Abstract
This chapter explores the connections between nation-building programs and anti-communist violence in Argentina from the overthrow of populist leader Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 to the end of the last military dictatorship in 1983. Using an array of documents from policy proposals to declassified military orders, it argues that increasingly violent modernization schemes were the product of both Cold War authoritarian politics and recycled nineteenth-century tropes of race and incomplete state formation. Amid labor discord, Peronism’s unexpected endurance, and the specter of the Cuban Revolution, military officers repeatedly voiced fears that underdevelopment and a premodern rural culture had created a population susceptible to demagoguery and Marxist subversion. This anxiety contributed to four coups d’état, shock industrialization, population transfers, and finally the transformation of Northern Argentina into a laboratory for state terror. This case study illustrates how anti-communism was rooted in a deeper regional historical context during Latin America’s Cold War.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Jorge Rafael Videla. “Discurso pronunciado el día 24 de septiembre de 1976 por el Excelentísimo Señor Presidente de la Nación, teniente general Jorge Rafael Videla, y dirigido al Pueblo Argentina desde la provincia de Tucumán en ocasión de cumplirse seis meses del Proceso de Reorganización Nacional.” September 24, 1976.
- 2.
Historian Roberto Pucci estimates the number of displaced Tucumanos between 160,000 and 230,000 following the closure of the mills. See Historia de la destrucción de una provincial. Tucumán 1966 (Ediciones Pago Chico, 2007), p. 167.
- 3.
Jennifer Schirmer. The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 64–80.
- 4.
Richard L. Maullin. Soldiers, Guerrillas, and Politics in Colombia (Santa Monica: Rand, 1971); Javier Castrillón. “La guerra fría en Colombia: El rol de los Estados Unidos en la política de defensa colombia en el período 1966–1970,” Revista de Relaciones Internacionales, Estrategia y Seguridad 8, no. 1 (1 June 2013), pp. 85–112; Thomas C. Field, Jr. From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Gerardo Rénique. “‘People’s War,’ ‘Dirty War’: Cold War Legacy and the End of History in Postwar Peru,” Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, editors. A Century of Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 324–327; Jorge Luís Sierra Guzmán. “Armed Forces and Counterinsurgency: Origins of the Dirty War (1965–1982),” Fernando Herra Calderón and Adela Cedillo, editors. Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982 (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 182–197.
- 5.
Sebastián Carassai. The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Federico Finchelstein. The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century Argentina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); James P. Brennan. Argentina’s Missing Bones: Revisiting the History of the Dirty War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
- 6.
Pamela Colombo. “Spaces of Confrontation and Defeat: The Spatial Dispossession of the Revolution in Tucumán, Argentina,” Elia Schindel and Pamela Colombo, editors. Spaces and the Memories of Violence (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 48–60; Carlos Salamanca. “Espacios, tiempos, identidades: políticas de la última dictadura militar en el Chaco argentino,” Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio,” Año 7, volumen 10 (November 2015), pp. 157–176; Silvia G. Nassif, “Terrorismo del Estado en la Argentina: Tucumán y la ofensiva contra los obreros de la agro-industria azucarera,” Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios Agrarios Nº 48 - 1er semestre de 2018; James H. Shrader. “A Foundation of Terror: Tucumán and the Proceso, 1975–1983,” Juan Grigeria and Luciana Zorzoli, editors. The Argentine Dictatorship and Its Legacy: Rethinking the Proceso (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), pp. 23–46.
- 7.
I borrow from Roger Griffin’s thesis of palingenetic ultranationalism in his 2009 study Modernism and Fascism to describe the Argentine military’s vision of a society that blended traditional Catholic conservatives’ belief in a glorious past with the promise of future capitalist modernity. I do not, however, make the argument that this signaled an embrace of fascism or any particular fascist bent, as the dictatorship neither sought to mobilize the masses nor construct a cult of personality around its fractured leadership. In fact, like its counterparts in Chile, Brazil, and elsewhere in the region, it rather sought to demobilize the masses, the opposite of fascist ideology and practice. It is thus more appropriate to use Guillermo O’Donnell’s concept of bureaucratic authoritarianism to describe the makeup of the regimes.
- 8.
Christian Gerlach. Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 200–213.
- 9.
Domingo F. Sarmiento. Facundo: Or, Civilization or Barbarism (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998).
- 10.
Ariel De la Fuente. Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 181–186.
- 11.
Carlos Dimas. The Poisoned Eden: Global Disease, Local Environments, and Cultural Change in Northwestern Argentina, 1865–1916 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
- 12.
