Abstract
Four decades after the Falklands/Malvinas War and Argentina’s return to democracy, this article explores the ways in which veterans accused of crimes against humanity remember the conflict. Before confronting the British in the South Atlantic in 1982, the Argentine military had been involved in operations of counterinsurgency and illegal repression at home. Since 2005, hundreds of former officers — including veterans of the Malvinas War — have been accused and convicted for the crimes of the 1970s. This article focuses on the narrative of ‘Malvinas’ shared by former comandos (special forces) in the prison where they are detained in the present. It questions the content of ethnographic interviews with these veterans, and the context in which they were produced, to revisit the link between the violence of the 1970s and the Malvinas War from the perspective of the military involved in both scenarios. In so doing, the article deals with some unsolved issues of memorialization in post-war and post-authoritarian Argentina.
Introduction
The Malvinas War,Footnote1 and especially the way in which it should be remembered, is still a source of divisions in Argentina. Assessed at the point of its 40th anniversary, the relationship between the war and the dictatorial regime that waged it against a background of wide popular support, is a knot that seems difficult to loosen. This article seeks to understand this link from the perspective of the military who embody it, the approximately 30 per cent of active-duty officers involved in the political repression of the 1970s, who are also veterans of the Malvinas War (Waisboard, Citation1991: 166).
The military government (1976–83) that violently repressed leftist ‘subversion’ in Argentina, making thousands of desaparecidosFootnote2 among civilians and revolutionary guerrillas, also took the decision to ‘recover’ the Falklands/Malvinas Islands in April 1982, triggering an armed conflict with Great Britain. The ‘1970s’ and ‘Malvinas’, which the military see as two wars, marked a whole generation of middle rank officers who experienced both events. However, the complex evolution of civil–military relations has affected the way in which broader Argentine society understands and remembers the Malvinas War, and especially the role of the military in it.
In 1983 the defeat suffered on the islands, the abuses perpetrated in the country, and the difficult economic situation forced the military to call for elections. Two years later, a special tribunal sentenced the generals, leaders of the military regime, to life in prison for gross violations of human rights. The court’s intention to extend prosecution to the lower ranks triggered rebellions in the Army (the carapintadas ‘painted faces’ mutinies) in 1987 and 1989. The rebels did not aim to establish a new military government, but demanded their superiors take responsibility for the orders given in the 1970s, and the government find a political solution to the trials. Nonetheless, the uprising was perceived as a threat to the democratic order, the trials were suspended, and the generals were pardoned a few years later. Things changed radically in 2003, when President Kirchner launched a new cycle of trials. Since then, hundreds of former officers of all ranks — including a conspicuous number of Malvinas veterans — have been prosecuted for the crimes of the dictatorship, in a process of transitional justice that is almost unparalleled in the contemporary world.
The trauma of state violence, and the consequent criminalization of the military, installed across wider Argentine society an image of the armed forces as an actor antithetical to society. This fracture has affected the social memorialization of the past, making the Malvinas War a chapter particularly difficult to process. As Guber (Citation2019) explains, two opposed and rather simplistic views of the conflict crystallised. The first sees the conflict as the ‘heroic endeavour’ of officers and conscript soldiers against the British, for a just national cause. This view is quite popular among the military, who tend to adopt a defensive stance over the memory of the conflict. The second interpretation sees the war as a crime against humanity, the extension of state terrorism in the South Atlantic where the military played their ‘natural’ role of perpetrators (Guber, Citation2017: 24), this time against conscript soldiers. This ‘dictatorial’ view of the war associates soldiers with the victims of the dictatorship and is validated by a smaller but highly mobilized group of ex-conscripts who reported abuses by superiors in the islands (Panizo, Citation2014; CECIM, Citation2021). This discourse has become dominant since 2003, as it was embraced by the Kirchner-Fernandez presidencies (2003–15) and by human rights groups, finding a strong echo in the media (Niebieskikwiat, Citation2012) and among social scientists (Ranalletti, Citation2017; Gamarnik et al, Citation2019; Perera & Sanchis, Citation2021).
As a result, ‘Malvinas’ ceased being an international conflict against a foreign power and became a domestic matter. Scholars who sustain the ‘dictatorial’ view of Malvinas adopt the same humanitarian standards used to explore the legacy of state terrorism. In this conceptualization, memory is not a social phenomenon to study, but a political endeavour aimed at ‘truth’ and ‘justice’. So much so that the slogan ‘memoria, verdad y justicia’ (memory, truth and justice) wielded by human rights groups since the end of the dictatorship has incorporated the term ‘soberanía’ (sovereignty) to include the memory of the Malvinas War within the humanitarian cause (Vassel, Citation2007).
