Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War

2. “A Correct, Hermeneutic Reading”: Fantasies of a Constitutional Coup and the Promotion of Indigenous Rights

“A Correct, Hermeneutic Reading” Fantasies of a Constitutional Coup and the Promotion of Indigenous Rights In his 1980 novel Respiración artificial, Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia imagined a protagonist who mysteriously disappears. Readers understand that this disappearance comes in the context of a dictatorship, though Piglia makes no mention of military rule. There is no discussion of a coup, of dictatorship, or of massive state-sponsored terror. We know of the context because Piglia gives us dates; the disappearance happens weeks after the March 1976 coup d’état. That’s all we ever know for certain. Piglia’s narrative becomes a horrific fantasy of what Argentina’s military rulers concocted as an elaborate denial of state-sponsored terror and an equally convoluted defense of the dictatorship as in favor of human rights. Disappearance is mysterious. Piglia unmasks the military fantasy of Argentina as peaceful under dictatorship—like Sweden or the 2 Fantasies of a Constitutional Coup and the Promotion of Indigenous Rights · 31 Argentina of Carlos Reutemann—where the explanation for a “disappearance ” might lead to all sorts of conclusions.1 In this vein, Piglia also probed how contortions of logic become normalcy . A central character in his novel finds that “Mein Kampf was a sort of perfect complement or apocryphal sequel to the Discourse on Method.”2 Piglia is taken with time as a continuum and how the present might alter the future. After a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories published in the Baltimore Sun, an exiled Argentine in Piglia’s novel imagines “some isolated, almost trivial, letters exchanged by future Argentines. Letters that seem to have gotten lost in time. Little by little the Hero begins to understand. He tries, using almost invisible signals, to decipher what is going to happen.”3 In the story, an imagined oddity becomes reality as present, past, and future become blurred. After the coup d’état in March 1976, various branches of government immediately set about this exercise in blurring reality, anticipating the firestorm of international protest that would come. With neither irony nor humor, the dictatorship drew on an Argentine Supreme Court opinion that the coup had marked a “correct, hermeneutic reading”4 of the 1853 Argentine Constitution and a body of law that had ensued. This pseudo-legal validation for the coup quickly became a nightmarish version of strict constitutional constructionism. The military advanced the tautology that there was no human rights problem because human rights were enshrined in the Constitution and in law. Thus, reports of torture, clandestine detention, and disappearances at the hands of the government were impossible because the law prohibited such actions. As blunt a tool as this argument was, Argentine leaders anticipated correctly that this very simple logic would be adopted by the same media sources that would lionize Guillermo Vilas and Carlos Reutemann and would appeal to their primary overseas audience—poor and Soviet-bloc nations with which Argentina hoped to maintain strong ties. With the exception of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, national governments and business partners around the globe had little difficulty swallowing the fabrication and maintaining good relations with the dictatorship.5 In a telling irony, the junta experienced little pressure from Communist states on the issue of human rights. This was somewhat surprising , given the context of Cold War politics and the conviction of some Argentine military ideologues that the Soviets were behind Argentina’s revolutionary left and the growing international “conspiracy” to invent a 32 · Consent of the Damned human rights problem there. Shortly after the coup, for example, the Cuban government secretly assured the Argentine military that although it had intervened in the domestic politics of some countries in the Americas , it had and would have nothing to do with Argentine insurgents. Cuban authorities understood that such links would jeopardize friendly relations with Argentina that Cuba valued (in the field of nuclear medicine, for example) and told the Argentines as much. While they opposed the Argentine coup d’état, they considered it a “necessary change” because “bandits” (meaning the previous Peronist government) had taken over in Argentina, inspiring chaos.6 There has been extensive discussion in the aftermath of the dictatorship about “how much” Argentines inside and outside of government knew about the rampant human rights abuses under state-sponsored terror between 1976 and the fall of military rule in late 1983. Some clearly knew a great deal while others knew...