But in seeking coherence and consistency, its linguistic routines, valuable for many purposes, often fail fully to grasp the irreducible mystery of some kinds of human behavior, to capture the world’s true nuttiness. An alternative characterization is here oVered in the interests of more Ž nely textured understanding and subtler social explanation, consistent with a larger share of known facts. It enables us to view the perpetrator in Argentina’s antisubversive Re p r e s e n tat i o n s 75 · Summer 2001 q t h e r e g e n t s o f t h e u n i ve r s i t y o f c a l i fo r n i a i s s n 0734-6018 pages 119–158. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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campaign through a conception of the world much closer to his own, that is, as best one outsider and nonadherent can describe it to others.3 This ‘‘thicker’’ ethnographic description inevitably works to unsettle and disturb the genre conventions of geopolitics with their much ‘‘thinner’’ rendering of character and cultural context.4 In the end, one is almost tempted to conclude that the Ž ctional conventions of ‘‘magical realism,’’ their indulgence of surrealistic fantasy as a routine facet of quotidian reality, are necessary to make the dirty warriors intelligible to us, to grasp their lived experience, and ultimately, to understand their behavior.5 Between eleven and Ž fteen thousand people were murdered between 1976 and 1980 by members of Argentina’s oYcer corps, with some help from police oYcials and civilian paramilitaries.6 To this day, most Argentine oYcers insist on describing the episode as ‘‘the war against subversion,’’ while critics invariably call it the ‘‘dirty war.’’7 The contours of political repression were by no means uniform across the many regimes classiŽ ed as ‘‘authoritarian,’’ even among the subset occupying South America’s Southern Cone in the 1970s and early 1980s. In seizing power, military rulers may hold very diVerent aims, modest or ambitious, and embrace very diVerent views of the crises ‘‘requiring’’ their intervention. These rulers Ž nd the principal threats to their political objectives in quite various places and presumably seek to channel their repressive policies accordingly. Repression is rational, in this sense.8 Yet in these same societies, as in Argentina during 1976–78, terror sometimes reaches such extremes— exceeding any proportionate response to discernible threat—that it can seem, at least, almost random. The experience of other highly repressive societies suggests that near arbitrary victimization does indeed occur when repression reaches this most severe, near-totalitarian pitch.9 These uncertainties compel us to ask of episodes like the antisubversive campaign: To what extent do authoritarian rulers actually control the repressive process they set in motion, directing it instrumentally in service of deŽ nable goals? If they do, to what degree do these goals require (or preclude) identiŽ cation of speciŽ c groups as targets? If the class of victims displays any consistent pattern, do its contours follow from institutional features of the regime? EVorts to link the distribution of victims to the nature of the regime would inevitably draw the observer to two of its key features. First, one might look to the rulers’ professed ideals, that is, to the so-called National Security Doctrine, ultramontane Catholic nationalism, and neoliberal economic orthodoxy, each upheld by powerful factions of the oYcer corps. Second, one could look instead to the nature of the coalition that brought the regime to power, its socioeconomic composition and the interests of its supporters. The central protagonists in organizing and conducting the antisubversive campaign, I shall show, were religious zealots, inspired by ultramontane Catholic nationalism. They held their ideas in deadly earnest. They were neither the prudent pragmatists depicted by the ‘‘authoritarianism’’ school of political science nor the

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unwitting instruments of ‘‘deeper’’ socioeconomic forces, portrayed by neoMarxists. But they were too few to staV fully the ranks—over seven hundred nationwide—needed for the campaign. They therefore formed an odd, uncomfortable, and ultimately transitory alliance with others (numbering several dozen, some civilian), who sought only to gratify their impulses for sex, booty, and blood. The spread of neomedievalist theology among the oYcer corps helps explain why repression went so much further in Argentina than it did in several contemporaneous and equally authoritarian regimes in South America.10 There is a close correspondence between the ideas of leading theologians who spent their careers proselytizing the military and those expressed by the most garrulous antisubversive warriors (and their supporters among the mutineers). There is also considerable evidence of direct in uence, by way of the curricula of military academies and conŽ rmation by antisubversive warriors themselves. 11 The Catholic nationalists got their way for so long only because of an explicit power-sharing agreement with other factions of the oYcer corps, a malevolent pluralism that allocated ‘‘cultural matters’’ to the nationalists, economic issues to the ‘‘liberals.’’ That division of labor, however, broke down in the late 1970s, when foreign pressure began to imperil the regime’s international position and domestic support. This largely explains why the same factions that tolerated the right’s brutality in one period were no longer prepared to do so later on. But before we arrive at this conclusion, it is necessary to consider several alternative accounts of the pattern of victimization in the antisubversive campaign. These include the possibility that it may have been partly without central aim or purpose. Antisubversion as Class War

Those who have examined the campaign almost uniformly argue that the policy of disappearance was designed to facilitate implementation of an economic policy serving the interests of the rural oligarchy and international capital, a policy highly unpopular with organized labor, small national business, and most other Argentines. One such specialist writes, for instance, that the dirty war entailed ‘‘state terror as an economic policy instrument . . . as a complement to an economic program that pursued a particular social vision with an overt class content . . . to enforce the acquiescence of those most adversely aVected by that program.’’12 ‘‘Chief among the focal points of terror,’’ writes another scholar, ‘‘was organized labor.’’ The ‘‘dirty war was a form of economically motivated combat, targeted against [those] perceived to be obstructing . . . economic objectives.’’13 Still a third announces that the antisubversive campaign displayed ‘‘a blatantly class character.’’14 ‘‘State terror aimed at . . . a quiescent citizenry incapable of opposing a new scheme of economic restructuring conceived in terms of strict liberal orthodoxy.’’15 The aim of this scheme was ‘‘capitalist revolution’’ against the organized working class.16 Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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Repression was much more intense in Argentina than in Brazil, one in uential scholar contends, because the Argentine working class was better organized, eVectively mobilized to oppose less repressive means of securing its acquiescence to unappealing policies.17 We are thus told, in essence, that there was more repression because more repression was required, that is, if military rulers were successfully to implement their unpopular policies. The much greater numbers of the disappeared in Argentina simply attests to a class consciousness far greater there than in Brazil, a point of obvious national pride for this Argentine scholar. The more ‘‘mature’’ a country’s working class is, the more conscious it is of what it can rightly demand, then the more numerous the disappearances will be, the more pervasive the torture. This is functionalist sociology run amok: capitalist repression is made to modulate itself in homeostatic equilibrium with the strength of the workers’ anticapitalist challenge. The subjection of a particular country to greater repression than its neighbor, on this account, threatens to become a perverse badge of pride for those displaying greater resistance to injustice. According to most such accounts, it is also important to establish that smallscale urban Argentine business was not a part of the ‘‘hegemonic fractions of capital’’ controlling the state’s economic policies. Hence one author even insists that the anti-Semitism admittedly displayed by so many torturers, was not at bottom anti-Semitism as such, but rather ‘‘an aspect of the state terror applied against the lower bourgeois,’’ which in Buenos Aires included a disproportionateshare of ‘‘Jewish merchants.’’18 No empirical support is oVered for this view, which reduces antiSemitic ideology to class interest, thereby minimizing its independent causal force. Such accounts can at best explain a small fraction of the disappearances. Only 30 percent of the disappeared were blue-collar workers. This is not a small portion, to be sure, but no larger than the proportion constituted by blue-collar workers within the population at large. Only a small percentage of blue-collar victims are known to have been union activists, moreover. In fact, more than 40 percent of the disappeared were upper middle class by Argentine standards. They were liberal professionals, journalists, intellectuals, artists, university students, and school teachers.19 In a society like Argentina’s, such groups Ž gure in the top 5 percent of the population on virtually all socioeconomic indicators. Victims even included the head of the Tucuma´n Chamber of Commerce and several judges. EVorts by in uential business and professional people, even top military oYcers, to have their detained children or family members spared from death were generally in vain.20 Similar elite intervention in neighboring authoritarian regimes, by contrast, proved widely successful.21 It is true that one of the leading guerrilla organizations at which the antisubversive campaign was initially directed, the Montoneros, grew directly out of the much larger Peronist union movement.22 Thoughout the sixties and seventies, Peronist leaders vigorously resisted economic policy aimed at reducing protection of na-

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tional industry from international competition and foreign investment. To this extent, at least, it was plausible for military oYcers favoring Argentina’s integration into the international market system to view the guerrilla as part of a larger, longstanding eVort to resist such policy. At least eighteen months before the 1976 military coup, however, Peronist leaders had not only publicly denounced the Montoneros but had also established ‘‘private’’ paramilitary groups to assassinate guerrillas.23 Authoritarian Pragmatism, Totalitarian Zealotry

Neo-Marxism is not the only intellectual persuasion to have depreciated the guiding ideologies of the Argentine regime. The prior generation of scholars— with no fondness for economistic explanations of politics—often characterized regimes such as Argentina’s as ‘‘authoritarian,’’ as opposed to ‘‘totalitarian.’’ A central feature of authoritarian regimes was their lack of an ‘‘elaborate and guiding ideology,’’ taken seriously by leaders or followers.24 Political rulers were guided by pragmatic considerations with maintaining power, not with following any Ž xed, Ž rst principles. On this view, authoritarian rulers do not take their own professed ideologies very seriously when they would interfere with more mundane concerns. Such pragmatists do not kill capriciously, or to instantiate some pet theory, but only where necessary to implement their most unpopular policies. After all, as pragmatists, they shun unnecessary risks and thus rightly fear that a more extensive repression might unleash a more widespread opposition to their rule. One would thus expect an authoritarian regime to select its victims via some rational eVort to identify those (and only those) actively threatening its survival. These threatening individuals would not necessarily be expected to spring from a particular socioeconomic sector, as the later generation of academicians contends. But victims would at least be chosen on the basis of having posed some genuine (that is, nonfantastical) threat to the rulers’ continued control. This view, like the preceding, sits uneasily with much of the evidence concerning the Argentine antisubversive campaign. Repression as a Cultural ‘‘System’’

Figures in cultural studies have recently joined neo-Marxists and the ‘‘authoritarian/totalitarian’’ political scientists in theorizing the nature of radically repressive regimes.25 Like their predecessors, these authors emphasize the extent to which all features of a polity necessarily operate as interdependent and mutually reinforcing elements. This search for coherence, I shall suggest, prevents us from recognizing the distinctive anomalies and characteristic paradoxes of such regimes. Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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One such author, for instance, perceives a need to reconcile the Argentine juntas’ eVorts to keep their most repressive policies secret with the recurrent incidents by which such policies nevertheless became publicly known. How are we to understand, they ask, a regime that ‘‘makes a spectacle of an abduction that will later be denied’’?26 The answer to this paradox? ‘‘It was in order to discipline the public space of whole cities, to create involuntary spectators.’’27 In short, such states seek to ensure that people are ‘‘conscientiously forgetful yet fearfully curious, unseeing yet voyeuristic. Their citizens must know there are secrets so terrible they must be kept secret, even while these states make it publicly known that secrets exist—a situation that the states hope will create precisely the climate of fear and paralysis in the citizenry they desire.’’28 Such rhetorical  ourish conjures up a sinister image of central orchestration and perfect coordination, one in which all the curious details and tangential diversions of social life are now harnessed to a single scheme, conceived and implemented from above. This imagery is chilling not only on account of the political repression it suggests but also in its very single-mindedness, coherence, and comprehensiveness. It seeks subtly to evoke the most powerful literary portraits of oppressive regimes, such as those by Franz Kafka or George Orwell. Emotional evocativeness of this sort has its legitimate purposes. But careful historians and social scientists will respond that serious social understanding is not among them. This is because the resulting picture largely contradicts what they have labored hard to learn about the less  amboyant realities of politics and policy implementation in such regimes. The literary image of oppressive regimes resembles that oVered by functionalist sociology and suVers from the same deŽ ciencies. Both accounts view all the features of a repressive society Ž tting neatly together in a reinforcing whole, with no anomalous remainder. The possibility that there is not necessarily any comprehensive master plan behind all the ‘‘seeming’’ disorderly and disorienting ambiguities readily observable in such societies is not seriously entertained. Frank Graziano and Jennifer Schirmer, for instance, do not address (or apparently consider) the possibility that the public visibility of some illegal abductions during the antisubversive campaign (a very small minority of the total, in any event) was due merely to the arrogance of unrestrained subordinates, conŽ dent of their impunity—rather than directly to more subtle schemings from on high. If all features of the antisubversive campaign are easily integrated into a seamless web of meaning, a coherent semiotic system, what is one to make of its persistent anomalies, such as the curious combination, in the minds of many warriors, of Catholic humanism with a murderously violent paranoia? The insistence on Ž nding perfect coherence in every cultural trace from the period begins to resemble, in fact, the very paranoia it seeks to understand, interpreting it all as cumulative evidence of a single conspiracy. As Richard Hofstadter observed, paranoia ‘‘is noth-

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ing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities.’’29 The far right has no monopoly on conspiracy theories, after all.

Repression as Intentionally Arbitrary?

