The Information Age: Culture, Communication, and Intelligence Gathering in Cold War Argentina
The past decade has witnessed a reassessment of the Cold War's significance. Whereas earlier accounts privileged the diplomatic sparring between the United States and Soviet Union, the new literature shifts the focus to the violently “hot” conflicts of the global South. Despite this widened scope, the cultural dimensions of Cold War politics in Latin American countries like Argentina merit greater scrutiny. This paper applies a cultural historian’s concerns with communication and the circulation of information to the study of Cold War Argentina. It draws on the recently-opened intelligence archives of the police of Buenos Aires province, the DIPBA, from the late 1960s and early 1970s. These documents reveal that the Cold War in Argentina was not simply a contest between bands of radical militants and state repressors: the loyalties, opinions, and habits of popular majorities were of major political concern, and a variety of social sectors were enmeshed within networks of intelligence gathering.
The present-day transition to a “digital era” highlights the importance of “analog era” technologies of publishing, audio recording, and information-processing in waging the Cold War. The DIPBA relied on secretive webs of informants, clandestine recordings of conversations, and the sifting through of print media ranging from homemade flyers to mass-circulation newspapers. Read with care, these records shed light on how radical groups like the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo reached out to audiences as diverse as factory workers, university students, and farmtown parishioners. Yet these documents also reveal that state agents were devoted not just to watching “subversives,” but also to assessing their strategies of communication. Intelligence agents weighed their rivals’ successes and failures in explaining their political goals and making effective use of the mass media – at times even proposing alternative interventions to win the public’s hearts and minds.
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