Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and

Democracy in the Falklands/Malvinas

Shannon Dowd

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo 52, Número 2, Junio 2018, pp. 551-574
(Article)

Published by Washington University in St. Louis

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2018.0031

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705014

Access provided at 30 Sep 2019 19:30 GMT from Stony Brook University (SUNY)
Shortened Title 551

SHANNON DOWD

Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty,

Decolonization, and Democracy in the
Falklands/Malvinas

This article analyzes the key terms in the ongoing sovereignty debate over the
Falklands/Malvinas Islands through a reading of Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill’s clas-
sic novel Los pichiciegos: Visiones de una batalla subterránea. I argue against
critical interpretations of the novel as anti-war and counter-foundational,
finding that the novel reproduces sovereignty underground instead of resisting
it. I examine this thesis through competing, seemingly irreconcilable claims to
sovereignty: Argentina’s arguments for decolonization and Britain’s arguments for
self-determination. In fiction, Fogwill miniaturizes and allegorizes these concepts,
borrowing from Argentine dictatorship and Thatcherite discourses. He exposes the
concept of sovereignty as the link between the internal Dirty War and external
Malvinas War and between dictatorship and post-dictatorship politics and eco-
nomics. I argue that Fogwill also provides a way to begin considering the legacy
of sovereignty after globalization’s move away from the nation-state. Re-visiting
the novel makes the reader question the key terms of debate—decolonization
and self-determination—and look beyond sovereign territory and the nation,
suggesting a renewal of democracy.

˙˙˙˙˙

Since the brief but bloody 1982 war between Argentina and
the United Kingdom, the Falklands/Malvinas debate has continued to
stir international headlines.1 A few years ago, Prince William, the em-
bodiment of British sovereign succession, was stationed on the islands’
military base for training. A few years later, the islanders held a vote
affirming their status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, Argentina began issuing commemorative currency recalling
key episodes in the fight to keep hold of the islands. A new fifty-peso
note printed with an image of “El Gaucho” Rivero, “primer defensor
de la soberanía nacional en las Islas Malvinas,” recently joined a com-
memorative two-peso coin issued in 2012, so that the sovereignty claim
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 52 (2018)
552 Shannon Dowd

has literally become common currency. This defense of sovereignty by
the common man recalls a primal theft of Argentina’s national wealth,
fittingly, at a time of economic crisis and as oil deposits surrounding the
island seem larger than initially thought. Unsurprisingly, then, the dis-
pute over the islands remains one of the most intransigent sovereignty
conflicts in the world.
The problem has been brewing for hundreds of years, dating
back to colonial legal arguments about who discovered the islands, how
long they belonged to whom, how far the islands are from the UK or
how close to Argentina, and who lives there. Two core principles have
governed the debate since large-scale European withdrawal from Global
Southern colonies: decolonization for Argentina and self-determination
for Britain. These principles came into conflict in the lead-up to the
war, and remain unresolved and subject to interpretation and debate in
international law.2 Yet, the war had immediate and concrete effects on
politics on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to topple the Argentine
military dictatorship known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional
and consolidating Conservative power under British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher.
In what follows, I examine the political impasse between
decolonization and self-determination in the Falklands/Malvinas
through the first and most famous novel about the war, Los pichiciegos:
Visiones de una batalla subterránea by Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill. I read
the novel alongside cultural criticism and political discourse in order
to challenge canonical interpretations that see Fogwill’s novel as em-
blematic of the Argentine anti-epic or a counter-foundational novel in
the wake of the war. While these interpretations fit Fogwill’s polemical
personality, they gloss over the ways Los pichiciegos uses fiction to distill
political process and engage social and political context. I argue that,
instead of a narrative against war and toward life or against epic and
toward ethics, the novel presents a fictional sovereignty that reconfigures
but does not fundamentally alter the questions of decolonization and
self-determination under debate. Los pichiciegos depicts a redoubling of
these terms in a fictional, nationless sovereignty. It enacts a paradoxical
movement away from the nation and toward the state, away from tra-
ditional warfare and toward war’s extension in other diffuse forms. The
novel exhausts the foundational principles of sovereignty and leads to
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 553

one of the most politically pressing issues of our time, namely, the ero-
sion of nation-state sovereignty under globalization. As the relationship
between sovereignty, territory, and people shifts, Los pichiciegos offers
an experimental site to test both the intensification and dissolution of
sovereignty in ways that resonate with our contemporary situation.
By the end of the novel, I argue, Fogwill shifts focus to the pueblo—
the demos—in order to re-frame the islands away from the sovereign
territory and toward democracy.

Fogwill and the Anti-Epic

Written in the final days of the war, Los pichiciegos became an

instant classic, quickly circulating in manuscript form prior to its 1983
publication. The novel set the major themes and tone for the next three
decades of Malvinas fiction in Argentina. State censorship meant that
accurate information about battlefield conditions was difficult to find;
Argentina’s increasingly dire situation was covered up with the infa-
mous “Estamos ganando” headlines. Nevertheless, Fogwill imagined a
scenario that was very similar to the more accurate accounts that began
pouring in after the war. For instance, the testimonial account Los
chicos de la guerra, which formed the basis of the hit 1984 film of the
same name, reveals the extent of state reliance on young conscripts who
were inadequately prepared and whose superiors were ill-equipped to
respond to the British. Despite having no certainty about these condi-
tions, Fogwill describes his novel as an experiment in combining what
he knew about the cold South Atlantic, young men, and the army based
on his experience in obligatory military service (Kohan, “Fogwill”).
Fogwill’s nimble manipulation of these circumstances into narrative
render his novel a lucid exposé of the messages hidden within political
and media propaganda at the time of the war.3
The resulting text, Los pichiciegos, follows a group of desert-
ers from the Argentine military during the war. Like the soldiers on
the islands, they are largely conscripts who name their group after
an armadillo—the pichiciego—that burrows into the ground when
threatened. The deserters, pichis for short, have all abandoned their
regiments and built an expansive underground network of tunnels. Be-
cause of their flagrant disobedience, they are often cast as part of early
554 Shannon Dowd

