State, religion and education in Argentina during the last dictatorship (1976-1983)

RODRÍGUEZ, LAURA GRACIELA

San Luis de Potosi

Congreso; International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE 33); 2011

 In Argentina occurred five golpes de Estado between 1930 and 1966. Similar to other countries of the Southern Cone, on March 24, 1976 was organized in the sixth and last dictatorship in the country. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church strongly supported the interruption of democracy and the most fundamentalist sector justified abduction, the use of torture, and murder of thousands of people accused of "subversive". This systematic plan resulted in a balance of about 30,000 "disappeared" victims of State terrorism.  This plan of the military Government could not be implemented without the support of important members of civil society. In this paper we will develop the case of civil servants who played by the Ministry of Culture and Education during the years of the dictatorship (1976-1983). In particular, we will examine the role played in educational discussions, certain identified as Catholic nationalists, belonging to the fundamentalism of right-wing intellectuals. In general, were part of national and international associations linked to the figure of Santo Tomás de Aquino. Some of them also had relationships with groups of the French right wing that had been acting in the country since the late 1950s.  We intend to show that in the years of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional exerted an important influence in certain areas of the Ministry of Culture and Education and left an abundant written production regarding educational issues with the explicit aim of modify root bases of what they understood that it was "national identity", threatened by the reigning "secularism" Argentinian education.