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Imagining the dictatorship, Argentina 1981 to 1982

Anne Magnussen
Visual Communication 2006; 5; 323
DOI: 10.1177/1470357206068463

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 visual communication

ARTICLE

Imagining the dictatorship,

Argentina 1981 to 1982

ANNE MAGNUSSEN
University of Southern Denmark

ABSTRACT
Using a semiotic framework, this article discusses how the Argentine
comic Buscavidas (by Alberto Breccia and Carlos Trillo) can be used as
material for historical analysis in reference to the military dictatorship in
Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The author examines the comics represen-
tation of the dictatorship and its participation in the creation of a collective
conception of the dictatorship at the time of its publication in 1981 and
1982, and of a collective memory of the dictatorship after the democratic
transition in 1983. The discussion focuses primarily on the comic in the
context of the Argentine comics field, and of the human rights organization,
the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

KEY WORDS
Alberto Breccia Argentine dictatorship 19761983 Carlos Trillo
Charles Peirces semiotics collective memory comic stories

INTRODUCTION
In 1981, two of Argentinas most admired cartoonists, Alberto Breccia
(191993, born in Uruguay) and Carlos Trillo (1943), cooperated on a
series of 13 short comic stories that were published from 1981 to 1982 in the
magazine SuperHum. The stories always had the same protagonist,
Buscavidas, a blank-faced overweight man who created and maintained an
archive of stories he collected from people he sought out on the street or in
bars.
The Buscavidas stories have been published as a complete album
several times since the beginning of the 1980s and, in a comment on the
latest reprint in 2004, the album is described as an exercise in historic
memory (grotesque by definition) regarding the very recent dictatorship [in
Argentina, 197683] (Muoz Gimnez, 2004, my translation). This
statement became the point of departure for the present study as it led to the
following two questions.

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 First, how can a fictional comic such as Buscavidas be said to refer to a
past period of time as a historic memory? This must surely mean that the
comic represents the dictatorship in a specific way that can be described
through analysis. The second question is whether these stories actually
became part of the collective memory of the dictatorship. Did the stories
representation of the dictatorship circulate in Argentine society; in other
words, did they play any part in the formation of a collective memory of the
dictatorship?
Both questions are related to the overall objective of this article, to
discuss visual and fictional material such as comics as material for
historical analysis. I argue that the questions invite a specific kind of
historical analysis, where the comic stories function as a prism through
which the Argentine military dictatorship is seen and discussed. This
discussion will serve as an example of the way in which Charles Peirces
semiotics (193158) can be used as the theoretical framework for the analysis
of different textual genres within historical studies.1
Within historical studies there has been a lack of methodological and
analytical interest in images as historical material, although there are
important exceptions (see Burke, 2001). Images have often either been
considered as see-through mirrors to the past and therefore accessible to the
historian as sources without any specialist knowledge, or as phenomena that
require specific art history skills that historians in general do not possess
(Jordanova, 2000: 189).
Within a semiotic framework, however, images may be analysed as
historical material in two interrelated ways that refer to the two questions
posed just now. With reference to the first question, I argue that semiotics
offers a theoretical framework and analytical strategy for the analysis of
images as representations of a specific time period, phenomenon or event.
With regard to the second question, semiotics may also function as a
framework for describing how comics circulate in society, through the
interpretation of them and their reproduction or modification of con-
ventions and world views. It should be noted, though, that neither of these
analytical strategies is specific only to images or comics. Any text may be
analysed as a prism within the framework of semiotics and examined in
regard to these two questions.
The Buscavidas stories are fiction, and therefore they constitute a
specific kind of historical material. The stories are not interpreted as
representing historical activities of historical persons, at least not by readers
who know the conventions of fiction as a genre. They are images or
metaphors of historic reality rather than specific references to it. If this
difference of reference is taken into account in the analysis, it is possible to
use fiction such as the Buscavidas stories as historical material, and semiotics
offers the tools for doing this in a precise way.
After a short introduction to the theoretical framework and historical
context, the article is structured on the basis of the two questions mentioned

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earlier. First I analyse Buscavidas as a representation of the military
dictatorship, and second, I discuss the circulation of this representation in
Argentine society. The discussion of the second question is divided into two
parts: one with regard to Argentine society at the time when the comic
stories were first published from 1981 to 1982; and the other concerning that
society after the transition to democracy in 1983.
The second question is broken down into two further discussions:
first, in an analysis of Buscavidas representation of the dictatorship within
the context of the field of comics, I argue that the comics as a whole took
part in the circulation of representations of the dictatorship during that
period, and therefore that Buscavidas was interpreted also as a reference to
the dictatorship. However, as the comics field and the political context
changed during the 1980s, so did the interpretations of Buscavidas, leading to
a less clear relationship between the comics and the dictatorship in the
interpretations of the former.2
In the second discussion, the Buscavidas representation is compared
with the Argentinian human rights movements representation of the
dictatorship, more specifically, with that of las Madres de Plaza de Mayo. In
this way I aim to show to what extent the Buscavidas representation of the
dictatorship was in accordance with other representations circulating in
society. I have chosen las Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a representative of the
human rights movements depiction of the dictatorship because it became
the dominant representation after the end of the dictatorship (Jelin, 2002:
712).
I argue that Buscavidas representation differs from the dominant
representation on a series of important points, leading to the hypothesis that
it did not play a significant role in the creation of a collective representation
and memory of the military dictatorship. This lack of representativity does
not mean, however, that Buscavidas is not useful as historical material. On
the contrary, it leads to new questions regarding this less significant role, and
whether Buscavidas representation refers to a counter-representation or
image. These last questions, however, are outside the scope of this article
which, as mentioned earlier, is to exemplify the use of texts such as comics as
historical material within a semiotic framework.