The 1982 conflict has thus become a heavily morally charged subject. Its unfolding remains difficult to assess and its lessons hard to learn (Tessey, Citation2020), partly because the hegemonic narrative of Malvinas tends to exclude the military from the social memorialization of the conflict. This ultimately assigns them a pre-confected role without questioning of their experiences.
This article bridges this gap by exploring the memories of veterans of Malvinas accused and imprisoned for the crimes of the dictatorship. In particular, it draws on ethnographic interviews with officers who participated in the war as comandos, the special forces unit of the Argentine Army, demonstrating that veterans consider Malvinas part of a broader professional trajectory in which the experience of and attitude to combat are central. In so doing, the article discusses the ‘combat position’ from which comandos remember the war in the present, and it analyses the meaning of Malvinas in relation to the violence of the 1970s, contributing to recent empirical studies on military experiences and perceptions of the 1982 war (Rodriguez, Citation2009; Melara, Citation2012; Benwell, Citation2021; Guber, Citation2022, Citation2016). Moreover, it speaks to studies on military memories of that period (Robben, Citation2006; Badaró, Citation2010, Citation2012; Salvi, Citation2012; Ohanian, Citation2017; Lorenz, Citation2020) and the professionalization of the armed forces in Argentina and beyond (Soprano, Citation2016; Janowitz, Citation1960).
The article first introduces the subjects of the study, the comandos. Then it provides methodological and empirical context for this analysis in terms of the interviews conducted with the veterans. After that, it explores participants’ narratives and the emphasis they placed on professionalism and incompetence in the war. The article then describes the interactions between the researcher and participants in the prison where veterans were detained at the time of the study in 2018, discussing how these interactions were fundamental to the analytic interpretation of professionalism. Finally, it rethinks the link between the Malvinas War and the violence of the 1970s from the standpoint of officers involved in both scenarios.
The Argentine comandos
Most interviews for this study took place in the ex-military prison in Campo de Mayo, now Federal Penal Institute Unit 34 (U-34). With its 3,800 hectares, Campo de Mayo is the biggest Army garrison in Argentina, hosting regiments, education and training centres, a hospital and a prison. Most veterans detained in the U-34 had been assigned to the garrison at some point during their military career.
Campo de Mayo is a historical place in Argentina, and an emblematic spot for Army servicemen and women in the country. The garrison also hosted the second biggest clandestine detention centre during the military dictatorship, where hundreds of political prisoners were illegally detained, tortured and disappeared. In fact, a project to open a memory site in Campo de Mayo is currently underway (Bullentini, Citation2022).Footnote3 The School of Infantry was (and still is) the comandos’ base. In 1982 it was their assembly point for deployment to Malvinas, and some years later it became the headquarters of the carapintadas rebellions, whose heads had been the highly respected leaders of the comandos in Malvinas.
The comandos are special forces within most armies in the world. Organized in small patrols, these troops specialize in planning, conducting and carrying out missions behind enemy lines. The Argentine Army established the course for comandos in 1963, following the Cuban missile crisis (Ruiz Moreno, Citation1986). In the early 1970s, when the guerrillasFootnote4 reached their maximum expansion, the course added techniques of counterinsurgency, intelligence, parachute jumping, diving, mountaineering, communications, meteorology and photointerpretation. The three-month course was highly demanding and aimed to prepare aspiring comandos from a ‘spiritual, physical, psychological, tactical and technical point of view, to conduct and execute missions in diverse geographical environments and within enemy territory’ (Ministerio de la Defensa, Citation2015: 101).
Those who successfully completed the training, acquired a distinctive status that made them an elite within the Army: by demonstrating they possessed the attitude and abilities for the role of comando, these men gained unprecedented prestige. Officers and NCOs used to take the course on a voluntary basis, to re-join their unit after completion. However, in 1978 the Army created the first permanent group of comandos, the Special Team Halcón 8. While its members focused on preventing guerrilla attacks within the context of what the military called ‘the anti-subversive war’ against revolutionary armed groups, they also prepared for a conventional conflict against Chile, given the dispute with the neighbouring country over the Beagle Channel. Guillermo, veteran of Malvinas and former comando, remembers:
I was lucky because I was called to join the Halcón 8. […] I had taken the course because I saw the first to be called [to fight the guerrillas] were the comandos. So, I thought “If I want to be in the front line, I need to specialize in this stuff”. And thanks to that, I went to Malvinas.
When preparing for a mission, the comandos trained in pairs who shared the same task. Jaime and Marcelo — both participants in this study — belonged to the 602nd and were partners in Malvinas. On 23rd May 1982, they were called to Campo de Mayo and were both impatient to set off to the theatre of operations. Four days after landing, they faced the British special forces. Despite a fierce resistance, their patrol was neutralized and held prisoners by the enemy, as the events that led to the Argentine capitulation unfolded. After the war, Jaime and Marcelo were decorated with medals for ‘military merit’ and ‘effort and abnegation’. Many in Argentina considered them heroes. However, both veterans were then accused of crimes against humanity for their participation in ‘the other war’ in the 1970s, and imprisoned within the same military garrison where they gathered to set off to Malvinas.
