Paula Canelo, El proceso en su laberinto.

La interna military de Videla a Bignone (Buenos Aires: Prometeo

2008)

p.13
Introduction
Armed forces have considered the “anti-subversive struggle” its principal achievement for many years – after its
tumultuous failure at governing on the one and and as professional experts of war on the other, the massacre of
Argentines has been its principal recourse for legitimation and institutional cohesion

p.14
Canelo tries to avoid two simplistic but dominant interpretations:
1) The junta had the almost exclusive objective of implementing an economic plan that would allow the
disarticulation of the conflictive “postwar society” – true classist revenge by the dominant sectors over
the popular sectors and an anticipation of the changes to come in the ‘90s
2) The repressive politics was the unmistakeable expression of absolute evil
 metaphors such as “años oscuros”, “años de plomo”, “larga noche”, “herida abierta [surely
these metaphors are acceptable??]

p.15
 Nunca Más has done much to construct this interpretation – “descenso a los infiernos”, “teoría
de los dos demonios”
This interpretation risks hiding what actually occurred during the dictatorship
 “Deresponsabilización” (Vezzetti, Pasado y presente)
 Importantly, it ignores the fact that those who massacred their co-citizens were nothing more
than men – the “banality of evil”

p.16
“Static” understandings of the military regime – underestimate capacity for resistance and action of different
actors and overestimate the power of the armed forces
This research follows the pioneering work of Hugo Quiroga, El tiempo del proceso (1994) and María de los
Ángeles Yannuzzi, Política y dictadura. Los partidos politicos y el Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. 1976-
1982 (1996) and continued more recently by Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La dictadura militar
1976/10983. Del golpe de Estado a la restauración democrática (2003), Vezzetti (2002) and Pucciarelli (2004
and 2006)

p.29
Rather than try to add to interpretations that have epmhasised the imperialist strategy of the US during the
dictatorships and the exportation of the National Security Doctrine, this book looks to recover the ‘relegated
current of the military actor’ – but this also has its risks
 Need to avoid reducing social relations to a simple “collusion of interests”, minimising the importance
of organisational components, such as ideology, corporative interests, values, trajectories etc.

p.30
 Need to avoid a purely endogenous view, neglecting civic-military relations etc.
Adopt the analytical-methodological method of Ernesto López (1986, 1994 and 1996), in which the politico-
institutional conduct of the armed forces is the product, fundamentally, of a combination of two factors:
1) Its specific logic as actors (derived from certain organisational characteristics)
 Bureaucratic organisation – commitment to the principle of rationality and impersonal rules in
the decision-making process; hierarchical order; careful selection of candidates to enter the
organisation; and the instrumentation of a a system of authority based on “the specialisation
and instruction of a rational and technical type” (Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in a
Reorganised Germany’ in Political Writings, 1999)
 The military organisation must maintain a higher level of cohesion and hierarchy than any
other bureaucracy
2) The situation in which they act (context of political action)