‘We have arrested one of the fundamental pieces of subversion in the country’: The construction of the figure of the enemy in police memos of 1975 following the arrest of Marcos Osatinsky

Abstract

In the following article, I investigate the modes of construction of a specific subjectivity in the 1970s in Argentina: the figure of the enemy at the onset of the last civic-military dictatorship in the country. To achieve this, I focus on the arrest of Marcos Osatinsky, head of the Montoneros organisation, in Córdoba in August 1975. I analyse the how his arrest was handled by the security forces, based on police memoranda that refer to this event, available for consultation in the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria [Provincial Memory Archive]. I inquire how the Córdoba police functioned in the 1970s, and how what happened to Osatinsky was reflected in the writing practices of the police through police memos, in order to understand how the figure of the subversive was constructed in this handling of the facts.