Semiotics and memory

Charles Peirces semiotics is a complex conceptual framework. Past
experience of using Peirces semiotics for practical analysis means that, over
time, I have drawn up a short list of concepts and theoretical assumptions
that summarize the basic ideas of Peircean semiotics, and which has also
proved useful as a framework for practical analysis of texts and their
circulation in society.
Semiotics is the study of the relationship between sign, object and
interpretant. The relationship between sign and object is described by iconic,

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 indexical and symbolic references, which is the part of Peircean semiotics
that has proved most useful in practical analysis.
According to semiotic principles, a sign refers to its object because it
resembles it (as an icon), is linked to it or dependent on it (as an index) or
has some other link by convention or law (as a symbol). One of the basic
features of these concepts is nevertheless sometimes overlooked. According
to Peirce, no sign is just an icon, index or symbol as the interpretation of any
sign activates all three references (Peirce, 193158: 2.2472.249).
When considering images as historical material, this is especially
useful as the interpretation of an image to some extent and in specific ways
involves both similarity between sign and object as well as different kinds
of conventions or norms. This point becomes useful when analysing texts
that combine images with other types of sign, for example writing, as comic
stories do. In comics, there is seldom a clearcut distinction between writing
and images, meaning that such a distinction is not very useful in analysis.
When the interpretant is added to the definition of the sign, the
concepts of icon, index and symbol theoretically provide an answer to the
problem mentioned earlier as to whether images and fiction are completely
isolated from historic reality or whether they are literal references to it.
Whereas icon, index and symbol describe the relationship between a given
text as a sign, and historic reality as one that includes both likeness
(iconicity) and conventions (symbolicity), the presence of the interpretant
positions the sign within a specific reality of time and space. A sign is only
valid if it is interpreted as such (Peirce, 193158), which means that it is
necessarily interpreted by someone somewhere.
With regard to the second question concerning the ways in which the
interpretation of a comic such as Buscavidas circulated in Argentine society,
the semiotic concept of semiosis has proved very useful. Semiosis refers to
the idea that the interpretation of a sign automatically engenders a new sign,
which is the interpretant. This new sign refers to its own object and
interpretant, and so on. In this sense, interpretation consists of a series of
sign relations, and past interpretations of a sign will have an effect on the
interpreters future interpretations and have the potential to affect his or her
world views and behaviour. If a person interprets a comic such as Buscavidas
as a representation of the dictatorship, this interpretation will, as a new sign
and as part of a semiosis, influence the persons future interpretation of signs
that he or she relates to the dictatorship.
These characteristics of semiotic theory the sign relation including
the interpretant, iconindexsymbol and the concept of semiosis are basic
to the structure and understanding of the analysis and discussion of the main
question posed in this article how may the analysis of Buscavidas
contribute to the understanding of the last military dictatorship in
Argentina?3 With its focus on the way in which Buscavidas participated in the
conception of the military dictatorship even after it ended, the second
question involves another conceptual framework including the concept of

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collective memory mentioned earlier. In historical and sociological studies,
the study of the ways in which memories of past periods and phenomena are
used for present purposes is already an established field of research.
The idea of collective memory has been questioned (e.g. by Gedi and
Elam, 1996) but this is a discussion that is outside the scope of this article.
Here I define collective memory as the conception of the military
dictatorship after its end in 1983 that dominates public discussions and
activities with reference to the dictatorship. In the case of Argentina, the
dominant collective memory of the military dictatorship is visible, for
example, in the trials of military personnel, in human rights reports and later
in the foundation of museums.
Memory is a dynamic concept that changes from person to person
and over time according to the different contexts and uses in which the
reference to a specific past is activated. This idea is in accordance with the
definition of the sign relation and the concept of semiosis described earlier.
In this study, the combination of semiotics and the concept of memory leads
to mutual gains. Whereas the concept of memory specifies the relationship
between past and present in the interpretation of the comic, the concepts of
icon, index and symbol offer a conceptual framework for the analysis of
memory sites, including museum exhibitions and monuments.4

Argentina and Buscavidas

The history of Argentina in the 20th century encompasses industrialization,
social welfare reforms and economic growth, but the characteristics that
most often come to mind are those of economic crisis, military takeovers and
political and social repression. To the Argentine population, the military
coup of 24 March 1976 that brought down the government of Juan Perns
widow, Isabel Pern, was no new or surprising experience. To a considerable
part of the population it even came as a relief as the military junta promised
to dispense with the continuing conflicts involving the revolutionary
guerrilla organization as well as the severe economic crisis (Romero, 2002:
215).
However, the population was not as well prepared for the fact that the
military regime in question was to prove extremely repressive and violent in
its efforts in a metaphor used by the regime itself to cleanse Argentine
society from its illnesses in what was called the Process (e.g. Romero, 2002:
216). The Argentine dictatorship 197683 was one of the so-called Latin
American terrorist states of the 1970s (Dabne, 1999: 304) and was
characterized by an enormous number of violations of human rights.
The military dictatorship combined a neoliberal economic strategy
with traditional nationalistic and Catholic values while literally removing any
political or social opposition from society. The repression was, in sum, a
systematic action carried out by the state (Romero, 2002: 216). Thousands of
Argentinians were kidnapped from their homes in broad daylight and

