24 de marzo de 1976

24 de marzo de 1976 is the date the Argentine armed forces overthrew President María Estela Martínez de Perón and began the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. In the novel, the coup is both a political rupture and the beginning of an organized campaign of disappearances: it links Argentina’s new dictatorship to earlier systems of repression and sends another generation of exiles across the Atlantic, including Spanish Republicans returning to a country they no longer recognize as home.

The coup and the new regime

The coup took place in Buenos Aires on 24 March 1976. Its leaders removed María Estela Martínez de Perón, known as Isabel or Isabelita, from the presidency and confined her in a villa in the remote Patagonian province of Neuquén. The new government called itself the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Its first governing junta brought together the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force: Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Brigadier General Orlando Ramón Agosti. Videla led the process until 1981, after which three successive juntas held power.

The takeover was not presented as an isolated episode of domestic politics. The novel sets it against the Cold War’s National Security Doctrine, under which military dictatorships in Latin America were supported as instruments of an anti-communist campaign. Two days after the coup, former US Secretary of State William P. Rogers anticipated substantial repression; his successor, Henry Kissinger, expressed a desire to support the new rulers rather than make them feel besieged by the United States. This international climate helps explain the regime’s impunity and the scale of violence that followed.

From counterinsurgency to state terror

The coup escalated a campaign already underway. In February 1975, Isabel Perón had issued the decree that launched Operativo Independencia, ostensibly a military intervention against guerrillas in the forests of Tucumán. In practice, it divided the country into five military zones and gave each area’s commanders virtually unlimited power to repress those labeled subversive. Brigadier General Acdel Vilas described the operation as cultural in purpose: the target was not only guerrilla forces but a much wider population, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures in San Miguel de Tucumán. The book presents the operation as a prelude to the intensified repression of the dictatorship.

The new regime’s terror began on the night of the coup, with hundreds of illegal arrests. From the spring of 1976 through the autumn of 1982, thousands of people were forcibly disappeared; because many bodies were never found, estimates place the number of victims at around 30,000. In 1977, Buenos Aires provincial governor Ibérico Manuel Saint-Jean publicly described an expanding sequence of targets, from alleged subversives to their accomplices, supporters, and finally the indifferent. The widening definition of the enemy made political safety impossible to secure by simply avoiding armed resistance.

Repression was organized as a clandestine system, not just a succession of public arrests. Task groups specialized in distinct parts of the machinery: abduction and disappearance, secret detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and clandestine maternity wards where imprisoned women gave birth to children they would never see again. Other offices erased the identities of stolen children and arranged their adoption by military families or civilians aligned with the dictatorship. The death flights were an especially stark form of this division of labor: military pilots carried living, bound, drugged prisoners out over the sea and dropped them from aircraft at great height. The apparatus attacked people’s bodies while also destroying the evidence and identities by which their lives could be traced.

Exile and historical recurrence

The immediate consequence for many Argentines was the search for a way out. Mexico received the largest number of exiles; Spain received the second largest. That destination was striking: Francisco Franco had died only months before, but Spain had been both a protector of Juan Perón and a refuge that Latin American dictators invoked as a model. The novel connects the dictatorships not only through anti-communism but through the circulation of repressive techniques, including the theft of children from political prisoners.

For Spanish Republicans who had gone into exile in 1939 and built new lives across the Atlantic, the Argentine exodus created a cruel reversal. Nearly forty years after leaving Spain, some were forced into exile once more, returning to their former homeland as foreigners and with nothing. The date therefore marks more than the replacement of one government by another: it opens a new flight from state violence and folds that flight into the book’s longer account of defeat, refuge, and repeated displacement.