Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional

Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional is presented as a Cold War policy framework that treated military dictatorship as an instrument for defeating left-wing movements across Latin America. In the novel’s account, this doctrine links the language of anticommunist security to the authorization and support of state violence. Its Argentine expression is not an abstract political theory: it becomes a system that divides society into targets, disappears people, and works to erase the evidence of what it has done.

Cold War framework and external support

The account places Argentina within a regional landscape already marked by military rule. Uruguay and Chile underwent coups in 1973, Bolivia had been under dictatorship since 1971, Paraguay since 1954, and Brazil’s military dictatorship began in 1964. Against this background, Argentina’s 1976 coup is described as another success for Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional: Washington’s diplomatic approach aimed to combat left-wing movements throughout the continent, with military governments treated as a means to secure victory over communism.

The doctrine’s practical meaning is underscored by statements from senior United States officials soon after the coup. On 26 March 1976, William P. Rogers anticipated extensive repression and bloodshed, including the pursuit not only of alleged terrorists but also of trade-union dissidents and members of the coup leaders’ own political parties. Henry Kissinger, Rogers’s successor, said that the new rulers would need support and that he wanted to give it to them. Together, these statements show the distance between public professions of democratic values and a policy willing to encourage a regime expected to use broad repression.

From anticommunist policy to state terror

The novel traces Argentina’s repression to a process that began before the coup. President María Estela Martínez de Perón, seeking to demonstrate her anticommunist commitment and preserve her position amid international pressures, issued the first so-called annihilation decree on 5 February 1975. It initiated Operativo Independencia, ostensibly a campaign against guerrillas in the forests of Tucumán. In practice, the military divided the country into five zones and gave their commanders unlimited power to repress those designated subversive.

Brigadier General Acdel Vilas described the operation’s purpose as fundamentally cultural: guerrilla activity, in his view, was only one aspect of subversion. That framing widened the target beyond armed opponents. The operation brought terror to civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures in San Miguel de Tucumán. The novel presents it as a precursor to the more extensive and refined repression of the subsequent military regime: the security framework made a purportedly internal threat expansive enough to encompass civilian life and culture.

The Argentine system of disappearance

From the spring of 1976 to the autumn of 1982, the dictatorship was responsible for the forced disappearance of thousands of people. Because many bodies were never found, estimates vary; the novel gives an approximate total of thirty thousand victims. The scale of the violence is set beside a statement by General Ibérico Manuel Saint-Jean, the military governor of Buenos Aires Province, who told The Guardian in May 1977 that the regime would eliminate alleged subversives first, then their accomplices, supporters, and finally the indifferent and the hesitant. The declared sequence makes repression effectively limitless: association, sympathy, and even passivity could be made grounds for persecution.

The regime combined an indefinite state of siege and brutal repressive laws, which suspended civil rights and freedoms and denied citizens the possibility of leaving the country, with a clandestine apparatus organized into specialized task groups. Its functions included abductions and disappearances, secret detention centers, torture, executions, disposal of bodies, and clandestine maternity wards where detained women gave birth to babies they would never see again. Other personnel erased the stolen children’s identities and arranged their adoption by military families or civilians aligned with the dictatorship.

The death flights reveal the system’s fusion of organized killing and the removal of evidence. Military pilots carried living prisoners, bound and drugged, in aircraft and threw them into the sea from great heights. The disappeared were thus subjected not only to detention and death but to a method designed to make both the crime and the victim difficult to recover. The regime’s clandestine structure transformed political violence into a division of labor, with concealment built into the operation.

The novel’s wider pattern of secrecy and impunity

The Argentine account resonates with earlier scenes in the novel, which depict related techniques of concealment without treating the episodes as identical in scale or political context. During the Spanish Civil War, a military commander who finds wounded Rafael Cuesta Sánchez is instructed to save him if he is alive, keep him out of hospitals under his own name, and, if he is dead, bury him as an unknown person without registering him. The secret instructions are justified by Rafael’s importance to the Republic; they also make identity and registration matters of life and death.

A later scene shows how a dictatorship can make such administrative erasure serve a different purpose. In Madrid, an unidentified man killed by a shot to the neck is officially recorded as having died of cardiac arrest and sent to a common grave at La Almudena Cemetery. The officials involved bypass an autopsy and complete the burial quickly; the gravediggers notice the bullet wound but proceed with their ordinary task. The scene’s bitter contrast between the body’s visible injury and its falsified paperwork illuminates a central mechanism of state terror: the official record can be made to deny what the body proves.

Across these episodes, secrecy is not merely the absence of information. It is produced through instructions, false records, unregistered burials, hidden detention, and the destruction or reassignment of identity. The Argentine dictatorship’s scale and systematization mark its particular horror, while the recurring motif shows how coercive power can control not only bodies but also the names, histories, and evidence by which violence might be recognized. Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional gives this violence its political rationale; the novel exposes the human and institutional consequences of turning anticommunism into permission for repression without meaningful limits.