"The voice of the State and memories of the disappeared in Argentina"

CRENZEL, EMILIO ARIEL

Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Simposio; "Social memory and historical justice"; 2008

Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

The voice of the State and memories of the disappeared in Argentina Emilio Crenzel CONICET/University of Buenos Aires/IDES In December 1983, President Raúl Alfonsín set up the "National Commission on the Disappeared" (CONADEP). The Commission investigated the fates of those who disappeared during the rule of the junta. In 1984, the Commission published a report, Nunca Más (Never Again), in which it established that 8961 persons, most of them left-wing political activists, had been disappeared. Human rights organizations estimated that the real number of such victims was in the order of 30,000. More than half a million copies of this report have been sold. It has been translated into several languages, and become an influential model for other reports about human rights violations committed by dictatorships. In my paper, I analyze the narrative strategies of this report, paying particular attention to the categorization of historical actors as victims or perpetrators. I examine how the narrative of the report differs from other narratives offered by the State or by civil society about the period of political violence under the junta. I explore how the report has had a long-lasting impact on how people in Argentina have conceptualized and remembered political violence under the dictatorship.