Ethnography behind bars
The ethnographic interviews analysed in this article were conducted in 2018, in the context of prosecution of Argentine citizens for violations of human rights perpetrated during the dictatorship. Originally a military prison, the U-34 in Campo de Mayo fell under the jurisdiction of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FPS) when the code of military justice was abolished in 2008. At the time of the study, the U-34 hosted exclusively individuals accused of or convicted for crimes against humanity, a population of about 100 inmates mostly comprising retired Army officers and NCOs.
Ethnography, with its techniques of in-depth interviewing and participant observation, enables understanding a phenomenon, culture or group in the terms of its members and protagonists. The link between Argentine military involvement in the 1970s and in Malvinas, and its socio-political and judicial consequences, materializes in the condition of imprisonment of military personnel active on both fronts. This makes the U-34 a privileged space for ethnographic enquiry of meanings, practices and narratives that imprisoned veterans construct around their war and post-war experiences. Observing and participating in the dynamics by which they inhabit, socialize and speak in the prison, while also interviewing their comrades outside, enabled me to get a much deeper insight into the experiences and memories of this unique group of veterans. This situated knowledge was then analysed against broader historical and political processes in post-war Argentina, to make intelligible the position and perspective of the accused veterans.
My study had been authorized by the Ministry of Justice. Thanks to the mediation of two retired officers who participated in previous studies in 2016, I recruited six veterans within the U-34. Based on their regular visits to comrades detained there, the two also ‘instructed’ me on how to overcome the resistance of the penitentiary guards. ‘Incidents’ regarding prisoners for crimes against humanity get huge public attention in Argentina, and often have consequences for the authorities involved. In 2012, journalist Ceferino Reato (Citation2012) interviewed ex-dictator General Jorge Rafael Videla while he was serving time in the U-34. In the interview, Videla detailed and justified the method of disappearances, generating public outcry against the authorities who had allowed the visit of Reato and the ‘confession’ of the repressor. Many in Argentina think perpetrators should have no space to express their voices. Given the sensitivity of the matter, accessing inmates detained for crimes against humanity has then become increasingly difficult, with the FPS restricting visits to relatives and comrades wherever possible.
Gaining access to the U-34 took three additional months of unanswered calls, useless journeys to the prison, tense negotiations with the FPS and endless paperwork. Despite the authorization of the Ministry, the FPS was reluctant to let me conduct my study, and in fact had the power to prevent me from accessing the prison. As a researcher asking sensitive questions to high profile inmates, in their perspective I was no less dangerous than a journalist. With the excuse of representing ‘a threat to the security of prisoners’, the penitentiary guards regularly tried to stop me from entering the U-34. However, they also wanted to avoid problems with the Ministry of Justice, so they ultimately gave in.
Argentine penitentiary personnel often belong to the non-white lower-middle class, and they rarely possess higher education qualifications. Besides constituting a potential problem, I was a European, white, well-educated, female academic. The U-34 guards barely tolerated my presence, and constantly boycotted my visits to the veterans who, because of those same characteristics of my positionality, were instead very eager to talk to me. They felt they had more in common with me than with the guards, despite the generally good relationship they had with them. Moreover, I was a non-Argentine with no relation with the ‘anti-subversive war’, recommended as trustworthy by their comrades outside the prison. Thus, despite the resistances of the penitentiary personnel, interviews took place thanks to the joint effort of former officers outside the U-34 and their comrades inside.
Once the FPS agreed to let me in, I conducted twenty-one interviews with six veterans during visiting hours, over three months, interviewing each participant between three and five times. I also interviewed three veterans outside the U-34 (one under house arrests and two extraneous to the trials) for a total of nine participants and twenty-six interviews for this study. The sample included three former comandos, the Argentine Army special forces. This article shares and analyses their rich testimonies.
Interviewees generally answered my questions about their experiences in Malvinas, but they also discussed their detention. They never went in detail into their cases; the trials were still ongoing, and they would never risk disclosing sensitive information. Conscious of this, I never asked about specifics of their involvement in operations in the 1970s, and we agreed I would use fictitious names in publications.
The narratives: professionalism and incompetence
Previous work has shown how the possession and performance of military skills supports soldiers’ claim of a military identity (Kasurak, Citation2009; Woodward & Jenkings, Citation2011; King, Citation2013; Guber, Citation2016). Professionalism, both in the form of expertise and lived experience, is one of the main themes that emerged in the interviews with Argentine comandos, through which participants gave Malvinas a specific meaning.