anti-war sentiment. Against the masses that filled the streets of Buenos
Aires in support of the military campaign in April 1982, the pichis give
voice to the horrors of war. Their disdain for official power fit into the
quickly developing narrative in which the Argentine surrender in June
1982 handed the military junta its marching orders. The people rose
up and disavowed a previous reliance on the military to impose and
maintain order. The pichis seemed to be one step ahead of those on the
mainland in abandoning the military.
Understanding the pichis as anti-authoritarian aligns with Fog-
will’s reputation for controversy. Los pichiciegos was his first novel, and
marked a forceful entrance to the literary scene for an outsider. Trained
as a sociologist, he later worked in advertising before dedicating himself
to journalism and fiction. He became known for his unabashed expres-
sion of polemical stances (Fogwill: Literatura de provocación). Conse-
quently, criticism tends to see his first novel feeding into the rebellious
post-war political climate on the one hand, and Fogwill’s reputation as
a kind of picaresque character in his own right on the other.
Perhaps as a result of Fogwill’s outsider status in Argentine
letters, critics tended to see the novel as inherently anti-authoritarian.
For instance, Martín Kohan’s article “El fin de una épica” describes Los
pichiciegos marking the end of the heroic war epic. Kohan explains that
the novel’s anti-epic style paved the way for farce rather than drama
in later Malvinas fiction, especially Carlos Gamerro’s celebrated 1998
novel Las Islas (Kohan, “El fin” 6). Drawing on Kohan, Julieta Vitullo’s
comprehensive Islas imaginadas. La guerra de Malvinas en la literatura
y el cine argentinos traces a genealogy of Malvinas narrative, beginning
with Los pichiciegos as the inaugural anti-epic of Malvinas (19; 72–78).
Vitullo describes how the novel transforms the war’s dire conditions to
solidify an anti-epic model for subsequent cultural production about
Malvinas. In the wake of the war, fiction, testimony, and film became
the instruments to describe the soldiers’ lack of preparation, official
abuse, and generalized disappointment with the supposedly heroic
mission. Beginning with Fogwill, this interplay between social and lit-
erary texts ensured the hero’s disappearance from cultural production,
replaced by reluctant conscripts and would-be deserters.4
The novel’s challenge to the traditional war story reflects a
change legible across different registers of Argentine culture. For in-
stance, in Paola Ehrmantraut’s Masculinidades en guerra. Malvinas
en la literatura y el cine, Los pichiciegos stages a textual negotiation
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 555

of the transition from military to neoliberal models of masculinity,

from national hero to savvy businessman. Bernard McGuirk reads
the novel as a transformation of the very foundation of society in his
Falklands-Malvinas: An Unfinished Business. He writes that Fogwill’s
novel “performs a counter-foundational narrative of inverted values,
an underground movement that whilst apparently refusing metaphor,
exploits the metaphorical power of the literal” (21). In other words, the
pichis inhabit the underground of the anti-epic or counter-narrative.
They exploit the slippage between literal and metaphorical registers.
Fogwill translates this slippage spatially, most clearly in his subtitle:
Visiones de una batalla subterránea. There are planes bombing the men
from the sky, land mines lying flush with the ground, and submarines
surrounding the islands while the scared-to-death pichis inhabit a crypt-
like burrow carved into the side of a hill, barely alive in the realm of
the dead. The pichis have escaped the war, which they observe from the
bottom up instead of top down. Their underground struggle resists the
spatial frame of the battlefield and inverts traditional hierarchies, which
Fogwill, as sociologist and critic, was not afraid to explore.

Sovereignty, Anti-Sovereignty

The pichis have ample reason to retreat from the battlefield and
hide underground. Poorly equipped and facing bitter cold, the soldiers
realize that the campaign has become little more than mutual slaughter.
Far from home and understandably terrified, they abandon the state.
Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation explains that “it proceeds from
fear of mutual slaughter, that one man submits himself to the domin-
ion of another” (39). Protection from the state of nature, “a mere war
of all against all,” is the promise made to citizens in return for obedi-
ence (Hobbes 13). Carl Schmitt condenses Hobbes’s observation into
a simple formula: “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the
state” (52). Through this promise, the state aims to maintain power. On
the islands, state sovereignty—its power over the body politic—reaches
crisis. The state extends its dominion into Malvinas, claiming the right
to territory in order to expand its protection and obligation onto the
islands. As it does so, its promise of protection fails and so the obliga-
tion likewise disintegrates.
556 Shannon Dowd

