“All the World’s a Stage”: Violence and Political Performance in Proceso Argentina, 1973–1983

Abstract

This study re-examines the political performances of Argentine Proceso military leaders (1976-1983) and the specific characteristics of bureaucratic authoritarianism that they upheld. I argue that the Junta’s leading “moderate wing” moved state terrorism and violence out of the public view and into clandestine spaces, thus, performing specific, goal-oriented politics. The absence of public, visible violence enabled military leaders to project a sense of stability to domestic populations and international capital. Human rights activists, international investigators, and victims of military violence challenged the military’s performance. However, the silencing of public violence remained an active project that enabled the military to interact with international power brokers.A close reading of Argentine military manuals and legal mandates, witness testimonies, competing propaganda narratives, and international diplomatic analyses by U.S. State Department personnel reveals a dual failure of military leaders’ goals of their performance. First, the inherent contradictions of the Junta simultaneously using an extralegal, parallel state apparatus and the legal, legitimate state apparatus prevented a unified narrative to support the Junta’s performance. Second, the resulting friction between military leaders’ official narratives on one side and victims’, investigative bodies’, and guerrillas’ narratives on the other, made the Proceso state’s hidden violence more visible. This visibility prevented effective Cold War citations of anti-communist counterinsurgency and human rights compliance centered in the Junta’s performative strategy. As a result, powerful external observers were unable to read the Junta’s performance because it did not fit the new international human rights policy paradigm of the 1970s. I show that the Proceso’s unique position at the border between old and new Cold War political and cultural orders’ reveals the limits of both state political performance to international audiences and bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes’ turns to violence in the absence of legitimacy-building processes.