Argentina Betrayed

Memory, Mourning, and Accountability

Antonius C. G. M. Robben

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780812294910
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Violence in Society
• Index: Social Sciences

The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country's people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the state's trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror?In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past.With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina—and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum—Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.

CHAPTER 1

Trauma

On 16 June 1955, shortly after midday, twenty-six bombers from naval aviation were circling above an overcast Buenos Aires poised for attack. The sky finally cleared at 12:40 P.M., and the airplanes began bombing the Plaza de Mayo in a rebellion against President Juan Domingo Perón, causing great havoc. The presidential palace sustained a direct hit that killed twelve people. Perón remained unscathed because he had taken refuge in the Ministry of War. Civilians died from the shattered glass that fell from the Treasury building, and a bus filled with schoolchildren fleeing home was hit. Meanwhile, trucks carrying Peronist workers were arriving. They wanted to come to Perón’s aid, as they had done on 17 October 1945, when their leader had been detained by the military government. They asked for weapons to assist the army in repelling the three hundred marines advancing from the harbor. Soon, four Sherman tanks arrived to attack the rebel troops from the rear. Further bombardments took place at 1:10 P.M. and 3:30 P.M. Some naval planes were shot down by anti-aircraft fire and fighter planes manned by loyalist Air Force pilots, but most rebel bombers escaped to Uruguay. The naval uprising failed that day, leaving 309 dead and more than 2,000 wounded, many of them civilians. One eyewitness described the scene the day after: “We saw a bus with dead children and their heads crushed against the roof. At the square, there were dolls thrown on the pavement, abandoned by young girls who had run away, terrified by the bombardment” (Cháves 2005:119; Comisión de Afirmación 1985:46; Portugheis 2015).

In his radio address at 6:00 P.M., Perón told the Peronist workers to return home and leave the fighting to loyalist government troops. But the desire for revenge was too great. The metropolitan curia at the Plaza de Mayo went up in flames that night, because the Catholic authorities had supported the opposition movement against Perón since 1952, and seventeen churches were ransacked or set on fire while police and firemen stood by passively. In a reconciliatory gesture, Perón dealt out only mild sanctions against the rebels, but the political opposition continued unabated. The Catholic Church hierarchy kept up its pressure, a new coup was in the making, and the crowds of both Peronists and anti-Peronists filled the streets of Buenos Aires. Perón made an about face. At a major Peronist rally, he announced that the time of retaliation had arrived: “The watchword for every peronista, whether alone or within an organization, is to answer a violent act with another violent act. And whenever one of us falls, five of them will fall” (Torre and Riz 1993:262). Because of this ominous threat, and the Peronist union central’s intention to form an armed militia, the Army and Navy rose again in rebellion on 18 September 1955. Perón fled to the Paraguayan embassy, and left the country on 3 October (Potash 1980:200–202; Torre and Riz 1993:262–263). General Lonardi became Argentina’s president but was ousted in January 1956 by military hard-liner General Aramburu.

The bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo became the first sociocultural trauma of the Peronist movement. Weapons of war had attacked a Peronist crowd. A state apparatus had betrayed its constitutional mission to protect the Argentine people, had violated their political trust in the state, and in so doing had revealed the vulnerability of street mobilizations. Crowds, according to Canetti (1966), produce feelings of equality and gregariousness that relieve participants temporarily of the residues of resentment left by economic exploitation and social inequality. Perón had addressed these grievances in his speeches and had improved Argentina’s labor conditions with his policies. The Peronist rallies dignified his following and transformed the unorganized popular masses into an invincible, disciplined crowd, according to Perón (1985b:325). The aerial assault was therefore a traumatizing attack on the most public manifestation of Peronist identity and against the trust forged at the Plaza de Mayo as Peronists sang the Peronist march and cheered for Perón. Ultimately, the bombing damaged the infinite unity and mutual attachment experienced by people in a crowd as well as the belief in the force of mass association.

