Operation Independence Military Repression

Operation Independence was a military intervention in Tucumán whose stated purpose was to defeat guerrillas but whose reach extended to civilians and public life. The novel presents it as a rehearsal for the later dictatorship: military authority was enlarged in the name of security, while the definition of subversion widened until it could encompass teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures.

Background and Authorization

On 5 February 1975, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued what the narrative calls the first decree of annihilation. That decree established Operation Independence, nominally to eliminate guerrillas operating in the jungle of Tucumán province. The intervention also divided the country into five military zones, giving each area's commander unlimited power to repress those designated as subversives.

The operation was already shaped by a larger Cold War politics. The narrative places it within the National Security Doctrine, which treated military dictatorships as instruments for defeating left-wing movements across Latin America and describes U.S. diplomatic support as part of that political environment. Operation Independence thus begins not as an isolated campaign in a remote province, but as a locally executed intervention linked to a continental anti-communist strategy.

The Meaning of the Campaign

Brigadier General Acdel Vilas, the operation's commander, described its objective as primarily cultural. In his formulation, guerrilla warfare was only one aspect of subversion, and not the most important one. That distinction widened the target beyond armed opponents: the campaign unleashed terror against civilians in San Miguel de Tucumán, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious people.

The contrast between the declared military objective and the breadth of those targeted exposes how the language of security could authorize violence against social and cultural life. Once the campaign defined subversion as a cultural problem, people could be subjected to repression not for taking up arms but for occupying professions and roles within civilian society. The intervention's power therefore lay not only in military force but in the expanded category of whom that force could reach.

From Regional Intervention to State Terror

The account identifies Operation Independence as a prologue to the repression intensified and perfected under the National Reorganization Process, Argentina's 1976–1982 dictatorship. The continuity is one of method and scope: a counterinsurgency rationale made possible an expansive authority that could turn its attention from guerrillas to whole civilian groups.

After the coup of 24 March 1976, the dictatorship made state terrorism central to its rule. The narrative estimates that thousands of people were forcibly disappeared between the spring of 1976 and the autumn of 1982, with the total commonly placed at about 30,000, though the numbers vary because many bodies were never found. It describes a clandestine system divided into task groups responsible for abductions, secret detention, torture, executions, disposal of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of babies born to detained women. The so-called death flights carried living prisoners, bound and drugged, in military aircraft before they were thrown into the sea. These later mechanisms are not presented as identical to Operation Independence, but as the far more extensive repression for which the Tucumán campaign had served as a precursor.

Significance

Operation Independence marks the point at which a military operation ostensibly directed against guerrillas becomes, in the narrative's account, a model for attacking the wider population in the name of cultural and political security. Its division of the country into military zones and its grant of unlimited authority to local commanders make the state’s coercive reach explicit; Vilas's cultural definition of the objective shows how that reach could extend beyond combatants.

Its importance rests on that progression from a regional intervention to a national system of terror. The operation foreshadows not simply an increase in violence, but a transformation in the objects of repression: civilian identities, occupations, and family relationships would also become vulnerable to state power. In this way the novel connects the 1975 campaign in Tucumán to the dictatorship's later disappearance of people and erasure of identity, while distinguishing the operation that preceded that system from the full machinery that followed.