Proceso de Reorganización Nacional

The Proceso de Reorganización Nacional was the Argentine military dictatorship that took power in the coup of 24 March 1976, overthrowing President María Estela Martínez de Perón. Its defining method was state terror conducted through a clandestine apparatus: people could be detained, made to disappear, and stripped of the records that might establish what had happened to them. The novel places this regime in a regional and international context, then links its violence to a renewed exodus that sends refugees—including Spanish Republicans who had settled in Argentina—back across the Atlantic.

Establishment and political context

On 24 March 1976, a group of Argentine generals deposed María Estela Martínez de Perón, the country’s president and the first woman in the history of the West to hold that office. The coup followed the death of Juan Domingo Perón on 1 July 1974. His widow, known as Isabel or Isabelita, had become president as vice president and remained in office for more than a year and a half before the military removed her, detained her, and confined her to a villa in the remote Patagonian province of Neuquén.

The new regime was named the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Its governing junta represented all three branches of the armed forces: Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla took power as commander general of the Army, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera as commander general of the Navy, and Brigadier General Orlando Ramón Agosti as commander general of the Air Force. Despite this tripartite structure, Videla acted as the regime’s leader until 1981, when a new junta headed by Lieutenant General Roberto Eduardo Viola replaced the first. Two further juntas followed. Military rule ended only after defeat in the Malvinas War, the spread of domestic protest, and the loss of international support led the armed forces to call elections, held in October 1983.

Argentina’s coup came amid a regional retreat from democracy. Uruguay had become a dictatorship in 1973 under Juan María Bordaberry, backed by the army; Augusto Pinochet had seized power in Chile that year; Bolivia had been ruled by Hugo Banzer since 1971; Paraguay had been under Alfredo Stroessner since 1954; and Brazil’s military dictatorship, established in 1964, continued under successive generals after Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco’s death in 1967. In March 1976 Argentina was the only country in the Southern Cone still governed democratically. The novel frames the coup as part of a wider pattern, rather than an isolated national rupture.

Cold War support and the path to repression

The narrative connects the Argentine dictatorship to the National Security Doctrine, a policy adopted by United States diplomacy in Latin America to combat left-wing movements and organizations. In this Cold War framework, military dictatorships were treated as instruments in the struggle against communism and could receive support from Washington. Two days after the coup, former U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers anticipated extensive repression and bloodshed, including the targeting not only of armed opponents but also of union dissidents and members of the ruling party. His successor, Henry Kissinger, expressed a desire to support the new rulers rather than make them feel besieged by the United States.

The novel traces an earlier stage of this repression to the government that the junta overthrew. On 5 February 1975, Isabel Perón issued the decree that founded Operativo Independencia, a military intervention ostensibly intended to defeat guerrillas in the forests of Tucumán province. In practice, the operation divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders sweeping authority to repress people labeled subversive. Brigadier General Acdel Vilas described its objective as cultural: guerrilla activity, in his account, was only one aspect of subversion. The resulting campaign targeted civilians in San Miguel de Tucumán, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures. The book presents Operativo Independencia as a precursor to the more extensive repression carried out under the Proceso.

Clandestine state terror

From the spring of 1976 through the autumn of 1982, the dictatorship was responsible for the forced disappearance of thousands of people. Because many bodies were never recovered, estimates vary; the novel gives an approximate total of 30,000 victims. In May 1977, Buenos Aires provincial military governor Ibérico Manuel Saint-Jean described the regime’s expanding targets to The Guardian: first those called subversives, then their accomplices, sympathizers, and finally the indifferent and hesitant. The sequence makes explicit how repression could extend beyond armed opposition to an ever-widening circle of people.

The regime imposed an indefinite state of siege and brutal repressive laws that suspended citizens’ rights and freedoms and denied them the ability to leave the country. Alongside those public restrictions, it created a clandestine structure of repression organized into task groups, each assigned a particular function. The work of this apparatus included kidnapping and disappearance, secret detention, torture, executions, and the concealment of bodies. It also operated clandestine maternity wards where detained women gave birth and were separated from their infants; other offices erased the children’s identities and arranged their adoptions by military or civilian families aligned with the dictatorship.

The so-called death flights were an especially stark example of this division of labor. Military pilots transported living prisoners, bound and drugged, in aircraft and cast them into the sea from great heights. The practice joined physical killing to the destruction of evidence: disappearance was not merely an outcome of violence but a means of concealing responsibility and denying families reliable knowledge of the missing. In this system, the state attacked both the person and the traces by which that person could be recognized.

Disappearance, documents, and the novel’s wider frame

The novel places the dictatorship’s methods in conversation with earlier acts of concealed state violence in Spain. During the Spanish Civil War, a wounded man identified as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez is believed by medical staff to be dead. A commander discovers an identity card from the Public Order Council of the Defense Junta and receives instructions from a police commissioner: if Cuesta is dead, he is to be buried as an unknown person without registration; if alive, he must be kept alive but prevented from entering a hospital under his own name, because someone may try to kill him again. The episode shows how a person’s legal visibility—or deliberate erasure—can determine whether he is protected or exposed.

Another Spanish episode makes the administrative cover-up visible in a later period. After a body is found in the Casa de Campo, officials arrange to bypass the autopsy and complete the burial promptly. The unidentified dead are assigned to a common grave at La Almudena Cemetery, where many unregistered people have supposedly died of the same unspecified cardiac cause. An apparent gunshot wound is folded into that routine fiction. These scenes do not make the Spanish and Argentine regimes identical; they establish a recurring narrative concern with institutions that conceal violence by controlling names, records, and the handling of the dead.

The same concern with identity shapes the lives of exiles. After losing his home and living under an assumed name, Guillermo García Medina learns to inhabit a false identity as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez; the avenue of the Castellana becomes, in his daily walks, a dividing line between one life and the other. Manuel Arroyo Benítez, meanwhile, returns to Ginebra in 1939 under changed circumstances, lonely after Meg Williams’s departure and employed in an unofficial role arranged by Pablo de Azcárate. He meets political representatives under the name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez and sends reports to Taplow. His work contributes to efforts to keep Francoist Spain isolated internationally, but the novel emphasizes the personal cost and the compromised, precarious position of exile.

On 10 September 1946, Arroyo re-enters Spain through Gibraltar under the cover of an American visitor of Spanish parentage. The route and passport conceal a return undertaken for a mission, just as his earlier assumed identity concealed the work he performed abroad. Later, in Buenos Aires, he accompanies Clara Stauffer while already trying to distance himself from her network. His movements across borders and names give the Argentine dictatorship’s new refugee crisis a long prehistory: political violence repeatedly forces people to leave, and political arrangements determine whether they can return, remain, or be identified.

Exile and historical consequence

The terror began on the night of the coup, when hundreds of illegal arrests took place. From that moment, many Argentines sought ways to leave the country. Mexico received the largest number of exiles, while Spain was the second most common destination. That destination carried a pointed historical irony: Franco had just died, and Spain had been both a protector of Juan Perón and a place associated with his exile. Latin American dictators had also treated Perón as a model, while adopting techniques such as taking children from political prisoners—methods the novel connects to practices already used in postwar Spain.

The Argentine crisis thus returns Spanish Republicans to a country they had left in 1939. After building new lives across the ocean, some are forced, nearly forty years later, into another exile that brings them home as foreigners and with nothing. The regime’s significance in the book lies not only in its own machinery of repression but in this reversal of refuge: Spain, once a destination for people fleeing political defeat, becomes the place to which another political catastrophe sends them back. The repeated passage between countries, identities, and generations turns exile into one of the dictatorship’s far-reaching consequences.