The Spoils of War: Accounting for the Missing Children of Argentina's "Dirty War"
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ProQuest Information and Leaming 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 ( The Spoils of War: Accounting for the Missing Children of Argentina's "Dirty War" Ari Gandsman Department of Anthropology McGiII University, Montreal Submitted 10/2001 A thesis submitled to the Faculty of Graduale Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Masfer's. l CAriel Edward Gandsman 2001 National UbraJy 8tIIioIhèque natiOnale 1+1 of Canada du canada Acquisitions and AcquiIitiona et Bibliographie Services seNiees bibliographiques 315 WeIingIDn sar.t ......."......., 0Bawa ON K1A 0N4 -aa... ON K1A 0N4 c..a CIMda The author bas granted a non L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence aIlowing the exclusive pennettant à la Natioual Libnuy ofCanada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distnbute or sen reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies ofthis thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur fmmat électronique. The author retains ownersbip ofthe L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extraets ftom il Ni la thèse Di des extraits substantiels may he printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the autbor's ou autrement reproduits sans son penD1SS1on. autorisation. 0-612-75228-3 Canadl • Abstract (English) During the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976 -1983),30,000 civilians disappeared. Most of these people were taken by the military to clandestine prisons where they were tortured and killed. The children of these victims were also seized, and pregnant women were kept alive long enough to give birth. An estimated five hundred infants and young children of the disappeared were given for adoption to highly connected families. This thesis consists of a historical background of these events and then offers a series of explanations as to why the military did this. Abstract (French) Pendant la dictature militaire en Argentine (1976.1983),30.000 civils ont • disparu. La majorité de ces personnes a été emmenée par les militaires aux prisons clandestines où elles ont été torturées et détruites. Les enfants de ces victimes ont été également arrêtés, et des femmes enceintes ont été maintenues vivantes assez longtemps pour donner naissance à leur enfant. On estime que cinq cent bébés et jeunes enfants des disparu ont été donnés en adoption a des familles hautement connectées avec la junte. Cette thèse commence par présenter un historique de ces événements puis propose une série d'explications quant aux motifs qui ont amené les militaires à commettre ces actes. • 2 • Acknowledgements Foremost, 1would like to thank my supervisor Allan Young for his wisdom and guidance. Ellen Corin provided invaluable feedback on my initial draft. From my arrivai at McGiII, Kristin Norget gave me extremely helpful advice and encouragement. 1also greatly benefited from the support and insights of Margaret Lock and John Galaty. 1 would like to thank the rest of the Department of Anthropology. Rose Marie Stano helped me navigate through the bureaucratie web. Without her assistance, 1would have been lost a long time ago. 1would like to thank the graduate students at McGiII. 1would Iike to single out Stephanie Lloyd, my office mate, with whom 1went through the seemingly interminable rewriting process this summer. Without our frequent coffee breaks, we both would have • undoubtedly finished two months earlier. 1would al50 like ta acknowledge Mary K. Smith, Dominique Behague, Janalyn Prest, Yasir Kahn, Martha Poon, Melanie Rock, Jennifer Cuffe, Caroline Tait, Mary Ellen Macdonald, Janet Childerhouse, and Ajay Gandhi. Without the support and encouragement of my parents, 1would not have made it this far. Last but certainly not least, 1would fike to thank the thieves that broke into my apartment this summer. They may have stolen most of my compact dises but they left my laptop, without which 1would have had the utmost difficufty completing this thesis. • 3 Table of Contents • Preface: Anthropology and Violence 5 Introduction: Starting Backwards: The Weekly Marches 13 Aceounting for the Missing Children 16 Baek to the Beginning: A Researeh Question 21 PART 1: Through the Past Oarkly 23 It Takes Two ta Tango: The Myth of the lDirty War' 27 The PoUtieal Eeonomy of Terror 31 CoId War Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Global Circulation of Torture 33 nln Defense of Western, Christian tradition." - the Dirty War Ideology 35 The Meaning of