ABSTRACT
The culture of fear becomes very visible in a context of civil war. El Salvador and other Central American societies were mentioned during the Seminar as highly significant cases deserving careful study, although none could be produced on that occasion. The impact of change on the underlying society. Liberalization, crisis, collapse, redemocratization are all macro-processes, at the top. An authoritarian society, on the other hand, develops unitary mechanisms that collapse different orders of problems, reduce the public sphere, and systematically distort and repress communication. The main bias of most social science studies of authoritarianism in Latin America, has been to analyze the increasing power of the State and the ideology of elites—the managers of fear, the agents of repression—to the detriment of studies on the bottom of society. Present trends towards political liberalization and the return to a democratic regime in Argentina favor the development of field studies which were extremely difficult to design and execute.
