Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War

1. Dictatorship, Media, and Message

Dictatorship, Media, and Message There is no denying that democratic rule in Argentina after 1983 marked a break with authoritarian rule. Just over half of the voters chose Raúl Alfonsín’s Radical Civic Union party in an election that fielded over fifteen candidates. The election demonstrated that democratic institutions in Argentina had a strength that military rule could never muster. Even so, President Raúl Alfonsín found it difficult to shake or resolve the stain caused by the dictatorship’s abuse of human rights. The military came to power because it made fanciful promises that Argentina would no longer be the underdeveloped, economically troubled nation of the past. Under military tutelage and a prompt return to democracy, it would become a country that participated fully in an international system that would increase material consumption in a capitalist economy. The “new” Argentina , the military said, would quickly produce victories over poverty, political instability, and economic uncertainty.1 1 Dictatorship, Media, and Message · 9 The dictatorship offered a violent ideological and cultural break from what many officers viewed as perpetually debilitating elements of Argentine identity. The prime villain, so the military narrative went, was peronismo . During his first two terms as president (1946–1955), Juan Perón and his wife, Evita, had spearheaded dramatic social change by promoting the strength of trade unions, legislating benefits that included guaranteed paid vacations and rights for single mothers, and attacking some wealthy Argentines and their institutions, albeit in a haphazard way. At the same time, a Peronist cultural revolution took place that led to the advancement of working people of color from Argentina’s interior provinces in a variety of ways and in many sectors of society.2 Argentines have most closely identified with two key issues vis-àvis the dictatorship: the country’s internal war on civilians and radical changes in economic policies that helped undermine peronista social, political, and economic legacies. Military leaders sought a return to what they imagined as a lost Argentine identity founded on social discipline, hard work, and sharp class and gender hierarchies that placed women, for example, in subservient, domestic roles. Their foil was Perón, whom they blamed for social turmoil and much of Argentina’s ills. The dictatorship that came into power after March 1976 was not the first to react with alarm to Peronist Argentina. Indeed, military views were not an isolated response to social change. Journalist Graciela Mochkofsky has written about how the white middle class had rejected what Perón represented fourteen years before the 1976 coup d’état. For example, in 1962, Jacobo Timerman launched his news magazine Primera Plana, which attracted a broad readership that was eager for European- and American-style modernization and anxious to show themselves “finally free of Evita, blacks (cabecitas negras), and vulgar Peronism.”3 The military went much further : It associated Peronism with a decadent national identity. In their efforts to break down barriers to the free flow of capital and goods across the nation’s borders, high-ranking officers reviled Peronist protectionist economic nationalism. They fought the trappings of the Peronist social welfare state and the power of organized labor. More chillingly, they associated myriad changes in the 1960s with Peronism, from the rise of the revolutionary left to avant-garde art and literature to the independence that birth control brought women to an ambiguously defined “moral decline.”4 10 · Consent of the Damned Print and other media sources reveal middle-class, urban sensibilities, prejudices, and ideals regarding peronista identities. They also provide direct and indirect representations of the military government’s social, political, and cultural objectives. Under military rule, print media, television , and film helped set standards of cultural ideals about beauty, sport celebrity, and humor. The dominant historical memories in Argentina, which were reconstructed after 1983 and the return to democracy, emphasize a near-universal resistance to all that the military dictatorship represented, including human rights violations, conservative Catholicism , and the dominant ideology of rigid morality. In the imagination and memory of the middle class of the 1980s and 1990s, the history of the dictatorship has broken free of the “chronological boundaries of 1976– 83.” Instead, this group has constructed a history of that period that emphasizes the Argentine people’s “unfinished projects and their permanent resistance [to oppression].”5 It is true that many middle-class Argentines opposed the dictatorship and resisted oppression and that many more...