By cross-analysing data obtained through interviews with comandos and participants who were not special forces, I found that the comandos underscored upfront their high degree of specialism more than other veterans. They explained their diverse experience of war, gained in conventional and unconventional settings, described the multiple courses they took, and the knowledge they built throughout their careers. Marcelo mentioned, for instance, the advantage he possessed thanks to expeditions to Antarctica that allowed him to endure the inclement weather of Malvinas. Another aspect they emphasized was the centrality of combat in their understanding and experience of war:
I joined the infantry and then specialised as comando because of the direct contact [with the enemy], I was looking for close combat from the beginning. Being in the front line, muddy, that’s the essence of comando.
In the Argentine Army’s social world, moral authority does not come automatically with seniority. This special form of respect is owed by comrades and subordinates based on the example set in the battlefield (Ejército Argentino, Citation1990). Understood as being in opposition to entitlement, moral authority is the combined result of competence and integrity, and one of the most important qualities of a good commander. Therefore, Marcelo placed special emphasis on professionalism as a fundamental component of his experience and military identity, which in turn validated the position of moral authority from which he claimed to speak.
Importantly, Marcelo was concerned with differentiating moral authority from heroism. The view of Malvinas as a ‘heroic feat’ is especially visible in the literature produced by veterans and military analysts in the post-war period. Besides providing valuable information on the technical and human dimension of combat and operations, these memoirs and analyses tend to praise cadres and soldiers’ performance and the suffering they endured for a national cause dear to the Argentines (Guber, Citation2019). Furthermore, this view is often accompanied by a defensive attitude that officers contemporary to the war tend to adopt in relation to Malvinas, because of the criticism moved to the institution and its conduct during the dictatorship. The result is the difficulty or the reluctance to question the positions on which these accounts are constructed. Nevertheless, the comandos’ interviewed in the prison distanced themselves from the ‘heroic’ view of Malvinas:
In Malvinas I witnessed individual feats, from both officers and soldiers, and general incompetence, on the strategic level. The defeat creates the need for heroes because somehow the myth exorcises the defeat. And I did receive decorations after the war, which put that myth onto my shoulders. But I want to destroy that image, because I just did what had to be done.
While Marcelo described the resistance of his patrol, he never mythologized nor romanticized his own or his comrades’ actions. He explained the mistakes they made — looking for shelter in the only detectable spot for miles around — and stressed the preparation and experience of the British special forces, as well as their coordination with the high command which allowed them to neutralize the Argentine patrol. The comandos lacked these elements. Some had been mobilized to Malvinas despite having occupied sedentary roles for years; others were not familiar with the weaponry; and, above all, their superiors had sent them with contradictory orders into enemy territory, without sufficient information on British movements in the area (Ruiz Moreno, Citation1986). The ambush at Top Malo House was also a consequence of the carelessness of the Argentine higher command.
While the comandos acknowledged the bravery of combatants in the battlefield, they were highly critical of their superiors and rigorous in analysing their own conduct. This allowed them to point out two interconnected elements: the professionalism of combatants at the lower tactical level, and the superiors’ incompetence at the higher tactical, operational and strategic levels.
Both Jaime and Marcelo explained how this was not just the experience of comandos, but of most Argentine forces on the ground. For example, Marcelo shared his analysis of the situation on 11–12 June 1982, two days before the British offensive led to the Argentine defeat. He used maps of the theatre of operations to show which Argentine strategic mistakes caused the capitulation. Marcelo showed positions and movements of actors in the field in a frantic way, jumping from one map to another, constantly checking if I was following him. — ‘You look as clueless as Menendez’ — he chuckled, noticing my initial confusion and comparing it with the mediocre conduct of the Argentine general commander in Malvinas.
In his analysis, Marcelo pointed out important strategic errors: the decision to recover Malvinas in winter, the miscalculation regarding the possibility of a British military response, the poor logistical planning of the campaign, and so on. By showing the position of the airport on the map, Marcelo explained how the first mistake made by the Argentines was not to extend the airstrip in Port Stanley. Due to the presence of British nuclear submarines, the Argentines could not rely on aircraft carriers. The Air Force pilots had to operate from the continent but could not land in Port Stanley to refuel, as the airstrip was too short for combat aircraft. Despite the time they had at their disposal between the Argentine recovery on 2nd April and the arrival of the British task force on 1st May, the Argentine high command never ordered the extension of the airstrip. According to Marcelo, their short-sightedness impeded the Argentines’ abilities to sustain air superiority in the war. When I pointed out that the British had prioritized the airport, as one of their first actions was to bomb it on 1st May 1982, Marcelo replied — ‘Of course, because they acted with intelligence’. By ‘intelligence’ the veteran implied both ‘common sense’ and ‘information’ in military terms, two elements that are crucial in the planning and conduct of a war, but that the Argentine commanders did not demonstrate or appear to use.
