The so-called Process of National Reorganization, or the Process as it was simply called, entailed the coexistence of a clandestine terrorist state in charge of repression and another visible one, subject to the norms established by the military government itself but submitting its actions to a certain legal scrutiny. In practice, this distinction was not maintained, and the ilegal clandestine state was corroding, corrupting the state institutions in their entirety and the state's very juridical foundations.
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| Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, General Jorge Rafael Videla, & Air Force Brigadier Orlando Ramón Agosti |
The first ambiguity was found precisely where power resided. Despite the fact that a strong executive was an Argentine tradition and that the unity of command was always one of the principles of the armed forces, the authority of the president – who in the beginning was a first among equals and then not even that – turned out to be weak and subject to permanent scrutiny, with restraints imposed by the commanders of the three services. The Statute of the Process and the subsequent complementary government decrees – which shut down the congress, purged the judicial system, and prohibited political activity – created the Military Junta, with power to designate the president and control many of his actions. The problem was that no one's powers were clearly delineated but were rather the result of the changing balance of forces. A newly created Advisory Legislative Commission, made up of three representatives of each branch subordinate to the orders of their commanders, was another instance of alliances and confrontations. To top it off, every executive position, from governors to mayors, as well as the administration of state companies and other government agencies, was divided among the armed forces. Those who occupied these positions thus depended on a double chain of command: that of the state and that of their service branch. This amounted to a feudalized anarchy rather than a state made cohesive and constituted through executive power.
The same anarchy existed with respect to the legal norms that the government provided itself. There was confusion about the very nature of these norms – laws, decrees, and state regulations being jumbled together without criteria – as well as who had the power to declare them and what was the full extent of their powers. There was also a well-known reluctance to discuss the reason for such norms; even their very existence was on occasion a secret. The military government preferred omnibus laws and frequently granted itself broad discretionary powers, but also tolerated the repeated violation or only partial fulfillment of its own legislation. Contaminated by the clandestine terrorist state, the country's entire juridical structure was similarly affected, to the point that there were practically no legal limits on the exercise of power, which functioned as the discretionary power of the state. This corruption of purpose was extended to public administration, where the most able personnel were removed. Arbitrary decisions were made by minor bureaucrats, transformed into little dictators without control and lacking the ability to assert control themselves. . . .
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| General Roberto Viola |
Fragmentation of power, centrifugal tendencies, and anarchy were the product of the strict division of power among the three armed service branches, to the point that there was no means of requesting a final appeal to authority that might arbitrate in the event of conflicts between the branches. But such a state of affairs was also the result of the existence of clear factions in the army, where from the repression emerged true warlords, generals Videla and Roberto Viola – Videla's second-in-command in the army – the most powerful factions were established, but even these were far from dominant.
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| Minister of Economy José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz |
These commanders backed Martínez de Hoz – a figure criticized by the more nationalist military officers, who abounded in the ranks of younger officers – but they recognized the necessity of finding some political solution in the future. They maintained communication with the leadership of the political parties, who hoped that this group represented the most reasonable and even the most progressive sector of the military, perhaps because it was the faction that recognized the need to control the repression in some way.
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| General Ramón J. Camps |
Other groups, whose most prominent figures were the generals Luciano Benjamín Menéndez and Carlos Suárez Mason, commanders of the army's Third Corps and First Corps with their headquarters in Córdoba and Buenos Aires, respectively, and the chief of police of Buenos Aires province, General Ramón J. Camps, a key figure in the repression, maintained that the dictatorship should continue sine die and that the repression – which these figures carried out with special savagery – should be taken to its final consequences. . . .
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| Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera |
The third group in the military was that of the navy, firmly led by its commander, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, who, trusting in his own political talents, proposed to find a political agreement that would popularly legitimize the Process and at the same time carry him to power. Massera, who carried out a major part of the repression from the navy mechanics' school and gained distinction in that sinister competition, always played his own game. He harried Videla to limit his power and distanced himself from Martínez de Hoz. He took great pains to find issues and causes that would win some degree of popular support for the government . . . When he retired, Massera established a political think tank, his own newspaper, an international publicity agency based in Paris, a political party – Social Democracy – and a bizarre personal staff made up of former members of the guerrilla organizations kidnapped and imprisoned in the navy mechanics' school, who agreed to collaborate in the admiral's political projects. . . .
In summary, the politics of order began to fail among the armed forces themselves, because the military behaved in an undisciplined and factional manner and did little to maintain the order that it sought to impost on society. Nevertheless, for five years, the military managed to secure a relative peace, a peace of the tomb, owing to society's scant ability to respond, partly because it had been battered or threatened by the repression and partly because it was disposed to tolerate a great deal from a government that, after the preceding chaos, had promised a minimum order.
