Crisis, state of emergency and state terrorism: particularities of the dictatorship in Argentina (1976−1983)

Abstract

In Argentina, the 1976 coup d’état was a change of political regime and not just a change of government, from one of democratic origin turned authoritarian to another with fascistic tendencies, since the constant amplification of the State of exception will constitute a structure of state power of fascist projection, whose central characteristics were the expansion of the repressive apparatus and the institutionalization of new branches of the State: the Detention and Extermination Centers and the Task Forces. The character of the regime, however, had a dense sedimentation that combined a complex axiology. The notion of exceptionality allows us to elaborate the problem from a stage prior to State terrorism and to observe how legal and political statutes, for example the exception, secrecy, and military intelligence in a framework of severe capitalist crisis, derived in authoritarian forms of democratic regime and were generating the conditions for the coup d’état. Once the last dictatorship occurred, the concept of exception gave us access to correlate the repressive model with the characteristics of the political regime.