LITMIR.BIZ

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Yet even the best of this nascent scholarship has focused more on questions of societal trauma and memory than on causation and methods. A provocative exception to the victim-centric literature is Argentina’s “Dirty War” by Anglo-Argentine Trotskyist Donald Hodges. Hodges takes seriously the military’s history, its strategic calculations and belief that Argentina had been converted into a battleground in a global war, albeit an unconventional and undeclared war. In his lengthy narrative on the history of the revolutionary Left, he argues that the armed Left’s relatively small numbers were compensated by its verve and cultural influence, that it in effect constituted a formidable adversary to Argentina’s armed forces, though he summarily rejects the military’s outlandish claims of Argentina as a battleground of World War III. Hodges also sees at least as strong an influence of Catholic nationalism as Cold War ideologies and related geopolitical thinking on the Argentine officer corps.⁹

      The very term guerra sucia (“dirty war”) is roundly rejected now by all human rights groups in Argentina as morally indefensible, of lending credence to the military’s assertion that it was indeed waging a war and therefore its crimes were mere acts of war and legitimate. Yet the military did not hold a monopoly on the use of such terminology and the Left itself routinely referred to a “revolutionary war” being waged at the time against the reactionary forces, public and private. I employ the term dirty war for several reasons. First, since a major objective of this book is to examine the perpetrators of the violence and not just its victims, it is necessary to understand the military government’s understanding of what constituted war and its applicability to conditions in Argentina. Aside from some passing references in often obscure, both right-wing ultranationalist and leftist publications to a “dirty war” being waged against the left during the 1973–76 Peronist government, it was the military that most appropriated the term but only belatedly, in the final stages of the dictatorship and early days of the reestablished democracy, to describe the methods employed in its campaign against the Left and then its defense of such tactics in criminal proceedings to defeat the so-called subversion. It did so publicly for the first time during the brief government of General Reynaldo Bignone (1982–83), the last of the military juntas, in a press conference given by Bignone, followed by letters to the editor of various newspapers, written by retired officers invoking the experience of the French in Algeria and French theories of counterrevolutionary war as a justification for its methods (methods now being severely questioned by society) and a besieged military regime in the wake of the Falklands-Malvinas conflict. The Argentine press soon appropriated the dirty war characterization and popularized it. I also employ the term because the current preferred term in Argentina, the repression, is both imprecise and contains its own assumptions about culpability and causation. Moreover, its very blandness makes it unlikely to replace the term dirty war widely used elsewhere in the world and likely enshrined for posterity in histories of Argentina dealing with the period. Even from a strictly juridical and moral point of view, the term war does not exonerate. There are rules in war, and those states, governments, and individuals that violate them can and should be held accountable. Indeed, during the clandestine so-called antisubversive campaign the military government deliberately avoided the term war since to acknowledge it as such it would have conferred certain rights on the belligerents (guerrillas) as defined by the Geneva convention. It employed the term only after the fall of the dictatorship as a defense of its actions. The human rights movement itself did not always reject the term, and the Permanent Assembly on Human Rights used it in its 1988 report (“Las cifras de la guerra sucia”) on the numbers of disappeared, with a prologue written by journalist and human rights activist Horacio Verbitsky.

      Why Córdoba? Águila’s study of the dictatorship in Rosario demonstrated the significance of regional variations in the heretofore rather monochromatic story of the state terrorism of those years. The peculiarity of the experience of provinces like Chaco and Neuquén has also been noted, where the dictatorship attempted to claim the mantle of protector of indigenous peoples’ rights through a program of modernization and a “commodification of indigenous identity” marketing souvenirs and other supposed artifacts of indigenous culture at the same time it promoted Catholicism to better integrate the Toba, Mataco, Mapuche, and other tribes into the national community.¹⁰ Such policies were contemporary with a murderous campaign of state terrorism directed against the Left in those provinces.

      The case of Córdoba in the pursuit of the regional dimension of the dirty war is particularly urgent since it loomed as one the worst sites of repression, a place not only that contributed a large number of the disappeared and many others unlawfully detained, tortured, and murdered but also where the military sought to erase an entire sociocultural milieu. Massive social protests in 1969 and 1971, a militant and in some sectors radicalized labor movement, site of an active Third World Priests movement, and contributor of many youthful recruits drawn from the city’s large university population to guerrilla organizations such as the Montoneros and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), Córdoba seemed to incarnate in a single place all those supposedly corrosive influences that the military hierarchy wished to extirpate. The military was well positioned to undertake such a campaign. Not only was the army’s Third Corps based in Córdoba, so too were other military units including air force, paratrooper, intelligence, and artillery brigades as well as one of the three regional headquarters of the federal constabulary (Gendarmería Nacional) subordinate to the army command. The dictatorship thus brought with it not only state terrorism and detention centers but also a thorough militarization of public administration and the judicial system, key components in the repressive architecture. A study of the dirty war in Córdoba, however, cannot be a mere exercise in regional history. Córdoba’s experience with state terrorism goes beyond Córdoba itself, extending to French counterinsurgency theories essayed in Algeria, to Cold War strategies devised in Washington, to secret military cabals held in Buenos Aires to coordinate a national campaign against the Left, even to Mexico where an exile community was closely monitored by both the Argentine embassy and an obliging Mexican government.¹¹

      The regime that terrorized Córdoba and Argentina perpetrated one of the twentieth century’s many dirty wars—war in the dark, murderous yet deniable. War before the twentieth century lacked such qualities and was rather the confrontation on the battlefield of armies advancing the interests of kings, empires, and states, “the extension of politics by other means” to use Clausewitz’s famous maxim. Even partisan guerrilla warfare produced dead bodies. In the twentieth century, the nature of war changed. It sometimes now involved not large armies but small groups of men, operating secretly, employing the most violent methods including torture to annihilate, demoralize, and defeat not only an enemy but an entire society, ethnic or religious group, or political sect deemed to have engendered such enemies. Its victims were as much ideas and cultures as flesh-and-blood human beings. These wars too were Clausewitz’s extension of politics by other means, but they were the politics of antipolitics, to dissemble, to expel, and to erase. The road to Argentina’s experience with such a war is littered with the missing bones of Kenyans, Algerians, and others who had lived under similar regimes. One of the first such wars was the brutal British counterinsurgency in Ireland in the 1920s, much of it directed against the civilian population, complete with abductions and murders.¹² The Nazis took such tactics to new depths with their tactics, after Hitler’s December 1941 “Nacht und Nebel” decree authorized the army and Gestapo to make underground resistance fighters disappear into the “night and fog,” a chilling prequel to Argentina’s dirty war.¹³ In Algeria, the French refined the techniques of mass detention, torture, and psychological warfare against a colonial people fighting for their independence.¹⁴ The British responded to an anticolonial struggle in Kenya with similar tactics.¹⁵ Argentina’s experience departs from all these in the small number of combatants involved, and that the vast majority of the dirty war’s victims were unarmed political and union activists. If Argentina suffered a war, it was above all a war of extermination of defenseless civilians.

      In the dreary catalogue of twentieth-century genocides and crimes against humanity, Argentina’s dirty war certainly ranks small. Not millions, not even hundreds of thousands died in the death camps of the dictatorship. The state terrorism in Argentina lasted but a few years, its victims numbered at most 30,000 and almost certainly a far smaller number.¹⁶ Yet it occupies a special

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