Argentina's Missing Bones

Argentina's Missing Bones is about the history of the dirty war in Córdoba province and the author's search to find the specific features that would make it a “unique” case within Argentina (p. 18). Chapter 1 reviews the social forces that the province's military authorities perceived as threatening. Chapter 2 studies the repressive apparatus created by Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, who from 1975 was in charge of the Córdoba-based Third Army Corps; chapter 3 studies La Perla, the province's most important clandestine detention center (CDC), through which more than 1,000 prisoners passed. Chapters 4 and 5 respectively analyze the Third Army Corps' dynamics and transnational influences on the Argentine military's indoctrination. The final three chapters are devoted to some of this process's consequences: respectively, the trials that ended up condemning Menéndez to life imprisonment, the memory of those directly affected by state terrorism in Córdoba, and the question of blame for what happened.The book's main contribution is to provide a cartography of illegal repression in Córdoba, which covered not only the six clandestine detention centers created by Menéndez but also police stations, local prisons, and other official dependencies, such as the federal penitentiary. Brennan also explains the repressive apparatus's division of labor. The dirty war's operations, he argues, fell mostly to task forces not formally identified with the army rather than on the regular forces, which functioned mostly within the CDCs. The description of the terror machine includes objective data, such as the names and pseudonyms of La Perla's torturers or the circuit that the prisoners embarked on from their capture to their disappearance, as well as subjective reflections, such as that torturers exercised their “job” with “great zeal and conviction” (p. 44).According to Brennan, Córdoba was unique in that victims of state terrorism there had little chance of survival (around 15 percent survived) and that the repression had a “class character,” due to the province's combative past and Menéndez's maniacal temperament (p. 48). However, the similarities with other sites are greater than the differences: as in other urban centers, the repression in Córdoba, among other common elements, was strongly felt by members of guerrilla organizations, politically engaged workers and students, and people allegedly linked to the Left; affected more men than women and younger rather than older people; combined the participation of police and military forces; often ended in detainees' disappearance; and was motivated by rebuilding a social order otherwise believed threatened. That a higher proportion of Córdoba's desaparecidos were workers is not enough to affirm that the dirty war there had a class character, at least no more than in other places. Targeting for repression was based not on individuals' status as workers but rather on their status as union or political activists. That more workers were among Córdoba's victims was probably due to the social composition of the province's activists, not to the repressive power's objectives or strategies.Concerning the regime's strategies, Brennan convincingly argues that they were a French, not an American, legacy. His main point is that “the US role thus seems to have operated more at the level of ideology than specific tactics and overall strategy” (p. 69). Contradictory things are claimed, however, about that ideology's influence in the dirty war. On the one hand, the author claims that it was “an essential component of the dirty war” (p. 69). On the other, he asserts that Catholicism and the belief in a national community under threat “rather than . . . East-West Cold War considerations animated much of Argentina's state terrorism” (p. 73). Overall, the book correctly looks for the main causes of both the 1976 military coup and the type of repression it implemented in domestic rather than exogenous factors; the book is also valuable in its discussion of the thesis that the dirty war stemmed from the need to impose a neoliberal model.Brennan reviews the relationship between society and the dirty war by searching for complicity, a criterion that leads more to pointing out the guilty than to understanding attitudes and stances. The press, the church, the courts, and even society in general are accused of complicity with the dirty war, which contradicts the more accurate statement that “in the very worst years of the disappearances and state terrorism, many were as yet unaware how extensive the state terrorist apparatus was” (p. 31). Some claims, while not central to Brennan's argument, are empirically incorrect. The term dirty war, for example, has a more extensive and less linear history than Brennan suggests when referring to the period from 1973 to 1976 as its origin and asserting that it was always directed against the Left (p. 4). As early as 1970, for example, the leftist organization Fuerzas Argentinas de Liberación used the term in justifying the assassination of Osvaldo Sandoval, then head of political affairs at the Federal Police. Something similar could be said about the use of the term terrorism by the military authorities to describe the guerrillas' actions (p. 75). More importantly, Brennan joins those who attribute to the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas report on human rights violations the thesis that “the military dictatorship and the Left” were “equally responsible for the human rights abuses,” omitting that the report's prologue judges state terrorism as “infinitely worse” than the terrorism that the military claimed to combat (p. 80).Nevertheless, Argentina's Missing Bones will be useful to all who investigate state terrorism in Argentina and the recent past in Córdoba province

Blame · Criminology · Imprisonment · Political science · Prison · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Terrorism · History · Law · Memory, violence, and history · Psychology