At the outbreak of war, and especially in the case of conscrip-

tion, the state takes the risk that fear, characteristic of the state of na-
ture, might dissolve the political compact set up in the protego. Indeed,
the soldiers in Fogwill’s novel are shot through with an instinctive,
animalistic fear. Beyond the title’s armadillo, Fogwill likens the pichis
to the mindless sheep roaming the islands. In a deliberately attentive
passage, the narrator follows one at length as it nibbles on some shrubs
then runs away from an approaching soldier. In its haste to escape, the
sheep steps on a land mine, its limbs, skin, and scorched wool flying
through the air.5 The narrator describes the smell: “El olor a oveja re-
ventada por una mina es parecido al olor a cristiano reventado por una
mina: olor a matadero cuando se carnean animales y llegan los peones
que les trabajan en el vientre para hacer achuras” (117). The passage
provides a carnivorous update to Hobbesian mutual slaughter in the
old Latin phrase homo homini lupus, “man to man is an arrant wolf.”
The indiscriminate force of modern warfare spares nothing and no one.
Once the pichis find that the state’s promise of protection has
dissolved, the national boundaries between Argentine and British, like
those between human and animal flesh, begin to break down. Seeing
no obligation to continue serving, they drop out of the army, first sim-
ply digging into the ground, and later actively collaborating with the
British in exchange for valuable merchandise. For instance, they place
radio transmitters to guide missiles to Argentine targets in exchange for
other goods like batteries and fuel. Below ground, the logic, and even
the existence of the state is placed in suspension; the burrow becomes
the infra-world of the soldiers that refuse to fight, bound together by a
will to survive. In her article “No olvidar la guerra de Malvinas,” Bea-
triz Sarlo writes: “Paradójicamente, es la guerra que ha destruido, para
ellos, toda idea de nación: llegados a Malvinas como soldados de un
ejército nacional, las operaciones de ese ejército han deteriorado todos
los lazos de nacionalidad. De la nación, lo único que los pichis conser-
van es la lengua” (12).6 If there is no nationalism in Malvinas, there is
no enemy, no ordered division of the political along the line Schmitt
famously set between friend and enemy. For Sarlo, this basic national
division has deteriorated so that the pichis form a “colonia subterránea
donde se refugian para sobrevivir, y donde los valores se organizan en
función de esa misión social única: la de conservar la vida” (12). As they
refuse to obey the state, the pichis pass into the condition that Giorgio
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 557

Agamben calls “bare life,” reduced to basic survival.7 Under this read-
ing, Los pichiciegos becomes a text that refuses war as politics—a text of
the interregnum.
In the wake of the defeat and subsequent toppling of the mili-
tary government, the pichis’ desertion of the regime, though fictional,
seems prescient. However, it does not take a central role in the plot,
which begins when the soldiers are already underground. The novel’s
scribe, Quique, only briefly mentions that the process of desertion was
planned and methodical. Before abandoning their regiments, a core
group of pichis surreptitiously persuaded other soldiers to help dig the
tunnels that would form their burrow. By the time Fogwill drops his
reader in the pichicera on the first page of the novel, this core group
is already known as los Reyes Magos (referred to below as the Kings).
In other words, before it has even begun, the interregnum has already
come to an end; having dropped out of the ranks of the Argentine state,
the Kings create their own protego ergo obligo.
Like many of those that read the novel through its anti-sover-
eignty currents, Sarlo’s analysis of Los pichiciegos functions in the sus-
pension between one protego and the next, in the interval between one
type of sovereignty and another. The pichis, freed from the obligation
to kill or be killed, enter an amorphous, subterranean space in which
they can escape the nationalism that brought them to Malvinas. At
first, it seems uncertain whether this new arrangement is horizontal or
hierarchical, but uncertainty gradually gives way to new rules imposed
and habits defined. Fogwill describes one of the earliest rules: the men
are strictly forbidden from drinking potentially contaminated water and
from defecating in the burrow. They must boil all water or drink mate,
tea, or coffee to avoid getting uncontrollable diarrhea on pain of death.
Having described the rule, Fogwill writes: “y aunque nadie sabía si los
Magos eran capaces de matar o no a un pichi o a uno que había sido
pichi, por las dudas no lo iban a probar: obedecían” (34–35).
Later, the Kings collectively decide which are the weakest of
the bunch, and those select few never come back from a mission to
the British encampment. When the leader in charge of getting rid of
them returns, he feels compelled to invent an explanation: “Como
nadie nombró a los pichis que faltaban, el Turco sacó el tema y les dijo
que habían quedado con los ingleses, en garantía, y todos creyeron, o
quisieron creer o hacer creer que creían . . .” (64). This disappearance
558 Shannon Dowd

bears the hallmarks of the arbitrary violence and utilitarian logic toward
the populace that the Argentine dictatorship used to justify its actions
between 1976 and 1983.
The key difference between the junta militar and the Kings is
that the violence is on a much smaller scale and stripped of ideological
justifications like nationalism, anti-communism, or anti-terrorism. In
a brief analysis, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott presents Los pichiciegos as
a work that “discloses the post-hegemonic articulation of power in the
sense that it is not necessarily configured (and never was) through clas-
sical ideological interpellation” (201). At the moment they desert, the
pichis refuse the state’s interpellation. However, this moment is already
eclipsed in the text. Denuded of ideology under the guises of nation
and army, Fogwill shows the pichis’ new sovereign protego, including a
set of norms, central storage system for food and supplies, and, most
ominously, an organizing junta with the power to determine which of
them lives or dies. The pichis forego the dictatorship’s territorial claims
and ideological instruments in order to articulate a non-national—but
not quite post-sovereign—state. They use the material conditions of the
battlefield as instruments of force. Like one of the pichis, who spends
his time retelling the plots of films he has seen, we already know this
story. Fogwill merely recounts it, and like the pichis listening to el Tur-
co, we believe or want to believe or make others believe that we believe.