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 tortured in secret camps throughout the country. The prisoners included
members from militant, leftist guerrilla groups as well as people who just
happened to be in somebodys address book at the wrong time (Romero,
2002: 219).
Nobody was brought to trial within the official legal system, and
many at least 9,000 people, but according to human rights organizations
probably closer to 30,000 (Romero, 2002: 218) completely disappeared and
have never been found. The phenomenon led to a new expression with a
grammatical twist: that people were disappeared, and thus called the
disappeared (in Spanish, los desaparecidos).
Although some protests against the kidnappings and disappearances
began shortly after the beginning of the military dictatorship (for example,
las Madres de Plaza de Mayo), the military regime effectively subdued its
opponents and important parts of Argentine society continued as if nothing
happened:

. . . for five years, the military managed to secure a relative peace, a

peace of the tomb, owing to societys scant ability to respond, partly
because it had been battered or threatened by the repression and
partly because it was disposed to tolerate a great deal from a
government that, after the preceding chaos, had promised a
minimum order. (Romero, 2002: 236)

The regimes atrocities forced people to look away in the words of Diana
Taylor (1997:123), which led to a society that contributed to a superficial
appearance of normality. From the beginning of the 1980s, however, protests
began to be voiced on a larger scale, which, combined with the severe
economic crisis, was the beginning of the end of the military dictatorship.
As mentioned earlier, the protagonist of the Buscavidas stories
Buscavidas collects other peoples stories for his archive. In one of the
stories (Breccia and Trillo, 2004: 6976), a relative (Marengo) is knocking on
Buscavidas door, asking him for help (p. 69). Marengo thinks he is being
persecuted by a man (Valds) who is supposedly angry because Marengo ran
off with his woman. Buscavidas will not let Marengo in, but at the same time
he realizes that there may be a good story behind this, so when Marengo
leaves to look for help elsewhere, Buscavidas follows him, savouring the
thought of witnessing the confrontation between Marengo and his enemy,
Valds.
But the confrontation never happens. Marengo continues his flight,
trying to phone friends or escape in a taxi, but to no avail (p. 73). In the
penultimate scene in the story, Marengo is standing somewhere on the
outskirts of the city, probably trying to figure out what to do next, when a
man shouts something to him. Thinking that it is Valds who has finally
caught up with him, Marengo starts running directly into a live barbed-
wire fence and is electrocuted. Buscavidas witnessed the entire escape

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including the tragic end, and he realizes that the man who had been shouting
was a security guard who was trying to warn Marengo not to go any further
because of the live wires. At the end of the story, Buscavidas is at home
writing in his archive, commenting to the reader that apparently Valds had
not been anywhere near Marengo. He had gone to Las Vegas to celebrate the
fact that he had got rid of a woman who had been bothering him (p. 76).
I now argue that this story exemplifies a series of the central themes in
the Buscavidas stories as a whole, themes that refer to Argentine society at the
beginning of the 1980s, representing the dictatorship in a specific way. This
will be an answer to the first of the two questions mentioned in the
introduction.

B U S C AV I D A S : R E P R E S E N T I N G T H E M I L I TA R Y
D I C TAT O R S H I P
Anyone reading the Buscavidas stories may interpret them as a reference to
the Argentine dictatorship, but he or she may also see them as a more general
comment on modern life and its lack of human relationships. As material for
historical analysis, however, the historian must have sufficient knowledge of
the comic stories source and original context to argue whether it is relevant
to consider the comic as a specific representation of the Argentine dictator-
ship. In this case, the Buscavidas stories were published in Argentina from
1981 to 1982 and, more specifically, in the comic magazine SuperHum.
It could of course be argued that although the stories were published
at this time and place, there may not have been anybody who actually
interpreted them as a representation of the dictatorship. This will be
discussed later concerning the second question about the possible circulation
of Buscavidas in Argentine society. However, as a first step in the analysis of
the comic stories as historical material, it is necessary to argue that the
possibility of such reference exists, that it makes sense to consider Buscavidas
as a representation of the dictatorship.
The next step, therefore, before the discussion of any actual interpre-
tations, is the analysis of the way in which the Buscavidas comic stories may
represent the military dictatorship when interpreted as a reference to, and
within the context of, the Argentine dictatorship at the beginning of the
1980s.
The concepts of icon, index and symbol may be used at different
levels of analysis, from the description of the single elements within the
comic, to describing the comic as a story and as a reference to the military
dictatorship. I will concentrate on the significance of the graphic style in
terms of the narrative and the atmosphere of the story; for examples of
iconic, indexical and symbolic references on the level of single signs, I refer
the reader to other articles (e.g. Magnussen, 1999, 2000).
At the point in the story where Buscavidas turns his cousin away at
the door (Breccia and Trillo, 2004: 69), the tall and narrow frames together

