ABSTRACT
Until 1983, Argentina was one of the countries in South America where the military had ruled most frequently and for the longest time, pervading the bureaucracy of the state and the political logic of access to public power. While in the nineteenth century militarization was the inevitable corollary of the wars of independence and of the internal power struggles over the centralization of the State, the militarization of the government during the twentieth century was caused by recurrent military coups. During the state terror of the 1970s, political persecution of academics, students and state university professors was carried out relentlessly. By 2005 all of the military forces involved in crimes against humanity during the state terrorism were gradually facing legal charges and prosecutions regardless of rank and the "due obedience" argument that had protected the junior military personnel for almost 20 years. In some way, ethnographic research was challenging one of the constitutive dimensions of the Argentine military career.