Carlos Martínez Sarasola. “The Conquest of the Desert and the Free Indigenous People of the Argentine Plains,” Nicola Foote and René Harder Horst, editors. Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010), pp. 213–220.
- 13.
Quoted in Kenneth M. Roth. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2002), p. 45.
- 14.
For works by Viscat and Mosconi, see Ejército y revolución industrial (Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez Editor, 1964), pp. 25–82.
- 15.
Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins, pp. 33–51.
- 16.
See María Estela Spinelli. Los vencedores vencidos: El antiperonismo y la “revolución liberatadora” (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2005), pp. 72–80.
- 17.
James P. Brennan. The Labor Wars in Córdoba: Ideology, Work, and Labor Politics in an Argentine Industrial Society, 1955–1976 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 26.
- 18.
See Aaron Coy Moulton. “Building Their Own Cold War in Their Own Backyard: The Transnational, International Conflicts in the Greater Caribbean Basin, 1944–1954,” Cold War History 15, no. 2 (2015), pp. 135–154.
- 19.
Maristella Svampi. El dilema argentino: Civilización o barbarie (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 1994).
- 20.
Mark Healey. “El Interior en disputa: Proyectos de desarrollo y movimientos de protesta en las regiones extra pampeanas,” Mirta Lobato Juan Suriano, editors. Nueva historia argentina, Tomo 9. Violencia, proscripción y autoritarismo (1955–1976) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2009).
- 21.
For Jujuy, see Marcelo Lagos. “The Organization of Jujuy’s Sugar Ingenios (1870–1940),” James P. Brennan and Ofelia Pianetto, editors. Region and Nation: Politics, Economics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Argentina (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
- 22.
Eric D. Carter. Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), pp. 141–166.
- 23.
Andrés Rebechi. 1962. “La guerra revolucionaria. Las operaciones de guerrillas, su actualidad y nuestro problema,” Revista del Círculo Militar 62, no. 666, pp. 81–82.
- 24.
José Felipe Marini. “La lucha por la América Latina,” Revista del Círculo Militar 65, no. 675.
- 25.
Carlos M. Mazzoni, La subsociedad argentina. Ensayo para un sesquicentenario (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Publicaciones Navales, 1968), pp. 104–110.
- 26.
Alberto Benito Viola. La Guerra de guerrillas y la fotointerpretación (Buenos Aires: Circulo Militar, 1968), p. 32.
- 27.
Daniel H. Mazzei. “La mission francesa en la escuela superior de Guerra y los orígenes de la Guerra Sucia, 1957–1962,” Revista de Ciencias Sociales, no. 13 (2002); Daniel Kressel. “Francoist Spain’s Spiritual Quest and Argentine Authoritarianism during the Cold War,” American Historical Association (CLAH), Washington DC, January 5, 2018; Brennan, pp. 64–70; Shrader, “A Foundation”, pp. 29–30.
- 28.
Acdel Vilas. Diario de campaña. Tucumán: enero a diciembre 1975 (unpublished, 1977), p. 52.
- 29.
Michael Latham. The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
- 30.
Organization of American States. Séptima Reunion de Consulta de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores, San Juan Costa Rico.22 a 29 de Agosto de 1960. Acta Final (Washington, DC: 1965).
- 31.
Estado Mayor. Acción civica militar en el desarrollo económico y social de los países (Washington, DC: Junta Interamericana de Defensa, 1965).
- 32.
Osiris Villegas. Guerra revolucionaria comunista (Buenos Aires: Circulo Militar, 1962), pp. 210–217.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 212.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 210.
- 35.
“La Argentina va a la guerra,” Panorama, June 6, 1965.
- 36.
Juan Carlos Onganía: “Conferencia de Ejércitos de América de West Point (6 de Agosto, 1964),” Revista Militar, January–July, 1989, no. 721, pp. 79–86.
- 37.
Mario Horacio Orsolini. Ejército argentino y crecimiento nacional (Buenos Aires: Arayú, 1965).
- 38.
Nicolás E. Ferrari. “Apropiación del espacio público: Significación y funcionalidad. El caso de la Plaza Ejército Argentino de Bahía Blanca,” V Jornadas de Humanidades, September 2011.
- 39.
Estado Mayor, Acción cívica militar en el desarrollo económico y social de los países, p. 29.
- 40.
Estado Mayor General del Ejército. “La obra del Ejército en la educación, la investigación cientifica, la tecnologia, la industria, la economía y la acción cívica,” Revista de la Escuela Superior de Guerra, January 1–March 3, 1964, pp. 75–93.
- 41.
