(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 467 pp.)
Martin Edwin Andersen
Senior Latin America Analyst
Freedom House
Contemporary analyses of the—at times monstrous—fratricide that wracked Argentine politics for nearly half a century generally fall into two categories. The first mirror an author’s own personal preferences and social commitments, injecting the personal “I” into the ordering of recollections, facts, and theories that are mustered to explain, for example, how as many as 30,000 people, including hundreds of elderly and children under 16, were secretly abducted, tortured, and killed by the Argentine military during the 1970s and early 1980s. The second category substitutes the “I” with the “Eye,” meticulously providing new information, insight, and careful synthesis to an already much-studied topic.
Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina straddles these two approaches. Antonius C. G. M. Robben convincingly challenges conventional wisdom that violence alone engenders more, and often more vicious, violence. He argues that social trauma played a mediating role, aggravating the downward spiral into mass murder in what was once called the most “civilized” country in Latin America. Unfortunately, the book—whose dust jacket boasts of “combining history and anthropology”—itself does some violence to the former, while making real, important contributions to understanding how the repeated traumatization of political adversaries helped create a counterinsurgency strategy and a military regime whose methodology was, as Robben notes, “inadmissible by any moral standard, and especially by the Western values they claimed to defend” (p. 232.) ...
↧