y Entangling Shadows of Authoritarianism and Democracy: Political Science, Cinema and Literature

After forty years of democratic restoration in Argentina, this essay proposes a path through seven steps, each of them marked by a Gordian knot in the historical and conceptual development of Latin American political science, such as the study of: the processes of democratic breakdown, authoritarian regimes, the imprint of dictators, transitions to democracy, democratic quality, the unfinished promises of democracy and its de -democratization. This itinerary in the conceptual debate of political science seeks to mirror itself in the light of the artifacts of Argentine and Latin American literature and cinema. This enables us to stop thinking of film and literature as fiction on the one hand, and history only through the scientific record on the other; that is, it allows us to think of film and literature as a mixture of artifice and reality that brings into play time, image, art, morality, aesthetics and politics.