We should face the possibility that available evidence concerning victimization in the antisubversive campaign cannot conŽ rm any available theory concerning the nature of the regime behind it. For all their apparent diVerences, both the materialist and idealist analyses I have just sketched view repression as rational, that is, coordinated in light of intelligible human purposes that are advanced by the means employed. To assume even such minimal coherence and intelligibility may be to assume too much, however. It makes better sense to begin, at least, with the null hypothesis: the possibility that victimization was intentionally arbirary, to a great degree. This hypothesis at least conforms to a central aspect of the phenomenology of life under authoritarian rule, as Argentines experienced it, the seeming arbitrariness of where and when the ax would fall. Many known guerrillas were treated particularly well under detention, and given the opportunity to emigrate, while detainees without obvious guerrilla aYliation were routinely murdered.30 Low-level operatives in the death squads, moreover, enjoyed considerable autonomy in determining the fate, if not often the identity, of their victims.31 OYcers were often quite candid about the capriciousness of their decisions in this regard. General Leopoldo Galtieri, for instance, announced to a detainee that her life would be saved because she shared the Christian name of his daughter. Admiral Massera ordered the murder of a civilian businessman who had the misfortune of being married to the admiral’s current paramour. The widespread seizure of property from detainees, abundantly documented in Nunca Ma´s, displays the routine use of the repressive apparatus for personal plunder. Wealthy individuals and their children were often especially attractive targets for abduction and ransom, regardless of their political views or activities. It is known, for instance, that one group of operatives targeted Jewish businessmen in provincial Buenos Aires.32 Other operatives apparently preferred to ‘‘cruise’’ through downtown Buenos Aires, patrolling for ‘‘pretty girls’’ to abduct and rape.33 The antisubversive campaign seems willfully to resist the eVorts of social scientists to press such facts in service of their pet theories. It does so with stories like that of the small businessman who had the misfortune of meeting with his lawyer at the moment when a death squad arrived to seize the latter, who had signed several habeas corpus petitions.34 Neither was ever seen again.35 What is one to make, moreover, of the seizure of eight adolescents from their homes, for having partici-

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pated in a school protest against the increase in their bus fare? All eight were savagely tortured and ultimately murdered.36 Several detainees passed back and forth between clandestine centers and oYcial prisons, without apparent reason. High-ranking generals and admirals were free to target their civilian competitors in sexual rivalries and to settle private grudges. Some victims were tortured and murdered without any eVort to learn the extent or nature of their actual links to the guerrilla movements. This suggests that the practice of torture, in contrast with the public rationales oVered by defendants post facto, was not narrowly tailored toward intelligence functions, that is, not exclusively aimed at extracting information.37 None of these basic facts about the antisubversive campaign sits easily with the grand theories invoked to explain it. The less precise the line between what is permissible and what is not, the more powerful the deterrence of all activities, however innocuous, that ‘‘could be seen’’ by military rulers as suspect, as approaching the line between the two. Some ‘‘randomization’’ in victim selection helps foster this uncertainty, with devastating eVect on the daily calculations of citizens, most of whom will be risk-averse. At such times, any rational actor is sure to adopt the practical maxim: ‘‘When in any doubt, one can never be too careful.’’ To judge from Argentine memoirs of the period and private re ections shared with the author and other scholars, this was precisely the ‘‘philosophy of life’’ adopted by most citizens during these years.38 People asked themselves, ‘‘Was it safe to attend a certain show, read a particular book, or frequent a speciŽ c shop? . . . which might attract unwanted attention.’’39 But if the place where repression touches ground, like lightening in a violent storm, is completely random (or perceived as nearly so), its deterrent eVect on even genuinely subversive activity may disappear entirely. The directionlessness of terror, however, has rarely reached this outer limit, except perhaps at the height of Stalin’s purges.40 Even well short of that limiting case, however, the capricious element in the application of state terror can have little of the diVuse, chilling eVect ascribed to it when citizens don’t believe that it exists. It proved very diYcult for many Argentines to acknowledge any such element of arbitrariness during the antisubversive campaign. Some memoirs and personal re ections from the period consistently recount that evidence of capriciousness was suppressed from consciousness. Though a large number of people without obvious ties to guerrilla movements were known to be disappearing, many of their colleagues, relatives, and even friends persuaded themselves that the victims ‘‘must have done something’’ to explain their treatment, however unjustiŽ ed their fate.41 This denial of irrationality is itself clearly irrational in certain respects, albeit functional in others. It served many citizens, as one of them recently observed, as ‘‘a way to believe that they themselves were diVerent from the tortured and the disappeared, thus dispelling the unbearable fear that they would be next.’’42 It may be more diYcult to accept the possibility that such horriŽ c events may be ‘‘meaningless’’ than that they display a coherent pattern, however pernicious and indefen-

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sible. ‘‘Unable to bear the anguish of capricious brutality,’’ re ects one Argentine, ‘‘we attempt to overcome our confusion and disinformation by formulating explanations. An adaptive reality replaces our internal chaos. This reality, however, little resembles the actual rules and criteria that guide state terrorism,’’ which during the antisubversive campaign increasingly displayed ‘‘no discernible pattern.’’43 This curious feature of human psychology may also explain the fact that, in Nazi concentration camps, those who adjusted most easily to life’s new rigors, and survived in greater numbers, were those who had been self-conscious opponents of Nazism (that is, communists, socialists, and religious activists).44 By contrast, those who had ‘‘played by the rules’’ all their lives, who had not willfully embraced a life of struggle against injustice, found their fate not merely indefensible, but inexplicable. Its unintelligibility became yet another intolerable burden for them to bear.45 In the Argentine experience, the most poignant illustration of this diYculty— recognizing arbitrariness as precisely that—is perhaps the conversion of Hebe de BonaŽ ni, founder and leader of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, from avowedly apolitical homemaker into self-declared Castroite revolutionary. Ms. BonaŽ ni long believed that her two sons, who disappeared during military rule, were innocent of wrongdoing, in any sense of the term. They were merely idealists, she said, hopeful for a better world. She thus defended their name, in travels across the globe, against the insinuations of military rulers to the contrary. In 1979, however, she publicly adopted the view that her sons were indeed ‘‘revolutionaries’’ and that their name should best be defended by embracing their cause. Once merely senseless, their deaths now become intelligible, at least. Ms. BonaŽ ni now praises Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in most of her frequent speeches and interviews.46 Once one acknowledges an element of arbitrariness in victim selection, one is compelled to ask further, more diYcult questions. Was this feature of repression deliberate or inadvertent, re ecting centralized decision making or its collapse? It may be that the repressive process acquires a dynamic independent of those nominally directing it, and that rulers thereby lose control of subordinates, who proceed to carry out private agendas. Alternatively, repression may actually be calculated in its very arbitrariness. In other words, the top leaders—still fully in control— may seek to chill the political and socially suspect activities of population at large, rather than (or, more likely, in addition to) eradicating any discrete category of active opponents. Arbitrariness may even have been deliberately inadvertent, that is, the outcome of a decision by central leadership to decentralize operational authority, with a conscious view to motivating and compensating oYcers’ participation by indulging their diverse private agendas (sexual, sadistic, pecuniary, anti-Semitic, and so on), provided that they also implement the rulers’ regime-related aims, quid pro quo.47 Even more centralized, totalitarian regimes sometimes display such ‘‘planned shapelessness,’’ as Hannah Arendt called it, to throw up a smokescreen of obscurity around their actions.48 I shall return to these possibilities. Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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Neomedieval Theology

Religion played a much greater role in Argentina’s antisubversive campaign than it did in promoting repression in any of South America’s other authoritarian regimes in the period.49 A virulently intolerant version of Catholicism, originating in Spain and Italy, had been present in Argentine political life since the 1920s. Its in uence reached a high point with the 1966 coup by Gen. Juan Carlos Onganõ´a, an Opus Dei member who appointed several fellow lodge members to his cabinet.50 In the mid-1970s, adherents of this current of opinion were still very strong within the oYcer corps. Military schools and academies began to adopt the works of these thinkers as part of their curricula.51 Through friendship and family, there were many informal links between senior oYcers and Catholic nationalist intellectuals.52 By the late 1970s, writes the leading historian of Catholic nationalism, ‘‘the statements of senior military oYcers rang constantly with the language and Ž gurative constructions of the Nationalists.’’53 In the minds of most of those conducting the antisubversive campaign, the primary threat was thought to lie not in the working class, but in the universities, high culture, the mass media, and the liberal professions. These were Ž elds also considered to be peopled disproportionately by Jews.54 If one troubles to read the campaign’s theoreticians, the theologians and philosophers who befriended and in uenced military oYcers for many years, one Ž nds no support for the view of military repression as an instrument of international capitalism and its domestic agents.55 One does Ž nd considerable support, however, for the view that the ‘‘national being’’ was threatened by modern university intellectuals, sympathetic students, and former students in the liberal professions and culture industry.56 Far from being unqualiŽ ed apologists for market mechanisms, most antisubversive militants were intensely critical of laissez-faire economics and its atomized view of human nature, speciŽ cally its unconcern for social inequality, which sowed the seeds of revolution, they acknowledged.57 Rather than sponsoring American in uence within their country, they denounced Argentina’s economic ‘‘dependency’’ on the northern behemoth and despised almost everything about the United States, particularly its ‘‘hedonistic materialism.’’58 No admirers of the Western international alliance, they advocated an intensely nationalistic foreign policy justiŽ ed by a ‘‘Hispanicist’’ conception of national identity and distinct from that of other Western societies.59 They viewed international organizations as infected with liberal universalism, as controlled by the Trilateral Commission and the ‘‘international Zionist conspiracy.’’60 They did not advocate the ‘‘deepening’’ of modern industrialization.61 Rather, they viewed themselves as critics of modernity, skeptics of industrial society and the scientiŽ c knowledge on which it rests, enemies of its avaricious magnates.62 In fact, they upheld a confessedly medieval ideal of self and society.63 All of these themes are abundantly present in the many books and journals

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published by Argentina’s C•´rculo militar and like-minded civilian presses.64 In this respect, the worldview of military ideologists came to converge, as in so much else, with that of those they viewed as their enemy. In the 1980s, as the Argentine left began to discover the ‘‘cultural Marxism’’ of Antonio Gramsci, the far right began to read Gramsci too, Ž nding in him considerable support for their view that the decisive political con icts were now to be waged not with organized labor over the means of production, but rather with the intellectuals over culture and conceptions of the world.65 (Among the more bizarre aspects of interviewing Argentine oYcers in the late 1980s was surely the experience of having them quote chapter and verse from the same Gramsci passages one had pondered in graduate school.) Because theologians viewed the historical process as driven, above all else, by ideas—by the progressive working out of their implications and discovery of their deŽ ciencies—it made perfect sense for them to focus their wrath upon the carriers of ideas, the intellectuals and those most subject to their in uence. The ‘‘idealist’’ theory of history informing theological discourse translated readily into a strategy of counterrevolution focused primarily on the propagators of ideas regarded as subversive of national being and identity. This conception of the con ict prominently reappears in military characterizations of the antisubversive campaign, such as that of General Galtieri: ‘‘The First World War was a confrontation of armies, the Second of whole nations, and the Third—of ideologies.’’66 During the transition to democracy, President Alfonsõ´n lent unintended support for their fears—if any more were needed—by repeatedly proclaiming that the country’s recent horrors were primarily attributable to the illiberalism of its political culture.67 General Ramo´n Camps thus speciŽ cally denounced Alfonsõ´n’s avowed eVorts to promote a new, more democratic political culture as ‘‘a continuation of subversion by other means.’’68 The uncompromisingly antimodern animus of Argentina’s radical nationalist theologians diVers signiŽ cantly from that of Nazi intellectuals who, as ‘‘reactionary modernists,’’ embraced modern technology enthusiastically as an expression of national essence and superiority.69 Some scholars have thus noted the ‘‘puzzling absence,’’ in oYcial rationales for the antisubversive campaign, of the central themes so ubiquitous in the justiŽ catory rhetoric of many other far-right regimes.70 The contemporaneous discourse of Brazil’s military rulers, for instance, was relentlessly technocratic, invoking the terminology of modernization and developmentalism.71 Yet the speeches of Argentine junta members, in defending repressive measures, focus almost exclusively on ethical issues: the need for a stronger sense of moral community, of cultural coherence and national integrity. In Argentina there was nothing secret about such ideas, and very little conspiratorial about the organizations espousing them. Their publications may still be purchased at most Buenos Aires newsstands; their meetings are reported by leading national periodicals. The many unregenerate defenders of the antisubversive campaign are perfectly happy to talk about their long-standing friendship with, and aVection for, Jorda´n Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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Bruno Genta and Julio Meinvielle—theologians who devoted much of their lives to proselytizing among the oYcer corps.72 These ideas were not conveniently devised just prior to the coup, but were regular themes in military writings and instruction in the war colleges.73 Moreover, military rulers did not quickly jettison their professed ideas when these proved at odds with more earthly objectives. Far-right theologians were especially in uential in two respects. First, they imparted a capacious conception of ‘‘the enemy,’’ focusing on cultural elites. Second, they preached the moral insigniŽ cance of positive law as a guide to individual conscience and conduct within a corrupt and decadent society. Both of these teachings proved fateful for guiding the purpose, scope, and methods of the antisubversive campaign. Churchmen taught that the positive law of the secular state could be ignored when inconsistent with the higher morality of God’s law, which justiŽ ed the methods employed in the war against subversion. Genta had long condemned ‘‘the empty formalism of merely external legality, . . . indiVerent to the moral order and to demands for divine justice.’’74 Such counsel was not always left at this level of theological generality, leaving adherents to draw their own inferences. Priests privately oVered justiŽ cations, drawn from medieval thought, for the practice of torture.75 Several in the military chaplaincy were present during torture sessions, encouraging victims to confess and collaborate, for the good of their souls.76 Navy oYcers returning from dropping victims into the sea received comfort from chaplains who would cite parables from the Bible about separating the wheat from the chaV.77 One former torturer recalls, ‘‘Once I asked Father Sosa, who worked in the [detention] camp, if this all seemed right to him, and he said, ‘You have to think like a surgeon. If you have to amputate a disease, you can’t think about how the patient will look.’ ’’78 Another oYcer admits, ‘‘When we had doubts, we went to our spiritual advisers, who could only be members of the vicariate, and they put our minds at ease.’’79 A police oYcer who worked as a driver in several abductions acknowledges, ‘‘Father von Wernich talked to me in particular because of the impact these events had on me. He told me that what we were doing was necessary for the good of our country . . . that God knew that what was being done was for the good of the country.’’80 A junta member observed of Bishop Medina, ‘‘Both the troops and command used to welcome him, avid to hear his preaching, the irreplaceable spiritual sustenance for keeping up the struggle and overcoming the lack of understanding. . . . His advice clearly pointed the military sword in the right direction.’’81 Many bishops publicly denounced the later indictment and trial of the juntas, favoring amnesty.82 The trial constituted ‘‘revenge by subversive forces . . . a Nuremberg in reverse, in which the criminals are judging those who defeated terrorism,’’ observed Archbishop Antonio Jose´ Plaza.83 The second contribution of ultramontane Catholicism was to broaden the military’s conception of its enemy. Argentina’s military rulers often spoke publicly of

