Introduction

The most evident development in Argentine history during the ten years following the coup d’état of June 1966 was the rise in political violence, which found an early catalyst in the student-worker riots of Córdoba in 1969 (the cordobazo). These gave momentum to the growth of mostly urban guerrilla groups, which pushed the military regime into allowing the return of Perón in 1973, in the misplaced hope that his leadership would pacify the country. Instead, the cycle of violence deepened, was exacerbated by Perón's death in July 1974 and eventually culminated in the state terror of the military dictatorship of 1976–83. The origins of political violence have, unsurprisingly, been the overriding concern of scholars of this period. In recent years, interest in the armed struggle of various left-leaning guerrilla groups, in particular the Peronist Montoneros and the Marxist Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), has even led to the emergence of specialised journals such as Políticas de la Memoria or Lucha Armada en la Argentina. Most historians would agree that arguments about national identity and nationalism were widely employed to legitimise violence, but again, this issue has not often been addressed in its own right. One reason for this is that ‘nationalism’, pervading so many different actors in various ways, is rather difficult to pin down as an independent variable or as a definable political agent. It is equally problematic to attribute the rise in political violence to any particular ‘nationalist ideology’. At the very least, a series of other factors have to be taken into account, such as the rise of third-world liberation movements and the success of the Cuban Revolution, with their enormous ideological repercussions in Argentina. Domestically, the proscription of the Peronist movement, which created an exclusionary and essentially fictitious political environment, had a catalysing effect.

From a theoretical angle, the relationship between nationalism and violence appears readily evident. If nationalism, as defined by Gellner, is a ‘principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent’, it follows not only that nationalism will exist only when there are political actors arguing that these units were not congruent, but also that violence can be a means of achieving this congruence through modification of either of the two units. However, Gellner, like most other theorists of nationalism, proceeds to apply this argument primarily to forms of violence explicitly framed in ‘ethnic’ or ‘ethnonational’ terms.