“The military has buried corpses, and they have built houses on top”: Rumors, space, and affect in post-dictatorship Argentina

A persistent rumor claims that beneath the foundations of the four strategic villages built during Argentina’s last dictatorship in Tucumán, the military buried corpses of the disappeared. This article aims to explore how the memory of what happened during the dictatorship is intertwined with, persists through, and is altered by the infrastructure built by the military. In other words, it examines the interaction between memories of violence and material traces in the aftermath. The article analyzes how the content of rumor continues to affect the very spatiality of the strategic villages but also the community of people who know and share the rumor. It is also explored how this spatiality reveals a very complex network of suspicions about the population still living inside the strategic villages. Finally, the article shows that silence prevails inside the strategic village and explore who silence help to create and maintain distance from violent episodes. Both rumor and silence surrounding the alleged mass graves activate and expose the underlying tensions in a territory still deeply affected by state-sponsored violence.