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Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War

2014; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1478-3398

Lloyd Hughes Davies,

Latin American Literature Studies

DaVid m. SHeinin, Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War. gainesville: university Press of florida. 2012. x + 217 pp. iSBn 978-0-8130-4239-8.This is a welcome addition to the growing bibliography on the argentine military government of 1976-1983. The introduction indicates diverging reactions to it: writers such as luisa Valenzuela are unequivocally condemnatory while other commentators justify the intervention as a necessary evil. Some see the military as saving the country from political and economic chaos and from violent left-wing forces. Sheinin claims that the military 'drew on a long-popular fasci- nation with violence in argentine society to legitimize and normalize state terror' (6) - an interesting point that might have been devel- oped. He previews here one of his main argu- ments: that the transition to democracy was not the firm break with the past that it often has been claimed to be.Chapter 1, 'dictatorship, media and message', emphasizes that the military were driven by an abhorrence of peronismo and by the desire to return to what they imagined to be a lost argentine identity founded on social discipline (9).Many sections of the middle-class were ambivalent towards the dictatorship; support, albeit fleeting, was galvanized by Argentina's triumph in the 1978 football World Cup and by the 1982 malvinas War. military atrocities were largely hidden from public view by media focus on sport, travel and lightsituation comedy. ordinary people were beguiled by the promise of rapid modernization and return to democracy. Sportsmen such as guillermo Vilas (tennis) and the racing driver, Carlos Reute- mann, 'became cultural vehicles through which the military could project propaganda that depicted social normalcy' (19).The second chapter, 'a Correct Herme- neutic Reading', shows how the military dismissed claims of torture and disappear- ances by invoking constitutional guarantees of human rights and, ironically, by justifying the coup as a defence of human rights.Chapter 3, 'The frank War, the fabrica- tion of an ongoing menace and the Jews', points to the military's contradictory claims: the success of its war on terror but also the persistence of that terror: 'the image of a battle almost won was accompanied by an unending image of defeat' (65). The govern- ment's anti-Semitism damaged its image abroad: Jacobo Timmerman, the distin- guished journalist, was detained, tortured and imprisoned. alicia Partnoy's The Little School (1986) provides evidence of links between anti-Semitism and the military regime. But the election of Ronald Reagan as uS president in 1980 relieved the pressure, though the regime was wary of the new french President, francois mitterand.Chapter 4, 'democracy and the (Re) Shaping of Human Rights Politics', looks at the tran- sition to democracy under Raul alfonsin of the Radical Party. One of the first acts of the new government was to commission a report on the disappearances and atrocities, which was published under the title Nunca Mas. its key finding was that there had been a meth- odology of repression in argentina. …