Once victors, now victims: how do the Argentine military remember their recent past?

Abstract

Despite the silence and concealment that surrounded this systematic policy of disappearance of persons in Argentina, both the Army and its retired and active cadres remember the years of repression; that is to say, they construct and reproduce versions of that past. An unstable balance between memory and oblivion, evocation and negation, selection and vindication is established in these versions. This irregular balance discloses that the military memories around the illegal repression reflects the weight of the shared traditions and identities as well as the persistence of certain narrative frameworks in addition to the ups and downs of the political and legal situations or the tensions existing with other competing memories.