Disappearance - The Reshaping of Reality 39 The Treatment of Pregnant Women 46 The Laeuna 47 • Witnessing and Testimony 51 PART Il: Explanations 57 The Role of the Military 60 Disappearance and the National Body - the Medicalization of Subversion 63 Sacrificial Lambs and Idealized Mothers 65 Argentina and Race 69 Political Modemism 72 The Uncertainty of Being Argentine 75 ln Place of a Conclusion 82 Bibliography 84 • 4 • Anthropology and Violence Violence is a ubiquitous element of the tribal and traditional societies on which anthropologists concentrated their attention during the first century of their discipline. Yet violence is absent from most of the early anthropologicalliterature. When it was discussed. it was generally depersonalized and viewed as a tacit element of cultural pradiees such as feuds. witcheraft, initiation rites and warfare. Many eany anthropologists identified feuds as the predominant form of violence. ln The Andaman Islanders, Radcliffe-Brown deseribes violence this way where "the whole art of fighting was ta come upon your enemies by surprise, kil! one or two of them and then retreat."(Radcliffe-Brown 1932:85) ln his summary of the anthropologieal • Iiterature on feuds based on ethnographie evidenee from Mediterranean and Middle East cultures, Jacob Black-Michaud argues that what had been identified as a feud "yields a bewildering variety of interpretations, ranging from individual aets of lethal retaliation for homicide. injury or insult, ta repeated acts of full seale aggression between large ethnie groups whose adult male population may number several thousand strong."(Black-Michaud 1975:1) 50 the word "teud," as it is generally employed by anthropologists, would seem to subsume numerous different types of violent actions in one general term. Like feud. witchcraft also represented a locus of violence in the conventional representation of tribal and traditional societies. The classic definition of witchcraft in the anthropologieal Iiterature is that it is "the covert use of mystical forms of aggression by human agents."(Goody 1970:207) Writing about witchcraft among the Azande. Mary • Douglas describes how "every death was (said to bel caused either by witehcraft or by 5 vengeance magic against the guilty witch."(Douglas 1970:XVI) Individuals may resort to witchcraft accusations as a weapon of attacking another persen. The accuser can then • become a victim ot physical or muai violence as a reprisaI. Earty anthropologists showed no interest in violence as a thing-in-itself nor did they attempt to suggest what categories of behavior constituted violence. that is, whether it was Iimited to the infliction of lethal force, injury, and pain, or whether it might also include psychological violence (e.g. threats, coercion) and loss or damage to property. This lack of anthropological interest in violence as an object of inquiry can be traced to the limitations of the dominant theoretical perspective of this period. Functionalism, the reigning anthropologieal paradigm, located social life in the "ethnographie present," Le. time out of time (Fabian 1983). Further, these ethnographies were often normative aecounts of behavior, from which confliet, coercion and resistance are either absent or deemphasized. The description of warfare in Raymond Firth's We, the Tikopia is an example of • writing in this tradition. According to Firth, war functioned as one of several possible "mechanisms of population control" that could also include celibacy, "coitus interruptus sex gratification," infanticide or sea-voyaging. Of these options, war was a "Iast resort" to be utilized only in the most severe cases to drive out a section of people to ensure social stability. Firth acknowledges that, at the time of his writing, European contact and fear of the colonial govemment would prohibit this from occurring. (Firth 1936) Reeently. the absence of the European colonial presence trom the "ethnographie present" has become one of the major critiques of functionalism. (Asad 1973; Fabian 1983) This monopolization of violence in the hands of the colonial powers was a reason why anthropologists could ignore violence sinee the colonial presence itself was largely • dtsregarded. The colonial context was the reason most functionafist anthropologists 6 were able to do research among a specifie community. It was also a reason why violence could not be addressed in their work. Endogenous violence was relatively rare • since the colonial powers had a policy of suppressing it in the interest of an orderly civil administration and economic development along imperiallines.