Remaking Argentina: Labor, Law, and Citizenship during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional

Abstract

This dissertation examines the creation, enactment, and application of labor legislation during Argentina’s most recent military dictatorship, the self-styled Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization, PRN) (1976-1983). Scholarship on the PRN has long overlooked the regime’s legalistic impulses while emphasizing extralegal repression, but I argue that the law remained a critical site of contestation for workers, trade unionists, corporations, and state actors. The dictatorship’s policies were more than a mask for state violence. Rather, I read this legislation as an integral part of a larger discursive effort to “reorganize” the nation through the articulation of a new national subject—a different version of the “worker-citizen.” Part I of the dissertation explores the inner workings of the PRN, first as a whole and then specifically within the Ministry of Labor. Part II uses three case studies to analyze workers’ responses to the regime’s political project in distinct worksites across Argentina (urban center, suburban township, and rural interior). This combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches provides a unique complement to the existing literature on labor and citizenship during the dictatorship. I challenge portrayals of workers as either revolutionary heroes or passive victims, instead highlighting how sectors of the labor movement defended and reconstituted organizational practices in the face of severe repression. My research draws on understudied and recently discovered documentary sources, together with federal, provincial, municipal, and private archives, and dozens of hours of first-person testimony. Even as the PRN attempted to redefine the inclusion/exclusion binary of citizenship, internal dissent between factions of the Armed Forces and entrenched practices on the shop floor complicated this effort. However, I argue that engaging the intentions behind this project is critical to understanding both how authoritarian politics function and what legacies the PRN left behind.