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their adversary as ‘‘communism’’ and Soviet in uence within the hemisphere. To some extent, this terminology was designed to appeal to U.S. policymakers who shared this concern. In this way, several such American policymakers and opinion leaders were indeed persuaded to regard the juntas as worthy allies, and to press for closer relations despite increasing evidence from reliable sources that massive human rights abuses were occurring.84 That the Soviet Union was Argentina’s largest trading partner during this period should have induced greater skepticism about the juntas’ professions of concern over Soviet in uence in the region.85 That many oYcers remained preoccupied with ‘‘subversion’’ even after the breakup of the Soviet Union is perhaps the clearest evidence that their concerns lay elsewhere. But it would be wrong to dismiss the expressed concerns of Argentine oYcers with communism as insincere, as a convenient cover for a radically diVerent agenda designed to impress and deceive the gullible gringos. This view of anticommunist rhetoric—as a disingenuous facade—is now overwhelmingly the majority view among scholars of Latin American politics. Yet anyone who spent time talking at length with such oYcers could harbor no doubt about the depth and sincerity of their convictions in this regard. It is impossible to dismiss such professions of belief as self-interested apologetics, as they aVord no legal basis of excuse for manifestly illegal acts.86 Only the methods of interpretive understanding, pursued through sustained and unstructured interviews, can capture the intensity with which those who fought the antisubversive campaign honestly believed that they were Ž ghting international communism. If academic social science does not yet oVer us the tools by which to convey this intensity of belief on the cold printed page, this simply attests to the methodological limitations of such science.87 Even their immediate victims came to acknowledge this earnest intensity. ‘‘He was a kind of ‘worthy enemy’ for us,’’ remarked one former Montonero of her jailor, Navy oYcer Alfredo Astiz. ‘‘He wasn’t corrupt. He didn’t rape. He was Ž ghting subversion and communism, not trying to get rich. His vision of the world was terribly Neanderthal, but he was convinced of what he was doing. He was there to ‘save’ his country.’’88 Social scientists who have not dismissed military concern about the spread of communism as insincere have tended to dismiss these instead as greatly exaggerated. After all, an enormous disparity exists between the extent of the threat to public order actually posed by organized communist and other radical social movements in Argentina, on one hand, and the repressive severity of the regime’s response, on the other. The magnitude of the military’s reaction strikes virtually all observers as grossly disproportionate and thus calls into question the juntas’ attempted justiŽ cation of the antisubversive campaign as rationally responsive to this threat.89 But this is only because such observers adopt a conception of communism very Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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diVerent from that of the oYcers whose conduct and self-understanding is at issue. It is these oYcers’ conception of the threat their country faced, not our own, that is pertinent in making sense of their behavior. Though this is obvious enough in the abstract, its considerable signiŽ cance for understanding events like the Argentine antisubversive campaign has not been appreciated.90 To be sure, there are several works professing to describe ‘‘national security doctrine’’ and to portray it as the guiding intellectual inspiration for policies like the antisubversive campaign.91 But virtually all such works are based exclusively on published documentary sources, rather than on extensive interviews with oYcers.92 The authors of these works are, in any event, generally so anxious to condemn those who hold such ideas that little genuine eVort is made to understand how or why anyone could be so foolish as actually to believe them. OYcers who have read some of this scholarly literature thus report, not surprisingly, that they Ž nd virtually nothing recognizable within it concerning their worldview. This is particularly true regarding academic assertions that Argentine oYcers were implementing lessons learned through U.S. training, assertions that Argentine oYcers vehemently and convincingly deny.93 In fact, the most careful content analysis of their publications concludes that Argentine oYcers ‘‘practiced a selective vision’’ of national security doctrine, ‘‘magnifying those components . . . it liked and losing sight of the rest.’’94 Their admittedly idiosyncratic understanding of ‘‘international communism’’ proved to have highly lethal consequences. That should be reason enough for taking a very close look at exactly what they meant by it. The threat of ‘‘communism,’’ in their parlance, did not refer to the power of the Communist Party of Argentina or to the Soviet Union. Rather, it denoted the logical end point of a historical process set in motion in early modern Europe and gathering momentum ever since, a process which— if allowed to follow its natural course—would someday, perhaps far in the future, result in the triumph of something like the Soviet empire. ‘‘Communism’’ must thus be treated here very much as a theological term of art. It refers to the Ž nal resting point of a long-standing process of social and intellectual evolution—powerful, but not entirely ineluctable—by which each successive stage of Western modernity since the Renaissance undermined the foundations of the preceding, until Ž nally nothing remained that would seem to most people worthy of defending with their life. ‘‘Communist nihilism is nothing more than the Ž nal expression of this void,’’ wrote Genta, ‘‘of the nothingness toward which human beings are drawn by their alienation from Jesus Christ and from his Church.’’95 He adds, ‘‘The inherent logic of this process leads from the displacement of Christ from public life into private, where his presence atrophies and eventually disappears, to his replacement by Marxian Communism.’’96 However misconceived this full-blown theory of history, the severity of the antisubversive campaign cannot be even minimally understood except in its light. It is tempting to simplify this account as a ‘‘conspiracy theory,’’ for the usual suspects

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are invariably invoked in both the theological and military-strategic literature to explain the country’s current crisis: the Protestant Reformation, the Jews, Freemasons, the French Revolution, European social democracy, the Bolsheviks, the Trilateral Commission, and international Ž nanciers.97 But these various groups are not really thought to be in active cooperation. Rather they are depicted as unwitting contributors to a more sweeping dialectical process by which the West has declined from its apogee in medieval Spain to its present state of sordid putrefaction, represented by the mirror-image ‘‘materialisms’’ of the United States and the USSR.98 Since the birth of the modern era, Western society had repeatedly promised inŽ nite progress to its members in their individual welfare, promises on which it simply could not deliver. Its failure to do so was becoming ever more apparent and would ultimately prove its undoing.99 The resulting slide into oblivion could only be halted by a fundamental intellectual and spiritual reorientation. This would require that Western society return to its premodern roots, abandoning individual utility and liberty for a restored sense of Christian duty and self-sacriŽ ce as the central aspirations of its members. This was indeed to be an attempt at veritable ‘‘counterrevolution.’’100 Each of their theological assertions can be traced into the many military publications of the period. Such themes and leitmotifs proved remarkably enduring, persisting well beyond the antisubversive campaign itself, Ž nding their way prominently into later publications by the oYcers who mutinied to stop the criminal prosecution of their comrades in arms.101 To be sure, no theory can be applied without Ž rst being interpreted. But perhaps what is most striking in the present case is actually how little was lost in the inevitable translation from the abstract theological discourse to the most concrete, tactical decisions about whom to capture and kill.102 The Ž rst assertion in the theological literature is that communism is not radically diVerent from or opposed to liberalism, but rather emerges from the dying embers of liberal society, seeking to redress liberal society’s problems and redeem its promises. ‘‘Communist doctrine and practice,’’ Genta argued, are nothing more than modern liberalism, carried to its ultimate consequences, in its rejection of the Western Christian order. Thus, one cannot separate Communism from Liberalism; liberal doctrine is—point by point, jot for jot—the negation of the principles and institutions of Western Christianity. The negative criticism and practical demolition achieved by liberalism reaches its extreme point in the dialectical materialism of Marx. Liberalism itself originates in Martin Luther’s doctrine of ‘‘free examination,’’ in the supposed right of anyone to read and discuss the divine word.103

The exercise of this right led in turn to the right to question the claims of legitimate authority, and for theologians like Genta, that was the beginning of the end. This same conclusion is vigorously defended by the oYcers who later mutinied against civilian authority between 1987 and 1990, protesting inter alia the continuing prosecution of oYcers involved in the campaign. For instance, the most in uenConstructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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tial leader of the mutineers, Col. Muhamed Alõ´ Seineldõ´n, issued a long 1987 document entitled ‘‘Synthesis of Subversion’s Long-Term Strategy’’ in which many of these same leitmotifs reappear.’’104 One implication of this theory of history was that the threat ultimately materializing into communist expansion had, in other earlier forms, been long present and powerfully at work, since well before the birth of communism as most of us employ this term. Hence the statement of General Luciano Mene´ndez, commander of the particularly brutal Third Corps in Co´rdoba, that ‘‘The Marxist-Communist International has been operating since 500 years before Christ.’’105 But for the peculiar theory of history informing it, such a statement would, of course, be a complete non sequitur. Even after the junta itself had declared its triumph against the armed guerrilla movements, oYcers of the highest rank were simultaneously proclaiming to the press that ‘‘the war has not ended’’ and that ‘‘the war continues.’’106 There was nothing contradictory in these two postures, for as General and junta member Roberto Viola explained, ‘‘this war, unlike classical war, does not have a determinate beginning nor a Ž nal battle at which the victor will be crowned.’’107 Many analysts have tended to forget this element of the military’s selfunderstanding when asserting that the oYcers’ continuing policy of mass murder—long after military victory over the guerrillas had been won—proves that the antisubversive campaign was not really a war at all. This charge, again, relies too heavily upon our own secular geopolitical conception of the con ict. It is true, of course, that by this time (late 1978) the oYcers were indeed Ž ghting ghosts in their minds, something of their own imagination. But there is often an irreducibly imaginative element in the construction of an enemy. ‘‘The enemy’’ is often, at least in part, a social and intellectual ‘‘Ž ction,’’ the by-product of a particular theory about how the world is divvied up and constituted into ‘‘friendly’’ and ‘‘unfriendly’’ forces.108 The oYcers’ belief in the proportionality of their response, moreover, can only be appreciated in light of how they deŽ ned their military objectives. That process requires answers to questions that are necessarily normative and conceptual, not primarily empirical.109 As late as 1987, General Villegas spoke of the ‘‘integral war, the permanent war, the war amidst the peace,’’ aiming to win ‘‘man’s psyche.’’110 The ‘‘silent inŽ ltration of subversion’’ continued, he insisted, a view shared by many senior oYcers.111 Hence, several of the police oYcers indicted for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, which killed eighty-six people, had been involved in the antisubversive campaign or closely associated with the mutineers (who defended it.)112 ‘‘It makes no diVerence that one is or is not a communist,’’ wrote Father Julio Meinvielle. ‘‘It is enough that one enter into the dialectical game through which one tacitly represents the movement toward communism. . . . Through this dialectic, communism penetrates into all areas of society, through the conduct even of those who do not desire communism.’’113 In short, communism advances through the cunning of history, behind the backs of those who unwittingly