Underground Colony, Underground Values

Belief in the promise of protection allows the pichis to gloss

over these disappearances. They are part of the preservation of life. The
preservation of life, in turn, spurs McGuirk to describe the novel as a
“counter-foundational narrative of inverted values” (21). If in war it is
death that is valued, in the pichicera it is life. In Sarlo’s interpretation
survival becomes the only value:
Los pichis son una colonia de sobrevivientes de las que se han ausentado
todos los valores, excepto aquellos que pueden traducirse en acciones
que permitan conservar la vida. Si el nudo de la guerra es liquidar al
enemigo, el nudo de la colonia pichi es evitar, a cualquier precio, que
ello suceda con los miembros de la colonia. (12)
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 559

The question becomes whether the pichis can value survival without
valuing protection, in other words, whether they can preserve life with-
out instantiating a new sovereignty.
Fogwill writes that the pichis’ instinct to survive drives them to
create an underground economy. El Turco, gathers the raw materials
needed for survival. He channels his fear toward commerce, including
full control of the underground market:
Es que el miedo suelta el instinto que cada uno lleva dentro, y así como
algunos con el miedo se vuelven más forros que antes, porque les sale
el dormido de adentro, a él le despertó el árabe de adentro: ese instinto
de amontonar las cosas y de cambiar y de mandar. . . . Y el que lo veía
mandando, cambiando y almacenando cosas ni pensaba que atrás de
todo eso estaba el miedo. Pero es el miedo el que está atrás mandándote,
cambiándote. (103–04)

The economy functions in line with the value placed on survival that
drove the pichis underground in the first place. The fear that permeates
the war marks an intensification of the death drive, and it makes el
Turco, described through the racist stereotype of the Arab businessman,
focus on acquiring and marketing material goods.
Gradually, however, the underground market gets channeled
toward accumulation, as el Turco shrewdly manipulates resources for
the group’s needs:
Si a él le sobraba querosén, hacía correr la bola de que precisaba quero-
sén, que se acababa el querosén, que todos daban cualquier cosa por el
querosén. Después mandaba un pichi desconocido a la Intendencia o al
pueblo, o a los ingleses, a ofrecer querosén y volvía lleno de montones
de cosas a cambio de un bidón aguado que a él le venía sobrando. (136)

False austerity and market manipulation drive the underground econ-

omy. Fictional scarcity helps the Kings control the market in order to
consolidate internal control. Mimicking the shift from state sovereignty
in its traditional form—the monarchy of the four Kings—to more
flexible, economic forms, el Turco suggests the rampant neoliberalism
of post-dictatorship Argentina as well as British Thatcherism.8 Already
before the fall of the dictatorship, there is a shift toward the control of
the market rather than mere survival. The pichis end up controlling life
in the name of preserving it. As Zac Zimmer points out when reading
Fogwill’s work as continuity between dictatorship economic policy
560 Shannon Dowd

and post-dictatorship neoliberalism: “the Pichis’ desire and willingness
to surrender themselves to the unregulated, underground market . . .
lends the text its eerie sense of prediction” (145). Survival, it seems, can
escape neither the logic of protection nor the language of value; it is
survival at any cost. Consequently, instead of a counter-foundation, this
underground market represents a key part of the alternate foundation of
the post-dictatorship—a shift in emphasis from state-sponsored death
to a life controlled by value.

Decolonization

Just as el Turco creates false scarcity in the fuel market, oil

reserves, including those surrounding the islands, exert influence on
the contemporary market. The value of the islands has increased since
the war, and the issue of decolonization has become more pressing
for Argentina. Since the war, Argentina has relied on a two-part legal
argument in presenting its case before the United Nations Special
Committee on Decolonization: an argument to restore territorial
continuity—conserving Spanish imperial borders—and an argument
that suggests using this continuity to re-populate the islands and extract
natural resources—transforming them into primary material sources
to supply the Latin American and global marketplaces.9 The tension
between these two tendencies makes the islands a proving ground for
legal arguments about decolonization.
Argentine claims to the territory remit, first and foremost, to
imperial borders. The islands had no known indigenous inhabitants
and were “discovered” by the French. They belonged to Spain in spite
of sporadic and scarce settlement, principally by European traders. At
independence from Spain, the islands transferred to the new nation in
accordance with international law, but in 1833, British settlers claimed
the islands and established the longest lasting continuous settlement.
Since then, they have remained politically affiliated with the UK, first as
a colony then as an Overseas Territory. The Falklands and UK govern-
ments have recently worked toward partial devolution of sovereignty to
the local government, seeking to satisfy the UN’s requirement that the
territory be self-governing. The Falklands government drafted a consti-
tution and held a referendum in 2013 that affirmed popular support
for continued association with the UK.
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 561

For Argentina, however, the year 1833 remains an important

date for claims to the territory. De facto Argentine president General
Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri established this moment as foundational
in the illegal British settlement of Malvinas in an interview that would
seal his fate as the incompetent leader of an illegitimate government.
During the interview in the final days of the war, journalist Oriana
Fallaci argued that UK settlement in the South Atlantic resembled
European settlement on the South American continent, a claim that
Galtieri refused to address. Flustered by Fallaci’s probing questions, Gal-
tieri told her: “Señora periodista, no retrocedamos tanto en el tiempo.
Analicemos las cosas como fueron desde 1833 cuando los británicos nos
robaron las Malvinas” (7). Fallaci disputed the date because, she argued,
if one goes back in time, much of Argentine history is colonial—more
specifically settler colonial—history. The Argentine claim rotates instead
around the theft of the islands, which disrupted continuity with Span-
ish borders.
At the end of the war, on the other side of the Atlantic, a mem-
ber of parliament confronted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on
the question of sovereignty: “Is it not a profound anachronism in 1982
for any sovereign state to have territory 8,000 miles away?” to which
the Prime Minister responded, “There is one principle—that territorial
sovereignty be respected” (“15 June 1982”). In order to back up her
claim to the inviolability of sovereignty, Thatcher later wrote that in the
early days of the conflict she tried to convince her advisors of the ne-
cessity of sending troops, using the metaphor of robbery: “I remember
asking him whether if a burglar had taken all his possessions he would
consider that he had to negotiate with the burglar as to how much
he was ‘entitled’ to keep” (Memoir 15). For Thatcher, this example
proved that the conservation of property superseded the historical and
geographical circumstances of its possession. Sovereignty is to territory
what possession is to property, both, in many respects, timeless.
Both leaders’ references to theft preclude the historical con-
struction of sovereign territory as property. Both colonization and
decolonization of the islands revolve around conserving territory,
taking territory—sovereign bordered land—as part of the state’s
ahistorical foundation. Yet territory is a historical construction, which
Stuart Elden defines at its most basic as “a political and legal term con-
cerning the relation between sovereignty, land, and people” (Terror and
562 Shannon Dowd

