The Uses of Culture in the Last Argentine Dictatorship (1976–1983): From Studies of Repression to Analyses of the Construction of Consensus

The First Academic Studies on Culture under the Dictatorship

Until the late 1990s academic studies on culture and dictatorship concentrated on the destructiveness of the National Reorganization Process. The institutional violence deployed by the military regime was perceived in much the same way: as widespread. Works such as Andrés Avellaneda’s (1986) Censura, autoritarismo y cultura: Argentina 1960–1983 made substantial contributions by recognizing the workings of the cultural repression apparatus and indicating that “one of the basic methodologies [of state terrorism] was repression exercised indiscriminately and without clear justification in order to cause massive internalization of the concept of punishment and thus forestall the greatest possible number of reactions” (1986: 14). This impression of the violence had an impact on the conception of who the victims were. Instead of considering that there were people whom the regime categorized as enemies that had to be eradicated in order to “cure” the national being, the construct of indiscriminate violence resulted in the whole society’s being identified as the victim of the dictatorship (Águila, 2008: 40; Crenzel, 2008: 105–113; Feld and Franco, 2015: 9–21).

The conception of indiscriminate repression responded to two social needs. The first, under the dictatorship, was the need to denounce what was happening in Argentina. The voices of this claim were, among others, Argentine intellectuals abroad (many of whom, persecuted by the regime, had gone into exile) who denounced the pervasive unplanned cultural censorship. In 1978 Julio Cortázar, for example, wrote in the Colombian magazine Eco that in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay a “cultural genocide” was under way, and other intellectuals reported that the persecution of artists and censorship of their works in those countries was leading to a “cultural blackout.” Paradoxically, the first to refute this claim were writers who had remained in the country, who pointed out, as Liliana Heker emphasized in a response to Cortázar, that the idea of genocide placed those who were active and working in the category of collaborators or silent witnesses—“the living dead.” ⁵

The second reason for conceiving of violence in this way, which arose during the postdictatorship, was to demonstrate and judge the atrocities committed by the military regime. In some intellectual circles—among them those that had previously distanced themselves from the image of a “cultural genocide”—there was a shift to acceptance of the idea in the context of the publication of Nunca Más. ⁶ This report, which demonstrated the forced disappearance of thousands of people, created the predominant view that dictatorship’s violence had been directed toward society—toward “anyone, no matter how innocent” (Crenzel, 2008: 106).

The consequence of this proposal was the construction of a homogeneous society. The generalized violence of the dictatorship turned the whole society into a victim, and in the face of the project of cultural destruction (“cultural genocide”) its survival was possible only on the fringes. According to Beatriz Sarlo (1988), a member of the editorial staff of the emblematic cultural review Punto de Vista (published from 1978 to 2008), provided an example, stressing that the great challenge had been “to construct, from the fringes, from the underground, some future alternatives for Argentine culture. And also to preserve an indispensable space for intellectual life, which seemed to have been nullified by the violence.” ⁷ This type of assertion evidenced the experiences of critical intellectuals and their ways of getting through life in a dictatorship. There is little that tells us about their assumptions about why the existence of these fringes was possible—the relationship between state and culture at the time. Did they exist despite its controls? Or, knowing of their existence, did it tacitly enable them because they did not interfere with its objectives? The answer would seem to be closer to the former, which implied a dichotomous view of cultural production on the one hand (on the fringes) and cultural destruction on the other (by the state). Above all, what this proposal reiterated was the image of devastation and censorship through which the National Reorganization Process made the promotion of culture impossible.

In December 1984 a conference of Argentine intellectuals at the University of Maryland provided a new opportunity to review the depictions of culture under the dictatorship of the first few years after the restoration of democracy. The meeting was organized by Saúl Sosnowski, head of the university’s Spanish and Portuguese Department, and the invitation underlined that the proposal was to debate “what had happened with culture during the years of the Process.” There were sharp disputes over the issue of exile, debated by some of those who had left the country and others who had stayed. ⁸ Nonetheless, no dissonant opinions were noted with regard to the perception of the dictatorship’s institutional violence as generalized and irrational. ⁹ Nor were there very different portrayals of the effects of the dictatorship on culture. The speakers agreed on the premise of the “cultural blackout,” but not all of them were saying the same thing. The cultural blackout was for the majority censorship and lack of culture, for others the substitution of a political culture for a nonpolitical culture, ¹⁰ and for others the creation of passive subjects. ¹¹ In this context, the only dissonant voice was that of the writer Osvaldo Bayer (1988), who said that the dictatorship promoted the creation not only of passive subjects but of active, mobilized ones ¹² —an analysis dissonant for its time and even for ours.

