The Drama of Sacrifice ‘So that the Country May Live’. The Last Words of Repressors in Trials for Crimes Against Humanity in Córdoba, Argentina

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the last words of four perpetrators at the last stages of their trial for crimes against humanity in Córdoba, Argentina. Through semiotic analysis, I address the representations of the history and relationships that defendants establish between the past and the present of the trials. I am interested in assigning the voluntary declarations of defendants prior to the reading of the sentence, models of representation, and formalization of memories to a set of discourses. I argue that these discourses generate positions, or subjects of enunciation, and build a profesional knowledge shared by the military who sacrificed for the country in the past, and the ex-military sacrificed in the legal present.