“We are being governed by the civilians of the dictatorship”—this meme has circulated in Argentina and Chile to describe a growing far right’s reclaiming of public figures, values, and policies from past military dictatorships. Indeed, as the historian Barbara Weinstein notes in the afterword to Carassai and Coleman’s volume (232), the region has seen the election of leaders whose claims about the past should “elicit revulsion” among citizens in democracies.
Things have been changing fast. In 2023, the fortieth anniversary of the restoration of democracy in Argentina boasted a consensus affirming human rights and a democratic politics of memory. Distressing graffiti and other signs vindicating the military dictatorship were seen as isolated, marginal expressions—or so many of us chose to believe. Instead, they proved early warnings of a “cultural battle” whose origins and dynamics the books under review help explain.Footnote 1 Following the presidential election, later that year, the Javier Milei administration conducted a drastic shift by attacking Argentina’s human rights traditions, expanding domestic intelligence, and reinstating a logic of national security that can treat dissent as a domestic threat while foundational elements of democratic life melt into thin air.
Under Milei, decades of progress in human rights and constitutional protections are being erased, often through executive decrees and presidential vetoes, replaced with policies that echo the rhetoric, economic programs, and unlawfulness of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. The Milei saga is part of the right-wing’s international “culture battle” (Milton and Lazzara, 10), with figures including the Chilean president José Antonio Kast and Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president now serving a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for orchestrating the January 8, 2023, coup attempt. On his part, Kast, who never hid his admiration for Augusto Pinochet, has promised to change Chile “from its roots.”Footnote 2 In his first speech from La Moneda, Kast announced “a government of emergency,” with a “firm hand,” as he designated two former Pinochet officials as ministers—a literal return of figures from the dictatorship.Footnote 3
Autocratization is not just a Latin American problem—global democratic gains since the mid-1970s are gone.Footnote 4 Still, the speed and intensity of the shift make historiography about the region’s military dictatorships especially timely. While the books reviewed span the breadth of Latin America, with studies of Cold War military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, and Peru, this review focuses on the Southern Cone as a distinct laboratory of the national security doctrine.
Bridging the gap between historical scholarship and the current political climate, these books illuminate distinct memorial traditions and regional connections, casting new light on continuities and blurred boundaries between democracy and authoritarianism.
In their edited volume, Carassai and Coleman identify shared regional patterns, arguing that the 1959 Cuban Revolution marked the “beginning of the Cold War proper” (7) in Latin America. Chapter authors address a common set of questions, including coups’ goals, the role of the US, and resistance for each country. Guided by the US-inspired national security doctrine and French counterinsurgency theories, which officers learned to treat as “sacred scripture” (5–9), regional militaries sought to block the Cuban path through what Carassai and Coleman characterize as a “late” wave of Cold War military coups, beginning with the 1964 overthrow of João Goulart in Brazil.
Burns’s and Schneider’s books provide distinct perspectives on the regional impact and propaganda of the twenty-one-year Brazilian military dictatorship. Águila, for her part, offers an impeccable critical history of the 1976–1983 Argentine military dictatorship, a complex period sitting in between “history and memory” (22). Navigating historical rigor with an accessible style, Águila reconstructs the regime’s ideology, organization, policies, violence, alliances, and collapse. Meanwhile, drawing on interviews with survivors, Sofía Jemio delves into Argentina’s Operativo Independencia in Tucumán.
Beyond its local impact, the national security doctrine and its “internal enemy” figures enabled the region’s military to chase individuals across borders. By the mid-1970s, led by the Chileans, a “transnational terror organization” (Camilo Trumper, in Carassai and Coleman, 147), Operation Condor, reshaped the region as states collaborated in kidnapping, torturing, and murdering each other’s citizens.
