"Nadie Ganaba" / "Nobody Won": El Salvador, Argentina, and the Transnational Roots of State Terror

Abstract

This project examines the relationship between El Salvador and Argentina in the leadup to El Salvador’s civil war. I argue that the military regimes in El Salvador and Argentina took on a consultative relationship during the late 1970s and early 1980s in which Salvadoran officials looked to Argentina for a “successful” model of repression. By pairing archival research conducted at the Historical Archive of the Chancellery in Buenos Aires with existing scholarship on Argentine involvement in Central America, I trace the rise of Argentine influence in El Salvador from a few well-placed offers of aid to the minds of four of El Salvador’s top-ranking wartime officials. In doing so, I look beyond the Cold War in Latin America as a phenomenon imposed from above by the United States and instead interrogate the middle layer, in which Latin American states reproduced the Cold War along more local and regional lines.