The professionalism of the comandos emerges not so much from their accounts of combat situations they faced in Malvinas, but from the use of skills and specialist knowledge in delivering lucid analyses of crucial events and conduct in the war. They reinforced this aspect of their military identity as they recognized it in the enemy, the British, an actor that is usually absent from the ‘dictatorial’ narratives of Malvinas, in which Argentine professional soldiers are remembered for the abuses against conscripts.
The British Army is known all over the world for its high degree of professionalism and its vast experience of conflict in the most diverse contexts. The Argentine special forces entered combat with their British equivalents, albeit those with a longer history and a much broader experience of war. Therefore, it is not surprising that the comandos tended to assimilate themselves to what they saw as their peers. At the same time, by engaging with the enemy in comparative terms, the comandos not only emphasized their own competence, but they also highlighted the imprudence of the Argentine higher command. The British were professional soldiers — like the comandos — but they worked as an intelligent coordinated machine, while the Argentines were shown to be incompetent at the strategic level and fractured between superior and middle-lower ranks.
Another huge mistake pointed out by Marcelo was the Argentine high command’s inability to predict the British landing in San Carlos Bay on 21st May 1982. Marcelo showed on the map that the Argentine defensive positions were misplaced, as the general commanders expected the British attack from south-southeast (Ruiz Moreno, Citation1986: 200). When instead the British landed on the west coast and started moving towards the interior of East Falkland, the Argentine troops had to quickly re-orientate, and those who were originally in the rear guard suddenly found themselves exposed in the front line. This important miscalculation forced combatants to quickly reorganize in the battlefield, often paying with their lives:
I reflect on these things, on the irresponsibility (of the superiors). It’s a constant questioning, because as a commander you are playing with your son’s life. You cannot wake up one day and improvise. So, I severely criticise (the superiors), because the one who lost their leg could have been your son. Why? I don’t have an answer for that.
The interaction: combat positions
To understand the meaning of professionalism and incompetence in the context of interview, it is crucial to analyse the interactions in the interviews, through which these themes emerged.
Narratives of complex cultural and socio-political phenomena of the past also speak about the present in which they are fabricated. The context of an interview in which narratives may emerge is often taken as fixed, able to determine perceptions, actions and narrations of subjects within it. However, according to anthropologist Tim Ingold (Citation2002), all context is determined by the interaction of subjects with the constituents of the environment that surrounds them. In Ingold’s terms (Citation2002: 5–7), veterans had been ‘dwelling’ in the prison for a while at the time of our first interaction. Marcelo had been in preventive custody for more than a year, waiting to see whether his case would ultimately go to trial; Jaime had been imprisoned for thirteen years, with a life sentence to serve. By the time of the study, participants had developed, recovered and incorporated skills to inhabit the environment of the prison, made of specific spaces, resources, objects and human beings. They constantly interacted with the constituents of their environment, which for a limited time included me, a frequent visitor to the U-34. Thus, the interactions at the basis of our interviews followed a specific dynamic, that gave the context of imprisonment a unique meaning.
In ethnographic interviewing, subjects develop different strategies to ‘explore purposefully with the researcher the meanings they place on the events in their world’ (Heyl et al., Citation2001: 369). Two conditions were paramount for Marcelo: conveying the position of moral authority from which he was speaking by emphasizing his professionalism; and making sure that I, the researcher, was correctly positioned to receive his message. He pursued this second goal by structuring our interaction as what in Argentine military jargon is called a ‘tactical topographic orientation’ (orientación táctica topográfica, OTT):
When you arrive — when I arrived in Malvinas — you know nothing. So, normally they take you for a tactical topographic orientation. They tell you: “Here is the distillery, here is the port, etc.” I arrived at night, when I landed I had no clue. So, first, you need to get all the information, so you can orientate yourself.
Marcelo never said explicitly he would use the OTT as a tool to assist me in my orientation during the interview. It was my ethnographic interpretation of the interview, including participant’s gestures, attitudes, behaviours and use of objects, that allowed me to read our interaction as an OTT. However, the OTT as a practice also speaks about Marcelo’s military identity and the centrality of combat for the comandos. The comandos are special forces, they ‘fight, sleep or eat’ (former Lt. Stel cited in Ruiz Moreno, Citation1986: 198); they act in small patrols, isolated from their unit; their nickname in the military environment is come-víboras (snake-eaters), which refers to their ability to survive in the harshest conditions with limited resources. In the comandos’ understanding of war, combat is central, and a proper OTT allows them to orientate in enemy territory, carry out the mission and survive in a hostile environment.
