The 1976 Argentine coup d’état began on March 24, 1976, when a group of generals overthrew President María Estela Martínez de Perón and established a military dictatorship. In the novel, the coup is both a decisive political rupture and the culmination of a longer pattern of repression: the new regime institutionalizes state terror, while the surrounding Cold War politics help shield that violence from meaningful international opposition.

Causes and Regional Context

The coup took place in a South America already marked by military rule. Uruguay had become a dictatorship in 1973, the same year Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile; Bolivia had been under Hugo Banzer since 1971, Paraguay under Alfredo Stroessner since 1954, and Brazil under military rule since 1964. Argentina was the last country in the Southern Cone still governed democratically. Its overthrow therefore completed a regional shift rather than standing as an isolated seizure of power.

The narrative connects that shift to the National Security Doctrine, which treated the suppression of left-wing movements throughout Latin America as a Cold War priority. It describes Washington as favoring and supporting military dictatorships in pursuit of that objective. Two days after the coup, former U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers anticipated severe repression and urged that the search extend beyond guerrillas to union dissidents and members of the regime’s own parties. His successor, Henry Kissinger, likewise expressed a desire to give the new rulers support rather than make them feel besieged. These reactions frame the coup’s international setting as one in which anti-communism could outweigh concern over repression.

From Pre-Coup Repression to Military Rule

The novel presents the coup as an intensification of policies already underway, not the beginning of political violence in Argentina. On February 5, 1975, Isabel Perón issued what the account calls the first decree of annihilation, establishing Operation Independence. Officially directed against guerrillas in the Tucumán jungle, the operation divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders sweeping power to repress those labeled subversive.

Brigadier General Acdel Vilas described the operation’s aim as primarily cultural, because he considered guerrilla warfare only one part of subversion. In practice, the campaign terrorized civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures in San Miguel de Tucumán. Its methods and intensity foreshadowed the repression that the dictatorship would expand and refine after taking power.

The Junta and Its System of Terror

The new government called itself the National Reorganization Process. It was headed by a three-member junta representing the Army, Navy, and Air Force: Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Brigadier General Orlando Ramón Agosti. Videla became the leading figure until 1981, when another junta, headed by Lieutenant General Roberto Eduardo Viola, replaced the first. Two further juntas followed before defeat in the Falklands War, mounting domestic protests, and declining international support compelled the military rulers to call elections in October 1983.

The dictatorship made state terrorism a central instrument of government and operated with what the narrative describes as near-total impunity. From the spring of 1976 through the autumn of 1982, it forcibly disappeared thousands of people; estimates reach approximately thirty thousand, although the number remains uncertain because many bodies were never found. In May 1977, Buenos Aires provincial military governor General Ibérico Manuel Saint-Jean publicly set out an escalating sequence of targets: first alleged subversives, then their accomplices, supporters, and finally the indifferent.

Repression was organized through specialized task groups. Their functions included kidnapping and disappearance, secret detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and clandestine maternity wards where detained women gave birth to children they were never allowed to see again. Other personnel erased the children’s identities and arranged their adoption by military or civilian families aligned with the dictatorship. The system thus attacked people both physically and administratively: violence was paired with the concealment or reassignment of identity, making the destruction of evidence part of the machinery of repression.

The death flights represented an especially extreme form of that system. Military pilots transported living prisoners, bound and drugged, in fighter aircraft and threw them into the open sea from thousands of meters above. The terror began on the night of March 24, when hundreds of illegal arrests took place. From then on, finding a way out of the country became an urgent concern for thousands of Argentines.

Aftermath and Exile

The coup’s immediate consequence was not only a change of government but the closing of ordinary protections and the spread of clandestine state violence. The dictatorship’s trajectory ended in a return to electoral politics in 1983, after military defeat, protests, and international isolation weakened its hold on power. Its victims, however, included thousands who remained missing, alongside families deprived of knowledge about the disappeared and children whose identities had been deliberately altered.

Mexico received the largest number of Argentine exiles, aided by its relative proximity and long tradition of asylum. Spain was the second-largest destination, a pointed historical irony: Francisco Franco had recently died, yet Spain had previously protected and then sheltered Juan Perón. The novel links the practices of the new Latin American dictatorships—including the theft of children from political prisoners—to techniques already used in postwar Spain. The coup therefore closes one chapter of the book’s political history while carrying its recurring concerns with state violence, concealed identities, and the limits of international solidarity into another continent.