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 with a dominance of black underscore the narrow gap of the open door,
while at the narrative level, it represents the little space Buscavidas leaves for
his relative Marengo. The almost claustrophobic feeling of such dark and
narrow frames is repeated throughout the story, also as a representation of
Marengos desperation that seems to put outward pressure on the frame. At
the narrative level, the non-realist drawings, where shapes merge, making it
difficult to distinguish the characters from the backgrounds, contribute to
the atmosphere of fear, not least because Marengos real persecutor
Buscavidas himself is difficult to pick out on the graphic black and white
background drawings throughout this story as well as several of the others in
the album.
This graphic style was typical for Alberto Breccia, the uncomfortable
cartoonist (my trans., Sasturain, 1995b[1987]: 137). The style creates an
atmosphere of tension, fear and violence (Martin, 1998: 42), which is an
important feature in the discussion of the main themes discussed later.
However, the style also refers to certain trends within the comics field,
which are important for the readers expectations as to the content of
Buscavidas. At an international level, Breccia was one of the protagonists of
the so-called comics de auteur of the 1970s and 1980s. The auteur comics
originated in France and Italy almost at the same time in the 1960s with the
establishment of a series of new comic magazines. Other European countries
followed the new trend through the 1960s and 1970s. Contact and
interaction of cartoonists and inspiration between Europe and Argentina
were considerable from the 1970s, and the Argentine comics field rapidly
became part of the new ideas and development of a comics field for an adult
audience (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 51).
Argentine comics had gone through a Golden Age in the 1940s and
1950s when a series of pioneering cartoonists such as Alberto Breccia, Hector
Oesterheld and Francisco Solano Lpez were firmly established as masters of
comics art. In the 1970s, Breccia and Oesterheld were still the most
important Argentine cartoonists and continued to be an inspiration to new
generations throughout the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Gociol and Rosemberg,
2000: 37). From the mid-1970s, Breccia and Carlos Trillo were established as
[politically, culturally] marginal to the system as a creative alternative (my
trans., Sasturain, 1995a[1984]: 38).
When Buscavidas was published in 19812, Alberto Breccias
drawings were already well known and admired both in Argentina and in
Europe. Therefore, even with limited knowledge of the comics field, an
Argentine reader would recognize Breccias graphic style and would expect
the dark and somewhat complex themes that were characteristic of his work.
The story about Marengo refers to a recurrent theme in many of the
Buscavidas comic stories, namely persecution and escape. It is, however, an
escape of a specific kind as the persecutor at the same time is imaginary
Valds is not actually persecuting Marengo and very real, in the shape of
Buscavidas.

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 In one of the other stories, Persecuta (Breccia and Trillo, 2004: 239),
a similar part-imaginary, part-real persecution is carried out. A police officer
is being followed by a person identical to himself, and when he tries to catch
him, the mirror image manages to escape. In the end, the police officer is
driven to suicide, followed by his own image, and by Buscavidas, who is
following both of them.
The tension and fear engendered by the graphic style is strengthened
in these story lines. The story about Marengo represents the distortion of
basic family conventions. Buscavidas is Marengos only relative, but not only
does he refuse to help Marengo, he even causes his death by following him in
his cynical pursuit of stories. In other stories (e.g. The Grandmother, pp.
1522 and The Family, pp. 5360, both in Breccia and Trillo, 2004), a similar
distortion of family relations is seen, engendering the image of a society in
which the family as an institution is important, although in a consistently
grotesque and cynical version.
Whereas the story about Marengo refers to basic social or human
relationships, Persecuta seems to question the identity of the police officer
who is destroyed, when he realizes that he has a double who is following him.
The mirror image ends up questioning his uniqueness and thereby dissolving
his identity. In this sense, the two stories refer to two basic conditions of
identity: its unique character and its dependence on human relationships.
As an index to the military dictatorship at the beginning of the 1980s,
the themes of persecution and fear may be understood as a literal reference
to the many who disappeared and about whom the Argentine population
gained more knowledge at the beginning of the 1980s. In this respect, the
vague character of the persecutors may refer to the lack of knowledge about
the actual activities of the authorities. However, in these stories the
persecuted or victims are represented as part of the problem as well, as to
some extent they either invent their own persecutors or become persecutors
themselves.
At a more abstract level, persecution and escape represent society as a
whole, a society or culture based on fear (Romero, 2002: 220), but without
fully knowing of whom to be afraid.

There were many victims, but the true objective [of the regime] was
to reach the living, the whole of society that, before undertaking a
total transformation, had to be controlled and dominated by terror
and by language . . . Only the voice of the state remained, addressing
itself to an atomized collection of inhabitants. (p. 219)

Peoples sense of personal and communal cohesion (Taylor, 1997:

122) was destroyed. This representation is of a society in which there are no
clear distinctions between persecutor and persecuted or between assailant and
victim, with consequences for human relationships in general and for the
individual. As a representation of the military dictatorship, rather than

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 offering a clear image of the regimes assaults on an innocent population, the
comic points to far deeper consequences of the continued repression.
According to Romero (2002), what was most notable, however, was [an
important part of the populations] appropriation and internalization of the
states actions, translated into self-control, self-censorship, and spying on ones
neighbors. Society controlled itself and became full of informants (p. 220).
Another recurrent theme in the stories is the way Buscavidas collects
stories for his archive. This theme may be interpreted in several ways, but the
story about Marengo exemplifies one central characteristic, namely that
Buscavidas is only interested in the stories, never in the people who tell them.
The stories are part of the individuals memories, but instead of contributing
to a sense of community or identity, the story archive keeps hold of the tragic
or cynical stories while the persons disappear completely once they have told
their stories (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 429).
The archive becomes a futile exercise as it diminishes the individuals
behind the stories and underscores the lack of human relationships, not least
because of the fact that the persons apparently have no-one else to whom
they can tell their stories apart from Buscavidas, a blank-faced stranger who
is obviously not interested in anything beyond the story and its capacity for
entertainment.
The theme of the archive activates in this sense a series of conventions
relating to history, memory and identity. Both individual and collective
identities are based on memory and narration of the individuals or the
communitys past (e.g. Gillis, 1994). Whereas the distortion of human and
family bonds in Buscavidas questions the individuals belonging to a commu-
nity, the collection of stories questions the existence of the individuals
history. In Spanish, historia means both story and history. In this sense, the
individuals identity is questioned or distorted on three levels in Buscavidas:
the individuals uniqueness, his or her relationships to others and to his or
her history.
Rather than explicit references to historic reality, the Buscavidas comic
stories can be said to create characters and scenarios drawing on the readers
knowledge of, and experience with, human beings and society (Johansen,
2002, e.g. p. 123). In this sense, they represent society as images or metaphors
of the readers views, engendering questions such as Would this be possible?
rather than statements such as this is how it was.
As shown earlier, the interpretation of the stories activates a series of
conventions and norms connected to families, to history and to human
relationships in general. As a metaphor of the military dictatorship,
Buscavidas represents a bleak and depressing society, the result of distorted
human relationships at all levels. Or as stated in the earlier quotation, an
atomized collection of inhabitants (Romero, 2002: 219).
The next question of course is did the readers at the beginning of the
1980s actually interpret Buscavidas as an image of the military dictatorship?
Did they acknowledge the themes of escape, identity and the archive as

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references to Argentine society at the beginning of the 1980s? Did the comic
stories make a mark on readers conceptions of the society in which they
lived? It is not possible to get clear answers to these questions, as it would
require interviews with Argentinians experiencing this society more than 20
years ago. However, in the next section I discuss possible answers in the
context both of the comics field at the time and of another contemporary
representation of the military dictatorship, that of las Madres de Plaza de
Mayo.

