Argentina's Missing Bones: Revisiting the History of the Dirty War by James P. Brennan (review)

During the 1970s the Argentinean government kidnapped, tortured, disappeared, and exiled almost thirty-thousand citizens. Academics and human rights activists still debate what happened in those years and its aftermath. Argentina's "dirty war" is shocking and challenging, particularly because there were no big social tensions in the country during the twentieth century: no postcolonial wars, no ethnic or religious divisions, and until the 1990s, no serious economic crisis. Moreover, compared with other Latin American countries, Argentina had few combatants involved; the guerrillas were not massive armies. Most of the "missing bones" were unarmed activists. To understand what happened is also challenging because most of what is known is based upon the testimonies of the victims. How can scholars criticize the history of Argentina's dirty war when it has been built mainly by the ones who suffered from it the most? How can we be sympathetic with the victims and at the same time be critical of their narratives? Such is the tension that lays under James P. Brennan's latest book, an effort to clarify what had happened beyond the denial of the military and their followers and the idealized account built by the victims and those who stood by them.

Perhaps the main challenge in understanding state terrorism in Argentina is how to interpret the "silent majority" of the country. This is a question that many Argentineans have avoided, in part because its answer defies mainstream narratives. Recently, the successive administrations of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner (2003–14) reopened the possibility of new trials, allowing new evidence to be discovered, as well as the building of archives, museums, and memorial sites. That same social acknowledgement, however, obscured a deep examination of the causes of the state terrorism, and reduced the answer to a "play of sadistic torturers and innocent victims" (80).

Brennan finds the explanation to Argentina's dirty war in deep, unsolved conflicts that are difficult to see and explore within the nation's academia. He places the roots of the problems before the 1976 coup d'état, giving two reasons: the complex and contradictory nature of Peronism and the nature of the threat from the Left. He explores the situation of social and political violence and highlights the contradictions within Peronism (the political and social movement created by president Juan Perón and his wife Eva) that allowed right-wing union leaders and politicians to persecute and depose legal authorities in Córdoba. The Left's diverse revolutionary practices that engulfed Catholics, students, and unionized workers frightened the military and their allies. The Left included not only guerrilla groups, but also socio-revolutionary practices that threatened the social order, challenging "Western culture" as the military interpreted it. Because of political turmoil in the decade before the coup, Argentineans grew tolerant to political violence.

The book is a comprehensive account and evaluation of state terrorism and its aftermath in Argentina's society, becoming a state-of-the-art handbook on the topic and its current historiography. Brennan provides a balanced view of what has been and still needs to be achieved. Argentina's Missing Bones is a pathway into Argentina's dirty war and a respectful and critical view of the narratives based on witness testimonies. A great methodological contribution of the book is the use of a case study. Focusing on the city of Córdoba, Brennan outlines a regional dimension of the plan for erasing an entire sociocultural milieu. According to Brennan, Cordoba was a priority because of its sociopolitical features: "A highly politicized youth culture, a socially activist Catholic Church and a militant, combative and even radicalized trade union movement" (18). And within Cordoba, the author focuses on a concentration camp, La Perla. There, a military garrison a few miles away from the city, the military sought to gain intelligence through torture and disappearances in order to erase...