Abstract

FERNANDEZ-BARRIO, Facundo  and  GONZALEZ-TIZON, Rodrigo. From ESMA to France: towards a historical reconstruction of the Paris Pilot Center. Folia [online]. 2020, n.38, pp.99-134. ISSN 0325-8238.  http://dx.doi.org/10.30972/fhn.0384465.

This article presents a thorough assembly of the historical events that led to the Pilot Centre, a State facility set up by the Argentinian military dictatorship in Paris in 1977. Spreading favourable news to help improve the Argentinian military regime image in Europe was the main task of the Pilot Centre, since the complaints of exiles about Human Rights Violations were being reported fast all over the European continent. However, at a certain point, this State office not only carried these intelligence tasks but also gave shelter to undercovered operations of the agents of the School of Mechanical Engineering of the Navy (ESMA), under the leadership of Admiral Emilio Massera. This article provides an accurate and detailed timeline plotted on both documentary and personal evidence, which especifies the stages of the history of the site through different moments. This overview, in turn, exposes three neat defining traits of the military regime: the legal and the covered repressive machinery entangled relationship of the state, the fierce political clashes within the Armed Forces (with subsequent consequences on the foreign policy), and the development of a “productive scope” of the illegal clandestine repression.

Keywords : Dictatorship; Diplomacy; Repression; ESMA.

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