Imagining America: The Delusion of Power and the Echoes of Dirty War in Today’s Immigration Crisis
The power of imagination and the danger of delusion.
There are two Americas.
One exists in the hearts of those who believe in Liberty, Justice, hope and the promise of shared humanity. It is the America encapsulated through our most united moments, and most iconic images, such as The Statue of Liberty, D-Day, Victories of the Civil Rights Movement, like the March on Washington, Unity after 09/11, and recent celebrations of healthcare workers and of each other during COVID, just to name a few. It is the America that we imagine and that we remember at the heart of the No Kings marches: Protesters from all backgrounds, who see neighbors in each other, and the triumph of America in our technicolor quilt of many faiths, languages, colors, and people. This is an imagination of community; a hope for a better, ‘more perfect’ union.
The other is a delusion of travesty: A grotesque inversion conjuring the modern day witches in the notion of “invaders,” where valid visa holders and migrants seeking asylum get recast as “terrorists” rather than neighbors or new Americans, and undocumented residents get assaulted, disappeared, and treated like “animals” rather than human beings. This is a delusion of dominion; an obsession with power.
History does not repeat. Situations recur. Today the echoes are deafening.
The Dirty War’s Legacy of Delusion: A Warning and a Call to Action
The delusions that fueled Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, which lasted from March 24, 1976 - 1983, spurred a psychosis in the military junta that overthrew Isabel Perón, widow of Juan Perón, led by Jorge Rafael Videla, Orlando Agosti, and Emilio Massera.
Over those 7 years, the junta forcibly disappeared an estimated 30,000 people-activists, students, journalists, and others deemed “subversive". Part of their manifesto demanded a cleansing of the country, and they targeted pregnant women among these subversive groups, keeping them alive just long enough to give birth, after which they illegally trafficked their babies out to military families connected to the regime. The women were murdered, considered collateral damage in the diabolical plan to erase the identity of the next generation and ensure ideological ‘purity’ among the population.
The torture and forced disappearance did not begin overnight, and yet once begun, they were systematic, soulless, evil. Members of the death squads tasked with kidnapping civilians drove around in unmarked Ford Falcons (often green), and when targeting families, they used black cargo vans disguised as “Postal Service” vehicles.
Who were taken?
The military junta targeted (mainly) two types of citizens: dissidents who spoke out against the junta, and Argentinian Jewish citizens:
“Dissidents” was a broad and deliberately vague label, encompassing artists, journalists, teachers, playwrights, writers, union organizers, students, and anyone who dared to speak out about the disappearances of their neighbors, friends, or family.
As for Argentine Jewish citizens, their persecution was not incidental but part of a calculated campaign.
While this post does not delve into the full complexities of the Nazi ideology that influenced the junta—or its mission to disappear both Jewish citizens and political “subversives”—I encourage readers to explore the resources below for further research on these atrocities.
It is worth noting that there is ample, well-documented evidence of the clandestine relocation of Nazi officers, scientists, and collaborators to South America after World War II, many of whom found refuge in Argentina and Brazil under false identities. For more on this dark chapter, see The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón’s Argentina by Uki Goñi, among other sources.
During the Dirty War the delusion of a ‘pure’ society aligned with nazi ideals again took root, only 31 years post World War II, obsessed with a mission to purge the country.
The enemies of the state were viewed as:
the socialists, democrats, communists, free-thinkers of all stripes who were so stupid that they could not understand that the vision of the millennium was worth any means necessary to attain it.
- Imagining Argentina, Lawrence Thornton, page 91.
The shadow men abducting people from their homes, and off the streets, and the military members and officers who willfully (sometimes gleefully) tortured their victims, actually believed they were saving the country.
They built camps to imprison these ‘subversives’ all over the country, including a notorious series of rooms in the basement of the Naval Mechanics School.
Eventually, families of the missing, especially the mothers and grandmothers of disappeared pregnant women found the courage to march in front of the government building at the Plaza de Mayo, demanding their children and grandchildren returned. Known now as Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and la Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, they started movements of organized resistance that have obtained recognition under the Missing Persons Global Response domain.
During the Dirty War, officers and generals in the military junta called these women ‘hysterical’, and began targeting them too.
The psychosis of the junta are the delusions of ICE, the badges of Cecot prison guards, and the smug grins of politicians who traffic in fear.
I write this as a Warning, and as a Call to Action.
The delusions, the arrogance, the fear that drove and fueled Argentina’s Dirty War are present in the fear mongering, manipulated messaging, lies, arrogance, and delusions behind the deployment of ICE, and of the National Guard upon undocumented residents, valid Visa holders, migrants seeking asylum, and our own citizens across the cities of America’s landscape, and the majority of them have zero criminal background.
We are living through a diorama of competing imaginations and delusions.
On one side, the America we carry in our hearts: An imagined land of Hope, of Reinvention, of Multicultural triumph.
On the other, the America that mirrors the delusions of Argentina’s military junta encapsulated in author Lawrence Thornton’s character - General Guzmán: The ‘war ravaged land under invasion.’
Thanks to The Heritage Foundation, the architects, supporters, contributors and allies of Project 2025, White House leadership, and the tropes of Christian Nationalism, evidence of this delusion run rampant across socials and news media.
In this delusion, the “official” history is a lie - insisting that slavery was ‘good’, that people of color and people outside their approved checklist of normality are the enemy; and where the only crime that matters is daring to exist outside the boundaries of their hate.
The Dirty War’s Legacy of Delusion
They see sheep and terrorists because they imagine us that way.
- Imagining Argentina, Lawrence Thornton, page 65.
