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The military coup of March 1976 in Argentina ruptured the prevailing institutional order, with the greater part of its repressive strategy built on clandestine practices and tactics (death, torture and disappearance) that sowed fear across large swathes of Argentine society. Simultaneously, the terrorist state established a parallel, de facto legal order through which it endeavoured to legitimise its actions. Among other social forces, the judicial branch played a pivotal role in this project of legitimisation. While conscious of the fact that many of those inside the justice system were also targets of oppression, I would like to argue that the dictatorship‘s approach was not to establish a new judicial authority but, rather, to build upon the existing institutional structure, remodelling it to suit its own interests and objectives. Based on an analysis of the criminal and administrative proceedings that together were known as the Case of the judicial morgue, this article aims to examine the ways in which the bodies of the detained-disappeared that entered the morgue during the dictatorship were handled, as well as the rationales and practices of the doctors and other employees who played a part in this process. Finally, it aims to reflect upon the traces left by judicial and administrative bureaucratic structures in relation to the crimes committed by the dictatorship, and on the legal strategies adopted by lawyers and the families of the victims.
Argentina 153 attacks and losses at the hands of the guerrillas. Moreover, they had put the basic structure of state terrorism to the test in the province of Tucumán between February and December 1975. The argument of avenging the dead, an issue that deserves investigation in the search for a deeper understanding of the slaughter that ensued, was added to the received indoctrination. From 24 March 1976 the armed forces and their civilian allies embarked on a campaign of repression against the ‘subversion’ that was unprecedented in terms of its breadth, intensity, and
the divine social hierarchy as maintaining an unjust social inequality. The Argentine dictatorship was determined to cleanse the national body and spirit of such forces and ideas, described as cancers and viruses. Tens of thousands of people were disappeared through state terrorism, at least 10,000 of them were assassinated, others were forced into exile, while only an estimated 100 captives passed through a few rehabilitation programmes. 146 Antonius C. G. M. Robben The chapter’s main argument is that necropower and biopower were under military rule no longer
offered instead a categorization of killings: judicial executions, assassinations, elimination during arrest, enforced disappearances followed by elimination, ambushes, entrapment operations, killing of own forces.5 Apartheid legislation allowed for the killing of political suspects through judicial execution when found guilty of offences of terrorism, sabotage, or treason.6 Additionally, generous indemnity regulations protected police officers responsible for shooting ‘rioters’ in civil unrest.7 If apartheid is understood as a regime that relied on coercion with
pressures. And all of this – these feelings of guilt and fear – occur in an already highly charged context where, in most cases, their previously unknown true origins are brutally revealed. Moreover, there is a kind of ricochet: the truth of the role played by the adoptive family in the disappearance of their own biological HRMV.indb 50 01/09/2014 17:28:35 The disappeared of the Argentinian dictatorship 51 parents and/or their complicity in state terrorism. On the other hand, the current juridical procedures also avoid the need to make these children responsible for
; Doidge, 2015a). From the 1950s in Europe, various types of fan groups emerged, from peñas in Spain, groups like Inter’s I Moschettieri (The Musketeers) in Italy and Torcida from Hajduk Split in Croatia (Guerra et al., 2010; Llopis-Goig, 2015; Perasović and Mustapić, 2018). It is from supporters’ groups such as these that the ultras emerged in the late 1960s in Italy. They grew out of a particularly fertile and febrile period of Italian political history that saw the re-emergence of fascism, an increase in political terrorism and growing discontent on the streets. The
instruments such as the famous ‘prod’, which were intended to deliver better results and inflict fewer marks, both on the bodies of political detainees and on public opinion.16 The contemporary chapter of mass political violence begins with the events of 1968 and definitively comes to the fore in 1973, with coups in the region (Brazil in 1964, Argentina in 1964 and 1975, Chile in 1973, and Uruguay in 1973) consolidating army hegemony over the forces of repression. This change also created a new territorial scope for ‘state terrorism’, an extension of The military
. Rigidity means death. […] The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa 2007 , 79). Although acknowledging the violence and “linguistic terrorism” inflicted on Mexicans or Mexican-American people, Anzaldúa moves away from the narrative of victimhood and brings agency, empowerment, and political struggle into the picture. With this, she opened up the possibility for the rise of border studies that followed the trajectories of “race” and “gender,” and then “nation” and “sexuality” (Anzaldúa 2007 , Michaelsen and
variety of verbal and physical abuse. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides (Russell 2008). The case of Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, where close to 500 murders of women took place between 1993 and 2009, led Marcela Lagarde (2006) to introduce the term ‘feminicide’ to emphasise government impunity and negligence in investigating the murder of women.5 Other distinctive marks related to feminicide are initial reactions of denial, particularly at the local level, lack of proper investigation and the lack of willingness to detain and bring to
contradictory approaches to urban rule that are both repressive and liberating (Amar 2013b: 7). These ‘humanitarian’ measures gave legitimacy, if not exactly popularity, to the military in its early days of rule through the pervasive campaign on the ‘war on terror’ against Islamic terrorism, which went hand in hand with restoring the so-called order after the chaos that accompanied the retreat of the police forces from 2011 until 2013. Following Amar’s argument on armed humanitarianism, the Sisi regime, for example, also championed public morality as a way of protecting women