Military Forces and Internal Repression in Argentina in the Late 1950s

The armed forces began to assume a crucial role in the repression of social conflict in Argentina toward the end of the 1950s. It was precisely in those years when, after a process initiated at the beginning of the Cold War, the military managed to take control of internal repression in Argentina, acquiring a leading role in the persecution, imprisonment, and trial of those who were considered “terrorists” or “subversives.” Not a minor detail is that this process of militarization of political persecution has occurred during civilian regimes. The first laws in this respect date back to the Peronist government (1946–1955) and, toward the end of the 1950s, the civilian government of Arturo Frondizi (1958–1962) carried out a deepening of these measures. Consequently, near the end of 1958, the armed forces took control of internal repression through the application of the Plan Conintes. As a result, thousands of civilians were not only persecuted and detained by the armed forces but also tried by the military justice system. Although legislation in this matter dates to Peronism, the Frondicist administration was the first civilian-constitutional government in Argentina to implement on a massive scale—by means of recurrent decrees—the application of military justice to civilians accused of subversion or terrorism. This systematic application of military justice during that government was also endorsed by the Supreme Court of Justice, whose judges did not question the constitutionality of the repressive laws and decrees of Frondizi’s regime. In practice, this repressive state of emergency resulted in multiple abuses of the individual rights of Argentine citizens. Both archive documents and oral interviews with former detainees have shown that illegal coercion and abuses of authority were the distinguishing features of the treatment of civilians by the armed forces and the police subordinated to them. Even worse, torture also constituted a standard form of treatment of detainees accused of terrorism throughout the country. Thousands of civilians were tortured in the cruelest ways in order to force them to sign false statements that would later be used against them in military trials. Once convicted, many of them were transferred to locations in the far south of the country, where there existed no conditions for humane confinement. The most extreme example was the ex-prison of Ushuaia, where 43 prisoners sentenced by military courts spent the winter of 1960 confined in an abandoned cellblock of the former penitentiary.