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contribute to its triumph. ‘‘With such a vague notion of threat,’’ writes one political scientist, ‘‘the junta was more likely to lash out against a broad cross-section of the population.’’114 Its subalterns did precisely that. The junta members themselves were not entirely unaware of such dangers. General Ramo´n Camps observed, for instance, that ‘‘the defenders of Christian order are not themselves completely clear about the nature of the values they are defending. This is partly due to the excessive materialism surrounding them in some capitalist societies. It is also due to strategic maneuverings of the subversives, which prevents these defenders from knowing exactly what they are to be attacking.’’115 In short, because subversion—in the form of decadent materialism— had insinuated itself even into the bosom of Christianity’s very defenders, these defenders must make the most vigorous, vigilant eVorts to root out its lurking presence throughout society, traces of which would linger even where the defenders themselves (as impure, sinful creatures) would likely underestimate the extent of the threat it continued to pose. As one Argentine admiral said, ‘‘It is an oversimpliŽ cation to say that this is a war against communism. We are at war against a set of historical circumstances, against the negative aspects of the human condition, against those aspects of our very selves.’’116 Such ideas were also widely disseminated by legal counsel for the junta members, during their trial. As Munilla Lacasa announced to the court, on behalf of client General Leopoldo Galtieri, ‘‘The victory by force of arms was not deŽ nitive; and the war is total, it continues in other Ž elds of national endeavor.’’117 In fact, the juntas’ supporters described the judicial proceedings as ‘‘the juridical front’’ of the ongoing antisubversive struggle.118 The judiciary, in giving sympathetic hearing to allegations by former guerrillas, had itself become an ‘‘objective’’ agent of subversion. Like the other liberals who unknowingly advanced the cause of communism, the judges were ‘‘useful idiots’’—unwitting agents of a historical process that worked behind their backs, but through their eVorts.119 The insuYciency of a strictly military victory against the guerrilla was amply demonstrated, for the Catholic nationalists, by the very fact that such a trial could take place at all. The conviction of the juntas and other oYcers established, in fact, that the forces of Christian order were on the defensive and must struggle still harder to regain the advantage they had lost. Again, it would at Ž rst blush seem incomprehensible that anyone could view subversion as having the upper hand at a time when the guerrilla movements had been completely annihilated—incomprehensible, that is, apart from the expansive theory of subversion to which these oYcers continued to cleave. From within their intellectual universe, however, such a claim becomes perfectly plausible. After all, anyone seriously committed to returning contemporary Argentina—an industrial society and liberal democracy—to the ideals and institutions of late medieval Spain could fairly be described, indeed with perfect accuracy, as very much ‘‘on the defensive.’’120 Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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The Ž nal in uence of Catholic nationalist theologians on the military may be found in the heavy emphasis of both on the cultural sphere and the loyalties of its elites as the principal arena in which subversion would continue to assert itself and so require continuing eVorts at suppression. ‘‘Culture is the true motor and motivating force of this eVort,’’ explained Gen. Acdel Vilas. ‘‘The war that we confront is preeminently a cultural war.’’121 The cultural realm was to be distinguished in this connection from other, more conventional arenas of political contestation, such as the economic conditions of blue-collar workers or strictly military confrontation with an armed enemy, external or domestic. It is intellectuals who lead revolutions, not the masses, Genta reminds.122 Hence, it is ‘‘the public universities that are today the central headquarters and mastermind of communism within our country, a role that, as is well-known, is always Ž lled by the intellectual classes.’’123 It followed that the Ž ght against subversion should focus not on blue-collar workers but on the elites, for ‘‘a nation becomes corrupt and putreŽ es from the top down.’’124 Subversion takes many forms—some manifest, others less so. ‘‘Even in the university, where communism acts with greatest openness, it also conceals its activity and its underlying objectives behind the mask of scientiŽ c, professional, scholarly or humanitarian objectives.’’125 In other words, even the most seemingly ordinary labors of cultural elites in such professions can be objectively subversive, regardless of the conscious intentions or professed beliefs of the persons in question. These several themes can easily be traced into the declamations of top generals and admirals during the antisubversive campaign.126 Such top oYcers contended, moreover, that since subversion had adopted nonmilitary methods during the 1980s and 1990s, the antisubversive struggle needed to concentrate on the strictly professional activities of the cultural elite, rather than overtly political (let alone military) activities, which had largely been abandoned. Subversion, observed General Heriberto Auel, had ‘‘basically adopted a strategy that gives special emphasis to the cultural superstructure, in Marxist terms, and to understand how this is to work, one need only read our national exponents of Gramsci.’’127 OYcers must be trained to decipher subtleties in political rhetoric, argued Admiral and junta member Armando Lambruschini: ‘‘It is a military task to attentively follow trends in language, in verbal styles, to learn what compulsions beset the freely reasoning mind.’’128 As late as 1987, General Roberto Levingston, a former president who had since become associated with Catholic nationalist currents in the oYcer corps, laid out their entire analysis for me succinctly: Subversion is still very strong in Argentina, but is today working much more subtly and surreptitiously than in the 1970s. It is now laying down roots in hopes of making people receptive to it again at some future point. The Alfonsõ´n government has many such people in its administration and has allowed their sympathizers to be appointed in turn throughout

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the state’s cultural apparatus, such as state television and public education at all levels. These people realize that the Argentine people do not share their basic values or political objectives, so they have softened or ‘‘whitened’’ their rhetoric and appearance. But from their oYcial positions of considerable power and in uence they are aggressively engaged in defaming the Church and the armed forces, without allowing representatives of these institutions fair opportunity to respond to their allegations. The television programs that they produce are pornographic, and therefore subversive of our cultural values. The administration knows that intellectuals with a long history of subversion are today working within the schools, universities, and mass media, but takes no measures against such people. In this way, the Alfonsõ´n government is advancing the cause of subversion.129

The mutineers strike many of these same themes in their public statements and interviews. First, the antisubversive struggle must focus on culture, because that is where subversion is strongest. ‘‘The subversives failed at armed struggle, and so took a step backward to modify their strategy,’’ observes Col. Aldo Rico. ‘‘Following Gramsci, they now seek to transform what they call the superstructure of society. . . . ‘let’s make them think like Marxists, and power will then fall to us willy-nilly,’ they say. ‘We will drop the military route to power only to adopt the cultural route.’ ’’130 This sentiment is echoed by Lt. Col. Angel Daniel Leo´n, another prominent and outspoken mutineer: ‘‘Here the subversives have followed the guidance of Antonio Gramsci: ‘take control of society by means of its culture, and then the State will fall into your hands like ripe fruit.’ ’’131 For the mutineers, as for the antisubversive warriors and theologians before them, the essential nature of the struggle is spiritual and philosophical, rather than military. ‘‘Revolutionary warfare is not so much a military aVair,’’ writes Lieutenant Colonel Carretto, ‘‘but a much broader and deeper aVair, more complex and more momentous than the simple encounter between the forces of the law and a few idealistic, misguided dreamers.’’132 He continues, ‘‘In our times two movements contend for the intellectual hegemony of mankind: Christianity and Marxism. This revives the traditional contest between spiritualism and materialism, which is as old as mankind. This struggle will not be won on the battleŽ eld, but in the schools. . . . The future of humanity turns on the result.’’133 Despite the secrecy of its execution, this war has since been volubly defended by several of the oYcers who planned and fought it, sometimes in multivolume works and lengthy public interviews. The transcript of the juntas’ trial, moreover, is laced with long speeches by defense counsel drawing upon early Christian and medieval theologians, including their doctrines of the just war. Finally, the centrality of cultural struggle entailed that state censorship would extend far beyond concern with overtly political ideas to virtually all forms of unconventional expression. A high-ranking minister for cultural aVairs revealed the extremes to which this idea would be taken. He observed, ‘‘In our country the channels of cultural and artistic expression have been inŽ ltrated and deformed by their utilization for protest songs, extreme forms of experimentalism, avant-garde theConstructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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atre . . . and clay statuary with a distinctly leftist coloration.’’134 General Camps blithely acknowledged, ‘‘We had to ‘take out’ [aniquilar] quite a few journalists, because they were taking positions that threatened prevailing institutions.’’135 The numbers of books published in Argentina dropped by more than two-thirds from 1976 to 1979. More than three thousand university professors were dismissed from their posts in the Ž rst six months of military rule. The general in charge of purging the universities explained, ‘‘Until we can cleanse the teaching area, and professors are all of Christian thought and ideology, we will not achieve the triumph we seek in our struggle against the revolutionary left.’’136 In sum, given the worldview of most antisubversive warriors—speciŽ cally, their intellectual debts to Catholic nationalist theology—it is scarcely surprising that a highly disproportionate number of the disappeared, as revealed by Nunca Ma´s, should have been ‘‘intellectuals’’ in the Gramscian sense: university students, professors, journalists, artists, secondary school teachers, and members of the liberal professions, particularly psychiatry.137 Most antisubversive warriors viewed these occupational groups—not blue-collar workers, the marginal semi-employed lumpenproletariat, or even the guerrilla movements themselves—as the entering wedge of modern secular rationality into the Argentina they knew and loved, a country whose ‘‘national being’’ and cultural identity was permanently deŽ ned by the traditional alliance of Cross and Sword. Their preoccupation with the sins of secularism and modern culture, in both its elite and mass forms, accounts for why many of the disappeared—Freudian psychoanalysts, sociology sophomores, instructors of modern dance—seemed quite genuinely ‘‘subversive’’ from their standpoint, albeit innocuous from any other. But this turn in the search for explanation runs aground on a diVerent shoal. It proves too much. If the zealous crusaders for Catholic ‘‘national being’’ had free rein, the list of victims would have run far longer. If the true enemy was the carriers of modern secular culture, then the class of plausible victims within Argentina would have run easily into the millions. The grisly question would then have to be, not ‘‘why so many?’’ but rather ‘‘why so few?’’138 Responding to the preceding argument, one leading Argentine historian, Tulio Halperin Donhi, goes so far as to conclude: The Catholic rationale for terror provided a general warning to be ever vigilant, and more speciŽ cally invited [the military] to place under suspicion people with the wrong ideas. But it was always suspicion of having aided and abetted subversion, in the narrower sense of the term. Here I am afraid that the lists of victims from the world of culture . . . prefer to ignore this fact: Paco Rondo was a great poet, and Rodolfo Walsh an important writer, but both were also Montonero oYcers; Haroldo Conti had guerrillas hidden in his weekend hut in El Tigre; Antonio Di Benedetto ([though] not a subversive in the Genta or Meinvielle sense of the word) went through hell because he refused . . . to share with the military authorities the original of a blurred picture of a pro-ERP rally published in the . . . daily of which he was sub-editor.

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While the repressors were always ready to expect a Jew, or a left-winger, or even somebody divorced and remarried (Mon. Bolatti, the bishop of Rosario, warned eloquently about the subversive inclinations of this last group) to be a subversive, they were really interested in subversives in the narrow sense. If they broadened their net, it was to include a perfectly non-subversive union leader who led an inopportune strike, such as Oscar Smith. . . . The only case I know of purely ideological persecution was that of the Universidad del Sur in Bahõ´a Blanca. But while people [there] went to jail for ‘‘Marxist inŽ ltration,’’ they were neither tortured nor killed. Even that [accusation] was not invented of whole cloth; logic was taught from Mao’s articles. And even in that case there was a political objective, crazy in a diVerent way: General Acdel Vilas [the regional commander] was indirectly targeting [General] Lanusse. The rector [of the University] under whom the Marxist faculty had been appointed later became Lanusse’s minister of education.139

Halperin’s shrewd account returns us to a shared aim of all factions of the corps: destroying the most violent, dangerous, organized antagonists of the regime’s central policies (both economic and cultural) while intimidating other people from joining these more active groups and movements. In this view, the maximalist agenda of cultural counterrevolution led to identifying suspects for possible detention and perhaps torture, but not all the way to murder. Halperin’s version is very credible, as far as it goes, because it stays close to the ground, working case by case. It observes discrete causes at work in individual incidents, even intelligible patterns, but embraces no single social theory. Ideological suspicion intersects with private vendetta (and sometimes, plain bad luck) in ways that elude the reach of the social scientiŽ c voice in its more heroic macroregister. His account also calls our attention to the considerable scale of disingenuous post facto denial (in both the lay and psychoanalytical senses) by those who came to regret their youthful indiscretions or who understandably wished to give a murdered loved one the beneŽ t of any doubt concerning his or her own.140 Most controversially, he would have us believe that the percentage of innocents among the murdered was ultimately quite small, given the very widespread support for the guerrilla movements in their early years, support once candidly acknowledged by very many.141 But an accounting as detailed and knowledgeable as Halperin’s, based on his circles of personal acquaintance, will surely never be obtained for the vast majority of the murdered. That is a task no truth commission or nongovernmental human rights organization could ever hope to achieve.142 In any event, his view almost certainly exaggerates the extent to which the institutional machinery of repression was always Ž nely calibrated and perfectly tuned, tightly aimed at a small set of objectives Ž xed from above and perfectly clear to all below. To Halperin’s own eVort at imposing order, one wants to respond with details as Ž ne-grained as his own. One is tempted to ask, for instance: What about the fate of people like Adolfo Valis, manager of the Canta´brica factory, assassinated because he was on the verge of exposing irregularities in the Ž rm’s takeover by friends of the economy minister?143

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Halperin’s view also underestimates the degree of victimization suVered by those whose overt political involvements put them only on the outer fringes of farleft activism. Many such people partook primarily of the engage´ cultural life of the universities, a life that necessarily brought them into friendly association with members of radical social movements, including the Montoneros.14 4 It would be wrong ‘‘to minimize the signiŽ cance of the questioning of all forms of authority that collective protest entailed before and after 1973,’’ concludes a recent study of the guerrillas.145 Mere ‘‘fellow-travellers’’ fell well within the ranks of cultural subversives, as understood by the Catholic nationalists. Still, Halperin’s unsentimental angle is a useful corrective to the common view that the dirty war ‘‘was directed not against the guerrillas but against society at large,’’ a view that—though much more comforting—is wildly exaggerated.146

Sadistic Whim, Nihilistic Will?

None of the preceding accounts tell us much about how so many subordinate oYcers, lacking vehement commitment to (much less economic self-interest in) the suppression of social and labor activism, could be induced to participate in mass murder on a colossal scale. It is known that they could have avoided that task with relative ease.147 Any satisfactory explanation of the entire catastrophe must combine a persuasive account of leaders’ aims (why order inferiors to kill thousands?) with followers’ incentives (what’s in it for me, the possible participant—and potential defendant?). This approach best links the macrobehavior of the regime and its rulers with the micromotives of their subaltern agents, as competing accounts do not. Their interests included self-aggrandizement, pecuniary enrichment, sexual gratiŽ cation, sadistic violence, or simply the pleasure of ‘‘playing God,’’ that is, in exercising absolute power over another’s fate. Torture, in particular, allows ‘‘dominion over spirit and  esh, an orgy of self-expansion,’’ one victim observes. 148 As Tzvetan Todorov notes of the Nazi camps, ‘‘The guards do not have to justify anything to anyone; they are entirely free and sovereign. Drunk with their own power, they feel they belong to a race of supermen.’’149 Similarly, in Argentina, ‘‘captors terriŽ ed the [detainees] by lecturing them on the boundless liberty of army oYcers to torture and kill at will,’’ a practice from which oYcers derived no small ‘‘sadistic pleasure.’’150 ‘‘Only God gives and takes life,’’ his torturer told Jacobo Timerman, ‘‘but God is busy elsewhere, and we’re the ones who must undertake this task in Argentina.’’151 Without at least occasionally making credible their capacity for such whimsical exercise of will, the terrorizing eVect of their speeches and consequent gratiŽ cation on their part would surely have been nil.

