Las políticas de la violencia: sangre y poder en la década de 1970 en la Argentina

Between the end of the 1960s and the mid-1970s, diverse acts of collective violence took place in Argentina, characterized by public executions and armed confrontations among revolutionary, labor, or party organizations, para-State groups, and law enforcement. These bloody deeds were framed within a view of politics as confrontation, in which retaliation and revenge were admitted as an integral part of the construction of power. In response to this idea of politics as armed confrontation, an apologetic discourse arose during the last civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983), regarding violence monopolized by the State as a way to discipline and reorganize society. In contrast with the previous form of violence, this one was implemented through a systematic program of detention, torture, and clandestine extermination of political dissidents, aimed at doing away with “subversion”. On the basis of testimonies, press materials, and official documents, the article analyzes the differential role that blood and bodies (dead, tortured, or disappeared) have played in the configuration of different ways of doing politics and building stability and sovereignty in one of the most conflictive periods of Argentinean national history.