Terrorismo de Estado

Terrorismo de Estado is the novel’s account of political violence organized and administered through state power, including acts concealed from ordinary legal and public scrutiny. Its most sustained treatment is the Argentine dictatorship of 1976–1982, where repression becomes a divided, clandestine apparatus for abduction, detention, killing, and the erasure of evidence and identity. The concept also connects that system to earlier scenes in Spain: the novel places illegal detention and unregistered deaths beside its later account of systematic disappearance, showing how state violence can make a person vulnerable while making the institutions responsible difficult to see.

From political crisis to state policy

In its account of Argentina, the novel situates the dictatorship within a regional and international struggle against the left. The Proceso de Reorganización Nacional is presented as an expression of the National Security Doctrine, which treated military dictatorship as a means of defeating communist movements across Latin America. The narrative points to political backing from Washington, including statements by William P. Rogers and Henry Kissinger soon after the coup, to explain the setting in which repression could proceed with impunity. The violence is therefore not described simply as the work of isolated perpetrators: it is tied to a political framework that casts dissent as a security threat and gives military rule international room to act.

The repression also has a prehistory within Argentina. On 5 February 1975, before the coup, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued the decree that established Operativo Independencia. Officially directed against guerrillas in Tucumán, the intervention divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders broad authority to repress those labeled subversive. Its commander, General Acdel Vilas, described its objective as cultural as well as military. In practice, the campaign spread terror among civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures in San Miguel de Tucumán. The novel presents this operation as a precursor: methods and a definition of the enemy that would be intensified under the later dictatorship.

A clandestine system of repression

The Proceso did not rely only on a state of siege and repressive laws that suspended rights and freedoms. The novel describes a parallel clandestine structure divided into specialized task groups, each assigned a stage of repression: abductions and disappearances, secret detention, interrogation and torture, executions, and the removal of bodies. This division of labor gives the violence an institutional character. Disappearance is not a single act but the outcome of linked operations, with each stage helping to prevent victims from being located and responsibility from being established.

The system also targets identity across generations. Secret maternity wards held detained women who gave birth and were separated from their babies; other offices erased the children’s identities and arranged their adoption by military families or civilians aligned with the dictatorship. The purpose and consequence extend beyond the detention of the parents: the machinery makes family relationships, origins, and records vulnerable to state manipulation. At its most extreme, the novel describes death flights in which military pilots transported living prisoners, bound and drugged, and cast them into the sea. These practices appear as specialized parts of the same apparatus, not as unrelated episodes.

The repression began on the night of 24 March 1976, when hundreds of illegal arrests took place. The novel 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 thirty thousand. It notes that figures vary because many bodies were never recovered. The absence of bodies is thus both a human consequence and an obstacle to accounting for the violence: the regime’s methods make the scale of its crimes difficult to measure precisely.

Secrecy, denial, and the unregistered dead

The concept is also illuminated by the novel’s earlier Spanish episodes, which are distinct in scale and historical setting from Argentina’s organized campaign. In wartime Madrid, a wounded man carrying a credential from the Defense Council’s Public Order Department is found by soldiers. A police commissioner, Basilio Rodríguez, orders that if the man is dead he must be buried as unknown and left out of every register; if he is alive, he must be kept out of hospitals under his own name so that those who tried to kill him cannot find him again. The instructions reveal a state-linked network capable both of protecting a person whose survival matters to the Republic and of concealing his existence from official records. The episode makes secrecy part of the political struggle, even as it differs from the later Argentine system in purpose and scope.

A later Madrid scene shows the manipulation of death records from the other side. After a body is found in the Casa de Campo, an inspector and his superior arrange for the autopsy to be skipped and the paperwork handled so that the dead man can be buried quickly. The death certificate and police report are prepared around a false account of the cause of death. At La Almudena, the body is assigned to a common grave for unidentified people, whose deaths are routinely recorded as cardiac arrest without further explanation, despite the gunshot wound visible on this victim. The graveyard workers notice the wound and discuss taking the dead man’s new coat. The ordinary handling of the burial does not undo the concealment; it shows how a false record and routine procedure can absorb evidence of violence.

The book also recalls illegal detention in Republican Madrid. Although the Madrid Defense Council had closed the city’s checas, unofficial detention centers continued to operate, and closing one could lead to another opening elsewhere. The account describes factional division and a fractured wartime authority, not an identical counterpart to Argentina’s later dictatorship. Its relevance lies in the recurring problem it exposes: detention outside oversight leaves the people held there at the mercy of forces that operate beyond reliable public scrutiny.

Consequences and the wider meaning of disappearance

Under the Argentine dictatorship, the immediate consequence was a widespread search for ways to leave the country. Mexico received the largest number of exiles; Spain was the second destination, a bitter irony in the novel’s account. Spain had just emerged from Franco’s rule, and the narrative connects the Latin American dictators’ admiration for Franco with their adoption of methods that included stealing children from political prisoners. The movement of refugees therefore carries the history of repression across borders: people flee one state’s violence into places whose own histories are implicated in its methods.

That connection is especially painful for Spanish Republicans who had gone into exile in 1939, built new lives across the ocean, and nearly forty years later faced another exile that returned them to Spain as foreigners, without what they had once made. The novel’s account places their displacement alongside the Argentine exodus, emphasizing that exile is not simply a change of location but a consequence that can unsettle belonging across generations.

Terrorismo de Estado names a system that acts upon bodies while also controlling the records, relationships, and public explanations through which a person might be recognized. In Argentina, the sequence runs from illegal arrest to hidden detention, disappearance, and the destruction or reassignment of identity; in the Spanish episodes, the same concern with unregistered death and concealed detention appears in different political circumstances. By tracing both the material operations of repression and the gaps they leave in records and families, the novel makes concealment part of the violence rather than an afterthought.