The Authoritarian Reorganization of State Administration During the Last Dictatorship in Rosario (1976–1981)

Abstract

The article analyzes the process of state disciplining within the Municipality of Rosario during Argentina’s last military dictatorship and explores how the “administrative reorganization” promoted by the regime’s upper echelons was translated, at the local level, into concrete mechanisms of rationalization and political-ideological control. Drawing on the examination of normative sources, dismissal decrees, intelligence documents, the press, and oral testimonies, the study reconstructs the transformations of the municipal administration and the shifting objectives that this reorganization assumed during different stages of the dictatorship. In the early years (1976–1977), under the discourse of “efficiency” and “administrative sanitation,” measures were primarily aimed at dismantling political and union networks from the constitutional period and establishing an atmosphere of surveillance and internal control. By 1978, the emphasis shifted toward consolidating a new administrative rationality, characterized by the outsourcing of services and the strengthening of a subsidiary type of State. From a local perspective, the article examines the intersection between state bureaucracy, legality, and disciplining, showing how authoritarianism became embedded in the everyday practices of administrative work and contributing to an understanding of the specific forms that state violence assumed within the bureaucratic apparatus during the dictatorship.