Argentine National Reorganization Process Period

The Argentine National Reorganization Process was the dictatorship installed by a military coup on 24 March 1976, after which state terror became a central instrument of rule. In the novel’s account, it was not an isolated episode of military government: it grew from an earlier campaign of repression, operated through a deliberately concealed system, and unfolded within a regional and international Cold War order that favored anticommunist dictatorships. Its consequences included thousands of forced disappearances and a new exodus, with some Republican exiles returning to Spain decades after their first flight as refugees once more.

Coup and Political Background

The coup removed María Estela Martínez de Perón, who had become president after the death of Juan Perón on 1 July 1974. The officers detained her and confined her at a villa in Neuquén province, in remote Patagonia, then established a regime that named itself the National Reorganization Process. The novel situates this change against the recent history of Argentina: in March 1976, it was the only country in the Southern Cone that still had a democratic government. Uruguay and Chile had undergone coups in 1973; Bolivia and Paraguay were already under dictatorship, while Brazil’s military regime dated from 1964.

The new government was headed by a three-service junta. Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla represented the Army, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera the Navy, and Brigadier General Orlando Ramón Agosti the Air Force. Despite the collective arrangement, Videla was the dominant leader until 1981, when another junta, headed by Lieutenant General Roberto Eduardo Viola, succeeded the first. Two further juntas followed. The military eventually called elections in October 1983 after defeat in the Falklands War, expanding protests at home, and declining international support.

Repression Before and After the Coup

The regime’s methods had a prehistory. On 5 February 1975, before the coup, President Martínez de Perón issued the decree described as the first decree of annihilation, establishing Operativo Independencia. Its stated purpose was to defeat guerrillas in the Tucumán jungle; in practice, it divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders broad power to repress those labeled subversive. Brigadier General Acdel Vilas described the operation’s purpose as cultural as well as military. The campaign therefore targeted civilians and people in public life—including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures in San Miguel de Tucumán—and the novel identifies it as a precursor to the repression that intensified under the Process.

The dictatorship’s terror began on the night of the coup, with hundreds of illegal detentions. From spring 1976 through autumn 1982, it was responsible for the forced disappearance of thousands of people. Because many bodies were never recovered, the number remains an estimate; the account gives approximately 30,000 victims. The disappeared were not merely killed: the absence of bodies also obstructed confirmation of deaths and the recovery of evidence, leaving relatives without a settled account of what had happened.

The system relied on a continuing state of siege and repressive laws that suspended civil rights and freedoms and denied citizens the ability to leave the country. Alongside this formal framework, the regime created clandestine structures that divided repression among task groups, each assigned specialized work. Their functions included kidnapping and disappearance, secret detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and clandestine maternity wards where detained women gave birth and were separated from their babies. Other offices erased the stolen children’s identities and arranged their adoption by military families or civilians aligned with the dictatorship. This division of labor made disappearance an organized process extending from capture to the suppression of identity and evidence.

The so-called death flights represented an extreme form of that system. Military pilots transported living prisoners, bound and drugged, in aircraft and dropped them over the sea from great heights. The account presents the flights not as an isolated method but as one specialized component in a broader apparatus designed to make victims disappear and conceal responsibility.

Cold War Context and Political License

The novel relates the regime’s impunity to the National Security Doctrine adopted by United States diplomacy in Latin America to combat left-wing movements and organizations. In its account, Cold War anticommunism made military dictatorship a favored instrument of international policy. On 26 March 1976, two days after the coup, William P. Rogers, recently secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, anticipated substantial repression and bloodshed, including the targeting of union dissidents and members of the new rulers’ own parties. Henry Kissinger, Rogers’s successor, argued that the coup leaders would need support and that the United States should not make them feel isolated. These comments place the Process within a climate of external accommodation rather than treating its violence as a domestic matter alone.

That context also clarifies the pre-coup escalation. Martínez de Perón, aware of the international setting, had already pursued an unprecedented campaign of political repression in an effort to demonstrate anticommunist commitment and remain in power. The transition from Operativo Independencia to the dictatorship was therefore not a clean break: the earlier operation supplied a precedent for military zones, expansive authority, and violence against civilians, while the Process extended and refined repression on a national scale.

Flight, Exile, and the Novel’s Wider Historical Frame

The immediate consequence of the coup was a rush to find ways out of Argentina. Mexico received the largest number of exiles; Spain, newly past the death of Francisco Franco, received the second-largest. The account emphasizes the irony of this destination. Franco had first been protected and later protected Juan Perón, and later Latin American dictators treated Perón’s figure as an example. They also adopted methods such as taking children from political prisoners—practices the novel links to their earlier use in postwar Spain.

For Spanish Republicans who had fled in 1939 and established new lives across the Atlantic, Argentina’s dictatorship made exile recur in reverse. Nearly forty years after leaving Spain, some were forced to face another displacement that brought them back to their birthplace as foreigners, without the lives and security they had built abroad. The Process thus reaches beyond a change of government or a sequence of crimes: in the novel’s historical design, authoritarian techniques travel across periods and borders, while political violence repeatedly converts homes into places to flee and identity into something vulnerable to state control.