This book wrestles with an important question: how could a “Dirty War,” which resulted in the senseless killing of 15,000 people between 1975 and 1979, largely at the hands of state security forces, have taken place in a society such as Argentina? Donald Hodges begins to unveil the mystery by arguing that political violence and intransigence are patterns of behavior that are deeply ingrained in the national character. The military’s deadly assault against its opposition was simply the latest and most perverse manifestation of an illness that has afflicted Argentina for generations. The author takes sides in the conflict, placing blame not on the guerrillas, whom he claims resorted to legitimate revolutionary violence, but on the armed forces, who resorted to illegitimate state terror. By failing to understand the root cause of Argentina’s problem, which, in his view, has always been the maldistribution of wealth produced by a capitalist system, and in attacking the symptom (subversion) instead, the military only ensured that social discontent would reappear in more virulent forms.
The book’s greatest contribution to scholarship on Argentina, and Latin America in general, is its recognition that the subjective forces that motivate political action are at least of equal importance to the impersonal, economic, and social forces that cause political behavior. Drawing on an impressive array of historical documents, Hodges discovers a number of plausible intellectual roots to the contemporary military mindset that justified the “Dirty War.” In a fascinating and convincing way, Hodges bridges the Argentine military’s preference for restricted democracy, and its obsession with fighting a “Third World War” to defend Western civilization against the evils of communism, with similar formulations made earlier by two rightwing French and North American philosophers. The views of James Burnham, former editor of the National Review, and André Malraux, the French resistance leader and minister of culture under the Fifth Republic, found their way into counterrevolutionary training manuals that in turn were exported to Argentina by French military missions traveling there in the late 1950s. Hodges cites an Argentine commander of Operation Independence in Tucumán who acknowledged his debt to the French doctrine. It is to Hodges’ credit that he establishes the social routing of these ideas, rather than assuming a cause and effect because of ideological similarities between historical and contemporary figures.
The Argentine generals’ uncritical absorption of misinformed theories about U.S.-Soviet antagonism resulted in serious misperceptions about their Dirty War. While the author notes this fact correctly, it is surprising that he also takes their misperceptions about the guerrilla threat as gospel truth. The military government’s dogma about the permanence of the Argentine revolution, its historical magnitude, and its chameleonlike capacity to emerge in disguised form from crushing military defeat to lead the political resistance against the dictatorship were all ideological inventions designed to rationalize its own unlimited and unwarranted use of state terror. In reality, the guerrillas were soundly defeated both militarily and politically, and played virtually no role in the unraveling of the Proceso.
Unfortunately, Hodges uses the military’s misperceptions as ammunition to support his own theories about the strength and viability of the Marxist-Leninist resistance, which, he believes, deflected the attention of the repressive forces as late as 1979, thereby permitting the working class to recoup and launch its own counteroffensive in 1981. The author provides very little evidence to corroborate this assertion, other than simply quoting uncritically from self-serving military and guerrilla documents alike. While the author’s critique of the fall of the military Proceso is misguided, his fundamental contribution remains that he has traced the intellectual origins of the Dirty War and in that manner increased our understanding of why this disgraceful chapter in Argentine history occurred.