How was it possible for military rule to be tolerated? Most military coups appear to be “preceded by a period in which the viability of the previous regime is gradually eroded,” Weinstein notes (232). In Brazil, the 1964 coup was preceded by a destabilization campaign that framed President Goulart’s moderate reforms as a “communist takeover” (Benjamin A. Cowan, in Carassai and Coleman, 27), using women’s marches in defense of the “family with God for liberty” (Schneider, 6) and media propaganda to erode the regime’s viability years before the military took power. In 1964, despite his 70 percent approval rate (Cowan 30), President Goulart was deposed with the support of the US military Operation Brother Sam (29). Simultaneously, as Mila Burns shows, the same Brazilian groups had already been working to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile. Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, the authoritarian shift began “well before the moment of military takeover,” Weinstein observes (222). In none of these instances was democracy defended, and in Uruguay, “the most flagrant case of short-term erosion” (223) took place when, in 1973, President Juan María Bordaberry became a participant in a coup presented as “inevitable” (Sebastián Carassai, in Carassai and Coleman, 176). In turn, in Argentina, by 1975, the entire political class seemed convinced that a military coup was coming and did nothing to prevent it.
Concerningly, authoritarian imagery and narratives have regained new strength in recent years. Milton and Lazzara’s edited volume How the Military Remembers scrutinizes military memories and “memory products” (5) as well as sustained efforts to regain hegemony, crucial to the rise of the current far-right. Authoritarian narratives accompanied military coups then, and they are now driving a backlash that is putting at risk democracy and fundamental freedoms—this time through elections, cyclical crises, and democracies’ difficulties in fully including vast sectors of the population. Identifying common threads, the following sections revisit the persistence of “internal enemies,” “cultural wars,” and enduring legacies of military dictatorships in the Southern Cone.
The national security doctrine and its “internal enemy”
Concerns with treason or hidden enemies may be an old trope, but with the Cold War, the US-inspired national security doctrine was pivotal in framing citizens as potential “subversives” or domestic enemies or threats. By 1947, “national security” replaced “common defense” in naming offices and laws in the US as a “more expansive” framework in mobilizing against “the communist threat,” Mark Neocleous notes.Footnote 5 In a short period, with thousands of personnel trained in the School of the Americas (Milton and Lazzara, 8), Southern Cone militaries shifted from a classical national defense tradition in which conflicts are assumed to take place between countries to the national security doctrine (Carassai and Coleman, 9). By “enlarging the spectrum of threats and locating them within the nation itself,” the doctrine justified the military’s intervention in politics, as Alain Rouquié observes.Footnote 6 In so doing, they securitized a “struggle for economic equality and political recognition in Latin America” (Carassai and Coleman, 2) by turning advocates of basic reforms into military targets. Over time, these ideas fueled a transnational (para)military effort supported by “unprecedented levels of state terror” (Carassai and Coleman, 1).
In Argentina, the focus on domestic enemies gained legal standing since 1966 with a new National Defense Law under the military dictator General Juan Carlos Onganía, authorizing the intervention of the military in cases of “internal commotion.”Footnote 7 In turn, the US supported unique repressive policies such as Operation Condor and encouraged escalating state violence. In his visit to Argentina, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the military to act “quickly,” in ways that, as Carassai observes, led to a peak in forced disappearances (Carassai, 159).
With its “subversive,” “internal” or “domestic” enemy figures, the National Security Doctrine served as “pretext” for repression (Schneider, 6, 2) and the unleashing of state terror in South America since the 1960s. Across the region, appeals to a total “war” against “subversion” pathologized dissent and justified “annihilation” (Águila 16, 39). The elusive internal enemy was said to undermine a “Christian and Western” social order. “Subversion” was portrayed as cancer (Águila, 76) requiring surgery to eradicate the disease (Jemio, 199; Trumper, 151).
In Brazil, the National War College was pivotal in framing “every Brazilian citizen … [as] a potential communist and … a threat” (Schneider, 5–6). In Chile, Trumper notes, Pinochet’s “reign of terror” decisively reshaped society (145). Any traces of “political creativity and experimentation” under the Unidad Popular were targeted for eradication in what Trumper (139, 148) describes as “policide.” In turn, in post-1976 Argentina, the alleged “war” against “subversion” provided the military with a unifying goal amidst otherwise “erratic” policies (Águila, 64).
