Total Normality

To the right is the front page of Argentine daily newspaper Clarín, from March 25th 1976, thirty years ago, the day after the coup d'état that ushered in the so-called "Process of National Reconstruction." A "Process" in which some 30,000 would be killed.

At the bottom of the page, the news of Argentina beating Poland at football. (For fact fans, Ezequiel Fernández Moores tells us that the score was 2-1, with goals from Héctor Scotta and René Houseman.)

Ariel Scher explains in "Fuera de juego":

The most brutal of Argentina's brutal dictatorships decided almost from the first minute of its reign that sport would play on its team. It tried to use sport and even mould it in its own manner. Just a few hours after the coup d'état of March 1976, at a time when Argentina could be summed up in terms of a collection of proclamations from the military junta all of which began with the words "It is prohibited," the authoritarian leadership released communiqué number 23, the only one designed to permit rather than prohibit something. And what was permitted was the broadcast of the football game due to take place in Poland between the Argentine and the Polish national teams. And so it was: in the middle of all the crimes against humanity, proscriptions, kidnappings, disappearances, incarcerations, and with television showing otherwise only the national coat of arms, immobile, for a while you could watch the football. And that this happened is not just another anecdote or the result of some whim. Sport was always squarely in the gaze of dictatorial power.

Meanwhile, the message at the top of the page: "Total Normality."

(For more, go here or, better, this Argentine government site [and thanks to Isis Sadek for the second link]. Plus more communiqués now at Posthegemony)

Cross-posted from Posthegemony