The bombardment of 1955 embroiled Argentina in a spiral of violence that did not escalate by itself. The notion that violence begets violence is thoroughly ingrained in Western thought and can be found as much in Greek tragedies like the Oresteia by Aeschylus as in the work of contemporary scholars such as Girard (1992), Kalyvas (2006), Minow (2002), Feldman (1991), Taussig (1987), and Van Creveld (1991). The spiral of violence is believed to be fueled by a tit-for-tat dynamic of hatred and revenge. In Argentina, at least, the mounting violence was mediated by repeated sociocultural traumas. Outbursts of political violence produced sociocultural traumas and then became the products of the sociocultural traumas they produced. Political violence did not simply lead to more violence, but violence begot trauma, and trauma led to more violence. Through the decades, these dynamics generated an overdetermined whole with escalating degrees of violence and accumulative trauma that were noticeable at multiple levels of society and that turned trust and betrayal into the scales of people’s political lives and everyday preoccupations.

This chapter explains the violence-trauma-violence dynamics in Argentina between 1955 and 1983 through their manifestation in street crowds, politicomilitary organizations, families, and the self. These four levels of social complexity correspond respectively to the public, political, domestic, and mental domains. Each level has unique practices, meanings, and social relations that are controlled by the complementary modalities of trust and betrayal. Their historical coexistence created interlinkages whose consequences spilled over from one level to another. For example, abductions took place in the political domain among armed organizations, affected the lives of the searching relatives in the domestic domain, and harmed tortured persons in the mental domain. Argentina was neither hit suddenly by an outbreak of crowd protests, revolutionary insurgency, or state repression nor traumatized by one bombardment or massacre, but their accumulation across four social domains resulted in a violent and traumatized society. Violence and trauma percolated through the interconnected yet distinct levels of social complexity, touching many citizens directly and the Argentine people as a whole indirectly because of the nationwide turmoil. The multiple manifestations of political violence and sociocultural trauma reinforced one another over time through continued betrayal, and they corroded people’s trusting relations. The multilevel mistrust did not dissipate when democracy returned but continued to influence Argentine society because of several enduring sociocultural traumas.

The Multiple Meanings of Trauma

Violence can become traumatic when major injuries, losses, and threats to life and limb provoke horror, terror, or helplessness (Green 1990; Weathers and Keane 2007). Such psychic trauma comprises three aspects: the violent event, the victim’s subjective perception, and the psychological response to the event. Life-threatening events, the death of loved ones, and hurting other human beings can all lead to psychic trauma (Green 1990).¹ Charuvastra and Cloitre (2008) have argued that not only fear but also insecurity can be traumatizing. The attack on people’s social attachments may leave them so vulnerable and unprotected that they can become traumatized, as was clear in Argentina when family members were helpless during an abduction in the home. Jennifer Freyd and her collaborators have stretched the meaning of psychic trauma even further by arguing that fear and betrayal are different dimensions of trauma. Abused children may develop a betrayal trauma because the sexual violence inflicted by a parent violates the trusting relation (Freyd 1996; Bernstein and Freyd 2014; Gobin and Freyd 2014).² I agree that betrayal can be emotionally very damaging, but I share Richard McNally’s concern about the risk of conceptual creep by spreading the concept of psychic trauma so thin that it applies to any experience of stress, pain, loss, and suffering (McNally 2010). What I take from this discussion is that psychic trauma involves intrapsychic and interpersonal processes, that betrayal can exacerbate emotional harm, and that the traumatizing violation of attachment relationships can become manifest on different levels of social complexity and not exclusively on the mental level.

People have the resilience to recover from traumatic experiences—without forgetting them—because they succeed in integrating them into their interpretation of the world. Such was the case with captured Argentine insurgents who regarded torture as inevitable in a class war and a necessary sacrifice for the revolution. A minority of victims develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) years or decades after the precipitating event. “Salient features are memories of the traumatic event or their avoidance, a negative mood, aggression, sleeping difficulties, reckless behavior, and hypervigilance” (Pillen 2016:97). Such psychic rupture reverses people’s ontological security in a topsy-turvy world that is incommensurate with everyday life in a society where trust and trustworthiness in human relations are taken for granted (Herman 1997; Robben 2000b; Saporta and van der Kolk 1992). For example, Gampel (2000) has shown that traumatized Holocaust survivors cannot reconcile and psychically integrate the everyday background of safety with the background of traumatic camp experiences, and therefore try to keep these disparate realities apart.