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This dimension of the antisubversive campaign links the element of arbitrariness in repression’s distribution with an account of the incentives provided its agents to participate in conduct that was obviously unlawful, subjecting them to risk of later punishment. These micromotives for repression cannot be reduced to such macroconsiderations as the regime’s ideology or the class interest of its civilian supporters. Some might see such an explanation as nontheoretical and entirely ad hoc. I would prefer to describe it as Nietzschean, in that it gives pride of place to the will to power at work within the individual agents of repression, and to the rulers’ shrewd harnessing of such impulses.152 This characterization comports well with the claim of Lt. Col. Hugo I. Pascarelli, for instance, that the antisubversive campaign ‘‘does not recognize moral or natural limits, is realized beyond good and evil, and transcends the human level.’’153 Some torturers even told their victims, ‘‘We are God’’ and ‘‘We are the law.’’154 No sincere adherent of the religious right could make such statements, for the religious right saw itself as doing God’s will, enforcing God’s law. The statements just quoted bespeak a nihilism, a willfulness, and a secular hubris completely inconsistent with the sensibility of those who saw themselves as God’s humble workmen. Antisubversive warriors were of both types. Where they were not ideologues, they were ordinary criminals, motivated by the greed and exhilaration attendant upon defying norms that others hold sacred.155 In fact, some of the more notorious civilian participants in the antisubversive campaign chose to continue a life of ordinary criminality after the transition to democracy.156 Such individual causative factors as greed, lust, and self-aggrandizement complicate the picture oVered by any macro-explanation, not just the Marxist. Though a crucial part of the puzzle, these micromotives cannot themselves oVer a suYcient account of the terror, however. They tell us little, after all, about the pattern of victims (drawn heavily from university students, cultural elites, and upper-middleclass professionals). To be sure, the enthusiasms unleashed by ultramontane Catholicism were deliberately cultivated, with a view to enhancing individual initiative in the antisubversive campaign. It was thus readily foreseeable that, once the enemy was painted with so broad a brush, such initiative from below would lead to horrible results if not carefully supervised. Most junta members and other high-ranking oYcers derived no private beneŽ t from the antisubversive campaign, it is clear.157 Their stake in the disappearances was institutional, not personal. They were willing to allow their junior subordinates free exercise of Dionysian will only as long as the destructive impulses thereby unleashed would be directed, substantially if not entirely, in service of regime goals. Of course, the breadth of those goals was itself a subject of continuing contention between the Catholic nationalists and laissez-faire liberals over the years of military rule. Nationalists deŽ ned the enemy in much broader terms than did the economists.

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Malevolent Pluralism

The relative power of these competing factions within the oYcers’ corps shifted back and forth. But the nationalists attained heaviest operational responsibility for the antisubversive campaign, since they cared most about this policy.158 For a long time, it did not greatly trouble more moderate oYcers that comrades with a very ambitious view of the war’s purposes should exercise greater in uence over its course and control. It is true, to be sure, that the most extreme acts of repression by far-right operatives occasionally evoked strong negative reactions, in private, from their more restrained comrades in arms. For instance, the murder by Navy Captain Alfredo Astiz of foreign citizens, including three French nuns, is known to have elicited particular ire from then-President Videla. Videla immediately realized how this development would impair the regime’s image abroad, particularly within important international organizations.159 That image was rapidly deteriorating, due substantially to the U.S. human rights policy, which had begun to isolate and ostracize the Argentine regime in international fora.160 In 1978, Argentina lost all U.S. military aid. In fact, President Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy is widely credited with strengthening the hand of the military ‘‘moderates’’ who wished to check their more murderous comrades, to preserve the country’s international standing and stature in world organizations.161 But because continued military rule required substantial consensus among competing factions, there was a tendency for each to concentrate upon the area of its greatest concern, and to concede other policy areas to other oYcers. The ‘‘liberals’’ got economic policy, the ‘‘nationalists’’ the antisubversive campaign. Most oYcers recognized that maintenance of their continued rule required a certain restraint on internecine rivalries. In fact, an explicit power-sharing arrangement was adopted at the outset of military rule to guard against this very divisiveness.162 To sustain that modus vivendi, however, required an attitude toward competing views, wherever possible, of ‘‘live and let live,’’ if you will. Several prior military regimes in Argentina had collapsed on account of interservice and intraservice rivalries, as those who led the 1976 coup were well aware. Hence, the choice appointments after 1976 were carefully distributed to ensure that all sectoral interests within the oYcer corps felt themselves fairly represented. Leaders of all such factions were highly attentive to the risk of antagonizing others in ways that would threaten their common interest in the survival of the new regime.163 This helps explain why ‘‘moderate’’ oYcers would, to the greatest extent possible, indulge their more murderous colleagues among the Catholic nationalists. It could also explain why many nationalists would restrain their most repressive impulses, to some degree, when international sanctions began to imperil the shared interest of the entire corps in continued rule.164 In short, the changing contours of disappearances over the eight years of military rule can be largely ascribed to the intensely antiliberal ideology of the far-right faction, insofar as this was at Ž rst in-

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dulged and ultimately restrained by competing factions, through shifts in their relative power. The rest of the variation, the genuinely arbitrary elements (from the standpoint of the rulers’ interests or ideology), can be ascribed to the need to compensate individual operatives (of varying ‘‘tastes’’) for whom ultramontane Catholicism, much less the imperatives of industry’s magnates, could not be counted upon to overcome the risks of participation in transparently felonious activities. It may also be that the marriage of convenience between sadism and theology, which at Ž rst seems bizarre, rested on deeper similarities at the level of personality, on an authoritarian temperament that drew some people to one, some to the other.165

Conclusion

The Argentine terror, in short, is ultimately too complicated to be reduced to any single explanation that is both parsimonious and all-embracing. There were nonetheless salient patterns and recurrent themes, particularly the signiŽ cant and widely unappreciated in uence of ultramontane Catholicism. Much of the literature on human rights abuse encourages us to expect the victims, such as Ms. BonaŽ ni, to be ennobled (not venomously embittered) by their suVering and the bad guys to be reassuringly simple cardboard cutouts, largely interchangeable from one episode of mass atrocity to the next. But the picture of the perpetrators that ultimately emerges from the Argentine antisubversive campaign suggests, at least, the perhaps disconcerting qualities of earnest intensity, ‘‘moral’’ conviction, and religious vision. There can be no doubt about the sincerity of these men, their feelings of being besieged by the pernicious hegemony of liberal secularity all around them. At the risk of condescension, one is tempted to say that the persistence into the twenty-Ž rst century of this odd little subculture would surely strike us as touchingly poignant, even quaint, with its quirky cocktail of natural law jurisprudence, ascetic personal morals, Old Testament Jeremiad, Ž erce anti-Semitism, Marxian dialectic, Manichaean xenophobia, antiscientiŽ c ‘‘humanism,’’ Gramscian culture criticism, and Franco-American counterinsurgency doctrine.166 We would all casually dismiss this minor grouplet as quaintly nutty—that is, were it not for the fact that during a brief, recent moment in history its members proved so devastatingly eVective in fulŽ lling their most homicidal fantasies. Whatever (considerable) criticism should rightly be leveled at these men, however, they are in no way ‘‘banal,’’ in Arendt’s sense. They are not unthinking automatons whose ethics are conŽ ned to the single commandment of obeying orders from a military or bureaucratic superior.167 Yet neither is it easy to characterize their evil as satanic or ‘‘radical,’’ in Immanuel Kant’s sense, for they do not willfully embrace the opposite of what they know to be the right or good. We cannot doubt, Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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in fact, that they profoundly believed (and continue to believe) themselves genuine patriots who saved their country from imminent destruction at the hands of the Antichrist. The picture of simple sadists and crazed ideologues drawn by human rights monitors, though orthogonal at points to the preceding analysis, is refreshing in its intellectual modesty, at least.168 It proves closer to the mark, for that matter, than the more ambitious theoretical assertions of macro–social science. The latter’s hubristic claims, totalizing logics, and shifting architectonic plates not only failed to Ž t the statistics on the social composition of the disappeared. They also threatened to conceal altogether the curious mix of moral inspiration, passionate antimodernism, fragile interpersonal alliances, and merciless indiVerence to others’ pain, indeed, delirious sociopathic fury—without which these terrible events would never have occurred.169 The religious zealot who understands himself as the instrument of God’s holy wrath—common throughout history—is not exactly unknown to us in the contemporary world.170 For that matter, we can readily observe the incipient sadism of the full-grown torturer in the unsupervised behavior of boys in any elementary school yard. When forced to confront the horrors such people, in adulthood, continue to wreak upon the rest of us, we should perhaps forgive ourselves, in the end, for taking some small comfort in their dull familiarity. At stake here, moreover, are not merely issues of historical accuracy and sound method. Some would claim that ‘‘the mere listing of the . . . discourse procedures of this cultural authoritarianism is . . . an act of exorcism’’ for Argentine culture.171 More modestly, one may hope that such listings and descriptions contribute, in their small way, to a larger deliberative process of self-scrutiny and democratization.

No t e s

1. This conclusion resembles that reached by Jaime Malamud-Goti, intellectual architect of the prosecution of Argentine military oYcers, who stresses how their ideas about subversion became insusceptible to logical or empirical disconŽ rmation Malamud interprets his conversations with oYcers through the lens of Gregory Bateson’s ideas about how ‘‘the authoritarian mind’’ relies on ‘‘self-sealing proofs’’ in his Game Without End: State Terror and the Politics of Justice (Norman, Okla., 1997), 72–99. I prefer, more simply, to ascribe their failure to be persuaded by his evidence and logic to the centrality of certain metaphysical, theological beliefs within their worldview. 2. Ernest Gellner, Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory (Cambridge, 1993), 166. Gellner goes considerably further than this, arguing, ‘‘We have no logical or independent way of proving that such a circular world . . . cannot exist. It cannot be excluded by fact either, for it is constructed precisely in such a way that all facts can be

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

accommodated. It is only to the outsider or, in its own terms, to the wicked, that facts are ‘accommodated,’ an expression which suggests willful manipulation.’’ On the myriad problems presented by such an enterprise, see generally James CliVord and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986). A stronger assertion would be that to understand how Argentina’s military constructed subversion in their minds, it is Ž rst necessary to deconstruct the conventions of representation by which we customarily apprehend the unlawful behavior of such people. Today, these are increasingly the conventions of human rights reporting, just as during the Cold War they were the rhetorical conventions of geopolitics. ‘‘Daily life in Latin America,’’ writes Gabriel Garcõ´a Marquez, ‘‘shows us that reality is Ž lled with extraordinary things. . . . It is suYcient to glance at the newspapers to realize that extraordinary things are always happening’’; Gabriel Garcõ´a Marquez, El olor de la guayaba (Barcelona, 1982), 36. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. I adopt this estimate from specialists of my acquaintance in Argentine law and politics. The oYcially recognized death toll stands at just over ten thousand, but it is generally thought that not all cases have been reported, due to the fear (or absence) of surviving family members. As a fraction of Argentina’s total population, those killed represent roughly the same proportion that U.S. soldiers killed in the Vietnam War represents of the total U.S. population. The repercussions of the antisubversive campaign for Argentine culture and politics have proven no less profound. Since this is a mini-ethnographic eVort to make the military’s worldview intelligible to others, it adopts my informants’ preferred terminology on this matter, departing here from prevailing practice among social scientists writing about this period. In adopting this vocabulary, I do not endorse my informants’ worldview as valid, of course. Robert Sterken, ‘‘The Decision-Making Process of Policy-Makers Responsible for Gross Human Rights Violations in Argentina, 1976–1980’’ (paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Conference, New York, N.Y., 1994), 7. On the arbitrary nature of some victimization by totalitarian regimes, see Juan Linz, ‘‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,’’ in F. Greenstein and N. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass., 1975), 3:217–28. One could fruitfully compare, in this connection, the memoirs of confessed torturers from the several Southern Cone states. See, e.g., for Uruguay, J. Victor, Confessiones de un torturador (Barcelona, 1981). The reasons for oYcers’ receptivity to this particularly virulent strand of thought, moreover, is still more diYcult to establish, as very small groups of people holding similar views were active in Brazil and Chile as well. In November 1982, I interviewed some of these individuals in the Sa˜o Paulo oYce of Tradition, Family, and Property. The reasons for the much greater receptivity to such ideas in Argentina therefore remain a central question for further inquiry. Paul Buchanan, ‘‘State Terror as a Complement of Economic Policy, 1976–1981,’’ in G. Lopez and M. Stohl, eds., Dependence, Development, and State Repression (New York, 1989), 33–34, 57. David Pion-Berlin, The Ideology of State Terror: Economic Doctrine and Political Repression in Argentina and Peru ( Boulder, Colo., 1989), 104; see also David Pion-Berlin and George Lopez, ‘‘Of Victims and Executioners: Argentine State Terror, 1975–1979,’’

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14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