BUSCAVIDAS: CIRCULATING IN SOCIETY 1981 TO

1982
This analysis of Buscavidas as a representation of the dictatorship is mainly of
interest to the comic story analyst or comics historian. If the Buscavidas
stories are to function as a prism through which the military dictatorship is
studied, this raises a further question. How widely was this specific
representation of the dictatorship circulated in society?
When Buscavidas was published from 1981 to 1982, the regimes
repression was less harsh than it had been from 1976 to 1980. This was due
partly to the economic crisis that led to protests such as demonstrations and
general strikes. Gradually, these economic and social conflicts started to
involve political protests as well, and the opposition to the military regime
became stronger (Romero, 2002: 236). Due to the work of humans rights
movements such as las Madres de Plaza de Mayo the disappearances and
torture became part of public knowledge (Jelin and Kaufman, 2000: 91).
After a long period of repression and systematic censorship against
any subversion, including Marxism, but also a questioning of family order
and sexual liberty (my trans., Invernizzi and Gociol, 2002: 50) there was a
breakthrough in terms of less severe censorship and more knowledge. This
led to an increased focus on politics, including the regimes repression, and
there was a propensity to interpret aspects of culture, for example comic
stories, as references to political issues, particularly when the reference was
not explicit (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 100). The interpretation of office
or family life as metaphors for the military regime was a common strategy
(e.g. Teodoro y Ca, by Viuti).
Often these metaphors were consciously constructed, not least
because many cartoonists within the comics field were in opposition to the
military regime, a fact which became more and more apparent when
censorship was relaxed from the beginning of the 1980s. In the next section I
discuss the comics field during the dictatorship and the interpretation of
Buscavidas as a reference to the dictatorship.

Buscavidas and the comics field from 1981 to 1982

The Buscavidas stories first appeared in the magazine SuperHum, an
offshoot of the weekly satirical magazine Hum published by Ediciones de la

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 Urraca. The first issue of Hum came out on 1 June 1978 and attacked both
the regimes economic policies and the football World Championship held in
Argentina that year (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 52). Hum became the
symbol of the opposition to the military dictatorship (p. 52), as it repeatedly
challenged the regimes censorship. Although in some cases comic stories are
taken less seriously because of the apparent innocence of their drawings, the
enemy could be anywhere according to the military regime, meaning that all
sorts of material were analysed by the Intelligence Service, including
magazines and fanzines (Invernizzi and Gociol, 2002: 51).
While Hum included a wide range of caricatures in images and
writing, SuperHum was a monthly supplement to it, and specialized in
comic stories. Its first issue was published in August 1980 and it ran for three
years, initially with an issue every two months. The majority of its material
was the work of national cartoonists and stories that concentrated on topics
close to the readership, such as everyday stories set in national contexts.
According to Juan Sasturain (1995a[1984]), it was an original and exciting
project that included within one cover all the comics that could not be
published at that time through the usual channels (p. 41, my trans.).
The readers of SuperHum may therefore have been attracted to
alternative cultures belonging to the political left in Argentina, and at the
same time part of the political opposition to the military regime. There are a
series of indicators that seem to confirm that this was true for the comics
field for adults as a whole, and that the Argentine comics field was in tune
with the development in European comics mentioned earlier in France and
Italy, although in the 1970s, the similarities with Spain and the opposition to
the Franco regime were the most apparent (Magnussen, 2001a, 2001b).
Hum first appeared in 1978, but the movement towards a more
visibly satirical and political content in Argentine comics had started in the
1960s with comic stories such as Mafalda (196474, by Quino) which gained
a larger audience over the years, not least from the middle classes (Sasturain,
1995a[1984]: 33). From 1973 onwards, the publication of a comic story page
in the national newspaper Clarn strengthened this development consider-
ably (p. 34), although the criticism was muted because of (self) censorship
at least until the last years of the dictatorship.
The Argentine comics field in the 1970s seems mainly to have
consisted of political (leftist) opponents of the military dictatorship with
Hum and SuperHum taking the lead. Although I have found no evidence
that it was due to his comics work, Hctor Oesterheld was disappeared in
1977, presumably because of his participation in guerrilla activities against
the regime (Muoz and Sampayo, 1998: 30; Mora Bordel, 2002), and other
comic artists had gone into exile.
Since Alberto Breccia was already an admired comic artist in
Argentina at the beginning of the 1980s, many readers probably already knew
other parts of his work that had more specific political references. For
example, in 1968 Breccia created a comic biography of Che Guevara with his