An awareness of the devastating social dimensions of traumatizing violence paved the way for the term social trauma. A social trauma is not a psychic trauma writ large but describes the process of traumatization on the group level, even when many members do not suffer from psychic trauma or have not experienced the violence in person. “Whether or not it manifests in individual disorders, the deterioration of social interaction is in and of itself a serious social disturbance, an erosion of our collective capacity to work and love, to assert our unique identity, to tell our personal and communal story in the history of peoples” (Martín-Baró 1994:115). A social trauma is not the sum of individual suffering but refers to ruptured social bonds and destroyed collectivities. “It is possible to describe social dislocations and catastrophes as social traumas if they massively disrupt organized social life” (Smelser 2004:37). Just as psychic trauma has been called a wound to the mind, metaphorically speaking, so social trauma is an injury “to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality,” according to Kai Erikson’s (1976:154) influential study of an Appalachian mining community hit by a deadly wave of water-saturated slag. This social trauma was caused by the disaster and the disassembled neighborhood ties after homeless survivors were dispersed over different trailer parks. Erikson (1995:198) speaks of “a loss of confidence in the surrounding tissue of family and community, in the structures of human government, in the larger logics by which humankind lives.” Social trauma may impair a community’s functioning by damaging social and political trust, but it may also incite social protest and political action, as will be shown in this chapter.

Social trauma is not an inevitable reaction to massive violence, and we must be careful not to equate social trauma with social suffering. Societies and social groups have shown a remarkable resilience under adverse circumstances and have found ways to reconstruct what was lost and broken through posttraumatic growth. Sometimes, however, they become defenseless when coping strategies fail. As I have explained elsewhere (Robben 2005a:346–349), repeated excessive violence may eventually prevent traumatized groups from functioning. A case in point is the Argentine guerrilla insurgency that was relentlessly pursued by the armed forces. After recovering from one blow after another, replacing fallen combatants and shoring up the chain of command, the guerrilla movement finally succumbed. The political ideals, the secret meetings and safe houses, the camaraderie and friendship, and the ideological faith in a final victory—all collapsed through attrition, capture, and betrayal. Likewise, assaulted societies are periodically reminded of past atrocities that are incommensurable with post-catastrophe times, as Friedlander (1993:48–58) has argued about the Holocaust. In post-authoritarian Argentina, shattering experiences resurfaced when mass graves were opened, former captives gave testimony in court, searching grandmothers found kidnapped grandchildren, and the military openly denied the disappearances. Such evocations of traumatic experiences were ways of struggling with the meaning of past atrocities.

Violence may also entail cultural traumas that manifest the inability to make sense of the onslaught. “Cultural trauma,” observes Alexander (2012:6), “occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.” Cultural trauma involves a cultural disorientation because meanings and explanations that have been taken for granted have become obsolete. In the same vein, Sztompka (2000:449) defines cultural trauma as “the culturally defined and interpreted shock to the cultural tissue of society,” and he delineates a traumatizing sequence that begins with a major upheaval, continues with unsatisfactory interpretations of the catastrophe, and leads to social and cultural disruption.

Social trauma and cultural trauma can be distinguished analytically but may also overlap in empirical reality. I will therefore employ sociocultural trauma as a generic term unless specific issues of cultural meaning or social disruption need to be addressed.³ Sociocultural trauma in Argentina stems from prolonged difficulties of mourning mass deaths and cumulative shattering events. Disturbing memories are relived in the present, and there is a persistent fear about repression or death. The traumatic past becomes indelible when people or groups cannot reconcile themselves with their losses and fail to integrate them into a shared narrative. Unexpected revelations and the appearance of new material evidence are disturbing because they cannot be accommodated in acceptable explanations. When satisfactory interpretations cannot be formulated, the traumatic past intrudes on the present, influences the future, and is relived in multidirectional social memories that attribute contested meanings to past experiences. In short, society is traumatized, not in a medical or pathological sense but as a result of complex historical and sociopolitical processes.⁴

