The Influence of French "Revolutionary War" Ideology on the Use of Torture in Argentina's "Dirty War" [1].

In 1957, a French military mission arrived in Argentina to teach courses in "Revolutionary War" (also known as "anti-Communist" or "anti-subversive warfare") at the Argentine Army's Escuela Superior de Guerra (the National War College) in Buenos Aires. [2] Articles written by French soldiers appeared in the Escuela Superior's official magazine, Revista de la Escuela Superior de Guerra, from the late 1950s until the early 1960s, and Argentine soldiers drew upon the ideas of their French counterparts in their own publications during that time and later into the 1970s and 1980s. A number of historians have recognized the influence of the French Mission, attributing to it varying degrees of significance in shaping Argentine military tactics and strategy, although references to its impact have usually amounted to no more than a footnote in the larger history of the Argentine Armed Forces. [3]

It is my contention that this commingling of French and Argentine thought was of great importance, as it contained a justification for the militaries' use of torture, [4] a practice that became widespread in Argentina in the 1970s, when the Argentine Armed Forces began to confront well-organized guerrilla/ terrorist groups, most notably the Montoneros and the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo. This was especially true after March 24, 1976, the day the Armed Forces installed its dictatorship, El Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional (The Process of National Reorganization) and initiated a phase of anti-insurgent warfare known as the "Dirty War," during which soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of Argentines, most of them non-combatants.

In this article, I explore the influence of the French mission on the Argentine Armed Forces, specifically as it relates to El Proceso's campaign of mass torture [5] from 1976-1982. In doing so, I shall outline what I consider the three essential components of the fused French/Argentine ideology: the holy mission of the soldier; the demonic nature of the enemy; and the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with a struggle between the two.

The Soldier's Mission: La Mission Civilisatrice and La Civilizacion Cristiana Occidental

In their introduction to The Politics of Pain: Torturers and Their Masters, Crelinsten and Schmid write that, although" [o]ur knowledge of those aggravating or enabling factors and of those impeding or disabling torture is still fragmentary," there appear to be a number of social, political, and legal conditions "under which torture is likely to occur." [6] One of the social/political factors they mention is "the presence of a 'sacred mission' which justifies anything." [7] Certainly, the sense that the Armed Forces were a part of a glorious, holy crusade permeates both the French and Argentine publications on anti-Communist counterinsurgency of the 1950s and 1960s, and, indeed, some Argentine soldiers continue to reflect such a belief at the beginning of the new millenium.

In her work Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-Algerian War, Rita Maran writes that it was the "peculiarly French interlinkage of politics and culture [that] led to the development of the civilizing mission ideology" or la mission civilisatrice. [8] This ideology derived from the belief that "France--by virtue of its status as an enlightened civilization--had a duty to disseminate these concepts widely," which is what colonists and soldiers did as they encountered "lesser" cultures on their colonial expeditions. [9] It was, in a sense, a French version of the "white man's burden." (Interestingly enough, by 1850, the French had carried their civilizing mission to Uruguay and Argentina, but this was in the course of founding colonies in Latin America, [10] and the framework that concerns us here--modern, anti-Communist warfare--was not in place until approximately one hundred years later.)

The French soldiers, especially French paratroopers, emphasized the religious component of their war in Algeria. Maran writes: "French people were led to believe that France was 'crusading for the defense of Western values against the barbarians from the East'..." [11] Coincidentally, 1957 was the first year of the French mission to Argentina, the same year that reports of French torture in Algeria began to gather intensity in France. [12] It is possible that the French paratroopers, under fire at home, were looking for support from their Argentine colleagues. [13] Regardless of their motivation, however, it seems clear that the French doctrine of revolutionary war "provides a key for reading reality that makes intelligible a complex and changing reality and enables the armed forces, an institution that sinks its roots in medieval values, to cope with social complexity and change." [14]

Similar to the French proclamations regarding Algeria, the Argentine junta underlined the holy purpose of its coup d'etat on March 24, 1976 that ushered in the "Dirty War." In its opening speech to the Argentine nation, the junta proclaimed that one of its basic objectives was to put into force "the values of Christian morality, of the national tradition and of the dignity of the Argentine being." [15] It must be said, however, that the mere manipulation of religion to achieve political or military aims will not necessarily lead to the mass use of torture. In previous coups, the Argentine military had presented the image of their struggle as a holy one, preserving the sacred values of the Argentine people against civilian demagogues and hypocrites. Moreover, the Argentine military had committed human rights violations throughout this century, but it did not commit them on such a massive scale as it did from 1976 onwards. It was the zero-sum way in which the French and the Argentines framed this religious str uggle that facilitated the greater use of torture.

An article appearing in the October-December 1958 issue of the Revista de la Escuela Superior de Guerra demonstrates that the French and the Argentine ideology were already commingling. Entitled "Guerra Revolucionaria: El Conflicto Mundial en Desarrollo," the article promoted the need for the Argentine military to study revolutionary wars. The author writes, "If, as it has been attempted to demonstrate, we find ourselves 'in war'; if what is risked in this war is nothing less than the life or death of everything that is foreign to Communism, that is to say, all that we most hold dear, it is urgent to detail the characteristics of this conflict." [16]

The war that this author was writing about did not, in fact, exist in Argentina in 1958. It was an …