The Shaping of the Theory of Depoliticization

Understanding the meaning of the cultural blackout requires acknowledging the special features of the Argentine case, since not all of the Latin American dictatorships received the same treatment in the 1980s. ¹³ Among the works on the dictatorship preceding Nunca Más, we can highlight two theoretical developments that were often cited. In both, the dictatorship’s violence was perceived as generalized and irrational, aimed solely at making the population passive and obedient. On the one hand, Alain Rouquié (1981; 1982; 1983; 1984) researched the relationships between the military and political powers prior to 1976 and, before the end of the dictatorship, provided an overview of their characteristics and patterns of domination. ¹⁴ On the other, Juan Corradi (1985; 1996; Corradi, Fagan, and Garretón, 1992), whose development of a “culture of fear” was widely quoted.

For Rouquié (1984: 300) the Latin American authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and 1970s could be interpreted in terms of their differences from the European totalitarianisms: “These regimes without one-party rule or mobilization mechanisms do not have, nor do they aspire to have, a mass base. They do not mobilize the citizenry; they depoliticize it. They do not indoctrinate the workers; they encourage them to return to the private sector.” This definition, which reduced the government’s goal to depoliticization, shut down any analysis interested in acknowledging plans, communication strategies, or other methods employed by the regime to steer the population. According to Rouquié (1983: 381), the Latin American dictatorships imposed obedience through terror, thereby allowing for a restoration of power to the traditional socioeconomic groups (the agro-export sectors) by enabling them to govern “without consensus.” From this perspective, the use of “ideological resources that would allow them to be legitimized independently” was explicitly rejected (Rouquié, 1981). This kind of ideological resource was reserved for totalitarianisms, not conservative regimes like the Latin American ones. In Rouquié’s view, it was clear that if these dictatorships enjoyed legitimacy it was inherited (either through the weight of the military institution, in the Argentine tradition, or through the importance of the figure of a dictator in a deeply caudillista culture) rather than pursued. The conclusion, therefore, was that military regimes such as the Argentine one that began in 1976 had handled the population through violence and without expecting any response except retreat into the private sphere (Rouquié, 1982).

The other line of studies drew from recognizing the so-called “culture of fear”, ¹⁵ interpreted as an atmosphere of “insecurity” (Corradi, Fagan, and Garretón, 1992) or “anxiety” (Corradi, 1996) provoked by the workings of an arbitrary and generalized violence that can lead to “processes of terror” that are not exclusive to dictatorial regimes. ¹⁶ In particular, Corradi’s writings share Rouquié’s thesis that, given that it achieved obedience through terror, the 1976 regime did not create hegemony or pursue legitimacy: “The state withdraws from the political realm to take refuge in the old arcana dominationis, from which it delivers blows that cannot be appealed” (Corradi, 1996: 93). Furthermore, he argued that the behaviors to be expected in a population converted into a target of state terror went from “absolute obedience” and “disorientation” ¹⁷ to the subject’s transformation into someone “potentially punitive to himself and others.” ¹⁸ The first two refer to the depoliticization of the population, but the third indicates the collaboration of the population with the regime as a consequence of terror. The question here is whether that collaboration was pursued (through communications or other strategies) or a consequence not pursued but used by the dictatorship. The works of Corradi would seem to be inclined toward the second option.

These theories and analyses emphasizing the cultural blackout have to do with the repression and destruction phase of the last Argentine dictatorship. The detailed analysis of that phase has limited the comprehension of other phases such as those aimed at governing through persuasion. In the remainder of this article I pursue new readings that may complement these first attempts and allow for a closer look at the use of culture as a tool of the National Reorganization Process’s power.