146

International Studies Quarterly 35 (1991): 63; J. Patrice McSherry, Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina (New York, 1997), 87–90. William Smith, Authoritarianism and the Crisis of the Argentine Political Economy (Stanford, 1991), 249. Ibid., 224. Ibid. For similar views, see Jorge Schvarzer, Mart•´nez de Hoz: La lo´gica pol•´tica de la pol•´tica econo´mica (Buenos Aires, 1983), 126; and Gerardo L. Munck, Authoritarianism and Democratization: Soldiers and Workers in Argentina, 1976–1983 (University Park, Pa., 1998), 49–103. Guillermo O’Donnell, ¿Y a m•´, que me importa?: Notas sobre sociabilidad y pol•´tica en Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires, 1984). Nunca Ma´s: National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (New York, 1984), 69– 74. Buchanan, ‘‘State Terror,’’ 57–58. Nunca Ma´s, 375. On the exceptions, see Marõ´a Jose´ Moyano, ‘‘The ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina: Was It a War and How Dirty Was It?’’ in Hans Werner Tobler and Peter Waldmann, eds., Staatliche und para¨staatliche Gewalt in Lateinamerika (Frankfurt, 1991), 67. A. W. Pereira, ‘‘Rethinking Repression: The Origins and Transformation of Brazil’s Political Trials, 1964–1979’’ (manuscript, 1996), 21, 48–55. But see Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror (New York, 1998), 212. The other leading guerrilla group, the Eje´rcito Revolucionario Popular (ERP), had no such ties to Peronism. Martin E. Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the ‘‘Dirty War’’ (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 109–10. It was not diYcult Ž nd abundant recruits. ‘‘Priests and sympathetic laymen, within small groups involved in continuous, intense confessional and political activity, provided a good number of the right-wing shock troops for nearly half a century’’; Gonza´lez Jansen, La AAA [Argentine Anticommunist Alliance] (Buenos Aires, 1986), 53. Linz, ‘‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian,’’ 175, 264; Amos Perlmutter, Modern Authoritarianism: A Comparative Institutional Analysis (New Haven, 1981), 67. Among the few accounts of the antisubversive campaign that take the ideas of its perpetrators with suYcient seriousness, implicitly dissenting from Linz’s ‘‘authoritarian mentality’’ account, are Donald Hodges, Argentina’s ‘‘Dirty War’’ (Austin, Tex., 1991); Alvaro Abo´s, El poder carnivoro (Bueno Aires, 1985); Frank Graziano, Divine Violence: Spectacle, Psychosexuality, and Radical Christianity in the Argentine ‘‘Dirty War’’ (Boulder, Colo., 1992); and Frederick Nunn, ‘‘The South American Military and (Re)Democratization: Professional Thought and Self-Perception,’’ Journal of Inter-American Studies and World AVairs 37 (1995): 1, 7–10. The authors I examine here were trained in literary theory or anthropology. Graziano, Divine Violence, 41. Jennifer Schirmer, ‘‘The Claiming of Space and the Body Politic within NationalSecurity States,’’ in J. Boyarin, ed., Remapping Memory (Minneapolis, 1994), 191 (emphasis supplied). For a similar perspective, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War (Durham, N.C., 1997), 99–107, 122–38. Schirmer, ‘‘Claiming of Space.’’ Quoted in George E. Marcus, ed., Paranoia Within Reason (Chicago, 1999), 1. Andersen, Dossier Secreto, 265–66; Marguerite Feitlowitz, ‘‘Night and Fog in Argentina,’’ Salmagundi 94–95 (1992): 62–68.

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31. Raul David Vilarino, Yo sequestre´, mate´ y vi torturar en la escuela de la armada (Buenos Aires, 1984), 138; Silvio Waisbord, ‘‘Politics and Identity in the Argentine Army,’’ Latin American Research Review 26 (1991): 165. This autonomy is not a ubiquitous feature of modern torture. It has been absent, for instance, in the Iran of the Mullahs; Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions (Berkeley, 1999), 4 (noting that ‘‘clerical authorities . . . keep close tabs on the interrogators and invariably stop the torment once they have obtained the sought-after recantations’’). 32. Since Jews were ‘‘preferred,’’ the in uence of anti-Semitic ideology on targeting is apparent, but the perpetrators’ motives were also clearly pecuniary. 33. Ronald Dworkin, ‘‘Report from Hell,’’ New York Review of Books 33, 17 July 1986, 11, 12. 34. Abo´s, Poder, 88. 35. Ibid. 36. In discussions of the antisubversive campaign, this incident is described as ‘‘the night of the pencils.’’ 37. Elaine Scarry observes that such a lack of systematic interrogation is quite common in the modern history of torture; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York, 1985), 28–29. 38. Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘‘On the Fruitful Convergences of Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and Shifting Involvements: Re ections from the Recent Argentine Experience,’’ in A. Foxley, M. McPherson, and G. O’Donnell, eds., Development, Democracy, and the Art of Trespassing (Notre Dame, 1986), 249, 264; Malamud-Goti, Game Without End, 119–21. 39. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 107. 40. Nicolas Werth, ‘‘A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,’’ in The Black Book of Communism, Ste´phane Courtois et al., eds., (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 71–107, 184–202; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the Thirties (London, 1973), 385–90, 421–28. 41. O’Donnell, Que´ me importa, 23–24; Malamud-Goti, Game Without End, 152; Nancy Hollander, Love in a Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), 111; M. E. Aftilio´n et al., Que´ nos pasa a los argentinos? (Buenos Aires, 1985), 83–84. 42. Malamud-Goti, Game Without End, 117. Cognitive dissonance may explain such seemingly irrational beliefs. 43. Ibid., 108, 106. 44. Bruno Bettelheim, ‘‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,’’ Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38 (Oct. 1943): 417, 428; Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington, Ind., 1967), 14. 45. The same paradox has been observed by survivors of the Soviet gulag; GeoVrey Hosking, ‘‘Memory in a Totalitarian Society: The Case of the Soviet Union,’’ in Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (Oxford, 1989), 109. 46. Of course, Hebe de BonaŽ ni’s second telling of her childrens’ story may simply be a more candid acknowledgment of a truth that the military itself has always proclaimed. There may be little reason to give any more credence to her later acknowledgment than to her earlier disavowals, however. I am here simply proposing a possible interpretation of the change. 47. On such atrocity by connivance, not by speciŽ c orders, see Mark J. Osiel, Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War (New Brunswick, N.J., 1999), 187–

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48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

148

93. This decentralization would permit indulging their most lurid fantasies in treatment of the regime’s active opponents, before despatching them to their deaths, but killing very few others, among suspects detained for questioning. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 402. The reasons for these national diVerences have yet to be adequately explained by scholars. But see Anthony James Gill, Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (Chicago, 1998); Mark Osiel, ‘‘Church Politics in Latin America,’’ Dissent 30 (Winter 1983): 114. On the support oVered by the Catholic Church for resistance to military rule in Chile and Brazil, see Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil (Stanford, 1986); Thomas Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church (Cambridge, 1974); Brian Smith, T he Church and Politics in Chile (Princeton, 1982); Hugo Fruhling, ‘‘Resistance to Fear in Chile: the Experience of the Vicaria de la Solidaridad,’’ in Juan Corradi, Patricia F. Weiss, and Manuel Garreto´n, eds., Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (Berkeley, 1992), 121, 135. Gregorio Selser, El onganiato (Buenos Aires, 1986), 1:44–47, 93–99, 157–72; Guillermo O’Donnell, Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Argentina, 1966–1973, in Comparative Perspective (Berkeley, 1988), 55. On Juan Carlos Onganõ´a’s rule, see generally Robert Potash, The Army and Politics in Argentina, 1962–1973 (Stanford, 1996), 3:194–288. The Opus Dei is a worldwide network of conservative Catholic elites. Potash, Army and Politics, 225; Moyano, ‘‘The ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina,’’ 45, 69 (describing teaching materials used at the Air Force Academy). Leading writers among the Catholic far right included Leopoldo Lugones, Manuel Ga´lvez, Carlos and Federico Ibarguren, Matõ´as Sa´nchez Sorondo, Ernesto Palacio, Jose´ M. Rosa, Alejandro Bunge, and Patricio Randle. David Rock, personal communication with author, August 1995. David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina (Berkeley, 1993), 227. He oVers considerable evidence at 228–37. Julio Meinvielle was particularly voluble on the role of Jews in the cultural decline of the West in general and Argentina in particular. See, e.g., De la cabala al progresivismo (Buenos Aires, 1959); Meinvielle, El Judio en la historia (Buenos Aires, 1969). For similar views among the mutineers, see Rau´l Jassen, Seineld•´n: El eje´rcito traicionado, La patria vencida (Buenos Aires, 1989), 140, 320–30; Hugo Chumbita, Los carapintada (Buenos Aires, 1992), 171. The leading historian of Catholic nationalism in Argentina concludes that J. Bruno Genta, in particular, ‘‘became extremely in uential in the air force’’; David Rock, personal communication. On the in uential role of Catholic intellectuals within military circles, see Alain Rouquie´, Poder militar y sociedad pol•´tica en la Argentina, 1943– 1973 (Buenos Aires, 1983), 2:369–71. Theologians and their military followers stressed the permanent and unchanging character of Argentine ‘‘national being’’ and the consequent threat of any foreign ideas to national identity; J. Bruno Genta, Tres estudios (Buenos Aires, 1970), 274; J. Bruno Genta, Guerra contrarevolucionaria (Buenos Aires, 1965), 42, 248. On the centrality of these ideas to the most active antisubversive warriors, see Eduardo Barcesat, ‘‘Ser nacional, seguridad nacional, y excepcionalidad institutional,’’ in Salvador Lozada et al., eds., La ideolog•´a de la seguridad nacional (Buenos Aires, 1983), 61–79. For similar views among the mutineers, see Pablo Herna´ndez, Conversaciones con el Teniente Colonel Aldo Rico (Buenos Aires, 1989), 52, 81; Jassen, Seineld•´n, 140, 180–81. Genta, Tres estudios, 50–51, 65–66, 127–28; Julio Meinvielle, El Comunismo en la revolu-

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58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

cio´n anticristiana (Buenos Aires, 1961), 56–69, 109, 251. J. Bruno Genta, La opcio´n pol•´tica, (Buenos Aires, 1973), 79, 90–92, 98, 109. For similar views among the mutineers, see Peter Snow and Luigi Manzetti, Political Forces in Argentina, 3d ed. (Westport, Conn., 1993), 118. Genta, La opcio´n pol•´tica, 133 (contending that ‘‘liberal capitalism has, under the cover of the state’s neutrality, produced a monstrous accumulation of wealth, causing the rebellion of the proletariat’’). This denunciation can be found in Genta, La opcio´n pol•´tica, 94; see also the electoral program of Col. Aldo Rico, for the Modõ´n Party, proclaiming that ‘‘it is essential to free ourselves from strategic dependence signiŽ ed by our alignment with the United States. This tie shows that we are a subject country’’; La Prensa, 14 May 1995. The ‘‘hedonistic materialism’’ of the United States is referred to in J. Bruno Genta, ‘‘Misio´n de professionales militares,’’ in Tres estudios, 268; for similar views among the mutineers, see Jassen, Seineld•´n, 125; Chumbita, Los carapintada, 87. Genta, Guerra contrarevolucionaria, 134–40, 244. Genta, ‘‘Misio´n de professionales militares,’’ 260; see also Hodges, Argentina’s ‘‘Dirty War,’’ 167–70. For similar views among the mutineers, see Jassen, Seineld•´n, 214, 229, 233, 275, 297. This is the term employed to refer to a redirection of resources from industries producing popular consumer goods toward sectors focused on infrastructure and capital goods. Guillermo O’Donnell invoked the alleged need for such a reallocation of resources to explain earlier Argentine military coups d’e´tat. See his in uential study Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (Berkeley, 1973), 53–64. J. Bruno Genta, ‘‘La funcio´n militar,’’ in Tres estudios, 71–72; Genta, ‘‘Misio´n de professionales militares,’’ 108. Genta, ‘‘Misio´n de professionales militares,’’ 156. Lt. Col. Carlos Horacio Domõ´nguez, La nueva guerra y el nuevo derecho: Ensayo para una estrategia jur•´dica contrasubversiva (Buenos Aires, 1980); Gen. Osiris Villegas, Guerra revolucionaria comunista (Buenos Aires, 1977). Nor did the such abundant publications cease with the reestablishment of democratic constitutionalism. See, e.g., Lt. Col. Julio V. Carretto, La ideolog•´a y la nueva guerra (Buenos Aires, 1987). A prominent civilian press, Ediciones DePalma, also published books from similar perspectives. See, e.g., Luis A. Leoni Houssay, La conexio´ n internacional del terrorismo (Buenos Aires, 1980); Norberto Oscar Beladrich, El parlamento suicida (Buenos Aires, 1980); Antonio Petric, As•´ sangraba la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1980); Ismael G. Montoyo, Derechos humanos y terrorismo (Buenos Aires, 1980); Armando Alonso Pin˜ero, ed., Cro´ nica de la subversio´ n en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1980). References to, and lengthy exegeses of, Antonio Gramsci’s work may be found in the works of many military ideologists. See, e.g., Carretto, La ideolog•´a, 43–47. General Leopoldo Galtieri, quoted in Nunca Ma´s, 443, 474. Raul Alfonsõ´n, speech before delegates of the National Committee of the Union Civica Radical, 12 Jan. 1985, published in Alfons•´n: Discursos sobre el discurso (Buenos Aires, 1986), 22. El bimestre pol•´tico y econo´mico (6 Aug. 1987), 44. An in uential reading of Nazi ideology to this eVect is oVered by JeVrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). As Graziano observes, ‘‘A lthough one would suppose that technocratic discourse subordinating the Argentine constitution . . . would properly be based on the objectives of a political philosophy as manifest in a program of governance, one rather discovers

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71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

