ABSTRACT
Despite its penchant for torture, throughout its two decades in power, Brazil’s military fairly consistently managed to convince many of its citizens that it was helping them fulfi ll the national motto of “order and progress.” Argentina’s military, however, kept a less steady hand on the national rudder, as evidenced by the chaotic succession of military coups and countercoups alternating with brief periods of civilian rule that plagued the country from the moment of Juan Perón’s ouster and exile in 1955. And while the Brazilian military, despite highs and lows in its levels of repression, held to a relatively moderate level of brutality throughout its most recent two decades in power (1964-1985), Argentina’s military rulers rarely hesitated to come down on their civilian population with an iron fi st. To use just one rough measure of atrocity, the number of civilians estimated to have been killed by the military in Argentina, a country with a population of about 30 million, during the dictatorship of 1976-1983 has been estimated as high as 30,000; the highest estimate of the number of civilians killed by the military in Brazil, a country with a population of almost 200 million, during a dictatorship that lasted more than twice as long, is less than a thousand.1 Argentina’s military rulers looked to Brazil as a model when structuring both their economic policies and their system of political repression. Yet while Argentine economic policies never managed to replicate Brazil’s economic success, the Argentine machinery of torture, assassination, and “disappearance” functioned with far greater effi ciency than Brazil’s.2
