Battles for h/History in the Federal Court of Bahía Blanca During the Last Argentine Military Dictatorship. The “Case Del Campo, Hugo et al., on Violation of Law 20.840”

Abstract

Inscribed within the old and complex problem of the relationship between History and Justice, of great historiographical interest especially among those interested in the study of Argentina’s recent past, this work explores a case initiated by the Federal Court of Bahía Blanca, during the first year of the so-called National Reorganization Process, in order to analyze what representations of history, understood as the past (history) and as an academic discipline (History), were at stake in the substantiation of this judicial process initiated in November 1976. The work is based on the hypothesis that in the federal courts of Bahía Blanca during the dictatorship, a group of actors with diverse interests and positions engaged in disputes over the meaning of h/History, which involved the construction/dissemination of an official interpretation of the recent past of the UNS. Additionally such disputes revealed issues concerned with historical writing (epistemological, methodological, and historiographical debates) that allow us to recognize the transformations taken place in the disciplinary map in the principal national universities after 1955, as well as the dissimilar distribution of traditional and innovative forms within Argentine historiographic field throughout the 1970s.

Keywords: Dictatorship, history, justice, historiography, universities, Argentina