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son Enrique Breccia, with Hctor Oesterheld as the scriptwriter. This
biography was openly sympathetic to Che Guevara, the Cuban revolution
and the socialist project in general (Breccia et al., 1997). The police destroyed
as many copies as they could find; they must have been quite thorough as the
book was almost impossible to find until its re-publication in 1997 by Grupo
Imaginador de Ediciones (Muoz Gimnez, 2004)
At a more general level, readers recognize the Buscavidas graphic style
as belonging to a specific genre of comics, comics de auteur, that mostly
offered grim images of society in the form of political and social criticism.
The Breccia style of dissolving shapes in black and white had already become
a great inspiration to new generations of cartoonists, such as his own son and
Jos Muoz (Martin, 1998: 41). This graphic style influenced readers expec-
tations as to the theme and scope of Buscavidas, prompting them to consider
the comic stories as representations of the military dictatorship.
Summing up, there is a series of arguments showing that it is quite
probable that the Buscavidas comic stories and their themes of persecution,
escape and lack of human relationships were interpreted as a representation
of the military dictatorship when the stories were first published from 1981
to 1982. Within their specific context and the increased knowledge of the
regimes crimes, the stories referred to an image of the dictatorship that was
already in circulation. Other arguments were: the graphic style of Alberto
Breccia and his earlier work; a propensity for texts such as comic stories to be
interpreted as metaphors of the political regime; and the critical and
oppositional character of the comics field as a whole.
I now examine to what extent Buscavidas representation of the
dictatorship was similar to other contemporary representations, and more
specifically, to the representation of las Madres de Plaza de Mayo.

Buscavidas and other representations of the regime:

las Madres de Plaza de Mayo
As mentioned earlier, the fact that the Buscavidas stories were published from
1981 to 1982 means that they were interpreted within the context of more
openness and knowledge about the regimes repression. It also means that the
comics representation of the dictatorship outlined earlier can be seen as part
of a general awareness of and protest against the regime.
One of the first visible oppositions to the military regime was las
Madres de Plaza de Mayo. They were a group of women whose adult
daughters or sons had been disappeared during the dictatorship.
Individually, the mothers had tried to obtain information about their
children from the authorities, but with no luck. From 1977 a group of these
mothers started to meet every Thursday on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos
Aires, carrying pictures of their children and wearing white scarves that
made them recognizable as a group in the crowded plaza (Bonafini and
Snchez, 2002). From 1981 to 1982, when the Buscavidas stories were

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 published, las Madres were already well known both within the borders of
Argentina and internationally.
Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo became a symbol of the protests against
the military regime and the fight for human rights, not least because of their
early and daring demonstration in the centre of Buenos Aires, right in front
of the presidential palace. The protest can be seen as a representation of the
military dictatorship, although of a different kind from the representation
offered by Buscavidas.
The point of departure of the comic story and the las Madres
demonstration is similar: the military dictatorship encompassed a society
made up of distorted human relationships under a superficially normal
veneer. Buscavidas and las Madres differed, however, when it came to the way
in which they represented society and the possibilities for change. Whereas
the Buscavidas comic story represented the repression and distorted human
relations by telling stories about them, las Madres referred to them by
drawing attention to their opposites most notably by emphasizing family
ties and the community. They did this by acting as a group and by showing
photographs of their children in a public place. In this way, they represented
the significance of family ties (they are mothers, they care) while at the same
time pointing to the abnormality of the situation, first, by being in a public
space according to the patriarchal regime, mothers should stay in their
homes and second, because the very presence of the photographs pointed
to the absence of their sons and daughters.
The difference between Buscavidas telling stories about and las
Madres pointing out is due in part to the difference in sign type. Buscavidas
is fiction, creating images of the dictatorship, while las Madres as a human
rights organization referred directly to the crimes carried out by the regime
by making them visible in public. In the context of semiotics, the former may
be described as primarily iconic and the latter as primarily indexical, and the
difference is central to the possibilities of representation. In this specific case,
it is also a difference in power of penetration in Argentine society, not least
because of the visibility of las Madres becoming more pronounced over the
years as more mothers joined the Thursday demonstrations.
However, I would argue that the representations also differ on at least
two other important points, and that these differences become decisive for
Buscavidas participation in the creation and reproduction of a collective
memory of the military dictatorship after 1983.

BUSCAVIDAS: CIRCULATING IN SOCIETY AFTER

T H E D I C TAT O R S H I P
Since the end of the dictatorship with the democratic elections in 1983,
Argentine society has tried to come to terms with the terrors of the
dictatorship. People who have been persecuted and repressed aim for a
double objective: offering the true version of history, based on their
memory, and demanding justice (Jelin, 2002: 43, my trans.). These objectives

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were central to both individuals and human rights organizations immedi-
ately after the dictatorship, and are still being pursued today.
At the government level, the new democratic president, Ral Alfonsn,
created a committee, CONADEP (National Commission of Disappeared
Persons). Its function was to investigate the disappearances and the states
breaches of human rights during the dictatorship. After approximately nine
months of work the committee handed the government a report named
Nunca ms (Never again) documenting mainly by testimonial that the
military regime was responsible for the disappearance of 8960 persons as well
as for the existence during the dictatorship of 340 secret torture centres. It is
also stated in the reports conclusion that these are not definitive figures
(Nunca Ms, 1984: conclusion).
The report became the point of departure for a series of trials against
the Junta members for human rights crimes, and they were sentenced in
1985. The next step was to be the prosecution of military persons of lesser
rank, but the protests from the armed forces led to the government issuing
two new laws, one setting a final date for the submission of charges against
persons with relation to the military regime (the End Point Law, from late
1985), and the other stating that duty of obedience would excuse the
majority of the armed forces from prosecution (the Due Obedience Law
from 1987). The legal proceedings were not only seriously slowed down by
these new laws, but they were also reversed by the pardons issued from 1990
by Carlos Menem (president from July 1989) to the already convicted Junta
members as well as to members of los Montoneros, one of the most important
guerrilla organizations active in the 1970s.
However, the CONADEP report of 1984 and the succeeding trials
were of enormous importance in Argentine society. Confronted with the
testimonial reports of CONADEP, people were faced with the reality of re-
enacting fears and disturbing feelings, asking themselves how all that
happened was possible, while everyday life seemed to go on, maintaining an
appearance of normality (Jelin and Kauffman, 2000: 96).
With reference to Buscavidas representation of the military dictator-
ship, the trials during the first phase of democracy seriously questioned the
atomized character of Argentine society. Apart from being decisive in the
trials, the testimonial reports also became part of the process of recreating a
sense of community and common identity in Argentine society. Stories and
memories of what had happened were key elements in the efforts of (re)con-
structing both individual and collective identities, underscoring the close
relationship between memory and identity (Gillis, 1994; Jelin, 2002: 5).