And yet for all the rhetoric of fighting armed insurgents, in Brazil, guerrilla groups emerged only after the coup (Cowan, 34). Moreover, this “largely imaginary” insurgency was conceived as part of a cultural war involving all aspects of social and personal behavior (Cowan, 33–34). The military sought to “annihilate the ‘internal enemy’” (Águila, 84) in “wars”—which in Argentina gained “holy” traces (Carassai, 167) under widespread surveillance and state terror. Escalating from Brazil’s Department of Information Operations—Center for Internal Defense Operations (CODI-DOI) to Argentina’s policy of mass disappearances through clandestine detention sites (CCD), Southern Cone authoritarian experiments rank among “the main massacres of the 20th century” (Águila, 11).
None of this started with the military alone. Even in a democracy like Uruguay, national security principles were “long-established” (Vania Markarian, in Carassai and Coleman, 115). Under US advising, political policing and the repression of protests were built over years of the parliament suspending rights, declaring “a state of internal war,” and defining crimes of “state security” in 1972 (Markarian, 121–122).
In Argentina, mass disappearances and CCDs began prior to the 1976 coup under the constitutional government of Isabel Perón, which Jemio identifies as a fact that many still find “uncomfortable” (24). In February 1975, a secret decree instructed military and police to “neutralize and/or annihilate the actions of subversive elements” (23) in Tucumán. The campaign Operativo Independencia—the main focus of Jemio’s book—served as “a rehearsal, a pilot experience” (Águila, 69) where the army first used clandestine camps to kidnap, torture, and “disappear” before spreading terror to the entire nation.
Drawing on interviews and archival research, Jemio theorizes Operativo Independencia as the start of a “reorganizing genocide” (28) where clandestine detention sites like the Escuelita de Famaillá were used to destroy social bonds and autonomy and realign the population into submission. The “well-known secret” of the camps (Jemio, 169) was reinforced by arbitrary searches, widespread repression, and surveillance. State terror in Argentina, both Jemio and Águila show, was part of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy that included fake media reports and psychological campaigns, as well as patriotic ceremonies, sports tournaments, and health or welfare assistance designed to seek the population’s acquiescence. Under constant threat, citizens were exposed to more subtle “long-term structures of violence” also discussed by Schneider (2) in Brazil.
Based on “eyewitness accounts,” Mila Burns (2) shows that the Brazilian military was no “mere pawn” (9) of the US but a proactive force that collaborated with the Chilean right as far back as the 1950s. Following Allende’s 1970 election, a combination of business lockouts, women’s pot-banging demonstrations, “armed neofascist squads” (Trumper, 140–141), US aid blockade, CIA-funded propaganda, and Brazilian agents collaborated in his overthrow. By the time of Pinochet’s coup, Brazil provided critical “money, weapons, medicine, expertise, intelligence reports, and torturers” (Burns, 6), while hunting Brazilian exiles within Chilean borders (4–5). By promoting “dictatorship across borders” (Burns, 8), Brazilian elites had been spreading political repression regionally since the 1950s.
The securitization of politics and life was devastating. Across the region, victim estimates range from thirty thousand forced disappearances in Argentina to three thousand dead and forty thousand victims of torture in Chile. In Brazil, fifty thousand people were detained, and hundreds killed or disappeared. In Uruguay, with sixty thousand political detainees in a nation of only three million, one out of every fifty citizens was detained, just as hundreds of thousands across the region were forced into exile.
Even after the return to democracy in the region, the language of security and its targeting of citizens as potential enemies were never fully gone. They remain a “long shadow,” now making a comeback in the “cultural battles” of the Mileis, Kasts, and Bolsonaros. Against an increasingly authoritarian background, the Southern Cone sees military narratives resurface in renewed “memory battles” (Milton and Lazzara, 9).
“Cultural wars”: Propaganda, memory, and the battle for hearts and minds
Echoes of the 1964 coup returned to Brazilian politics on January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters shouted the dictatorship-era slogan “Deus, Pátria e Família” (Cowan, 23) as they stormed the Planalto Palace to “save” the nation. The insurrectionists denounced Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as a “communist,” or as part of a “cultural Marxist” strategy to undermine morality (Cowan, 23). The surge of the far right represented by Bolsonaro supporters highlights the centrality of memory—and the propaganda that clouds it—as a battlefield.
