ABSTRACT
In history textbooks, the desaparecido has become the representative figure of the Argentine military’s abuses of power during the so-called Process of National Reorganization. Produced by the regime’s attempts to eradicate all voices of dissent from the public sphere, this figure belongs to a series of discourses and practices that are inscribed in a greater cultivation of silence: during the Process, the victims were silenced, the discourses they used fell silent, and the government kept its silence about the desaparecidos’ existence and whereabouts. Even the protest of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo addressed people’s unwillingness to hear with the desperate silence of mute photographs, white handkerchiefs and a ritual movement in Argentina’s most symbolic square. The military complemented this censorship with a form of propaganda that further blanketed public discourse with the homogenous drone of white noise. In its investigation of the desaparecidos, the National Commission reports that “covering up the truth and misinformation were essential to the most important acts of the military governments between 1976 and 1983” (CONADEP 1986: 52). Accordingly, the military’s official voice saturated the public sphere, rushing into the vacuum created by the radical censorship of leftist discourse and its actual or potential speakers. The totalizing propaganda transformed the shadow of the desaparecido into a “Marxist subversive” who waged a “dirty war” against the Argentine way of life: “Argentinians have had the opportunity of seeing an abundance of television programmes, of reading countless newspaper and magazine articles, as well as a full-length book published by the military government, in which those acts of terrorism were listed, described, and condemned in minute detail” (CONADEP 1986: 6). This extensive campaign of propaganda assimilated public discourse into a unitary ideological voice that presented the military’s vision of national identity and the process that would implement it.
