El discurso de la víctima militante en la temprana posdictadura: Madres de Plaza de Mayo, actores paraorganizacionales y redes informales en la construcción discursiva de las luchas por los derechos humanos en la Argentina

It is usually assessed that the Argentinean human rights movement did not reproduce the political ideals of the last dictatorship’s victims before the mid-1990s. However, traces can be found of a “militant victim discourse” in the first years of the post-dictatorship already, in the 1980s. Based on a reconstruction of the militant network of the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, this paper shows that family relatives are not the only grassroots for the human rights movement. The role of intellectuals and reviews close to Madres has to be highlighted, as they contributed to the formulation and diffusion of a radical political discourse on the victims of the dictatorship. It is argued that the human rights movement should be studied as a cross-organizational militant space, objectified through a network of reviews, rather than as a simple accumulation of formal organizations. The article then shows a few ways in which the commemorative repertoire of the “militant victim” has been used in the Argentinean public space in the 1980s by this militant base and identifies some of its major aspects