Territory xxvi). At the start of the war, the relationship between sover-
eignty and land eclipsed the importance of the people. The nation’s link
to territory became terror as both leaders extended the state’s monopoly
on violence onto the islands. The two deeply conservative currents
that the leaders embodied made the result of the war conservative in
the most literal sense: it re-affirmed the extant territorial order and the
importance of framing history around imperial borders.10
Just as in Argentina the charge to decolonize Malvinas elicited
and elicits nationalism then and now, in Britain, decolonization opened
a channel for possessive austerity. In a speech against a planned railway
strike just after the war, for instance, a triumphant Thatcher used the
military victory as evidence that Britain could recover its past glory, but
only under conditions of continued sacrifice:
[T]hey too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no
longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the
world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain
has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities
which shine through our history. (“Speech to Conservative Rally”)

In spite of decolonization, very little has changed, Thatcher seems to

say. Very little can or should change. Austerity, including in this case
lambasting striking workers for their disservice to the country, was the
lesson to be learned from the decadent empire and the only way to keep
fear at bay.11 The lesson of the Falklands is that empire only devolves
power on its own terms.
In both British and Argentine cases, decolonization adheres
to the foundational moment of colonization, whether the moment
the islands were bestowed on the young Argentina by a benevolent
colonizer (Spain) or the invasion of another decadent but not defeated
empire (Britain). Compromise has become impossible as decolonization
stagnates in old imperial rivalries. Yet, while Thatcher and Galtieri ma-
neuvered within the frame of property, Fogwill’s pichiciegos play with
the idea of transformation, re-colonizing the islands underground.
They have no territory or property to recover, so they can start from
the space they carve out for themselves. In addition to the Argentine
deserters who serve as initial settlers, Fogwill later adds a few English
soldiers to form a multi-national, multi-lingual community that, as we
have seen in the figure of el Turco, hints at the rise of a global melting
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 563

pot and increased power through accumulation. The pichis are primed
to test the discourses of sovereignty and decolonization that preceded
and accompanied the war.

Decolonization and the Dirty War

As the Argentine government mediated the precarious position

of defending colonial borders while fighting twentieth-century imperial-
ism, the war made strange bedfellows between the dictatorship and the
Argentine intelligentsia abroad—particularly the group of prominent
and soon-to-be-prominent thinkers exiled in Mexico City called the
Grupo de Discusión Socialista. Unwelcome in their home country since
the 1976 coup, the group published a manifesto calling for support of
the war. Even though they considered the government that had begun
it illegitimate, they rallied around the cause of anti-imperialism and
British decolonization.
León Rozitchner, however, cast a skeptical eye toward intellec-
tual support for the war. Writing at roughly the same time as Fogwill,
Rozitchner questioned the Mexican Grupo de Discusión Socialista’s ac-
ceptance of the dictatorship’s position and characterization of anti-war
sentiment as a result of “falacias de origen” (139). For them, the fact
that the war originated with the junta does not make it any less justi-
fied as a defense of the “justos intereses populares” (140). The Mexican
group argued for a direct link between sovereignty and national terri-
tory regardless of the type of government that made the claim. However
in Malvinas: de la guerra sucia a la guerra limpia, Rozitchner shows that
the military government’s destruction of popular sovereignty necessarily
rips open the representational seam between territory and people. The
junta precludes any claim to sovereignty because a “clean” war—the
Malvinas campaign—is no less reprehensible than a “dirty” one—the
large-scale disappearance and murder of Argentine citizens perceived to
be subversive. In fact, for Rozitchner this clean war is an outgrowth of
the logic of the Dirty War. Rozitchner argues that the Grupo de Dis-
cusión Socialista supported the war at the expense of other principles,
against invasion and occupation, for instance, or toward electoral de-
mocracy.12 They ended up entangled in uncritical anti-imperial desires,
defending expedient violence in the name of recovering sovereignty.13
564 Shannon Dowd

In short, they ended up defending the indefensible military junta that
had forced them into exile.
The path to decolonization—including the decolonizing desires
of the Grupo de Discusión Socialista—leads to defense of the indefen-
sible logic that violence bartered for a greater good can achieve true
popular sovereignty. As Argentine intellectuals supported the reclama-
tion of Malvinas, ignoring the military government’s self-colonization,
Fogwill’s pichis show that the consolidation of power consolidates a
different type of sovereignty underground. In both, the weakest are
disappeared in the name of survival. In Fogwill, a dirty war turns clean,
then dirty again.

