Consent of the Damned

How unpopular was the last military dictatorship in Argentina? In Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War, David Sheinin poses this question and takes an infrequently traveled path to answer it. He explores the emergence, development, and reconfiguration of a discourse about human rights during the period of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983) and its immediate aftermath, distinguishing between three different phases. The first phase concerns the beginning of the military government, when Amnesty International played a leading role in the campaign against the dictatorship yet failed to shape Argentine society's vision concerning the violation of human rights. The second focuses on how the military government itself constructed the narrative on human rights, appealing to a public that supported many of its objectives. Running until late 1983, the third phase involves the transition to democracy and some domestic and international policies implemented by the government of Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989).Although Sheinin's narrative does not go into depth about the years before the coup, a crucial starting point to best answer the question posed by the book, he does identify with precision the promises the military made about modernization, the creation of wealth, and the suppression of left-wing violence, all of which were supported by a significant portion of the population. In particular, as Sheinin points out, the middle class was drawn to the vision of that new Argentina. Although his general argument is probably true, some of the evidence he presents to support it is not entirely convincing — in particular, the all-too-linear identification he establishes among the various sports icons, social classes, and political cultures. By strictly associating the military with the middle class and populism with the working class, he misses an opportunity to explore the populist traits of the dictatorship.That said, more important to the book's intent is his analysis of the military's discourses about jurisprudence and human rights. He argues that the Constitution of 1853 and the body of law concerning civil rights forged during the twentieth century did not constitute an obstacle to the dictatorship; rather, they provided a platform from which the military authorities, not without a strong dose of cynicism, could justify their own existence. In the face of civil governments that had shown themselves incapable of assuring respect for the rights consecrated in the foundational documents, the military claimed for themselves, argues Sheinin, the legacy of putting that body of law into practice.The military's discourse about human rights went even further. It affirmed that Argentina not only respected human rights but that it had reached even higher standards of protecting them. With great thoroughness, Sheinin examines the military's discourse about the protection and promotion of human rights for indigenous Argentines, its policies presented as a beneficial “modernization,” both in economic and cultural terms. This policy, coupled with the decision to accept Vietnamese refugees, lent credibility to the official discourse that Argentina was not the pariah state that Amnesty International and other organizations had deemed it to be. So even though it was confronted with denunciations of human rights violations, the dictatorship managed to avoid marginalization in the United Nations and other international forums. The dictatorship's triumph was even more convincing in the world of international commercial relations. With few exceptions, says Sheinin, the military government managed to better its commercial ties with the rest of the world that either ignored or underestimated the denunciations of the regime.Among the charges laid against the military's repressive regime was that of having a special aversion to the Jews. Sheinin's analysis of the Jacobo Timerman case illustrates, on the one hand, how the international community linked dictatorship, human rights violations, and anti-Semitism, and, on the other, the contradictions that characterized many of the official responses to international protests. It is known that both the protests against anti-Semitism as well as the wider protests against human rights violations declined with the change of administration in the White House in 1980. What Sheinin adds is solid analysis of the strategic convergences between the new US government and the Argentine military, along with the official arguments fashioned to justify this change.Sheinin's book diminishes the importance of the antagonism habitually attributed to the dictatorship/democracy binary, including in the domain of human rights. Nevertheless, it mentions commonalities that are not always explained by a continuity in either principles or objectives. The fact that both military and civilian governments have internationally presented their policies on human rights by invoking the Constitution of 1853 does not mean that they are similar; unlike the Alfonsín government that came to power in 1983 on the basis of its stance on human rights, the dictatorship invoked this law in order to cover up a massacre.This does not imply that during the government of Alfonsín (and afterward) there were no human rights violations. Sheinin clearly points out the torture and assassinations carried out by police, especially in the province of Buenos Aires. But after a regime that practiced these and other repressive measures on an industrial scale as part of a state policy destined to disappear thousands of “enemies,” it makes sense that the Alfonsín government's ruptures with the military regime stand out more than any commonalities. In other areas, however, like the bilateral commercial or strategic relationships with countries like the Soviet Union or Canada, Sheinin's arguments for the policy similarities between dictatorship and democracy are more convincing.In short, Consent of the Damned contributes to a better understanding of the attitudes of a large portion of civil society and the international community during the bloodiest years in Argentine history

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