Supporters of past military dictatorships have been actively engaging “in a culture battle … ‘using’ culture … to shift public opinion … and entrench versions of the recent past” (Milton and Lazzara, 10). The books reviewed here suggest that the current right-wing turn stems not just from misinformation but also from an intentional retrieval of dictatorship-era discourses. In the dispute over souls, the 1970s doctrine of “total war” prefigures the current “cultural battle” against feminism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ+ rights, which Milei describes as Marxism in disguise. Today, presumed hidden enemies and the rhetoric of terrorism appear to justify the emergency measures announced by Kast and the repressive turn of the Milei administration.
Both now and then, the battle over hearts and minds has involved propaganda. Combined with censorship, post-1964 Brazilian propaganda sought to normalize military rule. Schneider’s book examines materials ranging from radio shows to TV to telenovelas, alternating between subliminal messaging and overt campaigns glorifying the regime. Schneider identifies 774 filmetes—short films often commissioned to advertisement companies—as the “backbone” of this effort (22). Whether featuring working-class Brazilians enjoying newly built homes or an animation likening the nation to an Indigenous woman, the films were intended as “an antidote” to communism by projecting a “miracle myth” of modernity, patriotism, and family values, and a Great Brazil (Schneider, 6, 51). Positive reinforcement was accompanied by aggressive campaigns such as the 1969 “Brazil: Love It or Leave It” series in support of the Bandeirantes Operation to “weed out ‘subversive’ suspects” (Schneider, 19).
In Chile, media close to the military junta reported fake leftist plots to justify repression while propaganda in El Mercurio contrasted “then” and “now” (Trumper, 150), equating the Allende years to chaos and praising the Pinochet regime. Likewise, the Argentine military resorted to “psychological action” to neutralize the “insidious effects of subversion” (Águila, 97).
In Argentina, the military summoned the population to “a total and integral combat” (Águila, 100) to fight subversion. Under the slogan “Let’s win the battle on all fronts,” said propaganda featured people describing their different jobs as “combat posts,” while images of disease and surgery were used to justify “annihilating” subversives.Footnote 8 In 1977, the regime commissioned a New York public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller. The resulting campaign “Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos,” presented honesty and respect for human rights as Argentine national traits (Águila, 163). The following year, hosting the World Cup became a massive rebranding effort to discredit reports of human rights violations by alleging an “Anti-Argentine campaign” (Águila, 146).
The cultural “wars” of the 1970s did not simply vanish with democratic life. They left behind “memory products” (Milton and Lazzara, 5), with stories of a benevolent military saving the nation from chaos as conveyed by figures like Bolsonaro. Elected to Congress in 1991, Bolsonaro was marginalized for years for his praise of the military dictatorship’s “‘law and order’ and economic growth” (Cowan, 45)—the same fringe positions that eventually made him popular. The opportunity came in 2016, during the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Speaking in support of the impeachment, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, Rousseff’s torturer, calling him “a hero of the Fatherland” (Rebecca Atencio, in Milton and Lazzara, 23). The statement challenged the post-1985 democratic consensus (Cowan, 44) and introduced an “opening for many military apologists” (Atencio, 37).
The case of Ustra, head of the DOI-CODI detention site, shows how military memories “resurface” as counternarratives to human rights. Following Brazil’s return to democracy, Ustra was treated as “a pariah” (Atencio, 26), only to become a far-right hero after writing two books. The first, Breaking the Silence, came in response to Congresswoman Bete Mendes, a DOI-CODI detainee who had been “tortured by Ustra himself” (Atencio, 27). After running into her torturer at the Brazilian embassy in Montevideo, where he served as military attaché, Mendes asked President Sarney for his removal. The army ignored the resulting presidential order, however, even when Ustra was identified as a perpetrator in the Brasil: Nunca Mais report.
Writing against Mendes, Ustra portrayed himself as the victim while describing the DOI-CODI torture site as a space of Christian charity (Atencio, 30–32, 34, 36). Ustra’s rehabilitation to “hero” status was a calculated project, aided by his wife Joseita’s management of “her husband’s memory” (Atencio, 32). This included her contributions to his second book, Suffocated Truth—which would famously become Bolsonaro’s bedside-table book choice. This revisionism allowed Bolsonaro to challenge the democratic consensus, not only by framing a notorious torturer as a hero but also by naming public spaces after perpetrators during his presidency (Atencio, 26, 38).