Consensus under the Dictatorship

A set of empirical studies has begun to reference the last dictatorship as not only repressing dissent but also inducing obedience through the use of institutions and strategic planning. For this analysis it is important to use the concept of “consensus,” understood as social acceptance and obedience to a political system that is not spontaneous but generated by the government in question to organize support for it. ¹⁹ The works selected can be grouped into three categories according to the strategies employed for the construction of consensus: (1) ideological manipulation through the mass media, ²⁰ (2) the exaltation of order and unity (and the rejection of sectoral interests, associating them with conflict) through the dissemination of nationalist sentiments, ²¹ and (3) the shaping of a citizenry sympathetic to the regime through programs of official training and rapprochement between civilians and the military. ²² Although many of these works are case studies that lack an analysis of their contribution to the formation of consensus, it is possible to identify the benefits of these state programs establishing and consolidating the dictatorship in increasing its backing, minimizing criticism of it, and improving its international image. While every government must plan how to build consensus (Calvo Vicente, 1995), the government led by the armed forces in 1976 had specific training in how to do so through the strategy called “psychological action” studied by Julia Risler. ²³

Was culture a resource for transmitting consensus? There were various cultural programs aimed at internalizing norms, values, and models of behavior aligned with the regime (such as the publication of books, the promotion and financing of films and plays, tributes and anniversary celebrations, and even the promotion of a “Museum of Subversion”). ²⁴ All of them aimed at creating consensus but not as part of a unique cultural policy decided by the highest authorities of the regime. ²⁵ Instead, to understand the way in which the dictatorship promoted culture it is useful to consider the ideal types of cultural policy called “Tocquevillian or market-related” (Brunner, 1988: 306–317) or “of liberal patronage” (García Canclini, 1987: 28–30). These models indicate that even when the state delegates the selection of content and does not develop cultural strategies, cultural policy may exist in the form of state agencies that distribute funds, encourage or dismiss lines in terms of their priorities, and seek “to obtain consensus for a type of order or social transformation” (1987: 26, italics added).

The Utility of Culture

Analysis of the newly discovered documents from the three archives mentioned above makes it possible to pinpoint the agencies in charge of organizing the cultural field under the dictatorship. First, the Ministry of Culture and Education was responsible for transmitting the “national culture.” The Ministry of the Interior, in particular the General Directorate of Publications, controlled the exercise of police power, including contacts with the military and police intelligence agencies, and was responsible for recommending laws to regulate the press and other social media communications. The Secretariat of Public Information, attached to the executive branch, was largely in charge of the development of “positive actions” (reporting on government events and information in general through the media in order to increase support for the dictatorship). The provincial and municipal ministries and departments of culture (in particular, the Department of Culture of the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires, which enjoyed the support of a Morality and Mores Committee) controlled live presentations and the circulation of publications in its territories. Finally, the Secretariat of State Intelligence was responsible for control of the communications media. ²⁶

In general, the mission of the state infrastructure in charge of the cultural domain was both to identify and limit information with effects that could harm the regime and to employ the information and cultural media to broaden acceptance of its actions. The Secretariat of Public Information was in charge of elaborating the calendar of “positive actions.” For example, in 1977 it presented actions aimed at ensuring that the population adopted supportive attitudes toward the National Reorganization Process. It included propaganda campaigns in the media (television, movies, theater, etc.), professional meetings (such as a pediatric congress or a national security conference), and celebrations (of national holidays and key military dates). On each of these occasions its intent—for example, to create a “military vocation among youth” or to “contribute to sustaining morale” in the ranks of the military—was highlighted. ²⁷

The organizations in charge of the cultural were affected by the same ideological tensions as the rest of the government apparatus with regard to the clash between military and civilian nationalist sectors and the liberal sectors, bearers of different views with regard to whether the state should “produce” culture ²⁸ or “delegate” it. ²⁹ The ability of the agencies to implement activities and programs was, however, determined less by ideological discussion than by budget allocation. The most dynamic stage of the Ministry of Culture and Education was in 1978. In the midst of the preparations for the country’s hosting the World Cup, the president General Jorge Rafael Videla decided to increase by 500 percent the budget normally received by this ministry in order to promote the prosperity achieved by the dictatorship and counteract complaints of human rights violations. At the same time, the head of the navy and member of the military junta Admiral Emilio Massera proposed that the army provide funding for the creation of a separate Ministry of Culture. It was an open secret that he wanted to promote himself as the successor to Videla as president (Rodríguez, 2011: 51–66). Although this latter project never materialized, the examples demonstrate that both Videla and Massera considered the control of culture a means to achieve their goals.