Buscavidas and the comics field after 1983

After the end of the dictatorship, the Buscavidas stories were published in
one volume at some point during the 1980s by the Argentine publisher
Doedytores (Muoz Jimnez, 2004). It has not yet been possible to find the

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 precise year of publication. This lack of information concerning the publi-
cation of the Buscavidas stories makes it difficult to say much about whether
the representation of the dictatorship in Buscavidas became part of the
interpretation of it throughout the 1980s. It could be argued, however, that
the difficulties of obtaining such information may be an indicator of the
comic storys lack of significance beyond the comics field as such.
As mentioned earlier, this does not render the comic useless as
historical material. Instead it points to the discussion of why this was so,
taking into account the arguments in favour of considering Buscavidas a
reference to the military dictatorship.
During the dictatorship, the comics field opposed the military regime
and continued the 1970s airing of political issues and social criticism,
although to a limited extent because of (self-)censorship. This characteristic
was still valid to some extent after the democratic elections in 1983. The
satirical magazine Hum maintained a leftist point of view, also critical of
the democratic politicians (Taylor, 1997: 55). SuperHum ceased publication,
but another magazine, Fierro, from the same publishing house was created in
1984 and became central to new generations of cartoonists and included
more experimental comics (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 52).
Fierro published many more or less explicitly political comic stories.
From its issue number 11 in 1985, it published the comics story Perramus, by
Alberto Breccia and Juan Sasturain, which is considered both one of the
masterpieces of Argentine comic stories and an explicit representation of the
last military dictatorship (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 446).
However, apart from this continuity dating from the 1970s, new
tendencies emerged. The American Underground comics made an
important impact on the Argentine comics field from the 1980s, as they did
in Europe (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 52; Magnussen, 2001b). European
comics continued to be an important influence in Argentina and vice versa.
This was due not least to the continuous interchange between cartoonists
during the 1970s and onwards (e.g. Hugo Pratt, Muoz and Sampayo, Carlos
Trillo, and Juan Gimnez all worked both in Argentina and for European
publishers).
In addition to being explicitly political, the Underground themes
were connected to generational conflicts and social and cultural issues in
general. This meant that the comics field as a whole became less specifically
political than it had been in the 1970s and early 1980s. It also changed in the
sense that there was an explosion in the publication of fanzines, especially
from the mid-1980s (Gociol and Rosemberg, 2000: 56). The fanzines
included new themes, but also new aesthetics, and the Argentine (and
European) comics field changed character. With the aesthetic and narrative
experiments and the focus on quality at all levels including the quality of
the paper the previously very popular genre lost a considerable part of its
audience; by the beginning of the 1990s it had become a cult genre for a
specialized audience.

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 As the comics field lost most of its more explicit political references
during the 1980s and early 1990s, while at the same time focusing on
aesthetics and narrative experiments, I would argue that the status of a comic
such as Buscavidas changed. Instead of participating in the circulation of
specific representations of the last dictatorship, it became more of a showcase
for the talent of Alberto Breccia, leading to a new edition in 1994 (a year
after Breccias death) in Argentina as part of his Collected Works (Breccia,
1994) and in France and Spain in 2001 and 2004 (Breccia and Trillo, 2001,
2004).
The changes within the comics field are not, however, the only reason
why Buscavidas did not play a significant part in the creation of collective
memories of the dictatorship. Earlier I mentioned the differences in
representation between the comic story and the dominant representation of
the dictatorship as an equally important reason. This is now discussed in the
next section, exemplified by las Madres de Plaza de Mayo.

Buscavidas and other representations of the regime:

the human rights organizations
After the end of the dictatorship, las Madres together with other human
rights organizations continued their work of exposing the regimes crimes
and bringing those responsible to justice. The human rights organizations
and their demands became a force within Argentine society that was impos-
sible for the government to ignore, although the power of the armed forces
until recently proved more decisive as they managed to put a stop to the trials
at the end of the 1980s.5
Nevertheless, the representation and memory of the military dictator-
ship from the point of view of the persecuted and the disappeared were and
still are dominated by the human rights organizations. I will use this
representation to make a comparison with Buscavidas representation of the
dictatorship in the 1980s.
As mentioned earler, Buscavidas represents the military dictatorship
as a society where human relationships are distorted, leading to a lack of
community, history and identity. Although human relationships are a central
feature in las Madres representation, they are not distorted relationships,
characterizing the whole society, as is the case in Buscavidas. The mothers
themselves and their demonstration in Plaza de Mayo are proof that healthy
human relationships exist, at least in parts of Argentine society.
This leads to two crucial characteristics of las Madres representation
of the military dictatorship: (1) the insistence on indices, of pointing out the
existence of their children, the regimes crimes and human ties, and (2) a
clear distinction between the oppressors and the victims, or between
persecutors and persecuted. These two aspects are not part of Buscavidas
representation of the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.
The need to accuse the dictatorship by finding evidence of disap-
peared persons, crimes and torture centres was central to the general