Lawrence Thornton’s Imagining Argentina lays bare the mechanics of state-sanctioned abductions and forced disappearances in the name of nationalism. The junta did not merely kill; it imagined its victims into existence. Communists, Jews, students, artists—anyone who threatened their vision of a “pure” Argentina was recast as an enemy of the state.
The disappeared were not people; they were abstractions, “subversives” to be erased. And the mothers who marched in the Plaza de Mayo? To the General, they were nothing more than animals howling for their lost young.
“Even animals have mothers, Rueda,”, (sneered General Guzmán)
Imagining Argentina, 107.
The junta were all too happy to recast these women as nothing more than political distraction, and hysteria, willfully blind to their humanity, and to the significance of the demand—
They want their children back
Imagining Argentina, 107
It was never ‘politics’; It was love. It was memory. It was the refusal to let the regime rewrite reality.
Fast forward to 2025 and Cecot
The 256 Venezuelan men illegally deported to El Salvador’s Cecot prison are the latest casualties of the same delusion.
They were not arrested for any ‘crime’. They were imagined into criminality:
“You are all Terrorists”
“‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison”, Julie Turkewitz, Tibisay Romero, Sheyla Urdaneta, and Isayen Herrera, November 8, 2025
Labeled “terrorists” by a government that knows the power of a lie, they were subjected to torture so depraved it defies language:
Beaten even in the infirmary, as medical staff sat there, looking on
Sexually assaulted by the guards
Held under water or in sensory isolation as punishment
Psychologically traumatized
This is not a failure of policy. This is the logic of Dirty War, repackaged for a new century.
The junta justified its horrors by claiming to save Argentina from chaos. Today, the same script is read from a different podium. The “invasion” at the border, the “criminal gangs,” the “terrorist threats”—all fabrications, all designed to justify the unjustifiable. The language is identical. The outcome is the same. The only difference is the accent of the men giving the orders.
The official history is a lie
In Cautiva, a film about the children stolen during the Dirty War in Argentina, one of the early scenes depicts two girls in a Catholic school, discussing the Guerra contra los subversivos or the “war against the communists,” as one girl called it.
Cristina/Sofía Lombardi
My father said it was during the war against the communists
Other girl
What war? There was no war.
(Cristina/Sofía looks genuinely baffled. The other girl keeps staring, incredulous.)
Other girl, still talking
They kidnapped people. They killed them. Don’t you know?
The room falls silent. Cristina/Sofía is stunned.
ICE taunted Kristi with this sarcasm as the gas canisters landed at her feet, before arresting her for peaceful protest outside a local detention center:
“Your 1st Amendment rights are on the sidewalk.”
This is the language of authoritarianism.
The insistence that rights are conditional, that humanity is a privilege, and that the state’s imagination trumps reality.
The Argentine junta rewrote history to suit its narrative. So does ICE. So do the architects of Project 2025, the leadership of The Heritage Foundation and Christian Nationalist movement.
Migrants are not “animals”. Protesters are not “thugs.”
They are not just lying. They are gaslighting a nation, daring us to betray our own eyes, our hearts, and our memories in favor of manufactured fear and delusion.
The only two races
Viktor Frankl, who survived the horrors of Auschwitz and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, describes the only two races that he perceives, based on his experience in the camps:
I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human “something” which this man also gave to me - the word and look which accompanied the gift.
From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two - the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man.”
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl, 2006, 80-81
The junta chose indecency. So does ICE. So do politicians who stoke fear for power, who turn a blind eye to torture, who call human beings “invaders” and “aliens”. This is not about ideology. It is about morality.
The General in Imagining Argentina saw himself as a savior: A man destined to deliver his country from the “weakness” of democracy. Sound familiar? The delusion of grandeur, the lust for dominion; the conviction that the ends justify any means. This is the playbook of every tyrant. And it is the playbook of those who cheer ICE, who dismiss the suffering of the disappeared as “collateral damage.”
There is no middle ground here.
You are either with the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo or with the men who stole their children. You are either with Kat Abughazaleh or with the agents who gassed her. You are either with the Venezuela men in Cecot or with the torturers who broke their bodies.
A Warning and A Call to Action
The America in Our Hearts is Under Siege
The #NoKings movement understands this. It is a rejection of the delusion. It is an insistence on the America we carry in our hearts—the one that welcomes the stranger, that defends the vulnerable, that refuses to confuse cruelty with strength.
But that America is under siege. It is being chipped away by lies, by rubber bullets, by prison cells in foreign countries, by the slow erosion of due process. The Dirty War caused Argentina’s economy to crumble once the junta fell. ICE will not reign forever. We must combat complacency in the face of their cruelty, as it is the ally of tyranny.
We must be the generation that refuses to look away. That insists on truth over fiction, on justice over expedience, on humanity over hate. The America we save may be our own.
The America We Fight For
I leave you with this: Argentina collapsed under the weight of the junta’s lies. Ours will too—if we let it.
Let’s fight this, together.
We can choose imagination over delusion. We can choose memory over amnesia. We can choose the America in our hearts over the manipulated messaging.
The question is not whether we will resist. It is whether we will resist in time.
Additional Sources & Further Reading
Reports on Cecot prison conditions
On the Dirty War: There are many historical accounts of Argentina’s Dirty War and human rights atrocities. It’s best to start with the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association, and these two books by Professor Emeritus of Long Island University - J. Patrice McSherry:
Cathrin McDougall is an Art Historian and Historian, with expertise in Argentina`s Dirty War, the history of the Jewish diaspora in South America, and the history of trauma, resistance and change.
