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

James Brennan's new work, Argentina's Missing Bones, is a necessary next chapter in Argentina's twentieth-century history of authoritarianism and democracy. It focuses on the role of the legal system in exacting justice for crimes committed during the late 1960s to the mid-1970s under the auspices of both Peronism and military rule. Brennan's research unearths the multiple and competing strategies of various parties in using federal, provincial, and military legal systems to seek retribution for violations of human rights and political violence.

Centered on the city of Córdoba, the capital of Argentina's automobile industry, a stronghold of union organizing considered to be the apex of 1960s leftist organization and subversion, the work takes on the controversial task of trying to rehabilitate the terminology of "dirty war" to explain the perspective of combatants on both sides during local critical events such as the Cordobazo uprising of 1969 and mass detentions at nearby camp La Perla. For historians of Argentina, this focus is a welcome and long overdue correction to national narratives of the period which gloss over critical differences in regional experience. However, it is jarring to revisit the "dirty war" framing and to be asked to reassess public memory debates with such attention to military perspectives. Brennan makes a case for this language choice by arguing that the levels of organized military conflict amount to that of a civil war, and that in such a war, the rules of the Geneva Convention should apply, making this a "dirty" civil war. He goes further to clarify that in considering the period to be a civil war, he does not intend to exonerate any party that used extraordinary violence for political ends.

One of the primary contributions of this work is in revealing the complexities of the left in Córdoba on the eve of dictatorship and afterward. While many English language works are dismissive of the plurality of Argentina's left, trivializing it as factionalism, by carefully distinguishing between diverse participants in social protest and various political organizations, Brennan makes intelligible the competing views of important components of the city's left. Critically, he considers how the pluralist nature of the left evolved over time and across several different modalities, from disempowered to popularly elected, and from criminalized to reconstructed under the aegis of human rights campaigns. This strategy allows for Brennan to illustrate one of his chief assertions, that the military intended to erase the left's influence with the ultimate goal of cultural transformation, and that this goal both preceded and outlasted the 1976–83 regime.

The second major contribution of Brennan's work is its attention to the cultural and social life of those serving in the military. In a way, this volume is well situated within an emerging literature of radical military history which looks at institutional structures in order to reveal the means by which officers and servicemen came to view and accept their roles in state violence. For Brennan, the educational and class background of those serving, particularly in the Third Army Corps responsible for much of the military violence in Córdoba, reinforced a position that not only did the left threaten to upend law and order, but that it also sought to undermine Catholic nationalism, through both liberatory radical Catholicism and a turn toward secularism. He also argues that practices and policies within military and police institutions reinforced collective responsibility for political violence, through the extreme punishment of dissent and disciplined blood pacts.

Beyond these two major contributions, the most substantial discussion of the work involves the complicated machinations of Argentina's legal system as it was transformed by the work of truth commissions, amnesty decrees, and suits brought against the military between the Alfonsín and Kirchner administrations. In the wake of the military's attempt to override the civil justice system...