150

that the Process was founded on abstractions indexing the mythological preoccupation with a decline of Christian morals, of traditional values, and of dignity’’; Graziano, Divine Violence, 84. Maria de Lourdes M. Covre, A falha dos homens: Ana´lise do pensamento tecnocra´tico (Sa˜o Paulo, 1983); and Guido Mantega, A economia pol•´tica brasileira (Sa˜o Paulo, 1984). I found this to be true in my interviews with Argentine oYcers in 1985 and 1987. Genta disseminated his own and Meinvielle’s theology for Ž fteen years through his publication, Combate, as well as through Cabildo, the latter edited by Argentine followers of Jose´ Antonio Primo de Rivera. Genta also gave numerous talks to military audiences, devoting himself full-time for Ž fteen years to such eVorts. His son-in-law, Mario Camponnetto continued the campaign after Genta was murdered by ERP guerrillas in 1974. ‘‘Soon after,’’ Rock concludes, ‘‘the in uence of his doctrines reached its zenith’’; Authoritarian Argentina, 224. Other in uential priests who worked at proselytizing Catholic nationalist doctrine among the oYcer corps were Leonardo Castellini and Gustavo Franceschi. On their considerable in uence within the oYcer corps, beginning in the 1930s, see Hodges, Argentina’s ‘‘Dirty War,’’ 158; Rock, Authoritarian Argentina, xvii; Rouquie´, Poder militar, 349; Pablo Lacoste and Andres Kozel, eds., Militares y pol•´tica, 1983–1991 (Buenos Aires, 1992), 24–25 (quoting Lieutenant Colonel Polo, one of Aldo Rico’s most vocal supporters, on the in uence of these thinkers, particularly Genta, on the oYcer corps). On this, see Hodges, Argentina’s ‘‘Dirty War,’’ 160–69; Leonardo Senkman, ‘‘The Right and Civilian Regimes, 1955–1976,’’ in Sandra M. Deutsch and Ronald Dolkart, eds., The Argentine Right (Wilmington, Del., 1993), 128–32. Genta, Guerra contrarevolucionaria, 115. Emilio Fermin Mignone, Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of the Church and Dictatorship in Argentina, 1976–1983 (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1988), 4 (citing several bishops present during a statement to this eVect by Archbishop Tortolo). A priest, Marcial Castro Castillo, authored a defense of torture, widely circulated among the oYcer corps; Fuerzas Armadas, E´tica y represio´n (Buenos Aires, 1976), 147. Nunca Ma´s, 259–63; Andersen, Dossier secreto, 92–93; Mignone, Witness to the Truth, 14, 110–18. Adolfo Scilingo, El vuelo (Buenos Aires, 1995), cited in Horacio Verbitsky, ‘‘Time to Discuss the ‘Dirty War,’ ’’ World Press Review ( July 1995): 47. Raul Vilarino, in Tina Rosenberg, Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America (New York, 1991), 87. Horacio Zaratiegui, in Rosenberg, Children of Cain, 124. The military vicariate is a separate suborganization of the Argentine Church whose priests serve members of the armed forces. Julio Alberto Emmed, in Nunca Ma´s, 60. For vivid description of the activities of death squad members at one notorious center, see generally Miguel Bonasso, Recuerdo de la muerte (Buenos Aires, 1984). General Cristino Nicolaides, in Mignone, Witness to the Truth, 8. The chief bishop for the army preached to the oYcers that ‘‘The anti-guerrilla struggle is for the Argentine Republic, for its integrity, but for its altars as well. . . . This is a struggle to defend morality, human dignity, and ultimately a struggle to defend God. . . . Therefore I pray for divine protection over this war against subversion in which we are engaged’’; Bishop Victorio Bonamõ´n, La nacio´ n, 6 May 1976. See, e.g., the public statement of Cardinal Primate Juan Carlos Aramburu in Michael Burdick, ‘‘For God and the Fatherland: Religion and Politics in Argentina’’ (Ph.D.

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83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

88. 89.

90.

diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1991), 422. On the trial, see generally Sergio Ciancaglini and Martin Ganovsky, Nada ma´s que la verdad: El juicio a las juntas (Bueno Aires, 1995). Interviewed by La nacio´ n, 25 May 1985, in Mignone, Witness to the Truth, 61. The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Jean Kirkpatrick, was the best-known individual in this regard. On Argentina’s large grain exports to the Soviet Union, and the diplomatic implications of this close economic relationship, see, e.g., Aldo Ce´sar Vacs, Discreet Partners: Argentina and the USSR Since 1917 (Pittsburg, Pa., 1984); and Roberto Russell, ‘‘Argentina y la polõ´tica exterior del re´gimen autoritario, 1976–1983,’’ Estudios Internacionales 66 (April/June 1984). The Soviets’ dependence on Argentine grain and their close relation with the country’s military rulers in these years even led to Soviet pressure on Argentina’s Communist Party to moderate its criticism of military rule. Hence, Communist members of Argentina’s human rights community repeatedly sought to restrain its public denunciations of human rights abuses; Emilio Mignone, Derechos humanos y sociedad (Buenos Aires, 1994), 135. They diVer completely in this respect from the ‘‘ordinary men’’ of Christopher Browning’s police battalion, who stood very much to gain by denying their own possible anti-Semitism as a motive for obedience to orders requiring the killing of Jews; Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992). For critique of Browning here, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagan, Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 530–56. Lawyers, at least, will be more inclined to trust such ‘‘demeanor evidence’’ and to explanations based directly upon it. For a defense and explanation of the methods adopted here, see CliVord Geertz, ‘‘From the Native’s Point of View,’’ in Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan eds., Interpretive Social Science (Berkeley, 1979), 225. Elsa Tokar, in Rosenberg, Children of Cain, 97–98. For an in uential statement of this position, see Carlos Waisman, Reversal of Development: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their Structural Consequences (Princeton, 1987). See also David Pion-Berlin, ‘‘The National Security Doctrine, Military Threat Perception, and the ‘A nti-subversive Campaign’ in Argentina,’’ Comparative Political Studies 21 (1988): 382, 385 (referring to ‘‘overkill’’ by the military regime of its putative enemies). But, as Linz observes, though ‘‘the statements on the threat by the new rulers may have started by being self-serving rationalizations . . . in analyzing collective phenomena it should never be forgotten that if people deŽ ne situations as real they are real in their consequences . . . ultimately people believe their own propaganda’’; Juan J. Linz, ‘‘Types of Political Regimes and Respect for Human Rights: Historical and Cross-national Perspectives,’’ in A. Eide, ed., Human Rights in Perspective (Oxford, 1992), 202. This is largely because, as Gustavo Gorriti notes, ‘‘very little has been written about the mentality that prevailed in Latin American armies during the continent’s thirty years of internal war, about how inimical to civilian democracy, or even to civilian rule, it was’’; Gustavo Gorriti, ‘‘Battle Scars,’’ review of Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, by Jorge G. Castan˜eda, New Republic, 9 May 1994, 34, 35. See also Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, 1991), xi (noting that ‘‘the military has probably been the least studied of the factors involved’’ in recent democratization throughout Latin America). While whole libraries have been published in recent years on the feminist movements in the region as well as on more consequential groups, academicians—most of whom have

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91.

92.

93.

94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

99.

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been very sympathetic to radical movements in the region—have found little of interest to study in the minds of those they viewed as political dinosaurs consigned to extinction. As a result, we know very little about what was going on in the heads of the most powerful political actors in the region during the 1970s and early 1980s: the oYcers who seized and held power throughout the Southern Cone states in these years. For a rare exception, see Carina Perelli, ‘‘La percepcio´n de la amenaza y el pensamiento Pol•´tico de los militares in Ame´rica del Sur,’’ in Louis Goodman et al., eds., Los militares y la democracia (Montevideo, 1990). Several lawyers who represent human rights organizations and families of the disappeared continue to stress the centrality of this strategic doctrine to any explanation of the antisubversive campaign and its pattern of victimization. This is the view, for instance, of Octavio Carsen in a personal communication with the author on 1 Aug. 1996. See, e.g., Joseph Comblin, T he Church and the National Security State (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1979); Joseph Comblin, El poder militar en Ame´rica Latina: La ideolog•´a de seguridad nacional (Salamanca, 1978); Daniel Frontalini and Marõ´a Cristina Caiati, El mito de la guerra sucia (Buenos Aires, 1984). For this conclusion, I rely primarily on my interviews with several such oYcers, both active-duty and retired, during 1985 and 1987. But for condemnations of the U.S. approach to counterinsurgency warfare, see also Ramo´n Camps, ‘‘Apogeo y declinacio´n de la guerrilla en la Argentina,’’ La Prensa, Buenos Aires, 4 Jan. 1981, 2d. ed., 2. Nationalist oYcers were generally distrustful of any advice from a liberal capitalist democracy. Hence, for instance, ‘‘the anti-communism of the State Department was dismissed as superŽ cial, for America’s capitalist system and demoliberal ideology had, despite professed aims, indirectly contributed to the spread of subversion’’; Hodges, Argentina’s ‘‘Dirty War,’’ 169. Pion-Berlin, ‘‘National Security Doctrine,’’ 402–3. Contrary to the promptings of their U.S. teachers, Argentine oYcers ‘‘redeŽ ned the subversive threat to become a catchall for all enemies of the state,’’ and in so doing ‘‘retained less of the NSD than has been commonly thought’’; ibid. Genta, Tres estudios, 296. Ibid., 288. Genta, for instance, wrote that ‘‘the power of Communism is sustained by all of the followers and successors of the Anti-Christ: Judaism, Masonry, High Finance—that is, all of the governing forces within contemporary democracies’’; ibid., 286. On the similarities between Soviet and U.S. brands of materialism, and the resulting cooperation between the two superpowers, see J. Bruno Genta, La seguridad y el desarrollo: Reexiones sobre el terror en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1970) 110–11; J. Bruno Genta, Princ•´pios de la pol•´tica Cato´ lica (Buenos Aires, 1970), 67; Genta, Guerra contrarevolucionaria, 102. For similar views among the mutineers, see Jassen, Seineld•´n, 131, 193, 280; Chumbita, Los carapintada, 86. In this connection, the extensive debt owed by Catholic nationalist theologians to Marxian social theory will not be lost upon most readers. It is apparent in the theologians’ repeated references to the ‘‘proletarianization’’ of the working class and the resulting ever-mounting hostility of workers toward capitalist institutions, the ‘‘bourgeois’’ character of liberal democracy, the ‘‘petty bourgeois’’ nature of such modern virtues as tolerance, moderation, and ambition, security, and even ‘‘the dialectical process’’ by which each stage in a process of historical evolution sows the seeds of its own destruction, giving birth to the next such stage.

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100. Hodges, Argentina’s ‘‘Dirty War,’’ 61. 101. Both Aldo Rico and Muhamed Alõ´ Seineldõ´n, the two most in uential leaders of the mutineers, describe themselves as ‘‘fundamentalist’’ Catholic nationalists. 102. Why these particular theological ideas proved so well received by the oYcers who planned and implemented the antisubversive campaign is a separate question, beyond the scope of this article. Here, my purpose is simply to show that these theological ideas were in fact adopted and applied by the antisubversive warriors and their later supporters among the military mutineers. 103. Genta, Guerra contrarevolucionaria, 30. 104. The document attempts to ‘‘synthesize the struggle that has taken place since the dawn of the Christian era between ‘truth,’ or ‘God’s reign,’ and ‘error,’ or ‘evil’s reign.’ The document places historical events into two categories, depicted graphically by a vertical diagram that puts everything related to truth above the dividing line and everything related to error below it. Above the line are the Bible, the various councils called by the Catholic Church, scholasticism, the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Muslims, the Counter-Reformation, and the papal encyclicals. The document commends the excommunication of Martin Luther, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre [when an estimated 50,000 French Huguenots were killed by Catholic nationalists in Paris, on 24 Aug. 1572], and Pope Pius VI’s condemnation of the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. Below the line are found the heresies condemned by the early church as well as contemporary social, political, cultural, and religious movements. Everything having to do with the Renaissance is condemned because of its ‘‘gloriŽ cation of the profane.’’ De´tente is considered evil because it allows communist ideology to penetrate and corrupt noncommunist countries. The document also states that progressive religious thought ‘‘disŽ gures the church’s mission’’ and that the church is being inŽ ltrated by Marxism through the ‘‘Third World priests’ movement.’’ Freudianism is also below the line because of its emphasis on sexuality. The document ends by foreseeing the coming of total ‘‘chaos’’; Latin America Weekly Report, 20 Aug. 1987. The document was Ž rst published in the magazine El expreso. In an interview shortly thereafter, published in Pa´gina 12, Seineldõ´n expressly defended the methods employed in the antisubversive campaign, including torture. See also the analysis in Chumbita, Los carapintada, 267–73. Only declared Catholics were accepted as members of the mutineer movement, colloquially called the carapintadas. These oYcers, many of whom had served with special distinction in the Falklands/Malvinas con ict, ‘‘stood out not only as exceptional warriors within an already armed institution, but as devout (sometime extremist) Catholics within an already Catholic Community,’’ as one specialist observes; Deborah Norden, ‘‘Between Coups and Consolidation: Military Rebellion in Post-Authoritarian Argentina’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1992). 105. This chronology, with its focus on the role of the Jews, is derived from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 106. Brigadier Omar Domingo Rubens GraYgna, quoted in Abo´s, Poder, 40. 107. General Roberto E. Viola, 29 May 1979, quoted in ibid., 29. 108. On ‘‘the constitutive role of fantasy in the construction . . . of enemies,’’ see Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, 1993), 9; Robert Rieber, ed., The Psychology of War and Peace: The Image of the Enemy (New York, 1991), 16–19, 214. 109. This does not mean, of course, that whenever someone tells us that there is a war, we must accept the assertion or treat him or her in light of its legal implications. From

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110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120.

