Naming violence: reflections around Malvinas post-war rumour
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Abstract
At the end of the Malvinas war, a macabre rumor ran. A soldier, who had lost both legs in the war, called his parents from the hospital and, without telling them what had happened to him, asked them for permission to house a comrade who had returned in that condition. When his parents refused to do so, he told them it was really him. Then, he hanged and killed himself.
The story, with variants, circulated throughout Argentina, and appears in testimonies of former combatants even today. From this finding, this paper proposes to explore the "likelihood conditions" of the rumor. There were a large number of elements that contributed to the elaboration of this story as believable one. First, the figure of the mutilated was one of the vehicles to narrate modern wars, as a symbol of the impact on people's lives. The rumor threaded a plot made of memories, visual images, texts and war experiences with the history of the postwar period. This is a look at the Malvinas war but also about the transition to democracy: the metaphor of the injured young man who is not received speaks not only about the return from the islands, but about the emerging state terrorism society, unable to talk about violence as it was not in language of the victims.
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