El regreso de los soldados de Malvinas: la historia de un ocultamiento

Abstract

The return of the Malvinas soldiers after the Argentine defeat in the war was seen as a threat to the Armed Forces. Their testimonies and their own physical and psychological state could contribute to fuel the social indignation and to deepen the discredit of the population about the Military Junta that had provoked a war against Great Britain. Given this, the Armed Forces they designed a plan to hide its own soldiers. The same methodology that had been used during the previous period of clandestine repression – cover-ups, censorship, threats, intelligence operations and media complicity – was implemented after the Argentine surrender in the islands so that the population could not see or receive the soldiers. This work aims to reconstruct how these returns were organized, the strategy of invisibility that the dictatorship developed and the mandate of silence that the ex-combatants themselves were forced to sign once they returned to the continent. The concealment of these returns was thus added to the long list of actions implemented by State terrorism tending to hide their crimes.

Keywords

• photography
• military dictatorship
• media
• Malvinas war
• soldiers return