As the volume edited by Milton and Lazzara shows, Ustra is far from an exception. Military narratives highlight heroism and self-victimization across the Southern Cone. In 1998, detained in London for crimes against humanity, Pinochet wrote to the Chilean people, claiming to be a “good soldier” willing to “accept the cross” (Milton and Lazzara, 3). In Argentina, perpetrators remained “largely unrepentant and unreformed” (Milton and Lazzara, 9), portraying themselves as the nation’s saviors and its “last moral reserve” (Carassai, 161). Thus, participants in Tucumán’s Operativo Independencia interviewed by Valentina Salvi (in Milton and Lazzara, 74–76, 75) proudly describe themselves as “the chosen ones” risking their lives in a “war against subversion.” Salvi’s interviewees insist that the Argentine government’s order to “annihilate” subversion was legal and “given by democratically elected authorities” (77). They normalize kidnappings, torture, and forced disappearances as the byproduct of a “little war” (74), and even those with prison sentences for crimes against humanity “ignore the ramifications of their actions,” Salvi reports (80).
In addition to self-victimization and sheer denial, military apologists now reclaim the “language, imagery, and mechanisms” of human rights movements and human rights protections for perpetrators (Milton and Lazzara, 10). They call for memoria completa (complete memory) while presenting themselves as activists for truth silenced by dogma (Salvi, 71; Milton and Lazzara, 10).
“Salvation” of the nation figures prominently in the discourse of Chilean perpetrators, as does the sinister gaslighting of claiming that “terrorists” made torture necessary (Leith Passmore, in Milton and Lazzara, 45). Passmore traces the “strident, public, and unrepentant resurgence of pinochetista memory” (46) to resist human rights prosecutions. It was in this resistance, Passmore shows, that memories of Pinochet’s dictatorship were mobilized through blogs and social media to reach new generations, as in the case of a young congresswoman proclaiming herself pinochetista (56).
The 2025 official video for Argentina’s National Day of Memory—the anniversary of the military coup—illustrates this generational renewal. In the video, New Right figure Agustín Laje labels human rights organizations “merchants of half memories” and summons younger generations to “break free of the imposed narrative and vindicate our right to know the complete truth.”Footnote 9 With tropes echoing Chilean perpetrators who strategically embrace rights claims to tell “the real story” (Passmore, in Milton and Lazzara, 46–47), Laje presents the defense of human rights as a form of censorship and military apologist narratives as a quest for truth and freedom. No longer a fringe perspective, under President Milei, the dictatorship’s apologists have been embraced by the state.
In his opening of 2026 congressional sessions, Milei declared, “The real battle of our time is cultural, philosophical, and moral,” emphasizing the dispute over historical memory. The Argentine president has frequently referred to a “cultural battle” fought over things such as “cultural Marxism,” feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights.Footnote 10 These expressions bring together current disputes and old military narratives. For the far right, the Cold War never ended, and the cultural war never stopped.
Of legacies and boomerang effects
Much of the storytelling and imagery analyzed in these books returned with a force that caught many by surprise. Is this an example of the “invented traditions” discussed by Eric Hobsbawm or the reemergence of undercurrents that never truly went away?Footnote 11 In a world sliding into “creeping authoritarianism” (Weinstein, 222), these books illuminate the way that current crises in the region connect to past experiences of military rule. In these and other forms, the ideologies of the last military dictatorships “continue to resonate,” as Burns points out (14).
Military rule was decisive in reshaping societies. While earlier coups made developmentalist claims, later ones embraced neoliberal reforms with Chile as “the perfect incubator” (Weinstein, 220), with market principles entrenched by Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution—an authoritarian legacy that years of mobilization and efforts by Chilean citizens have so far failed to replace. In Argentina, the military dictatorship sought a “refoundation” (Águila, 49) through a stable regime that reorganized “the functioning of the State and to restructure the economy in favor of the most concentrated fractions of capital” (Águila, 222). By the end of the military dictatorship, seven years later, the nation bore “little resemblance” (Carassai 176) to the country it was before.
