1976–1983 Argentine military dictatorship

The 1976–1983 Argentine military dictatorship is presented as a recent history of political repression whose dead remain part of Buenos Aires’s physical and imaginative landscape. In the supplied discussion of A Crack in the Wall, a buried body connects a building’s foundations to that history, making the city itself a register of violence and memory.

Historical Period and Repression

The period is named as the 1976–1983 Argentine military dictatorship. The evidence characterizes its legacy through political repression and the fate of the dead, describing Buenos Aires as a city where many of them lie outside cemetery walls. This image places the consequences of state violence beyond the boundaries of formal burial and public commemoration.

The Buried Body in A Crack in the Wall

In A Crack in the Wall, an uninvestigated crime is associated with a body literally buried in the foundations of the building where the action takes place. The critical account reads this physical concealment as a metonym for the city’s darker recent history, linking the novel’s specific crime to deaths produced by political repression during the dictatorship.

Urban Space and Historical Memory

The foundations make historical memory concrete: the past is not only recalled but lies beneath the setting in which the present action unfolds. The image of the dead outside cemetery walls sharpens that connection, suggesting a history that exceeds authorized sites of mourning. The supplied evidence establishes this literary association in A Crack in the Wall; it does not identify the dictatorship as a direct episode in Elena Knows.