Self-Determination

If traditionally Los pichiciegos is seen as a novel that reduces

soldiers to stateless survival—a community of bare life—a second look
at the novel reveals that the pichis move between dirty and clean wars,
as Rozitchner claims the whole Malvinas campaign does. One evening,
lubricated by a healthy dose of whiskey, the men discuss the thousands
of disappearances and death flights under the dictatorship. They won-
der aloud whether Argentines will ever be allowed to vote again, and
later that night the scribe, Quique, and el Turco are fitfully trying to
sleep. Quique, evidently suffering from a guilty conscience, asks: “‘Che
Turco… ¿te parece…?’ ‘¿Qué?’ ‘¿Que éstos pueden votar?’ ‘¡Éstos no
pueden nada!’, dijo el Turco y ‘¡dormite!’” (58). The issue never arises
again. The Kings have slipped from the state-sanctioned violence of
war to the state-instantiating violence of centralized authority and the
lack of popular sovereignty that Rozitchner denounced.14 Underground,
they escape the war but reproduce the lack of democracy, turning their
power against their own.15 The pichis are not only economically orga-
nized to begin a primitive accumulation, as in their manipulation of the
fuel market, but also reproduce the expediency of strong sovereignty at
the cost of electoral democracy.
Democracy in the form of self-determination has been Britain’s
defense against calls to relinquish claims to the Falklands. Yet, as with
decolonization, there are no fewer legal problems that arise with self-
determination, for instance: who is the self allowed to determine politi-
cal organization? How is this self defined? Even if both nations cut out
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 565

the historical vector of imperial claims and focus only on the present,
the problem remains. If the Malvinas belong to Argentina, then the
self could include the whole of Argentina, in addition to the relatively
small group of people living on the islands. A vote would surely support
Argentine sovereignty. If the self includes only the Falkland Islanders, as
in the current attempt at devolving power to local government, then the
result of any vote would confirm association with the UK.16 According
to Argentina, however, such a vote represents “a serious distortion of
the spirit of self-determination” because the islanders are an implanted
population (UN General Assembly 4). The distortion of self-determina-
tion, in turn, resonates with Fallaci’s questions, recalling the specter of
European settler colonialism in Argentina. The delimitation of the self
and Other in the islands depends on drawing another border around
the political unit, even as the first one remains disputed.
Consistent with the consolidation of a self against an enemy,
Néstor Perlongher wrote in his essay “Todo el poder a Lady Di,” con-
temporaneous with the war, that the Argentine invasion had whipped
up “un delirio xenofóbico” (177). On both sides of the Atlantic, the
immediate reaction to war was to distinguish between the two peoples
in terms of essential identities. Unsurprisingly, in a speech before the
House of Commons at the start of the war, Thatcher cultivated a com-
bined British-Falklander selfhood through qualitative and genealogical
proximity, confirming that the people are of “British stock” and alle-
giance, explaining their geographical and racial affinities:
The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United King-
dom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is
to the Crown. They are few in number, but they have the right to live
in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own
allegiance. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown.
(“3 April 1982”)

Thatcher presents an opening toward freedom of choice, suffocated

by the repetition of the Crown—an affiliation through sovereign
synecdoche. The inhabitants’ small number should not stand in the way
of their strength, she says.17 Their qualitative identity stifles dissent and
encourages freedom of association, fundamental to avoid the charge
of colonialism. As Jacques Derrida fittingly points out, this affinity is
“rooted in the security of an autochthonous foundation, in the stock or
in the genius of filiation” (104). After all, the word “stock” describes
566 Shannon Dowd

growth from a common core. Yet it also describes valuation: items held
in reserve, portions of assets bought and sold, and futures contracts
gambled on the market. In Thatcher’s case, taking stock of the islands
covers up the islanders’ impossible autochthony with a filial proxim-
ity. Consequently, in her view the stocks of the colonial era—as much
accumulated territories and resources bought and sold—can be linked
to specific identities.
In Los pichiciegos, stock takes on a slightly different, though re-
lated, character. Most of the novel takes place in or near the pichi stock
room, which forms the basis for Sarlo’s emphasis on materiality and sur-
vival. The pichis are among the few soldiers not starving to death, and
since most of them were presumed dead, the other conscripts “soñaban
que los pichis eran muertos que habían engordado comiendo tierra
abajo de la tierra” (80). The pichis seem to be autochthonous ghosts
springing from, belonging to, and feeding on the earth.
By the end of the novel, however, they go from consuming the
earth to being consumed by the earth. Quique returns to the burrow
to discover one by one that Pipo, el Turco, the embedded British radio
operators, and all of the other pichis are dead, suffocated by trapped
carbon monoxide. As Sarlo points out, by the end of the novel, the
pichis become objects themselves, melding with the objects in the store-
room (13–14). The narrator describes them gradually blending into the
ground: “los dos ingleses, los veintitrés pichis y todo lo que abajo estu-
vieron guardando van a formar una sola cosa, una nueva piedra metida
dentro de la piedra vieja del cerro” (155). Fogwill inscribes them into
the landscape, where they finally, lifelessly belong.
In the end, Quique admits that the pichis will not be remem-
bered beyond their fictional inscription. Their story is familiar: having
harnessed the fear of death, they abandon the state. They attempt to
re-colonize the space of decolonization, implement a survival-based
value system, but it then turns toward accumulation, resembling a
proto-neo-liberal war economy. Their story also exposes decolonization
as historically dependent on imperial territories and self-determination
as an identity-based war between self and other that easily slips into its
own dirty war. In short, their story binds two of the core elements of
territorial sovereignty—decolonization and self-determination—to the
point of suffocation.
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 567

