The Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia once remarked that a strange aspect of the Dirty War in Argentinain which thousands of people were secretly "disappeared" from 1976 to 1983is that the intentions of the military dictatorship were clear to anyone who knew how to read the generals' public statements. As Piglia notes in an interview from 1984: "Above all the military constructed a version of reality, and the military appeared in this myth as the medical safeguard of society. They began to circulate the theory of the foreign body that had penetrated the social fabric and had to be surgically