Still, military dictators across the region showed awareness about the need to invoke democratic principles for legitimation—keeping Congress open and running elections in Brazil (Cowan, 32–33), through Pinochet’s public consultations, or with the promise of returning to a “republican, representative, and federal democracy” in the addendum to the Constitution in Argentina, a performative caution that current right-wing politicians—surely elected—threaten to nullify.
In Argentina, the dictatorship’s economic legacy—an external debt that grew sixfold under military rule alongside deindustrialization—led to the “lost decade” of the 1980s (Águila 177). The return of democracy took place amid a 1970-level gross domestic product and recessive scenarios aggravated by International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities and endless indebtedness. Under these conditions, amid the concentration of wealth both in Chile and in Argentina, “what could have been an exhilarating period of political, social and cultural renewal across the region” turned into recurrent frustration and unmet demands, as Weinstein (230) observes. This helps explain the rise of eccentric outsiders like Milei. While presenting himself as a “specialist in economic growth,” his administration has drastically defunded vital infrastructure, health, education, science, and public services and keeps destroying wages and opportunities for most Argentines.Footnote 12
Still, in Argentina, “vigorous” citizen mobilization led to historic human rights trials that placed the nation as a “pioneer or exemplar in the quest for memory, truth, and justice” (Águila, 12). While Chile and Uruguay found paths toward prosecutions, no such trials were held in Brazil, where the 1979 amnesty remains in place. In Uruguay, Mariana Achúgar and Gabriela Fried Amilivia (in Milton and Lazzara) show how “occasional trials” of “emblematic” perpetrators have been used to perpetuate impunity and keep institutional accountability “out of sight” (91, 110). In the meantime, a “dictatorship-as-salvation” (Achúgar and Fried Amilivia, 108) military discourse “endures” in Uruguay while the “question of state terror” gets “evaded or erased” and impunity persists (92, 108).
Challenging the accounts of perpetrators, “new zones of memory” (Michael J. Lazzara, in Milton and Lazzara, 294) emerge through the conflicted voices of “implicated subjects” (295), such as their children and relatives who choose to speak up, which Lazzara examines through Chilean documentary films. After discovering that her favorite aunt, who lived in Australia, was an intelligence agent responsible for disappearances under Pinochet, Lissette Orozco decided to break the family’s pact of silence by making a film, El Pacto de Adriana, which came at a high personal cost. Revisiting similar personal trajectories, Lazzara shows how “privatized” forgiveness evolves into a “public commitment to truth and justice … in the interest of strengthening the broader community” (304).
Religion has not escaped these battles. Cowan (44, 36) assesses the alliance between reactionary Evangelicals and the Brazilian military as “the most impactful inheritance of the 1964 coup” that anticipated “the global religious Right of today.” Back in the 1960s, attracting ultraconservative Evangelicals allowed the dictatorship to reclaim Christianity while distancing itself from a Catholic Church committed to social justice. Eventually, with the entrance of agribusiness, the military-Evangelical alliance grew into a “Bible, bullets, and beef” hegemony (Cowan, 45).
Following the return to democracy, Brazilian televangelist leaders helped turn their followers into a conservative force (Cowan, 45). Defined by their “catastrophic resistance” to addressing inequality, they secured 20 percent of Congress and decisively contributed to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and to Bolsonaro’s rise (Cowan, 44–45). Bolsonaro—a Catholic rebaptized Pentecostal—consolidated ties with reactionary Evangelicals, furthering the alliances of the dictatorship.
For months, these groups led rallies with prayer and “emotional displays of faith” (Cowan, 45), alleging a religious war between good and evil. Finally, they took part in the January 2023 assault on both the presidential palace and democratic institutions. As Evangelicals are projected to displace Catholics in the nation, Cowan’s analysis of their role in the rise of the New Right exposes their links to the military dictatorship in Brazil.
