Argentine state terrorism is presented as a systematic policy of disappearance and repression, enabled by Cold War anti-communism and carried out through clandestine state structures. The novel explains its political preconditions, describes the division of violence into specialized operations, and links the resulting flight from Argentina to an earlier history of Spanish exile and state secrecy.

International and Domestic Preconditions

The account places the 1976 Argentine dictatorship in a regional landscape already marked by military rule. It identifies a broader doctrine of national security, adopted in United States diplomacy toward Latin America, whose stated objective was to defeat left-wing movements and organizations throughout the continent. In this Cold War framework, military dictatorships were treated as instruments of victory against communism and received support from Washington, with consequences that the narrative presents as central to understanding the Argentine regime.

That support is made concrete through statements by senior American officials. On March 26, 1976, two days after the coup, William P. Rogers anticipated extensive repression and warned that the regime would target not only people it described as terrorists but also dissidents in unions and within the governing political parties. His successor, Henry Kissinger, expressed a desire to support the coup-makers and avoid making them feel isolated. The contrast between such reassurance and the violence that followed helps explain the international conditions in which the dictatorship could act with impunity.

The crackdown had a prehistory in the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón, who sought to demonstrate her anti-communist commitment amid the same international pressures. On February 5, 1975, she issued the decree described in the novel as the first decree of annihilation, establishing Operation Independence. Officially directed against guerrillas in the forests of Tucumán province, the operation divided the country into five military zones and granted their commanders sweeping authority to repress those labelled subversive. Its commander, Brigadier General Acdel Vilas, characterized its purpose as cultural as well as military: in his account, guerrilla activity was only one aspect of subversion. The operation consequently targeted civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures in San Miguel de Tucumán. The novel presents this campaign as a precursor to the repression later intensified and systematized under the military regime.

The Repressive System

The dictatorship’s campaign ran from the spring of 1976 through the autumn of 1982. During that period, thousands of people were forcibly disappeared. Because many bodies were never recovered, estimates vary; the account gives an approximate total of 30,000 victims. A statement attributed to General Ibérico Manuel Saint-Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires province, makes the regime’s declared logic explicit: it would move from eliminating those called subversives to their supposed accomplices and sympathizers, and ultimately to the indifferent and the politically lukewarm. Repression was thus represented not as a limited response to armed opposition but as a project capable of expanding across society.

An indefinite state of siege and repressive laws suspended civil rights and freedoms, while also denying citizens the ability to leave the country. Alongside these public measures, the regime established a clandestine apparatus organized into task groups, each assigned a particular function. The listed operations form an integrated chain: abductions and disappearances; secret detention centers; torture; executions; disposal of bodies; clandestine maternity wards where detained women gave birth and were separated from their babies; and offices tasked with erasing the identities of stolen children and arranging their adoption by military families or civilians aligned with the dictatorship. The organization’s specialization joined the attack on a person’s body to the destruction or appropriation of identity and evidence.

The so-called death flights exemplify the system’s extreme division of labor. Military pilots transported living prisoners, tied and drugged, in fighter aircraft and threw them into the sea from great heights. The account places this practice within the same structure as secret detention and the disappearance of bodies: it was not an isolated act but one component of a machinery designed to conceal what had happened to those taken into custody.

Coup and Flight

The terror began on the night of March 24, 1976, when hundreds of illegal arrests took place. From then on, many Argentines prioritized finding a way to leave the country. The novel emphasizes the coercive setting of that flight: the regime’s indefinite state of siege and suspension of rights included a prohibition on leaving, even as the scale of clandestine arrests made escape an urgent concern.

The account also looks backward to earlier scenes of repression in Spain. During the Spanish Civil War, the Madrid Defense Council had closed the city’s unofficial detention centers, yet illegal sites continued to operate without oversight; when one was shut down, another opened. A wounded man carrying credentials from the council’s Public Order Department was to be kept alive at any cost, but not admitted to a hospital under his own name, because someone might try to kill him again. These episodes are not equated in scale with the later Argentine campaign. They establish a recurring mechanism of concealed detention, denied identity, and violence outside ordinary safeguards, while the Argentine account describes a dictatorship that organized such practices across the country.

The novel makes the concealment legible through another Madrid episode: after a search of a home, the narrator finds the family papers trampled and the gold taken, while an envelope of politically sensitive material remains locked in a desk drawer. Years later, an unidentified corpse bearing a fatal gunshot wound to the neck is processed under a false account of death and assigned to a common grave among people whose deaths are routinely recorded as cardiac arrest. The false cause, hurried burial, and administrative handling turn disappearance into a procedure as well as an act of violence. These Spanish episodes provide a historical and narrative counterpoint to the Argentine system’s deliberate separation of abduction, detention, killing, disposal, and erasure.

Exile and Historical Reversal

Mexico received the largest number of Argentine exiles, while Spain was the second most common destination—a striking reversal in a book shaped by Spanish Republican exile. By the time Argentines began arriving, Francisco Franco had died. The account recalls that Franco had first been protected and later protected General Juan Perón, whose example was invoked by Latin American dictators of the later twentieth century. It also links practices such as taking children from political prisoners to methods already used in Spain’s postwar repression.

The return to Spain could therefore mean arrival in a country marked by an older displacement rather than simple refuge. Spanish Republicans who had gone into exile in 1939 and built new lives across the ocean were, nearly forty years later, forced into another exile. They returned to their former homeland as foreigners and empty-handed. In this final reversal, the novel connects political terror not only to the immediate loss of life and freedom, but also to recurring displacement: repression drives people across borders, and the borders they cross lead back into histories of violence that have not been left behind.