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 atmosphere in Argentine society after the end of the dictatorship. The
CONADEP report was an important step but the press and television
programmes also participated in this search (Jelin and Kaufman, 2000: 91).
This need was a direct continuation of las Madres first demonstrations in
Plaza de Mayo, with the photographs of their children as indices of the
childrens existence and their family connections. At the same time, the
photographs were evidence of the regimes crimes as the photographs were
only necessary because the people they represented had disappeared.
According to Jelin and Kaufman (2000), the need for this proof of
persons and crimes was necessary to make them real, not only for the
relatives, but for society as a whole: The trial [in 1985 of the Junta members]
eliminated the spectral nature of the testimonies that were moving around in
society . . . It presented the victims as human beings, giving them equal
standing with the rest of humanity (p. 94).
This quote shows how close Buscavidas representation of the
dictatorship is to the starting point although not to the representation of
the human rights organizations and the trials. For instance, the spectral
nature of the dictatorship mentioned in the quotation is crucial to the theme
of escape and persecution in the comic. The consequences of this spectral
nature are according to Jelin and Kaufman and to Buscavidas a loss of
humanity. However, the difference is that Buscavidas represents society as a
whole as lacking humanity and makes no distinction between persecutor and
persecuted.
The objective of the trials and of the work of the human rights
organizations was to establish a clear distinction between oppressor and
victim. This characteristic is not present in Buscavidas. On the contrary, in
the comic there is a specific focus on vague distinctions between the
imaginary and real, and between persecutor and persecuted:

the charges and the prosecution of the ex-commanders in chief [in

the trial in 1985] maintained as the central figure the victim of state
repression, independent of his or her ideology or actions. The victim
suffers as the consequence of the actions of others. He or she is not an
agent, but a passive participant. (Jelin, 2002: 72, my trans.)

Buscavidas does not reproduce this image of the victim, as its

representation and criticism of the military dictatorship seems to be defined
primarily by a grey area, where no-one is a clearcut victim and where
everyone in one way or another, more or less consciously, seems to
participate in the breakdown of the community and social identities. In this
sense, the accusation and prosecution of the persecutors is neither the full
story nor the end of the story.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS
The conclusion to the analysis in this article is that Buscavidas offers a
representation of the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 as an especially bleak
and inhumane society. It also shows, however, that although this repre-
sentation shares basic features with the dominant representations of the
dictatorship, both during and after it ended, it leaves out two of the central
features: the insistence on indices and proof, and a clear distinction between
repressors and victims.
This of course is due partly to the difference in sign type. A human
rights movement such as las Madres de Plaza de Mayo refers explicitly to past
events in their demands for justice in the present. The demands are
necessarily based on specific values and conceptions of both the past and the
present. In contrast, in its role as a fictional comic story, Buscavidas invites
the reader to question existing conventions and their underlying ideology in
order to understand both past and present societies.
These differences of representation are not unique to the Argentine
case, but are seen in the collective memories of repressive dictatorships in, for
example, other Latin American countries such as Chile and in Spain. In
Spain, the collective memory of the Franco dictatorship changes over time,
but includes many of the same elements as the ones discussed here, and the
comics field participates in different ways. A comparative study of memories
of military dictatorships from the point of view of the comics field would be
very interesting.
The analysis of Buscavidas as a prism through which a specific period
of Argentine history is seen and discussed has shown, I hope, that a semiotic
historical analysis will engender insights and hypotheses that are not clearly
visible at first sight. In this case, the analysis of the comic story in the context
of its genre and the comics field has led to suggestions as to its influence on
Argentine society, and the comparison with the human rights organizations
representation of the last dictatorship has led to the hypothesis that the
difference between Buscavidas and the dominant memory of the dictatorship
is part of the explanation why the comic did not participate in the creation of
the latter. This again leads to a new question (although beyond the scope of
this article): does Buscavidas representation of the dictatorship create a
counter-image of the dictatorship?
With the example of Buscavidas I have shown how the basic ideas of
semiotics the relationship between signs and semiosis may work as a
framework and act as conceptual models for a historical analysis. The
analysis is of course of a particular nature as it focuses on a specific text and
its reference to a historical past as a representation or image of it, and as part
of the circulation of specific conceptions or memories. For this reason, a
historical analysis based on semiotics does not offer an alternative to other
genres of historical analysis, but rather a supplement that provokes questions
and ideas that may not have been raised or engendered otherwise.

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 NOTES
1. By the term semiotics, I refer to Charles Peirces semiotics, which
differs from the semiotic tradition based on Ferdinand de Saussures
semiology on a series of crucial points.
2. When I refer to the comics field in this article, it is to the comics for
an adult audience, excluding the comics that are aimed at a child
audience.
3. It is not unusual to see the dictatorship of 197683 referred to as the
last dictatorship, which means that it is the last of a series of
dictatorships in Argentina in the 20th century.
4. Although it is outside the scope of this article I should mention that
there is a considerable potential in the combination of the two, and
that the semiotic concepts may prove analytically useful in a
combination with Pierre Noras (1996) definition of sites of
memory.
5. In 2001, a process of the annulment of the two laws the End Point
Law and the Due Obedience Law (see p. 337) began as they were
considered against the Constitution. In June 2005, the laws were
definitively annulled by the Supreme Court.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ANNE MAGNUSSEN is an Associate Professor at the Institute of History
and Civilization, University of Southern Denmark. She has written several
articles about comics and semiotics and was co-editor of the anthology
Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000).

Address: University of Southern Denmark, Institute of History and

Civilization, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark. [email:
magnussen@hist.sdu.dk]

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