Argentina's "Dirty War" : An Intellectual Biography

407 Pages·1991·43.926 MB·English

by  Donald C. Hodges

ARGENTINA'S "DIRTY WAR
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Argentina's "Dirty War"
An Intellectual Biography
by Donald C. Hodges
*V* UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN
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Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition, 1991
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this
work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas
Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hodges, Donald Clark, 1923-
Argentina's "dirty war" : an intellectual biography / by Donald C.
Hodges. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-292-70423-2 (cloth)
1. Argentina—Politics and government—1955-1983. 2. Argentina—
Politics and government—1983- 3. Government, Resistance to—
Argentina—History—20th century. 4. Argentina—Military policy.
5. Violence—Argentina—History—20th century. I. Title.
F2849.2.H63 1991
982.06—dc20 90-44074
CIP
ISBN 978-0-292-77686-9 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-77689-0 (individual e-book)
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To Abraham Guillen
anarchist, communist, teacher, friend
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Contents
PREFACE ix
LIST OF ACRONYMS XV
i. The Argentine Question i
2. The Military Era 20
3. The Peronist Phenomenon 47
4. The Revolutionary War 87
5. Battleground of World War III 124
6. The Defense of Western Civilization 146
7. The Military's "Final Solution" 172
8. Resistance to the Military Process 195
9. The Final Humiliation 253
Conclusion 282
Appendix: Prison Interview with Mario Firmenich 287
NOTES 297
BIBLIOGRAPHY 329
INDEX 353
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Preface
THE "DIRTY WAR" of 1975 -1978 was of special significance in Argen
tine national life as it brought to a head social tensions that had
been accumulating since the launching of the military era by Ar
gentina's first successful coup of the century in September 1930.
As early as December 1924, Argentina's poet laureate, Leopoldo
Lugones, heralded the coming "Hour of the Sword," when the mili
tary would begin its sixty-year stint of intermittent interventions in
public affairs.
Although popular resistance to military intervention did not ac
quire momentum until the September 1955 coup, since then it has
continued to respond to military pressures under civilian as well as
praetorian governments. More recently, this continuing resistance
went beyond merely reacting to praetorianism and took initiatives
of its own. The result was not only a revolutionary war to which the
dirty war responded, but also the revival of subversion after the re
turn to democracy in 1983.
A microcosm of international politics, Argentina has experienced
domestically the hostilities that citizens of other states experience
mainly in the area of foreign relations. More than any other nation,
since World War II it has been a battleground of ideas competing
for supremacy—liberalism, democracy, socialism, communism, fas
cism, and the social teachings of the Catholic church—ideologies
contributing to a climate of social and political chaos. In Argentina
their encounter reached a pitch of violence unsurpassed in the hemi
sphere. Argentina can boast of the two largest, best-organized, and
best-financed urban guerrilla formations on record—the Ejercito
Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), and the Montoneros. The response
to their revolutionary war was also record-breaking—the military's
dirty war, a revival of the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, and
the most systematic form of state terrorism in the New World.
The dirty war had a covert as well as a declared objective. Publicly,
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x Preface
it was initiated by a constitutional government that authorized the
armed forces to use any and every means to eradicate armed subver
sion. Secretly, it was a link in a chain leading to the replacement
of the constitutional government by a military regime having for
its immediate goals the reversal of established economic policies,
the permanent crippling of the majoritarian populist party, and the
dismantling of organized labor and the protective mantle of social
legislation.
The dirty war became the springboard to the armed forces' Process
of National Reorganization, popularly known as the Military Pro
cess (1976-1982). The assignment of executive powers to the mili
tary in a national emergency whetted the generals' appetite for a
still-larger share of responsibility in the nation's affairs. With their
forces mobilized against subversives, they also turned against those
they held responsible for subversion. Thus while the constitutional
government shifted its responsibility for military repression onto
the guerrillas, the armed forces blamed the government for the coup
that toppled it in March 1976.
Although ostensibly limited to the elimination of Argentina's
guerrilla organizations, the dirty war also targeted unarmed subver
sives. Thus its ramifications extended to the military's "disap
pearance" of political undesirables and to the crackdown on labor
militancy. The hidden agenda of the dirty war aimed at extending it
to the factory floor, universities, political parties, and the rest of Ar
gentine society. Its final objective was to annihilate the rear guard of
subversion, although the armed forces were initially authorized to
eliminate only the vanguard.
Toward this end the Military Process fostered a climate of gener
alized terror that covered a wide range of persons linked to the guer
rillas, such as family members, friends, and associates. While its
tentacles reached out to embrace virtually everyone, they were es
pecially felt by those professions considered subversive because of
the level of the enemy's infiltration, mainly trade union organizers,
teachers, lawyers, journalists, and psychiatrists. With the military's
defeat of the guerrillas, the dirty war supposedly came to an end. In
fact, it was turned over to the intelligence services and shifted to the
political plane.
The military rebellions under the civilian government of Pres.
Raul Alfonsin (1983-1989) had as one of their purposes the vindica
tion of the "antisubversive struggle"—a euphemism for the dirty
war. Those rebellions testified to the armed forces' continued per
ception of their struggle as both licit and moral. For professional sol
diers it was not the shameful episode that other sectors of Argentine
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