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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.
Agustín Tosco Propaganda was published in the Argentine film journal El Amante Cine. It was written by Israel Adrián Caetano before his film Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes (Caetano and Stagnaro, 1998) triggered the concept of New Argentine Cinema. In this provocative text, Caetano criticised the way Argentine cinema had usually been made and, in a form of manifesto, he presented the principles that his own films – and those of many other young directors – have followed since then. Although New Argentine Cinema has been thoroughly studied in the English-speaking academia, only a few authors have made reference to this seminal text. Being aware of the principles set in this manifesto more than twenty years ago will help researchers and students understand some important features that tend to be overlooked when exploring not only Argentinean cinema, but also many other cinemas of the region.
Introduction The association between Islam and violence in the general portrayal of Muslims by Western media, is equally, if not more, present in other geographical areas, and adopts specific tropes. Regions with a visible presence of Muslim immigrants are likely to be interpreted from the perspective of this narrative, as has been described by Said in his important work Covering Islam ( 1981 ). Based on fieldwork of Muslim communities in the tri-border or Triple Frontier (TF) region of Brazil–Argentina–Paraguay, as well
‘publics’ are essentially contested: violence is not different. Therefore, this chapter considers the contingent (yet social and political) nature of violence in the public sphere. In this context, the objective of this chapter is to analyse and discuss the emergence of violence as a public health problem in Argentina, from a constructivist approach. In particular, tensions between the different explanations of the constitution of
This article will investigate the process of confronting death in cases of the disappeared of the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Based on the exhumation and identification of the body of a disappeared person, the article will reflect on how the persons social situation can be reconfigured, causing structural changes within the family and other groups. This will be followed by a discussion of the reflections generated by the anthropologist during his or her interview process, as well as an investigation into the authors own experiences in the field. This intimate relationship between the anthropologist and death, through the inevitable contact that takes place among the bodies, causes resonances in the context both of exhumations and of identifications in the anthropologists wider fieldwork.
Between 1975 and 1979, thirty-one unidentified bodies bearing marks of torture appeared at various locations along Uruguays coastline. These bodies were material proof of the death flights implemented in neighbouring Argentina after the military coup. In Uruguay, in a general context of political crisis, the appearance of these anonymous cadavers first generated local terror and was then rapidly transformed into a traumatic event at the national level. This article focuses on the various reports established by Uruguayan police and mortuary services. It aims to show how,the administrative and funeral treatments given at that time to the dead bodies, buried anonymously (under the NN label) in local cemeteries, make visible some of the multiple complicities between the Uruguayan and Argentinean dictatorships in the broader framework of the Condor Plan. The repressive strategy implemented in Argentina through torture and forced disappearance was indeed echoed by the bureaucratic repressive strategy implemented in Uruguay through incomplete and false reports, aiming to make the NN disappear once again.
The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
Mass violence is one of the defining phenomena of the twentieth century, which some have even called the 'century of genocides'. The study of how the dead body is treated can lead us to an understanding of the impact of mass violence on contemporary societies. Corpses of mass violence and genocide, especially when viewed from a biopolitical perspective, force one to focus on the structures of the relations between all that participates in the enfolding case study. Argentina is an extraordinary laboratory in the domain of struggle against impunity and of 'restoration of the truth'. It constitutes a useful paradigm in the context of reflection on the corpses of mass violence. Its special character, in the immediate aftermath of the military dictatorship, is to test almost the entirety of juridical mechanisms in the handling of state crimes. The trigger for both the intercommunal violence and the civil war was the mass murders by the Ustaša. This book discusses the massacres carried out by the Ustaša in Croatia during the Second World War. After a brief presentation of the historical background, the massacres carried out by the Ustaša militia and their corpse disposal methods are described. Using Rwanda as a case study, the book proposes an agenda for ethnographic research to explore the relationship between concealment and display in contexts of genocide. This relationship is explored in detail after a discussion of the historical background to the 1994 genocide.
This book explains how the famous Spanish singer and actress Imperio Argentina starred in a film, Carmen, la de Triana, that was made in Berlin under the auspices of the Third Reich. It examines the Transition between the dictatorship and democratic eras in four films featuring performances in which transgendered protagonists lip-synch to songs from the Hispanic diaspora. The book considers how punk music and its attendant sensibility and cultural practices were profoundly influential in Spain throughout the early years of democracy. It focuses on one of the most financially successful Spanish films of the last ten years:
Argentina participated in this global humanitarian activity through a large array of fundraising campaigns, and women as well as men volunteered as doctors, nurses, and stretcher-bearers on the European battlefields. Like other Latin American countries, Argentina had strong historical, cultural, economic, and demographic ties to Europe: it was a former colony of Spain; Britain’s major commercial partner in South America; an ardent admirer of republican France; and some of its scientific and military elites had been educated