Saturday, 12 November 2011

Argentina Week Two


La Guerra Sucia was even dirtier than I had realized.  I knew of the atrocities committed that stirred the “conscience of the civilized world” such as the kidnappings, torture, murder, and denial of the right to habeas corpus.  However, until this week’s readings, I had not begun to comprehend the extent to which damage was inflicted on the people of Argentina through the junta’s perturbing language and poor economic policies.  In “A Lexicon of Terror” Feitlowitz elaborates on the way the junta created a terror of language.  The military junta was deceitful in the way it inspired guilt and confusion.  The junta aimed to take away the normal meanings of words in order to create a lack of power to reason using those words.

The military junta also had an objective of implementing an economic policy that favoured only the affluent who had ties to the military.  Rodolpho describes this policy as one of “cold deliberation and raw ineptitude.”  He argues that the economic policy was the explanation for the disappearances and associated crimes.  The policy created an environment where people’s living conditions declined dramatically turning Buenos Aires from a city to a shantytown.  While the majority of the people were becoming more and more desperate, those associated with the military were becoming richer.  This he argues is the ultimate punishment of millions through “planned misery."

1 comment:

  1. It was a distortion of language. In other words, it was a creation of new vocabulary that the outside world would not comprehend, which set the new regime apart from the past. Buenos Aires has sure had its vicissitudes. The military screws over the porteños and then less than two decades later in 2001, thanks to Menem and the neoliberal agenda, the largely middle class city was affected once again.

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