The importance given to culture, no longer on a personal but on an institutional level, is made explicit in the political plans drafted by each sector of the armed forces between 1977 and 1978. ³⁰ Differences existed on almost every issue, but the three political plans concurred in considering cultural strategies for maintaining and augmenting support for the Process. The army identified a “cultural strategy” specifying objectives for the formal educational system and for the social communications media related to “the internalization of values and patterns of conduct.” The navy and the air force, in almost the same terms and calling the strategy “psychological action,” advised stepping up its use “to avoid committing the error of previous military governments that did not adequately publicize their governmental actions because of outdated or erroneous notions regarding self-promotion and support.”

These documents allow us to craft a more accurate idea of the dictatorship’s concept of culture. Besides being conceived in abstract and essentialist terms (as a defense of the armed forces in the face of an internal enemy), these documents considered culture a useful tool for deliberate intervention in the population to achieve concrete results such as endorsement. Two of the programs with this purpose are examined below.

Cultural Programs: The Cultural Train and the Theater for Health

In the seven years of the dictatorship, 1978 was a key moment marked by a series of initiatives aimed at legitimation and consensus and especially at countering the so-called “anti-Argentine campaign”. While the country was receiving journalists from around the world to cover the World Cup, protests of the violation of human rights in Argentina resulted among other things in the creation of the Committee to Boycott the Soccer Cup in Argentina. Given this context, the regime intensified its interventions through culture-turned-communication. Two official cultural programs were framed as a defense of the new “order” conceived as contrasting with the chaos and violence prior to 1976 and as necessary to set the country on a path of progress and modernity. One of these was the Cultural Train (Tren Cultural), and the other was Theater for Health (Teatro para la Salud). Beyond their huge differences with respect to the agencies in charge of carrying them out and the provinces in which they were developed, both reflected the regime’s intention to counter its authoritarian image and showcase the benefits of the new social “order” for people’s lives.

The Cultural Train, a project launched in July 1978 jointly by the army and the Ministry of Culture and Education, was intended, according to the undersecretary of culture Julio César Gancedo, ³¹ to “strengthen the cultural values that define our nationality” in border areas. The official expressed the government view that these were danger zones where the Argentine nationality was being besieged by the foreign (the influence of neighboring countries) and, to avoid this, Argentine culture had to be reinforced. The Cultural Train, which went through the northeastern provinces Misiones and Corrientes, was one of a series of governmental projects for combating foreign cultural invasion in border zones. ³²

The Train, which was “equipped with modern equipment for film and audiovisual screenings, audience facilities, a modular library that could hold 500 volumes, mobile panels for exhibits, a reading room, and complete ventilation installations and accident safety” (El Litoral, July 11, 1978), was designed to bring documentaries, art exhibits, and music and dance performances to towns remote from urban centers and their plentiful cultural offerings. It was evidence of technological advances and modernity that the dictatorship wanted to display to the world. At the same time, it was the expression of a pedagogical mission of the armed forces that arose from the historical perception of its duty to defend the nation. The press played an indispensable role by reporting on this initiative just as the agencies involved would have, emphasizing the difference between the present government, which respected the national heritage, and those of the past. Thus the dictatorship proposed the Cultural Train “with the objective of carrying out the reorganization that the nation requires to achieve at goals long yearned for. . . . Our heritage has suffered harm for decades due to the employment of biased policies” (El Litoral, July 11, 1978).

