passivity" of the citizens could only revitalize "subversive delinquency. Facing this
darkness the time for the Argentine people's waking has arrived"
80
: with the country
"placed at the edge of its disintegration", "The Argentine Army, with the fair right that the
generously scattered blood of its heroic and martyred children accord to it, claims with
affliction but also with firmness an imminent consciousness raising to define were we
stand"
81
.
Carcinogens, on the other hand, colonize healthy cells and build their own blood supply
inside the victim's body, however, they are essentially alien to the organism. They subvert
the body from within, but are not part of it
82
. Likewise, marxist infiltration brings the threat
into the "womb of the nation", as one general put it, but its origin lies beyond the
"ideological boundaries" of the nation-state, as top ranking members of the Brazilian army
used to claim
83
. So, for instance, "marxist subversives" had to be excluded from the
national realm, because they had "ideologically forfeited their right to call themselves
Argentineans"
84
.
But marxism is not only a form of social cancer, it is also a particularly malignant variety
of the disease, which, due to its own nature, is beyond cure:
Marxism is not a doctrine that is simply wrong, as many have been historically. No,
Marxism is an intrinsically depraved doctrine, which means that everything that stems from
80
The speech was reprinted in Vasquez 1985, pp. 15-17.
81
Ibid.
A few years earlier, and using similar arguments, the "Declaration of Principles" of the
Chilean
government under the leadership of general Pinochet concluded that it was
"imperative to
change the mentality of the Chilean people".
Quoted in Sánchez Ortúzar 1990, p. 295.
82
"In cancer, non-intelligent ('primitive', 'embryonic', 'atavistic') cells are multiplying, and you are
being replaced by the non-you. Immunologists class the body's cancer cells as 'non-self'".
Susan Sontag 1978, p. 67.
83
Gayoso 1986, p. 17.
84
General Agustín Feced in the newspaper "La Prensa", August 16, 1977; quoted in Fontalini and
Calati 1984, p. 93.
In a press interview, commenting on his government's counter-insurgency strategy, general Videla
claimed that the Argentinean people was not the victim of military repression, since repression was
being exerted "against a minority that we do not consider Argentinean".
Ibid., p. 22.
Convention