Another consequential legacy, in Brazil and elsewhere, has been the securitization of politics and identities. The national security doctrine justified treating citizens as security threats including through torture, extrajudicial killings, and forced disappearances. While redemocratization came with human rights agendas, concerns with common crime led to new incarnations of security, which, with qualifiers of “citizen” or “democratic,” sought to differentiate from their national security precursors. This involved resignifying “security from a symbol of authoritarian government into an object of consensus with democratic credentials.”Footnote 13 If somehow transformed, then, security (and the rationale contained in the national security doctrine) never went away.
Decades after the end of military rule, the scars of state terror remain inscribed in the social fabric. In Argentina, while the paralysis brought by terror may be gone, its “lasting effects” persist (Jemio, 172). The “internal enemy” is now the “cultural Marxist”—a term Javier Milei uses today to encompass a wide range of positions, as he challenges the hard-won democratic consensus, including human rights, in an increasingly authoritarian government where “freedom of expression, media freedom, and civil society organizations came under attack.”Footnote 14 In addition to weakening accountability and rights protections, with over a thousand documented deaths by the police and the security forces since December 2023, the Milei administration has become “the most repressive” since the 1983 return to democracy.Footnote 15
Conclusion: Autocracy’s old and new laboratories
The laboratories of state terror of the military dictatorships still resonate in current experiences of autocratization. Chasing “internal enemies” has gained a digital dimension, just like propaganda, supported by AI-powered, data-driven surveillance in what Palantir’s Alex Karp calls the “digital kill chain.”Footnote 16
In Argentina, Milei’s Decree 941/2025, restructuring the Secretariat of State Intelligence (SIDE) with the authority to detain people and coordinate across state organs and with foreign intelligence, has raised alarms. This decree “boosts the intelligence system to an unprecedented scale in Argentine history” in defiance of safeguards built over four decades of democracy.Footnote 17 This comes at a time when a fast and furious extractivist wave is transforming the landscape of Latin America. Moreover, as Indigenous communities are pushed into what Gabriela Valdivia in this journal has described as extractivism’s “sacrificial zones” and governments side with investors in suppressing protests, the revival of core ideas of the last military dictatorships should be taken seriously.Footnote 18
The books reviewed illuminate how securitizing politics and imagining and targeting citizens as enemies and security threats, whether under military dictatorships or far-right governments, lead to displacing power with violence. And a nation’s choice “to substitute violence for power,” Hannah Arendt warns, is never inconsequential but carries a “very high” price, paid not only by the vanquished but also “by the victor in terms of his own power.”Footnote 19 The displacement of politics by a logic of warfare under the Southern Cone’s military dictatorships brought a lasting, destructive impact on individuals and societies. Significantly, in promoting this logic abroad, the US does not seem to have escaped these effects. While the role of the US in supporting coups d’état across Latin America shows some “inconsistencies” (Carassai and Coleman, 19), considering its overall record of encouraging and assisting military coups, one might wonder how much of the nation’s current autocratization may be the result of what Arendt describes as a “boomerang” or “backlash” effect, which she discussed alongside imperialism, following Aimé Césaire’s coining of the concept in his critique of colonialism. In both cases, the violence exported returns.
The United States, once considered a beacon of liberal democracy, has rapidly lost that status. While the global unraveling of democracy has been studied for years, the speed of the US backsliding is “unprecedented” with a deterioration “comparable to some coups d’état.”Footnote 20 This shift is evident in the removal of “human rights” from the 2025 National Security Strategy, as in the September 2025 NSPM-7 Executive Memorandum, which frames antifascism and criticism of capitalism, Christianity, or “traditional American views,” as well as “extremism” regarding migration or gender as “domestic terrorism.”Footnote 21 As the right-wing international “cultural war” intensifies, neither national security nor its “internal enemy” framework has ever been questioned in the US.
This global unraveling of democracy is no mere accident, but the product of the “long-term structures of violence” (Schneider, 2) and the “policide” that Trumper describes (148). From the clandestine sites of 1970s Tucumán to the “digital kill chains” of 2026, the “internal enemy” remains a fiction used to justify atrocities. Ultimately, the books reviewed here remind us that the struggle for memory is never just about the past. They provide an essential map for both recognizing and resisting the revival of a doctrine that can turn the democratic quest for rights and equality into a military target.
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