This conjunction of technological modernity and appreciation of tradition was what could serve to counter the “anti-Argentine campaign”. It was exactly what was demanded by international organizations that valued technology as an expression of the integration of the countries of the world, and the selection of content and traveling artists, which promoted folkloric music as the UNESCO meetings did, gave impetus to legislation promoting the dissemination of folklore and aboriginal and pre-Hispanic cultures. ³³ Advances in this area were used as examples of the progress of the government with regard to the defense of human rights (Sheinin, 2012: 49).

The other program, parallel to the Cultural Train, was the Theater for Health, launched in June 1978. In this case, the Ministry of Social Welfare of the province of Santa Fe hired artists to “promote health education actions.” This purpose was part of a series of governmental interventions at the national level in preparation for the country’s being at the center of international opinion by the time of the World Cup. Along with the construction of stadiums and sports centers, highways, and television studios, legislation was adopted whose goal was to show the order and cleanliness achieved by the regime in the cities. In particular, the capital city of the province of Santa Fe got street lighting, sewers, and natural gas pipelines, ordinances that prohibited entry to the city center of ragpickers (traperos) and private trash collectors, and a 1980 master plan establishing schools and social services in “the central urban stretch” (Alonso and Citroni, 2008; Citroni, 2013; Silvestri, 2000). In Rosario, Santa Fe’s major city, one of the event’s venues, the slogan for the event alleged the benefits of the intended “order,” in particular improvements in people’s living conditions: “Rosario: Clean City, Healthy City, and Cultured City” (Águila, 2008).

The Theater for Health was presented by the authorities of the Ministry of Social Welfare on the assumption that health was a problem and to face it the state had to “regulate behavior.” Officials expected the project to inculcate behavior in the population. The plays, aimed at children of school age and dealing with public health problems such as Chagas disease, malnutrition, pediculosis, scabies, and oral health, were entitled “The Story of a Worried King,” “The Man Who Was Not Nuclear,” and “A Clean Child is Worth Double.” According to the officials, they had “signed an agreement with a theater group in which performances of didactic theater, especially designed for children, would be held on health problems that were priorities for the sector.” But didactic theater on hygiene did not seem to be what the artists hired had in mind for the series. The director, the scriptwriter, and the actors talked about Theater for Health in terms of their careers as participants in independent theater since the 1960s: “We decided to do theater despite everything. It was not a matter of getting on a stage and reciting a dissertation or to put forth advice. We had to relive an action” (El Litoral, December 30, 1978). This is a typical idea in independent or activist theater, which tries to pull the audience out of a passive place and move it to action (Ramírez, 2016: 31).The intention of the artists may have had nothing to do with the government’s intention in financing this project.

While the presumption was that the state should intervene to regulate people’s behavior (classified in terms of health and illness), in the original design of Theater for Health performances were held in elementary schools outside the province’s central cities and, in particular, in poor neighborhoods. ³⁴ Just as the border area was defined as a danger zone in which the Cultural Train was intended to intervene in order to halt foreign influence, the Theater for Health series located the danger in neighborhoods distant from the center with scant resources and intervened with the rationale that poverty could be linked to illness. Whereas one of the faces of this project was to promote healthy, moral, and hygienic behaviors, the other was the segmentation of the population and the realization of various public policies that had the same purpose, the promotion of the new “order” pursued by the National Reorganization Process—orderly, clean, and healthy cities.

Conclusion

Reviewing the reasons that the first depictions of culture under the dictatorship were directed largely at a record linked to repression, control, depoliticization, and social demobilization, I have compared works produced in the early postdictatorship years, which emphasized repression, with more recent studies that ventured into governmental uses of the cultural dimension for the continuous reinforcement of sympathy with the regime. Providing evidence of the existence of mechanisms of persuasion and the generation of consensus, these studies allow us to understand the National Reorganization Process as a strategic and political plan in addition to being repressive and authoritarian. In particular, I have aimed to stretch the boundaries imposed by the notion of a “cultural blackout” during the dictatorship, a product of the fear and repression deployed, to include an official cultural project that mobilized and justified the imposition of a new social “order.” The documents on which this article is based demonstrate that the armed forces considered it necessary to develop a cultural and communicational order to obtain the support of the majority of the population. It was primarily in 1978 that the regime displayed its enormous apparatus for producing feelings that would contribute to legitimization of its achievements.