Ernesto Salas. Uturuncos: El origén de la guerrilla peronista (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2003), pp. 96–97. For more Plan CONINTES, see also Mario Reina. Estado empleador, estado represor: El plan CONINTES y la repression a los trabajadores organizados (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2018); Secretaria de Derechos Humanos. Plan CONINTES: Represión política y syndical (Buenos Aires: Archivo Nacional de la Memoria, 2014).
- 42.
Consejo de Desarrollo Nacional. Plan nacional de planemiento y acción para el desarrollo (Buenos Aires: 1966), p. 31.
- 43.
Healey, “El Interior”, p. 206.
- 44.
Consejo de Desarrollo Nacional, Plan nacional, p. 38.
- 45.
La Gaceta, the local newspaper, described the reception for the newly installed dictator as the largest in the history of independence-day celebration. See “Celebracion Jubilosa,” and “Onganía Recibío a Obreros y Empresarios,” La Gaceta, July 10, 1966.
- 46.
Evelyn Vélez Rodriguez. Puerto Rico: Política exterior sin estado soberano, 1946–1964 (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2014), pp. 41–71.
- 47.
The Tucumano journalist Juan Octaviano Taire accused the dictatorship of carelessly closing sugar mills as if they were shoe mills. See Azúcar para el monopolio (Buenos Aires: Pago Chico, 2006 [1969]).
- 48.
Pucci, Historia, p. 139.
- 49.
“El Chocón: De hoy al año 2000,” Confirmado, January 9, 1969.
- 50.
Upon assuming power, the Onganía dictatorship passed repressive laws against undocumented migrants in an effort to “Argentinize” the region. Law 17294 outlawed undocumented migrants from working and threatened fines for their employers, while Law 18235 ordered the deportation of any foreign resident whose activities affected “social peace, national security, or public order.”
- 51.
“Se Inicia la Inscripcion de Obreros que Decidan Trabajar en Rio Negro y Neuquen,” La Gaceta, December 20, 1966.
- 52.
Interview with Juan Davíd Jiménez, September 11, 2009; Interview with Orlando Francisco Heredia, September 15, 2009.
- 53.
“Desde Rio Negro desean el regreso 40 trabajadores,” La Gaceta, December 31, 1966.
- 54.
Adolfo Canitrot and Juan Sommer. Diagnóstico de la situación económica de la Provincia de Tucumán (Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1972), p. 73.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 56.
Pucci, Historia, p. 198.
- 57.
Presidencia de la Nación. Plan nacional de la seguridad, 1971–1975. Metas para el plazo mediano (Buenos Aires: Secretaria de la Nación, 1972), p. 13.
- 58.
Comando Mayor General del Ejército. Instrucciones No. 334 (Continuación de las operaciones en Tucumán), September 1975.
- 59.
Vilas, Diario, p. 11.
- 60.
Poder Ejecutivo de Tucumán. Cuna de la Independencia, 1816–1977, Sepulcro de la subversion, 1975–1977. Tucumán, Argentina (Buenos Aires 1979), pp. 28–29.
- 61.
Presidencia de la Nacion. Documental final de la Junta Militar sobre la guerra contra la subversión y el terrorismo (Buenos Aires. 1983), p. 8.
- 62.
Villegas, Osiris G. Politicas y estrategias para el desarrollo y la seguridad nacional (Buenos Aires: Círculo Militar, 1969), pp. 252–256.
- 63.
Sheinin, David M. Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014), pp. 49–51.
- 64.
Salamanca, “Espacios”, pp. 162–165.
- 65.
Poder Ejecutivo de la Nación. Decreto Nº 261/75, February 1975.
- 66.
Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos de la Nación. 2015. Responsabilidad empresarial en delitos de lesa humanidad. Represión a trabajadores durante el terrorismo del estado. Tomo II (Buenos Aires: Editorial Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos de la Nación).
- 67.
Nassif, “Terrorismo”, p. 82.
- 68.
Shrader, “A Foundation”, pp. 34–37.
- 69.
Interview with José Máximo Vega, October 10, 2011.
- 70.
Ibid., pp. 38–39. See Jonathan Otto. “State Building and Roads in Postrevolutionary Chiapas and at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Oxford Research Encylopedias, May 2018, https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-585 (accessed September 12, 2019); Manuela Nilsson. “Building Peace Amidst Violence: An Analysis of Colombia’s Polies to Address Security and Development Challenges,” Iberoamericana—Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 47, no. 1 (2018), pp. 34–44.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shrader, J.H. (2020). Nation-Building as Anti-Communist Violence: The Armed Forces in Cold War Argentina. In: Gerlach, C., Six, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54962-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-54963-3
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)