Reading on Argentina

       Modernization and Military Coups attempts to explain dictatorial relapse in Argentina after 1955. It suggests that authoritarianism develops out of a chronic governability crisis that encourages actors, whether in power or in opposition, to expropriate and centralize control as a means to cope with dire circumstances. In Argentina, the armed forces have a long-standing tradition of intense participation in national politics because past governments have failed to guarantee order and authority, raise and stabilize rates of economic growth, diminish inflation and carry out other measures required for development (p.417). Further, as high capacity states have greater susceptibility to de-democratization (as has been argued by Charles Tilly etc.), Argentina in the context of rapid modernization and weak institutional mediations was vulnerable to this highly professionalized military.

       The passage from Artificial Respiration is a discussion of state violence and censorship though an allegory involving a writer who sets out in search of his uncle who has ‘disappeared.’ The reader is led to consider Argentine literature and identity and its relation to Europe. The cultural crossings between Argentina and Europe inform the way history, politics and memory are represented through text. This essentially revolves around the tension between the two concepts of civilization and barbarism – civilization as historically bound to the European model of progress and to what barbarism has historically stood in opposition to (as understood by the Argentine political elite).

       The Madwomen at the Plaza de Mayo is about the collective protest of suffering mothers whose children had gone missing during the Argentine dictatorship. The story begins with the voice of the state. This part is full of formal and legal terms but essentially it maintains that the state denied the mothers’ petition for Habeas Corpus (a basic judicial right). Following is an account from a mother, which in opposition to the discourse of the state is informal, intimate and nonpolitical. The mothers are not activists but ordinary women (motherhood as a natural instinct that is apolitical) and so they cannot be seen as conspirators against the state. Further, respect for mothers is also a respect for tradition and conservative institution – the same values upon which the dictatorship justified its actions. Thus, the regime found it more difficult to repress these mothers as it had with other points of oppression.

       In a State of Memory addresses the deformation of the Argentine historical memory caused by the military dictatorship. This is done through the examination of the distortions and dislocations that occur both during exile and upon return from exile - not only for those who have been exiled but also for the flow of life for the entire nation. The author describes the violence of separation from one’s homeland as a sensation of nakedness (a feeling of statelessness). 

       Corpses is a poem that explores the intervening spaces of language as a place where those who have disappeared can be located. The poem is complex as it enters areas of dialogue where there is no clear meaning and it seems as if nothing is being expressed and all that remains is violent facts.

        War in the South Atlantic is a collection of testimonies of officers and drafted soldiers who fought under the Argentine dictatorship against the British for the Malvinas. These testimonies show that many soldiers, while holding a sense of heroism, also felt guilt once the war was over. Many soldiers, particularly amongst the lower ranks, were unaware of the extent of the abuses carried out by the dictatorship against its own citizens (secrecy among the ranks) or had a lack of agency in participating in the dictatorship. When we hear of human rights abuses we often develop a sense of inhumanness towards the perpetrator; however, by reading the accounts of those who helped carry out these abuses the reader finds that it is more complicated than this.