Jaradat, N. (2020). Society’s Demons: A Critical Examination of Argentina’s Soi-Disant “Dirty War.” Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.14418/wes01.1.2297
The most recent Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) was a brutality that left an estimated 30,000 people “disappeared”, that is, presumed dead but without a body for families to mourn. This thesis examines the actions and consequences of this dictatorship in the larger context of Operation Condor, a United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed six-nation shadow network of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America’s Southern Cone. During this time, a subset of the Argentine population that was deemed by the authoritarian regime as “subversive” was targeted and subsequently kidnapped, tortured, and in many cases, assassinated, while many of their children were appropriated by military personnel or upper-middle class families who supported the regime. This thesis aims to uncover the atrocities that took place during these years while simultaneously making an argument against the term, “Dirty War”, and examining the existence of the idea of an ostensible human collective memory.