I am aware of existing critiques that address the use of the term trauma in relation to state violence and human rights violations.⁵ Trauma has become a moral construct that is generally associated with victims, not perpetrators. “As a result, the clinically describable trauma experienced by individuals who are immoral, or whose behavior should not be empathized with, is neglected in both scholarly and popular accounts of trauma. Indeed, perpetrators are considered potentially traumatized only when they can be viewed also as victims, such as child soldiers and individuals who commit crimes under duress” (Mohamed 2015:1167). However, like power, trauma is a double-edged concept that helps elucidate the complex relation between perpetrators and victims but does not imply their moral equivalence. The fact that power is a key dimension of both domination and resistance, exercised differently by rulers and ruled, does not disqualify the concept. The additional critique by Kleinman (1999) and Fassin and Rechtman (2009) that the concept of trauma tends to medicalize a sociopolitical condition can be avoided by always analyzing sociocultural trauma together with the political violence that preceded it, as I am doing in this chapter. Our human compassion for the tortured and subjugated should not make us blind to understanding dictators and perpetrators—to seeing them not as unilineal evildoers but as people with human contradictions and vulnerabilities, including psychic traumas. The same applies to sociocultural traumas, which is this book’s main interest. The armed forces and the guerrilla insurgency traumatized one another, and state terrorism traumatized Argentine society, but I do not regard them as morally interchangeable. Ignoring some sociocultural traumas because they affect unsavory groups and organizations would hamper our analysis. Argentina’s predicament in the last four decades can only be understood when all pertinent protagonists, organizations, and state institutions are included in one comprehensive analysis of the complex multilevel dynamics of political violence and sociocultural trauma.

In December 1983, Argentina was a traumatized society. This qualification does not mean that Argentina was a malfunctioning society but that the country was beset with several sociocultural traumas that influenced its memories of the past, its dealings in the present, and its plans and courses of action in the future. Without implying in any way a moral equivalence of the Argentine military and police, guerrillas and political activists, disappeared persons and searching relatives, they were all affected by the overdetermined whole of violence and trauma that came into being in 1955.

Street Crowds, State Repression, and Social Foment

Street crowds became the groundswell of Argentine political life after the rise of Juan Domingo Perón to national prominence on 17 October 1945. On that day, workers formed “an enormous and silent, almost subterranean, force” that converged on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to demand Perón’s release from internment after being ousted from the military government (Luna 1973:284). Crowds had been assembling on Argentina’s streets and squares since the mid-nineteenth century, but they only took center stage in Argentine politics through their periodic mobilization under Peron’s tutelage. Crowd mobilizations became the preferred form of political protest and legitimation in Argentina (Robben 2005a:5–10; Torre 1995). Peronist crowds were the acme of the unchained popular masses, and Perón (1985a:37) believed that only a strong leader could control their impulsive nature. They expressed the popular resentment of social, political, and economic wrongs and celebrated the dignity, social gains, and political rights of workers as full citizens of the republic. These class-conscious crowds were the seedbed of future armed resistance and revolutionary insurgency.

The success of crowd gatherings as a means of Peronist protest and legitimation forced the middle class to contest public space in like fashion when worries about Perón’s increasing authoritarianism surfaced. A growing opposition in the armed forces had already resulted in two military rebellions. In addition, the suspicion that the Peronist movement was trying to take the place of Argentina’s Catholic youth, labor, and charity organizations caused a falling-out with the Catholic Church. The first crowd contest erupted in Córdoba in September 1954. A march of ten thousand Peronist high school students was upstaged by a Catholic rally that attracted eighty thousand people. In the following months, more than a dozen large Catholic demonstrations were organized in Buenos Aires that clashed frequently with Peronist supporters. Perón added fuel to the fire by declaring in May 1955 the official separation of church and state. Rumors surfaced about a coup d’état, and the loyal Peronist union central CGT (Confederación General de Trabajo) began to organize its rank and file to support Perón (Robben 2005a:16–19). The mobilization failed to deter the forces of rebellion. The seat of government was attacked on the ground and from the air on 16 June 1955, as described in this chapter’s introduction. The threat of more violence three months later persuaded Perón to leave the country.

The bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo on 16 June 1955 became part of the Peronist identity as a sociocultural trauma: horror and terror about the attack, an overall fear of crowd mobilization, a strong distrust of the armed forces, and an inability to come to grips with the dead. The armed forces had turned their weapons against the people they were mandated to protect. The betrayal exacerbated the so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Trust and Betrayal
• Chapter 1. Trauma
• Chapter 2. Memory
• Chapter 3. Testimony
• Chapter 4. Denial
• Chapter 5. Sovereignty
• Chapter 6. Accountability
• Chapter 7. Guilt
• Chapter 8. Mourning
• Conclusion
• Appendix. Timeline of Argentine Political History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments