The Argentine Army against the trials for crimes against humanity

Thousands of military officers involved in human rights violations during the last dictatorship are being judged by federal courts. Undoubtedly, this unprecedented event has political and cultural consequences that need to be understood and analyzed. In order to understand the impact made by this new memory scene on the argentine army, this paper aims at giving an account of the tensions and conflicts that affect its members: working and retired officers, army authorities, and relatives and friends of military officers killed by the guerrilla in the 70s. This will allow not only to show the way the military officers' memory of the repression has shifted and become contradictory, but also to identify accurately the continuities and repetitions which form part of the institutional culture, which, although it lives on the reproduction of its values, traditions and rituals, it is challenged by its position about the way it behaved in the recent past.