Abstract

JENSEN, Silvina. The other letters from the Argentine exiles: Requests of reentry from the “opcionados” to the terrorist State’s bureaucracy. Av. Cesor [online]. 2019, vol.16, n.21, pp.63-82. ISSN 1514-3899.

This article is focused on a peculiar type of letters written during the last Argentine exile, those who wrote the so called “opcionados” to the consular authorities of the different countries of residence, and through them to the Ministry of the Interior and to the President of Argentina, in order to request the reentry to the country during the “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” (1976-1983). The article is divided into two parts as follow. The first part describes the documentary corpus and retraces the fate of the return petitions of “opcionados”. These documents were put online on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s website during Cristina Kirchner’s government (by contrast with opaque bureaucracy of the terrorist State). The second part analyzes the content of petitions. In this sense, it attends to the personal histories of militancy, repression and exile that conveyed those “supplication epistles” At the same time the article takes into count bureaucratic and repressive dimensions of praetorian power and the use of missive as an instrument of coercion and punitive administration.

Keywords : Letters of the exile; Opcionados; Requests of reentry; Terrorist Argentine State; Historical Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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