Participants with different military experiences, training and identities, used different strategies to communicate their accounts of the war. Some shared their written memoirs, others focused on their own and their families’ reactions to the events, or the logistical difficulties they encountered since deployment. Most of them recounted the events in chronological order, starting from the announcement of the recovery of the islands on 2nd April. Instead, both Marcelo and Jaime used photos and cartography, they sketched their own maps, and started their narratives straight in the middle of action. Interestingly, Ingold (Citation2006: 30–31) suggests that:
Drawing a line on a sketch map is much like telling a story, […] is to relate, in narrative, the occurrences of the past, retracing a path through the world that others, recursively picking up the threads of past lives, can follow in the process of spinning out their own. But rather as in looping or knitting, the thread being spun now and the thread picked up from the past are both of the same yarn. […] And in storytelling as in wayfaring, it is in the movement from place to place — or from topic to topic — that knowledge is integrated.
Furthermore, reading the interaction between researcher and participant as an OTT enables us to understand what the participant made of the context in which he was acting and narrating. In a context in which the military are judicially prosecuted and socially ostracized, former officers feel cornered. I have demonstrated elsewhere (Natale, Citation2019) that, regardless of their involvement in the trials, many middle ranking officers of the 1970s feel they are still at war in the present, this time against a state that condemns them and a society that despises them. In the context of the prison, this belligerent view of the present was especially evident. Part of the reason is due to the presence among participants of comandos, whose preparation for and experience of combat was part of a professionalizing trajectory, an element of their identity that shaped not only their memories of Malvinas but also the meaning that the current context acquired for them.
In the comandos’ perspective, I as a researcher was an outsider to their environment (the military world, but also the prison). Therefore, I was likely to be misguided: as an academic, a European and a civilian, I might well have been exposed to the ‘dictatorial’ view of Malvinas, in which the military are not recognized as professionals, but unilaterally condemned as perpetrators. The most important characteristic of comandos, their high degree of professionalism, is completely neglected in the dominant conception of the war in Argentina. This would lead to both a pre-judgement and a misjudgement not only of their actions in Malvinas, but of their whole ‘being military’. After all, fieldwork took place within a prison, an environment that reinforced the perception of the military as criminals.
So, to convey the ‘right’ military identity — the professional one — the comandos had to ensure that I as the interlocutor occupied a position that would enable me to grasp it. At the same time, they had to legitimate the position from which they were speaking. Thus, Marcelo chose to make the interview an OTT, and placed emphasis on professionalism as a fundamental component of his military identity, which in turn conferred him moral authority to speak.
The two wars: Malvinas in context
The trials for crimes against humanity represent for many middle ranking officers of the 1970s and 1980s the final chapter of their careers. Their military identities survived the end of active duty, and participants saw their ‘being military’ criminalized by the same state and society they served. Marcelo was clearly on the warpath with regards to that point. He was working strenuously on building his defence, and he was doing his best to keep sane in the prison, physically and mentally. During the interviews, our interaction reflected this belligerent attitude: he conducted an OTT because he turned his imprisonment into a battlefield in which subjects had to occupy specific positions, and this included me, the researcher, as a constituent part of the U-34.
However, not all veterans and not all comandos had the same combative spirit as Marcelo. A lot depended on their personal circumstances. Some were more optimistic, others more resigned to their fate, usually depending on how long they had been imprisoned. Marcelo and some other officers were in their early sixties at the time of the study, in good health and still in preventive custody, and they firmly believed they would ultimately prove their innocence and get out of prison. Nevertheless, regardless of their attitude to imprisonment, accused veterans knew the memory of the Malvinas War was another contested territory. Ostracized by a society that is reluctant to interrogate them on military matters like the war in the South Atlantic, they understood the importance of occupying the correct position in the current context.
As I crossed Campo de Mayo to reach the U-34, I often saw a recreation of the islands’ Darwin cemetery, where the bodies of Argentine fallen soldiers are buried. With its simple white crosses, the ‘fake’ graveyard stands as a reminder of the lives sacrificed for the fatherland. Interestingly, organizations of relatives of accused military personnel had raised a similar symbolic cemetery outside the Ministry of Defence in Buenos Aires in 2010 (Página12, Citation2010). In that case, the white crosses commemorated those imprisoned for crimes against humanity who had died under custody since the trials started in 2003, a number that has risen to more than 700 (Unión de Promociones, Citation2022). The simulated cemetery was quickly removed by the authorities:
Of course, they were forced to remove it. The prisoners for crimes against humanity are the image of the defeat, otherwise why would I be here? The anti-subversive war is undefendable, there are no arguments in support for that anymore.
