Burdick-Will Thesis

Unresolved debates over memory and history: La Nación and the evolving portrayals of the last dictatorship in Argentina Alexis Burdick-Will Latin American Studies Honors Thesis May 2013 Steven Volk, Thesis Advisor 1 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Introduction: La Nación and the Ongoing Legacy of the 1976 Dictatorship in Argentina 4 Chapter 1: History of Argentina and Transitional Justice (leading up to and) after the Return to Democracy in 1983 24 Chapter 2: The “Age of Impunity” - Issues of Justice, Amnesty, and Memory 60 Chapter 3: Prisoners of the past: Argentina’s inability to focus on the future 81 Conclusion: The Memory Debates in Argentina as a Continuation of Sarmiento’s Civilization and Barbarism 117 Bibliography 124 Appendix: Editorial 1985 130 Editorial 1990 136 Editorial 1998 141 Editorial 2004 144 Editorial 2005 148 Editorial 2011 153 2 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the collaboration and guidance of many others and I would like to thank everyone who has helped me out along the way. More than anyone else, Professor Steve Volk has helped me tremendously over the past year and throughout my time at Oberlin. His classes, “Latin American History: Nation and State Since Independence” and “Dirty Wars and Democracy” convinced me to focus my academic path on Latin America, especially in issues of collective violence and memory. Without his guidance and endless advice on how to frame my discussion of La Nación, this thesis would have been impossible. Thank you for your patience, for reading so many drafts, and for pushing my analysis to more profound level. I am also very grateful to a number of other professors who have improved my understanding of the complex history, politics, and culture of Latin America. Claire Solomon, Sebastiaan Faber, Kristina Mani, and Patrick O’Connor have all had an impact on my academic development, helping me make connections between classes and themes in Latin America. With their classes I was able to study Latin America from multiple disciplines and angles so as to create a deeper understanding of the region. All of their instruction has helped me with the development of this thesis and with the interpretation and analysis of the issues presented by La Nación. Finally, I want to thank my family and all of my friends who helped me out by reading draft after draft and for keeping me sane throughout my last two semesters at Oberlin College! Thank you for never getting tired of my stories about Argentina and for your constant encouragement and support! 3 Introduction: La Nación and the Ongoing Legacy of the 1976 Dictatorship in Argentina The inspiration for this thesis came to me during my time abroad in Buenos Aires. I had just finished up my semester in December 2011 and began noticing enormous billboards all along the length of Avenida Nueve de Julio, the widest avenue in Buenos Aires (and in the world, for that matter). The billboards were a memorial to the economic crisis and ensuing riots that took place ten years before, resulting in the deaths of 33 people.1 New graffiti also marked the Avenida de Mayo, the traditional route for demonstrations and protests. The message of both the billboards and the graffiti was the same: ten years after the economic collapse and thirty-five years after the beginning of the dictatorship, the same political powers were still in place and the legacy of the dictatorship remained unchallenged. Despite the demands that the entire government leave (“que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo,”), the political structures in Argentina had remained relatively unchanged over a long period of time. Upon seeing these messages, I began to wonder what other legacies of the dictatorship remained. I decided that I wanted to explore the intricacies of memory debates in Argentina and found that the best ways to do so would be to look at one of the main sources where memories come together to attempt to create history: the newspapers of Argentina. I chose to focus on La Nación in part because it was the narrative of the dictatorship with which I was least familiar. Over the course of my studies and my time in Argentina, I primarily learned about the dictatorship from more liberal perspectives, from people who readily assigned responsibility to the state and did not think of the dictatorship as a period of salvation. 1 Colin M. MacLachlan, Argentina: What went wrong? (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 172. 4 Thirty years after the transition to democracy, the questions of how to memorialize and interpret the events of the last dictatorship still linger, visibly affecting Argentine society. Although the coup that took place on March 24, 1976, overthrowing the weak government of Isabel Martínez de Perón, was neither unexpected nor unwelcome, the long and brutal dictatorship that followed was something completely new. Over the course of the twentieth century, Argentina had experienced frequent coups and military-assisted transitions of power. Between 1930 and 1976, there were nine military coups, some more extreme than others, but all a disruption to democracy.2 The coup that overthrew Hipólito Yrigoyen in 1930 demonstrated a crisis of liberal democracy and ideology within Argentina that would remain unresolved at the time of the 1976 takeover.3 More often than not, military rule was used to stabilize economic and political structures from the incompetence of civilian governments; often intervention resulted from inter-elite conflicts pitting the long-powerful rural oligarchs against a rising industrial class. In any case, many people in Argentina thought that the military would follow this same pattern in 1976, handing back control to civilians within a few years.4 Due to the intense political and economic chaos as well as the ideological polarization present in in the country during the 1970s, many Argentines were grateful that the military had stepped in to provide relief and desperately needed stability.5 While support for military intervention was not universal, it was widely understood as 2 Brian Loveman, For La Patria (Wilmington: SR Publishers, 1999), 64. ; Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 3 Jorge Nallim, Transformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930-1955 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2012), 35. Some of these internal conflicts began before Argentina was even a fully consolidated nation and are visible even today. These issues will be explored in more detail in later chapters of this thesis. 4 Colin M. MacLachlan, Argentina: What went wrong? (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 146. 5 Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics,(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), 68. 5 a necessary, almost natural occurrence in context of 20th century Argentine politics. However, the dictatorship that emerged from the crisis of the early 1970s and which continued in power until 1983 set about on its own, unique path, intent on transforming the entire nation. In the process, it delivered levels of repression that few, if any, Argentines (or international observers) foresaw or could have imagined. The regime functioned by cultivating a culture of fear that tore apart families, destroyed communal trust, and turned neighbors against one another. Employing organic metaphors, the dictatorship told Argentines that the country’s very survival depended on their being good citizens, and that meant looking the other way, not interfering with the work of the government. Characteristically, the regime took on the all-encompassing name of Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process) or “Proceso” for short.6 The culture of fear and mistrust led many Argentines to assume that if a neighbor or friend had been kidnapped, this must have been for a legitimate reason. Today, the legacies of the lives that were ruptured by the extreme violence and state terrorism of the dictatorship, as well as those who continue to believe the military was justified in its actions, shape the memory debates in Argentina as the nation struggles to come to terms with its past. As I have noted, the level of violence employed during the dictatorship reached previously unseen heights. The military hoped to eliminate every remnant of subversive ideology and political dissent and to do so, they tortured and “disappeared” close to 30,000 people 6 Feitlowitz, 34. See, as well, Jaime Malamud-Goti, Game without End: State Terror and the Politics of Justice (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 1996 and Thomas C. Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights (Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield), 2007. 6 between 1976 and 1983.7 Argentina had the sad distinction of introducing the concept of “disappearing” as a transitive verb; it refers the military’s practice of kidnapping, murdering, and disposing of an individual so that the body was never found and there would be no official record of the occurrence.8 Despite efforts on the part of family members, human rights organizations, and lawyers, the dictatorship never released any information on the whereabouts or fate of these individuals. Often the military would completely deny any record of their arrest or detention. Members of the military went so far as to suggest that missing individuals were still alive and had secretly gone into exile. Even today, thirty years after the transition to democracy many Argentines still have no idea what exactly happened to their friends and family members.9 The greatest irony of the dictatorship is that when the juntas’ leaders, desperately trying to distract the nation from an impending economic collapse and raise their own public support, went to war against Britain for control of the Malvinas (Falklands) Islands, the military turned out to be unprepared and grossly incompetent.

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