Abstract

FELD, Claudia. “I Killed and Watched People being Tortured”: Public Declarations of a Repressor in the Argentine Transition (1984). Secuencia [online]. 2020, n.107, e1711.  Epub Sep 09, 2020. ISSN 2395-8464.  https://doi.org/10.18234/secuencia.v0i107.1711.

This article analyzes the statements of former Navy corporal Raúl Vilariño regarding the crimes he witnessed and committed during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983). Published in a mass circulation magazine in 1984, these statements allow us to examine the ways attempts are made to construct the figure of the perpetrator during the early months of the political transition in Argentina. The article addresses: a) the language and point of view with which Vilariño referred to the facts; b) the “visibility device” (Rancière) used to dePICT Vilariño as the person responsible for and a witness of the crimes; c) the immediate impact of these statements and their links to the “factual truth” and “social truth” about state terrorism, and d) the notions of justice in conflict at that time. The results of this research shed light on the transition as a period in which the boundaries of the predictable were under review, in which the “crude” point of view of the repressor was socially acceptable and in which the struggles to understand the massiveness and exceptionality of forced disappearance still had an uncertain ending.

Keywords : dictatorship; Argentina; testimony; perpetrators; ESMA.