Veterans who are imprisoned are aware that heroic accounts of the 1970s, like those of Malvinas, are unsustainable. This is not so much because of the judicial and moral sentences imposed on both wars, but because the heroic view of these events is not compatible with the defeats suffered by the military in both scenarios, whose consequences they embody in the present. In his accounts of Malvinas, Marcelo underscored his professionalism while he deconstructed the myth of the war hero and articulated a strong critique of his own institution. He showed how the defeat was not the result of lack of professionalism, but the outcome of the disparity of forces in the field, and of strategic mistakes that could not be fixed at the lower tactical level. Interestingly, he also analysed the anti-subversive war along the same lines. Although it was a military victory in the eyes of the officers, that led to the annihilation of the guerrillas, the anti-subversive war represented a huge political defeat for the armed forces, with the hundreds of imprisoned officers as a blatant reminder.
Subaltern officers of the dictatorship have shown different degrees of criticism against their own institution (Natale, Citation2021). While most of them defended the actions of the military against the guerrillas, often overlooking the illegal side of the repression, they also pointed out the mistakes of the regime. The most radical, like Marcelo, voiced severe critiques of the generals’ decision to embrace the method of disappearances, and the superior officers’ reluctance to take responsibility for the illegal orders imparted during the dictatorship. This resentment is particularly heartfelt by officers who are imprisoned, but it is not incidental to their condition. It is the last manifestation of a deep fracture between middle ranking and superior officers that originated in the war against subversion in the 1970s, deepened in Malvinas, and broke out in the carapintadas rebellions of the late 1980s (Waisbord, Citation1991). In fact, while most junior officers did not join the mutinies, they shared the rebels’ motivations and were not ready to fight against the uprising comrades (Romero, Citation2006).
In this perspective, the trials are the final stage of the progressive disillusionment of middle ranking officers towards the institution and the higher commands, which found in Malvinas a catalyst of rebellion and discontent, especially for the veterans who participated in both scenarios. The link between the two events is embodied by men like Marcelo, who feel that they are paying the price of both wars, with interest: the defeat in Argentina, with judicial prosecution, and the defeat in the South Atlantic, with the indifference (if not the hostility) of an ungrateful society. The trials still make sense in his view because the armed forces had the legal instruments to fight subversion, but they opted for clandestine operations and the method of disappearances. However, he and other participants found society’s reluctance to see Malvinas as a conventional war unacceptable, because the military were participating in that scenario as regular forces. Hence, the emphasis on professionalism.
The narrative of the professional soldier counterbalances not only that of the perpetrator, promoted by the ‘dictatorial view’ of Malvinas, but also that of the hero. In fact, while some may think of this as a strategy to ‘clean’ the officers’ image, interviews with comandos suggest the mythologizing of the military is just as detrimental as their demonization. Both conceptualizations are misleading, swallowing incompetence and merit. In the 1970s, as in Malvinas, the entrenchment of defensive positions (like most former officers do) does not allow degrees of responsibility to be discerned. Moreover, this attitude undermines solidarity among the accused military, as each one is focused on their own judicial case, losing sight of the broader picture.
Indeed, while Marcelo’s accounts of Malvinas may suggest a strong generational identity, we should not assume homogenous positions on the past, nor solidarity among the officers accused. Marcelo declared that the critical stance he took on the anti-subversive war brought him problems in the U-34. His position of moral authority was recognized by other inmates, and only that respect allowed him to peacefully coexist with officers and NCOs who thought differently about the past and the conduct of the military in it.
At the same time, the condemnation of the military as inept and intrinsically evil, both at home and in the islands, is unfair in the eyes of Marcelo and other participants, because it makes the armed forces a criminal organization, again with no distinctions between ranks, roles and responsibilities. Instead, by emphasizing professionalism of the lower ranks, and particularly the special forces, Marcelo shifted the focus on how both the 1970s and Malvinas were part of a broader professionalizing trajectory, as also the comprehensive training for comandos demonstrates. Both wars ended in defeats because of important strategic mistakes that should not diminish the level of preparation and expertise of combatants.
In conclusion, the comandos remember Malvinas as an international conflict that holds a crucial political meaning for the accused military. This meaning emerges only by putting Malvinas in relation to the 1970s, the other war they fought, and with the context from which they speak. The continuity between these experiences reveals that the war in the South Atlantic is the context that more than others tested participants’ skills and capabilities, where they faced an equally professional enemy, and where they dealt with superiors who did not behave according to their expectations.
