The use of language in Argentina's dirty war

        In an effort to eliminate 'Marxist subversives' from its own citizenry, the Dirty War in Argentina was extremely verbal. As Admiral Emilio Massera stated: “Unfaithful to their meanings, words perturb our powers to reason.” For Massera and others involved in the Argentine dictatorship, a society in need of purification had to unmask words and return them to their essence to make them faithful again. Thus from the moment of the coup, a constant torrent of speeches and proclamations were made public and the newspaper, radio and television were flooded with messages.

       The regime’s rhetoric was like all authoritarian discourse: it had an obsession with the enemy and  it included exaggerated abstraction and messianic slogans founded on an 'absolute truth.' It drew on a reservoir of beliefs, phobias and rhetoric that existed in Argentine politics. Echoes varying from the Spanish inquisition and Opus Dei to the Nazis and French war in Algeria resonated through the rhetorical exercises of the country’s military junta. For instance, the notion that vast numbers of people should simply disappear originated with the Nazis. Desaparecido was coined by the Argentine military as a way of denying the kidnapping, torture and murder of thousands of citizens. A desaparecido became used to identify someone either living or dead but absent forever. Moreover, traditional values were twisted inside out. Codes of decency and domestic comforts were translated into instruments of physical and psychic torment. Kinship was defined by citizenship and only authentic Argentines could be part of the national family and otherness became a broad term used to define any minority that was not considered Argentine by the regime. Normalization, defined as a return to bourgeoisie values, was constructed to legitimize the killing of prisoners from the laboring classes who could not be “ideologically normalized” (p.65).