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the perspective of international law, for instance, if no state of armed con ict actually exists, then the killing of other people, including those the defendant considers as combatant, is simply murder. A legal state of ‘‘belligerency’’ did exist between Argentine guerrillas and the state for some period before the 1976 coup, at least in a few geographical areas, but this entails the duty to treat captured combatants as prisoners of war. Scholars diVer widely over whether the guerrillas maintained any serious operational capacity after that date. Compare Marõ´a Jose´ Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969–1979 (Berkeley, 1995), 93, with Andersen, Dossier Secreto, 162. If they did not, they were entitled to the legal rights of common criminals in domestic courts. But there is a more important general point here: we intellectuals are quick to dismiss any dominant imagery that we dislike as merely a ‘‘social construction’’—i.e., contingently imposed, politically dispensable, something that should not be confused with any inalterable ‘‘reality.’’ But we Ž nd it diYcult to concede the same reimaginative capacity to those whose views we abhor. Once we exhort people to ‘‘question reality,’’ we must live with the possibility that they may reach conclusions that we do not share. Osiris Villegas, ‘‘Estrategia integral de la lucha subversiva,’’ Revista Militar ( Jan.– April 1987): 11, 12. Juaquõ´n Morales Sola´, Asalto a la ilusio´ n (Buenos Aires, 1990), 146; Prudencio Garcõ´a, El drama de la autonom•´a militar (Madrid, 1993), 196, 217–22. Omar Lavieri, ‘‘AMIA: processaron a tres polõ´cias por la conexio´n local del atentado,’’ Clarin, 1 Aug. 1996. Several oYcers with whom I spoke in 1987 also emphasized the need to eliminate subversion not only in Argentina itself but throughout the region. They explained that the embers of rebellion could easily be fanned to active  ame again within Argentina by the inspiration of a successful revolution elsewhere in Latin America, as had occurred after such revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua. Particularly vehement on this matter were former President Gen. Roberto Levingston and Roberto Durrieau, former Assistant Justice Minister under military rule, and later defense counsel for General Videla. Author’s interviews, July 1987. Argentine oYcers were hence the Ž rst trainers and organizers of the Nicaraguan contras; Ariel C. Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977– 1984 (Athens, Ohio, 1997). Meinvielle, El comunismo, 86. Pion-Berlin, ‘‘National Security Doctrine,’’ 400. Ramo´n Camps, El poder en la sombra: El caso gravier (Buenos Aires, 1983), 205–6. Emilio Massera, in Genaro Arriagada, El pensamiento pol•´tico de los militares en la America Latina (Santiago, 1983), 175. The military’s struggle was ‘‘against a strange and cruel power, against an invasion that crossed the moral borders of our conscience’’; Emilio Massera, El camino a la democracia (Buenos Aires, 1979), 58. El Diario del Juicio, 10 Dec. 1985, 7. Jassen, Seineld•´n, 133. The term ‘‘useful idiots’’ is ubiquitous in the theology of the Catholic right and, correspondingly, in military writings during the antisubversive campaign. See, e.g., J. Bruno Genta, ‘‘Cristo y su iglesia,’’ in Tres estudios, 293. On the defensive political posture of Catholic nationalism in this regard, see Camps, El poder, 118. That such talk was no mere rhetorical posturing or post hoc breastbeating is clear from the fact that the strategic doctrine from which it was drawn had been well established in the war colleges and military academies many years before

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121. 122. 123. 126.

127. 128.

129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138.

139. 140.

the antisubversive campaign; Ernesto Lo´pez, Seguridad nacional y sedicio´ n militar (Buenos Aires, 1991), 156–91. Quoted in Fernando Reati, ‘‘Literatura Argentina de la ‘Guerra Sucia’: El paradigma de espacio invadido,’’ Texto Cr•´tico 15 ( July–Dec. 1988): 26, 33. Genta, Guerra contrarevolucionaria, 47. Ibid., 82. 124. Ibid., 80. 125. Ibid., 89. For instance, General Dõ´az Bessone stresses the centrality of intellectuals to successful revolutions. He cites several respectable scholarly and autobiographical accounts of the Argentine guerrilla movements for the conclusion that the vast majority of their members were university students, professors, intellectuals, and members of the liberal professions, most of whom grow up in middle- and upper-middle-class households; Ramo´n Genaro Dõ´az Bessone, Guerra revolucionaria en la Argentina, 1959–1978 (Buenos Aires, 1986), 105, 123. Such leading scholars as Guillermo O’Donnell, Peter Waldmann and Marõ´a Jose´ Moyano reach this conclusion. General Auel, in Chumbita, Los carapintada, 200. Armando Lambruschini, Dec. 1976, advocating linguistic study within military education (emphasis supplied), in Andre´s Avellanada, ‘‘The Process of Censorship and Censorship of the Proceso,’’ in David William Foster, ed., The Redemocratization of Argentine Culture, 1983 and Beyond (Tempe, Ariz., 1989), 24, 28. General and former President Roberto Levingston, author’s interview, 13 July 1987. For similar views among friends and family members of oYcers ‘‘killed in the Ž ght against subversion,’’ see Herna´n Lo´pez Echague, El enigma del General Bussi (Buenos Aires, 1991), 180. Col. Aldo Rico, in Herna´ndez, Conversaciones con Rico, 49. Quoted in Jassen, Seineld•´n, 172. Carretto, La ideolog•´a, 75–76. Ibid., 13. Carretto later became active in public support for the mutineers; Latin American Weekly Report, 29 March 1990, 5. Francisco Carcavallo, Assistant Secretary for Culture, Buenos Aires Province, quoted in Andres Avellandeda, Censura, Autoritarismo y Cultura: Argentina, 1960–1983 (Buenos Aires, 1986), 1:138. Quoted in El bimestre pol•´tico y econo´mico, 5 Nov. 1983, 44. New York Times, 6 Aug. 1976, 1. Rock, Authoritarian Argentina, 228 (observing that ‘‘no sector of the population suVered more’’ than the profession of psychiatry. In the view of the Catholic nationalists, the profession aimed ‘‘to destroy the Christian concept of the family’’; from Cabildo, quoted without citation in Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (New York, 1981), 130. Why the disappearances largely came to an end in early 1979 is indeed a crucial, still-debated question about the antisubversive campaign. Disappearances apparently dropped from 3,098 in 1977 to 969 in 1978 and to 181 in 1979. Kathryn Sikkink, ‘‘Human Rights, Principled Issue-Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America,’’ International Organization 47 (1993): 427. On reaction to such international pressure within one major Argentine detention center, see Uki Gon˜i, Judas: La verdadera historia de Alfredo Astiz (Buenos Aires, 1996), 109. Letter to author from Tulio Halperin Donhi, 17 Dec. 1996. In the last sentence, Halperin is suggesting that rivalry between factions of leading oYcers explains some of the selection of targeting for repression. His account is also commendably courageous, as it strays disconcertingly close at

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141.

142. 143. 144.

145. 146. 147.

148. 149.

150. 151. 152.

153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

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points to the military’s oYcial position on these questions. The most careful recent study of the guerrilla movement further concludes that the fact of widespread public endorsement of the dirty war explains why, ‘‘to this day relatives of disappeared persons attempt to hide the guerrilla identity of the victims’’; Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol, 98. O’Donnell, Bureaucratic Authoritarianism, 308–9 (describing survey data from the early 1970s ‘‘showing that the guerrillas . . . enjoyed the support, or at least the sympathy, of a remarkable proportion of the population . . . highest in cities [that were] epicenters of the most tumultuous and radicalized opposition’’). See also ibid., 323. Their purposes are more limited but perhaps more important: to establish that people were killed by the state in violation of their rights, i.e., to trial and other elementary due process. Moyano, ‘‘The ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina,’’ 66. In psychiatric training, for instance, one would often be assigned readings from Karl Marx and Louis Althusser as well as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and R. D. Laing. Hollander, Love in a Time of Hate, 139. Medical schools introduced many students to leftist activism. Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol, 89. Ibid., 93. It was often possible to avoid direct participation in the antisubversive campaign, and oYcers reluctant to accept explicit assignments requiring such participation were permitted to retire without loss of pension, according to Carlos Nino, Alfonsõ´n’s legal adviser; personal communication, Aug. 1987. Amery, Mind’s Limits, 36. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme (New York, 1996), 182. To similar eVect is Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp trans. William Templer (Princeton, 1997), 278 (arguing that ‘‘the camp provided the staV with a free Ž eld for untrammeled action. . . . The perpetrators were not subjects or underlings. They did more than they were required to do. They did what they were permitted to do—and they were permitted to do everything. . . . [The camp] owed its eVectiveness to the free despotism in the middle and lower echelons’’). Malamud-Goti, Game Without End, 126. Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, 31. ‘‘To practice cruelty is to enjoy the highest gratiŽ cation of the feeling of power’’; Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, no. 18, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter KauVman (New York, 1968). See, generally, James Miller, ‘‘Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty,’’ Political Theory 18 (1990): 470, 475. This remark was made at a military celebration attended by President Jorge Rafael Videla, in Emilio Mignone, Iglesia y dictadura (Buenos Aires, 1986), 190. Quoted in Graziano, Divine Violence, 203. This aspect of the motivation of the ordinary violent criminal is stressed by a leading criminologist; Jack Katz, The Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil (New York, 1988), 310–24. Raul Guglielminetti, for instance, continued to attempt abductions of businessmen for ransom, as he had done earlier under military auspices; Horacio Verbitsky, Civiles y militares (Buenos Aires, 1987), 65. General Videla, head of the Ž rst junta, and Captain Astiz, for instance, are universally mentioned in this regard; James Neilson, El Žn de la qu•´mera (Buenos Aires, 1991), 225.

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158. Andres Fontana, Decision-Making in a Military Corporation (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1991), 1–28. 159. Andersen, Dossier secreto, 282. 160. Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances ( Philadelphia, 1990), 160; Sikkink, ‘‘Human Rights,’’ 400. 161. This was the view, for instance, of Nino, Alfonsõ´n’s legal adviser, interview, Aug. 1987. See also Carlos Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven, 1996), 60 (arguing that ‘‘international opposition to the human rights abuses was quite eVective in attenuating repression after 1979’’). On U.S. blocking of bilateral aid and multilateral lending to Argentina from late 1977, see Alison Brysk, ‘‘From Above and Below: Social Movements, the International System, and Human Rights in Argentina,’’ Comparative Political Studies 26 (1993): 259, 269. 162. Fontana, Decision-Making, 1–28. 163. An alternative hypothesis is that Videla and his faction were simply outmaneuvered by the more radical faction, a possibility suggested by Col. Horacio Ballestar; author’s interview, July 1987. 164. Nonetheless, the importance of the antisubversive campaign to the oYcer corps as a whole ensured that those who took prominent part in its implementation received particularly choice assignments and were accorded greater in uence than others; Fontana, Decision-Making, 99; Gustavo Druetta, ‘‘Guerra polõ´tica y sociedad en la ideologõ´a de la corporacio´n militar Argentina,’’ Cr•´tica y Utop•´a 10/11 (Nov. 1983): 105. This exempliŽ es a phenomenon common to most military con icts: those oYcers who distinguish themselves in combat enjoy a meteoric rise in position and general in uence. 165. Malamud-Goti, Game Without End, 72–99, appears to hold this view of the antisubversive warriors. The clinical evidence necessary to assess it satisfactorily is not available to us, however. 166. As one specialist observes, ‘‘For these people, miraculously preserved in the spiritual atmosphere of 1937, Communism, Zionism, labor unions, free love, and Hollywood Ž lms are all of a piece, and nothing which has happened in the last two decades, not even the international campaign against Israel orchestrated by the Communist bloc, has attracted their notice. These are the people into whose hands Timerman had the misfortune to fall’’; Mark FalcoV, ‘‘The Timerman Case,’’ in Howard Wiarda, et al., eds., Human Rights and U.S. Human Rights Policy (Washington, D.C., 1982), 72. 167. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1962), 253. On the hostility of many Argentine oYcers to this idea of due obedience, and their acceptance of greater responsibility for their actions, see Chumbita, Los carapintada, 191. 168. Local rights groups in Argentina sometimes rightly stressed the centrality of ultramontane Catholic theology as a central factor in the dirty war. See, e.g., Comisio´n Argentina pro Derechos Humanos, Argentina: Proceso al genocidio (Madrid, 1977), 119 (observing that ‘‘this paranoid conception of reality is present [in the words of ] . . . the majority of those involved in state repression . . . including public declarations by oYcials and chiefs of Argentina’s Armed Forces’’). 169. These several factors, when recognized at all by macrosociology as causally signiŽ cant, tend to get lumped indiscriminately as ‘‘agency,’’ then contrasted with something called ‘‘structure.’’ Through the catchall of agency, we hope to impose some comforting conceptual order—if only by the waiving of this verbal talisman—upon an otherwise admittedly jarring and fragmented nonorder. ‘‘By this ordering procedure,’’

Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War

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157

notes an anthropologist, ‘‘the analyst . . . [is] still, so to speak, on top of things, understanding, taming, coping if not dealing with the horror’’; Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study of Terror and Healing (Chicago, 1986), 51. 170. Martin Kramer, ‘‘The Moral Logic of Hizballah,’’ in Walter Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind (Washington, D.C., 1998), 131. 171. Foster, preface to Redemocratization of Argentine Culture, 12.

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