Conclusions
The involvement of the military in mass political repression and its consequent criminalization in Argentina has discouraged the conduct of empirical studies of the military of the 1970s, including their participation in the only international conflict in which Argentina has been involved in the twentieth century. However, this article demonstrates that questioning the veterans accused of crimes against humanity about their understanding of Malvinas has important implications for the study of the war and the post-war in Argentina. The lessons of Malvinas can only be understood if social scientists and broader society agree to see the conflict as a military matter, questioning the military professionals as trained members of a regular army with no previous war experience, besides the repression of what they considered an internal enemy. This local knowledge not only adds to the meaning of the 1982 war in broader Argentine political history; but it also allows scholarship on the Malvinas War to converge and enter in dialogue with the one on the Falklands War, sharing the common goal of researching a conflict among regular forces.
Without neglecting the link between the 1982 war and the regime, the article looks at Malvinas as an international conflict while also emphasizing its political relevance for Argentine civil–military relations. In doing so, it overcomes the limits of both the ‘dictatorial’ and the ‘heroic’ views of the Malvinas War, showing that elements of both coexist in the view of the comandos. In their narratives, the military did not participate as heroes, nor as perpetrators, but as professionals of war, and imprisoned veterans still occupy a combat position (not necessarily defensive) about the past. This ‘third way’ of understanding Malvinas only emerges if we read the interactions between participant and researcher in the informants’ terms, that is, in military terms. Making the perspective of middle rank military a subject of enquiry, leaving aside the humanitarian categories usually adopted in assessing their conduct, may open the field of social sciences to more holistic studies of recent Argentine history, and to further problematisation of the uses of military force in the 1970s and 1980s.
This novel perspective on the Falkland/Malvinas War also speaks to the scholarship on the judicial consequences and the ethical limits of the military profession in this and other contexts. How to assess the blurred boundary between the performance of military duty and the unspeakable violence it often entails? Humanizing the subjects involved (without diminishing their responsibilities) and exploring their professionalism as the distinctive trait that allows them to cross that boundary, enables social scientists to gain local knowledge about this contradiction intrinsic to military profession. Furthermore, accepting that individuals who reach high levels of professionalization and fight in conventional wars, may be the same who take part in repressive actions and commit terrible crimes, allows us to question military performance in comparative terms. The professionalization of many armies of the 1970s, including the British one, passed through preparation for combat in contexts of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism (King, Citation2013:238). And the results were not always morally or legally irreprehensible, as shown by the convictions of military personnel for the bloody events that occurred within the Northern Irish conflict (Mills, Citation2021; Sanders, Citation2021). This study may then encourage social scientists to leave aside double moral standards when analysing how western/non-western militaries, and democratic/authoritarian states, deal with the monopoly of violence and its consequences.
In sum, understanding Malvinas as comandos, and interpreting it holistically besides other events in which veterans took part as professional soldiers, allows us to uncover new meanings of the conflict in the South Atlantic at the point of its 40th anniversary. Social scientists can and should question military personnel about their actions in the past and their position in the present without imposing their own categories and pre-packaged interpretations, but by interacting with participants in the ways they open up in the interview. This is not to justify their actions and narratives, but to understand their perspective as individuals who acted in different scenarios, first, by virtue of their professional affiliation with the military institution.
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Eleonora Natale
Eleonora Natale, Lecturer in International History, Department of War Studies, King's College London.
Notes
1 While across most publications the author opts for the double name ‘Falklands/Malvinas’, this article refers to the war and the islands exclusively as ‘Malvinas’; it does so because it adopts the terms and categories of the research participants, in accordance with the rules of ethnographic interpretation. All translations from Spanish are the author’s.
2 Spanish for ‘disappeared’. The 1976–83 regime was responsible for the death of 9,000–30,000 people suspected of ‘subversive activities’ like guerrilla warfare, political militancy and activism. The military repressed political opposition through methods such as kidnapping, secret detention, torture and forced disappearance. To this day, the bodies of thousands of victims are still to be found.
3 Other emblematic training spaces converted into clandestine centres (i.e. the Navy School of Mechanics — ESMA, and the Navy Infantry NCO School — ESIM) were subsequently taken from the armed forces and transformed into museums by democratic governments, to the great dismay of the military.
4 Inspired by the 1959 Cuban revolution, guerrilla groups insurged across Latin America to subvert the status quo through armed violence. In Argentina, the guerrillas counted 3,000 well-trained members in the early 1970s, fighting against armed and security forces in rural and urban areas (Novaro, Citation2005: 35).
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Interviews
- Guillermo. 2018. Former Colonel of the Argentine Army, 12 October, Buenos Aires.
- Jaime. 2018. Former Colonel of the Argentine Army, 25 October, Buenos Aires.
- Marcelo. 2018a. Former Captain of the Argentine Army, 11 October, Buenos Aires.
- Marcelo. 2018b. Former Captain of the Argentine Army, 6 Novermber, Buenos Aires.
- Marcelo. 2018c. Former Captain of the Argentine Army, 13 December, Buenos Aires.