Democracy

The impasse between decolonization and self-determination

has become even more entrenched since the war. Trying to sew up the
split between colonial and decolonial politics has only succeeded in
toughening the scar. While Thatcher and Galtieri’s speeches emphasize
different aspects of sovereignty in an attempt to restore an ahistorical
transcendence to the islands as possessions, resistant readings of Los
pichiciegos likewise emphasize the transforming power structure and the
soldiers’ underground life as a baseline of survival. Yet underground,
as we have seen, the pichis engage in a growing, pathetic repetition of
the conditions above. The Kings rehash the same, tired excuses as their
political leaders. Even in the pichi colony there seems no way to avoid
a feeble apology for imperial heritage and stifled dissent.
In this view, the pichi colony, based on fear, reaches a dead-end
in the Falkland/Malvinas genealogy. Instead of imbuing the Malvinas
genre with anti-authoritarian or picaresque tendencies, Los pichiciegos
appears to be a late-dictatorship novel displaced into the South Atlantic.
Unlike a dictatorship novel, however, there is a shift from internal to
external war and back again, accompanied by a weakened reliance on
territory and an economy ruled by artificial value. These characteristics,
in turn, hint at the novel’s resonance with current debates about the
role of the nation-state, sovereignty, and territory in the twenty-first
century. The pichi colony provides a testing ground for proposals about
the nature of sovereignty in the present. In “Will Sovereignty Ever Be
Deconstructed?” Catherine Malabou draws on the Hegelian dialectic
to suggest that if sovereignty were deconstructed it would be thanks
to an intensification of its own negativity. Instead of seeing the pichis’
underworld dwelling as some hard node of resistance, as in Sarlo, Ko-
han, or Vitullo, or as a slippage between metaphor and literality, as in
McGuirk, I would like to consider Fogwill’s novel an experiment with
this redoubled sovereignty underground, condensing and re-framing
Thatcher and Galtieri’s words in the name of expediency and survival.
In her essay, Malabou argues that sovereignty has not yet been
deconstructed, but perhaps we can see the beginnings of this decon-
struction by reading Los pichiciegos as an intensification of sovereignty’s
negative tendencies resonant with contemporary circumstances. In-
creasing international interdependence and partial dissolution of the
568 Shannon Dowd

nation-state into macro-political and trade units such as the European
Union and Mercosur have created new forms of political organization
under the catchall name of globalization. Accompanying these changes,
however, have been contradictory movements away from integration,
including the reclamation of sovereign rights based on older political
forms (Brown, Marramao).18 The pending withdrawal of Britain from
the European Union is one salient example. Virulent defenses of nation-
al and ethnic identity lead to rising xenophobia, while also justifying
the increasingly exploitative extraction of resources in the euphemistic
name of survival within the global marketplace. For instance, Malvinas
became a key issue under the Kirchner governments in Argentina dur-
ing a period of financial contraction and high oil prices. Los pichiciegos
reveals that these diverse phenomena were already present during the
war. The pichis’ redoubling of sovereignty deploys ossified state logics
that instrumentalize history and filiation, value and affect. They reveal
the kinship between colony and value, decolonization and the identi-
fication of the self against an enemy. In practice, these ideas operate as
discursive technologies of state and property within sovereignty, pro-
nounced above ground and fictionally repeated below. And these trans-
formed discursive technologies continue to function in reclamations
of decolonization and self-determination in the Falklands/Malvinas.19
However, the pichis also reveal the eclipsed other side of the
sovereignty question on the islands: democracy. As the novel has been
read and re-read through the decades, the critical impulse has been to
find and recover democracy over sovereignty. Yet one wonders, in light
of the interpretation presented here, is it even possible that the pichi
story might be recovered for this purpose? To borrow an even more
radical question from Derrida: “Would it still make sense to speak of
democracy when it would no longer be a question . . . of country, na-
tion, even of State or citizen—in other words, if at least one still keeps
to the accepted use of this word, when it would no longer be a political
question?” (104). Can there be democracy without fear, without pre-
serving imperial territorialization, without the sovereign state and its
citizenship, without an enemy?
Fogwill provides a clue about how to begin responding to this
difficult question. At the end of the novel, the only surviving pichi,
Quique, abandons the burrow before the carbon monoxide suffocates
him along with the others. Once above ground, “[Quique] volvió a
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 569

prender un cigarrillo, pitó, sintió más seco el humo, lo sopló, miró

cómo se deshacía entre los remolinos y decidió seguirlo y también él
se dejó ir con el viento a favor, hacia el lado del pueblo” (156). As he
mourns the loss of the past, Quique turns away from the ruined pichi-
cera and toward el pueblo. Fogwill doesn’t identify the town, so instead
of reading el pueblo as Stanley/Puerto Argentino where the Argentine
troops are surrendering, one might read Quique’s story as turning to-
ward el pueblo in the sense of people, or demos. This deliberate mis-/
re-reading of the equivocal word re-frames the war away from the link
between power and territory and toward a link between power and
the people. Argentina has not re-gained the lost territory; only a liter-
ary artifact lingers. Quique’s fiction then becomes, not only the most
famous novelization of a brutal war, but also the instrument through
which readers can critique the discourse of sovereignty and its dominant
affect of fear. In Los pichiciegos, this seemingly intractable conflict enters
a literary imaginary where the effects of war can be posed and reconsid-
ered, not through presence and property but rather minimizing terri-
tory in favor of the people. To borrow an image from Carlos Gamerro’s
novel Las Islas, the key cultural products to emerge from this war are
not, in fact, about the reclamation of territorial sovereignty, but rather
about the empty space left behind: “En el corazón de cada uno hay dos
pedazos arrancados, y cada mordisco tiene la forma exacta de las Islas”
(414).20 This loss continues to beg the difficult and unrelenting question
of how to let go of filling this mark of absence, how to turn toward the
pueblo—the demos—without falling into the trap of sovereignty.

University of Michigan

NOTES
1
Out of respect for the sovereignty implications of naming conventions, I refer to
the islands as Falklands/Malvinas in general, the forward slash preserving the split
rather than the supplement of a hyphen. I use Falklands when referring to the British
perspective and Malvinas when referring to the Argentine.

