Fuerzas Armadas argentinas

The Fuerzas Armadas argentinas are the military institution at the center of the 1976 coup and the dictatorship that followed it. In the novel’s historical account, their three-branch command structure gives the new regime its formal shape, while the armed forces’ authority enables a clandestine machinery of repression whose victims are not only killed but made to disappear.

Command and structure

After the coup, the government was headed by a triumvirate representing the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Army commander Jorge Rafael Videla, Navy commander Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Air Force commander Orlando Ramón Agosti formed the first junta. Although power was formally shared among the three services, Videla acted as the Process’s leader until 1981, when a new junta headed by Army lieutenant general Roberto Eduardo Viola replaced the first. Two further juntas followed, making military government a succession of command structures rather than a brief intervention.

The armed forces’ collective rule is presented alongside the individual ascent of senior commanders. The junta’s three-service arrangement made military control the constitutional fact of the new government, but Videla’s predominance shows how authority could concentrate within that collective framework. The account ends this sequence not with an internal transfer of power but with the military’s eventual loss of its capacity to rule.

Regional setting and political purpose

The coup placed Argentina within a South American landscape already shaped by military governments. Uruguay had come under dictatorship in 1973, as had Chile under Augusto Pinochet; Bolivia had been ruled by Hugo Banzer since 1971, Paraguay by Alfredo Stroessner since 1954, and Brazil by military governments since 1964. In March 1976, Argentina was the only country in the Southern Cone that still retained a democratic regime. Its military takeover therefore marked both the end of that exception and another advance for the region’s military dictatorships.

The novel connects this regional pattern to the National Security Doctrine and to Cold War anticommunism: military governments were treated as instruments for defeating left-wing movements, with support from Washington. The Argentine regime’s repression is set in that political context, not presented as an isolated domestic response. The account also traces a pre-coup precedent: on 5 February 1975, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued the first decree of annihilation, establishing Operation Independence. Although ostensibly aimed at guerrillas in Tucumán, the operation divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders unlimited power to repress those designated subversive. Its terror against civilians—including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures—prefigured the more extensive repression under military rule.

State terror and disappearance

The coup’s violence began on the night of 24 March 1976, with hundreds of illegal arrests. From then on, the armed forces’ rule relied not only on indefinite states of siege and repressive laws that suspended civil rights and freedoms, but also on a covert apparatus organized into task groups. Different units carried out abductions and disappearances, secret detention, torture, executions, and the disposal of bodies. The system also included clandestine maternity wards, where detained women gave birth to children they would never see again, and offices that erased the children’s identities and arranged their adoption by military or civilian families aligned with the dictatorship.

This division of labor made repression both systematic and difficult to trace. The regime attacked bodily life, but it also worked to erase the records and relationships through which a victim might be identified. The death flights were an extreme expression of the same machinery: military pilots transported living prisoners, bound and drugged, in aircraft and threw them into the open sea from thousands of meters above it. Disappearance thus encompassed killing and the concealment of what had been done, leaving families and the wider public without bodies or reliable accounts.

Between the spring of 1976 and the autumn of 1982, thousands of people were forcibly disappeared. Because many bodies were never recovered, the estimates vary; the account gives approximately thirty thousand victims. It also recalls the blunt public statement of Ibérico Manuel Saint-Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires province, who described a widening sequence of intended targets: first those labeled subversive, then their accomplices, supporters, and finally the indifferent. The declaration makes explicit how the category of enemy could expand beyond armed opposition to encompass people defined by association or insufficient loyalty.

End of military rule and historical significance

The military government survived through successive juntas, but the account identifies the defeat in the Falklands War, the spread of protests within Argentina, and the loss of international support as forces that compelled the armed forces to surrender power. Elections were held in October 1983. The end of the regime does not erase the scale or the methods of its violence: the fate of the disappeared, the concealed identities of stolen children, and the absence of many bodies remain part of the historical consequences described.

The organization’s significance in the novel lies in the contrast between formal command and clandestine violence. The junta’s public structure named the services and their commanders; the task groups fragmented the work of repression into secret operations. Together, those arrangements show how military authority could govern openly while making its victims—and the evidence of their treatment—vanish from public view.