Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Changing the Course of History: Dignity, Emancipation, and Entrenchment
“That’s the morgue,” she said calmly, having removed the padlock from the gate that gave access to a walled off wasteland surrounding a drab building. The morgue of Avellaneda cemetery near Buenos Aires consisted of three rooms. One room contained the skeletons of the exhumed bodies, another held various tools, while the central room was dominated by a stainless steel table. Autopsies used to be performed on the table years ago, but it served now to reassemble the remains of the disappeared. After taking off our coats, we walked to an area of ten by thirty meters overgrown with grass, some mounds of recently disturbed soil, and a large open pit protected from the autumn rains by a corrugated roof.
The site turned gruesome when I helped lift the boards that rested across the mass grave: not just because of the exposed skulls, but because most skeletons had been covered with blankets and sheets to protect them from the weather. It seemed as if they were asleep, only to be awakened by a gentle touch. Their place of rest was only temporary. They waited to be reunited with their relatives after exhumation, after having been abducted, tortured, disappeared, assassinated, stripped naked, and dumped at night in this mass grave in a concealed corner of Avellaneda cemetery.
Darío arrived soon after Patricia and I had removed the coverings. We tried to separate a tumbled collection of at least four bodies from section E-D 2. After brush strokes by Darío, a skull appeared. Luis arrived, and the three forensic anthropologists moved to section C 8 to a body that had been burned around the legs and head. Both legs appeared to have been broken with a club or stick and then cut with a knife or machete. One part could not be located. The remains were difficult to identify by age and sex, but indicated a man in his mid-twenties.
Piece by piece, Luis and Darío removed the skeleton and handed the bones to Patricia, who placed them in numbered bags which identified the anatomical contents. The brush swept away morsels of gray clay mixed with traces of rust. Burns on the skull and thigh became visible, but it was uncertain whether they were inflicted before or after death. The skull, weakened by the fire, had been crushed under the weight of the soil when the provisory grave was closed about eleven years ago. The anthropologists searched the soil for clues about the cause of death and the identity of the person—bullets, pieces of clothing, glasses, hair, and teeth—tossing the soil into a bucket. Once several were full, they were taken away in a wheelbarrow. After five hours of diligent work, one skeleton from section C 8 had been exhumed. The coded plastic bags were placed in a cardboard box for later study. We covered the mass grave again, and left.
The identification of the skeletal remains of 278 persons, including nineteen fetuses and babies, in the mass grave at Avellaneda would take years of painstaking work. Meanwhile, the multiple traumas of Argentina’s past kept intruding on society as more mass graves were opened, adopted children asked about their biological parents, and perpetrators made chilling confessions about torture, disappearances, childbirths under hooded captivity, and death flights by night.1
The Avellaneda mass grave and the pain and suffering of the searching relatives are the result of an all-out war in which the Argentine military out-terrorized and outtraumatized the guerrilla insurgency and the country’s radicalized political opposition. Just as the guerrillas attempted a social revolution, so the military were determined to protect Argentina’s cultural heritage. Two large guerrilla organizations made daring attacks on army bases, and political assassinations were happening daily by 1975.2 Argentine military rulers became convinced that their antirevolutionary war was a necessary shock therapy to heal a society ridden with violence, corruption, immorality and defiance of authority. General Alcides López Aufranc wrote in late 1975 that the political violence in Argentina, “concerns an infection of the minds, a gangrene that runs the risk of killing the free, democratic and plural Argentine social body if it is not attacked decisively and energetically.”3 The Argentine military felt that Argentina’s whole way of life, its entire cultural, moral, and social universe were at stake in this war. They decided in 1975 to stamp out this threat with ruthless resolve.
The political violence that led the Argentine military to assault their own society and disappear thousands of people did not come about suddenly. To understand how Argentine society became traumatized and why around ten thousand dead came to inhabit hundreds of mass graves, we have to uncover the historical roots of the cultural war that raged in the 1970s. We have to reach back to a time when the V-Day celebrations in Europe and North America at the end of World War II echoed in the euphoria of hundreds of thousands of Argentine workers who took to the streets of Buenos Aires on 17 October 1945 in defense of their leader Juan Domingo Perón.
Fear among the Argentine military and the middle and upper classes of a social revolution on Argentine soil began with this one crowd in 1945. It raised hopes for a better future among the working class and provoked anxieties among the vested interests. All recognized the revolutionary potential of this new political movement, but where some saw the 17 October gathering as a celebration of social emancipation, others feared that a demagogic leader might unleash the crowd’s irrational violence on the established social order. Mobilizations became a fertile political practice on which violence was grafted. A spiral of violence was set in motion that produced multiple social traumas suffered throughout Argentine society. The traumatizing fallout of tens of thousands of dead, disappeared, and tortured citizens affected Argentine society at large, and eventually engulfed the perpetrators themselves.
Crowds became a constant in Argentine political culture during the reign of Juan Domingo Perón from 1945 till his military overthrow in 1955. Perón manipulated the deep-seated fear of the crowd that existed among the middle and upper classes, and continued to mobilize his following in a crowd competition when the opposition to his government became greater. Crowds became the groundswell of Argentine political life, creating and toppling governments and dictatorships, inspiring fear and raising hopes.
An Enormous and Silent Force
The founding myth of the Peronist movement tells us that on the morning of Wednesday 17 October 1945, hundreds of thousands of workers began to walk the many kilometers from the factories, meatpacking plants, and working class neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to the Plaza de Mayo at the heart of the nation’s capital. They carried makeshift signs and shouted slogans in favor of Perón. “I had the impression that something very powerful and even mysterious was happening,” observed Ernesto Sábato years later, “the impression that, almost underground, an enormous and silent force had been set in motion.”4 Perón had become Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare in October 1943 and helped pass labor legislation that improved salaries, social benefits, and workers’ rights. Under pressure from hostile conservative forces, Perón was forced to resign on 9 October 1945, and was interned on the island of Martín García on 12 October. This confinement would lead five days later to protests of Argentine workers in the entire country.
The 1969 account of this day by historian Félix Luna has sustained the founding myth of the Peronist movement. According to Luna, the leaders of the national confederation of labor unions (CGT), had planned a general strike for October 18 to demand free elections and the protection of workers’ rights. With great drama, Luna writes that just as the union leaders were going to bed, the ordinary people were getting up to take to the streets and demand the freedom of Perón.5 Nothing could stop the masses advancing on Buenos Aires. They crossed the Riachuelo river on rickety rafts when policemen opened the bridges to stop them. Streetcars were rerouted, and trucks and buses were ordered to drive to the Plaza de Mayo. This spontaneous protest arose throughout Argentina. Everywhere, workers converged on towns and cities as if moved by an instinct or collective mind.6 The image of workers giving rest to their tired feet in the fountain at the Plaza de Mayo became a lasting symbol of Peronism. This Day of Loyalty (Día de Lealtad) to Perón, as it became known, has provided the Argentine working class with an interpretation of history in which they became its protagonists; an inspiration on which they have drawn in times of repression and times of protest.
The Argentine workers took destiny in their hands by mounting the peaceful protest, so the myth goes, and expressed their loyalty to the hastily released Perón in a spiritual reunion at the Plaza de Mayo. Most Peronists