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Silence Of Argentina By Jacobo Timerman Essay

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Silence in Argentina Jacobo Timerman’s memoir Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number both details Timerman’s time in captivity at the hands of the Argentine military government and examines the political climate in Argentina that allowed said government to “eliminate reality” (13) and plunge the country into chaos. Timerman exhaustively covers all forms of oppression – from various physical tortures to outright violations of the law – that the military government carries out in order to convey to the reader the idea of the military government’s “philosophy of repression” and illustrate the direness of the Dirty War. Many of the grievances committed against Timerman and his companions (like the 10,000 “disappearances,” or torture by electrocution) may stand out as particularly egregious examples of the military government’s oppression of the people. However, I believe that the military government’s hunger for complete control of Argentina and its people stands as the worst and most important aspect of its repressive philosophy, and that this need for control encouraged many of the actions that left lasting scars on both Timerman and Argentina itself.
From the very first page of the first chapter, Timerman dives straightaway into detailing the various forms of control the men of the military government exercised over him while he was in their possession. The most prominent instance of this comes from the fact that the soldiers manning the prisons stripped the

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