Sleight of Hand: Violence as Performance and the Spectacle of Absence in the Southern Cone

Abstract

I explore the changing use of political violence by the new Latin American military regimes, specifically post-1976 Argentina with comparative analysis towards Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, as well as by those who protested military authoritarianism during the Dirty War and Operation Condor. These military dictatorships adopted aggressive anti-communist ideologies and displayed them through internal, covert violence. In this study, I adopt definitions of the 'spectacle of violence' and the 'spectacle of absence' that seek to explore the politics of diplomacy behind violent acts that have informed the processes of staging, or hiding, both the methods and outcome of inflicted violence. Geopolitics of the post-human rights legislation era and the Argentine military’s perception of a failed judicial system fostered the institutionalization of a new violent performance, the spectacle of absence, in opposition to the guerrillas' application of the public spectacle of violence. My analysis of violent spectacles within Argentina and their reception at home and abroad displays the various meanings transmitted and received through the medium of political violence as performance.