ABSTRACT
Argentines—like Brasilians, Uruguayans, Chileans, and others—have actively sought answers. Argentina, attempting to come to terms with a decade of terror and its perpetrators, elected to office a government whose sole political program was the return to the rule of law in the form of the Constitution. The backdrop, the seven-year rule of the self-denominated Process of Argentine National Reorganization, has become synonymous in the international press with modern reigns of terror. The Proceso, as repudiated dictatorship is often called by Argentines, has the dubious distinction of adding the word desaparecido to the world's vocabulary. The gesture of documenting, of recording testimony, in all three cases—Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay—was to create an official memory of events that were never to be forgotten. State terrorism had atomized and thrown into crisis Argentine identities through frontal attack on political ties and the crumbling of social bonds in the resulting climate of fear.
