DEEP VIEW
Once victors, now victims.
How do the Argentine military
remember their recent past?
Valentina Salvi
CIS-CONICET / IDES, University Tres de
Febrero
D
uring the military dictatorship (1976-1983), the Argentine armed forces
implemented a repressive policy of clandestine and illegal type throughout the
country, previously tested by the Army in the province of Tucumán in 1975. With
the aim to eliminate the groups and people classified as “subversive” (armed organization
members, trade unionists, political activists, student or professional union members, artists
among others who might be labelled as suspicious), the armed forces imposed a policy of
terror that involved kidnapping, torture, illegal arrests, disappearance of people, abduction
of boys and girls born during their mothers’ captivity resulting in tens of thousands persons
disappeared, murdered or exiled.
Despite the silence and concealment that surrounded this systematic policy of
disappearance of persons in Argentina, both the Army and its retired and active cadres
remember the years of repression; that is to say, they construct and reproduce versions
of that past. An unstable balance between memory and oblivion, evocation and negation,
selection and vindication is established in these versions. This irregular balance discloses
that the military memories around the illegal repression reflects the weight of the shared
traditions and identities as well as the persistence of certain narrative frameworks in
addition to the ups and downs of the political and legal situations or the tensions existing
with other competing memories.
Indeed, the military institution and its officials play an active role in building
memories around the recent past. Looking inside the military community, tensions and
conflicts around what to remember and how to remember result in the construction of an
edifying memory that reinforces the sense of belonging and self-assessment of the cadres,
while boosting the intergenerational transmission with a solid emotional bond. Looking
outside, the memories of the army come into conflict with the memory of the disappeared
4
Observing Memories
ISSUE 2