Oath of Jorge Rafael Videla as President of Argentina.
29 March 1976 | Author unknown, Wikimedia Commons
Pedro Eugenio Aramburu visiting Oberá in 1965 | “Reseña histórica de
Oberá”. Gualdoni Vigo, Enrique. Municipalidad de Oberá, 1987. Wikimedia
Commons
The personal account of
two direct perpetrators
and the institutional
recognition of the
violence perpetrated by
the Army understood
from these public
statements definitely
left the military without
any chance to present
themselves before the
public opinion as the
“saviours of the fatherland
from the Marxist thread”
or as the “victors of a fair
war against the subversive
enemy” (Badaró, 2009: 311).
Corps and former Minister of Military Regime
Planning, Major General (R) Ramón Díaz Bessone,
became the main promoters of this memory with
the publication of the book In Memoriam, considered
by the military as the counterpart of the Nunca
Más (Never more) published by CONADEP in 1984.
His three volumes describe the circumstances in
which members of the armed and security forces,
their relatives and civilians were killed by armed
organizations during the 1970s, but above all it
provides a narrative from which to re-interpret the
past and take up a stance regarding the debates and
questionings of the present.
Indeed, the book lays the foundation for a
new narrative about the past to be strengthened:
The Complete Memory. This is a mirroring and
reactive memory opposed to as much as reflected
in the memory of the disappeared and the socially
legitimated category of victim of State terrorism. On
the one hand, this shift towards the memory of the
victims can be understood as a symptom of an era
in which the foundation of a collective identity in
a traumatic event represents a sufficient basis for
promoting claims and disputing different meanings
in the public arena; and, on the other hand, as part
of a mournful memory resulting in an active effect
Paradoxically, the generation of officers of unity and adhesion based on a common painful
contemporary to the illegal repression, gathered in memory. However, it can also be understood as an
the Military Circle were the main promoters of the expression of the little space found by the victims of
shift towards the memory of the military victims. the guerrilla in the memory of the activists and the
Among them, the former head of the Second Army human rights organizations, and for the State.
8
Observing Memories
ISSUE 2