2
For a recent discussion of international law in the Falklands/Malvinas case, espe-
cially regarding jus gentium, see Alexis Chommeloux, “The Falklands Conflict: The
Uncertainties of International Law Examined 30 Years On,” in 30 Years After: Issues
and Representations of the Falklands War.
570 Shannon Dowd

3
For more, see Alejandro Losada’s reflections on literature as a social institution, which
argues that “el único modo de entender la especificidad . . . del hecho literario como
un fenómeno social, es articulando de manera inmediata los conjuntos literarios con la
praxis social de los sujetos productores y . . . con la situación de la estructura social” (57).

4
For more on the dialogue between literary text and social context in Argentina, see
Andrés Avellaneda’s classic El habla de la ideología, especially the first chapter “Tiempo
de vivir y tiempo de escribir.”

5
Minefields remain on the islands since the war, including in the vicinity of the capital,
Stanley. They are marked but have not yet been cleared.

6
Note that, even though Sarlo claims that language unites the soldiers, Fogwill also
marks language as a point of division. In the scene in which they name themselves
pichiciegos, the soldiers have different names for armadillos, which they work around
by describing the animal’s behavior and appearance. Later, when two British soldiers
move into the burrow, they have entirely different languages again and struggle to
understand each other—with the exception of one of the pichis whose hushed intimate
relationship with a British officer is referred to obliquely.

7
Drawing on Sarlo, María Pia López describes the passage into bare life as the pre-
political foundation of a new community: “Fogwill va hacia ese momento prepolítico
de la fundación de comunidad, del encuentro de los hombres y de la constitución
de una lengua y de la construcción de cierto tipo de afectividad” (López, in Fogwill,
Literatura de provocación 69). As we will see, this pre-political moment is already
eclipsed in the text of the novel.

8
In an interview with Martín Kohan, Fogwill accounts for Sarlo’s 1994 materialist
analysis of Los pichiciegos as a response to neoliberal menemismo, in which one was
free to choose as long as that choice was to stay in the market (Kohan, “Fogwill”).

9
The committee still regularly considers the issue. For more detail on historical claims
and issues in international law, see Gustafson.

10
The question is whether or not there exists a way of approaching territory beyond
sovereignty while still accounting for the relationship between land and people. For
more historical background, see Stuart Elden’s The Birth of Territory, which provides a
conceptual history of territory in the Western tradition. His book Terror and Territory
examines the concept of territory during the so-called War on Terror.

11
Another of the lessons of empire is vividly portrayed in the film This Is England (dir.
Shane Meadows). The Falklands War, which claimed the life of the protagonist’s father,
shows the effects of large-scale decolonization on mainland Britain. As waves of im-
migrants from former colonies move to the UK during the already fraught time of the
miners’ strikes, white British workers perceive the so-called greatness of England to be
Los pichiciegos on Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Democracy 571

under threat. Immigrant presence stokes a strong xenophobic reaction, from which the
film shows conservative currents splitting, some into Thatcher’s economically-focused
neoliberal policies, others into white supremacist nationalism.

12
Rozitchner does not declare himself a pacifist, keeping his arguments contextualized
within the 1982 war. More far-reaching arguments against warfare from a decolo-
nial perspective appear in the more recent Against War: Views from the Underside of
Modernity, but as with most anti-war treatises, the title Against War reproduces the
binary to which it is so firmly opposed. Here I suggest that the Falkland/Malvinas War
exposes certain contradictory points in arguments for political and epistemological
decolonization that still need to be examined. Rozitchner’s book serves as a tool to
begin looking at this problem by creating an explicit connection between different
types of violence, thus avoiding blanket pacifism as well as the oft-repeated argument
that the Malvinas War was the just campaign of an unjustified government. Rozitch-
ner’s tempered view serves as an important counterweight to an uncritical nationalist
reclamation of sovereignty still common today.

13
Rozitchner writes of desire as part of the intellectual’s political position more broadly:
“como buenos intelectuales que nos movemos tratando de justificar nuestros deseos
en papel, reconozcamos que no estamos haciendo otra cosa que justificarlos y a veces
hasta alienarnos al deseo ajeno” (45).

14
In a further irony of history, democratic Argentina now claims that the islanders
do not have the right to self-determination because they are an implanted settler
population. The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization agrees with
this position, as explained below.

15
Galtieri was forced to confront the issue of democracy in his interview with Fallaci.
Using the dictatorship’s official rhetoric, he defended the impossibility of the vote as
preparation for future electoral democracy; once the pressing issues of the present had
been satisfactorily resolved, democratic elections would return to Argentina. Galtieri
fully expected to win the election and legitimize his government on the strength of
the recovery of Malvinas.

16
The 2013 vote on political association, mentioned above, returned nearly unanimous
support of the islands’ relationship with the UK, an impressive but unsurprising confir-
mation of the status quo. Perhaps the true surprise was that two people had voted no.

17
A similar idea appears as part of the xenophobic British National Front rally in This
Is England, in which one of the leaders quotes Shakespeare’s Henry V without mention-
ing that the play is his source: “An English king on the battlefield once said, ‘From
this day to the end of the world, only we in it shall be remembered, we few, we happy
few, we band of brothers.’ Gentlemen, it is the time to stand up and be counted. It is
the time for action.” The call is to eject those migrating from former colonies to the
UK in the name of a vigilante defense of the British way of life.
572 Shannon Dowd

18
Although Wendy Brown and Giacomo Marramao have different perspectives on
the contradictory nature of globalization, their work helps explain the resurgence of
sovereignty claims and identity politics, especially in times of crisis, in spite of macro-
level political and economic fusion in globalization. For a different perspective that
focuses on the disappearance of the enemy to update Schmitt’s thought in times of
globalization, see Galli.

19
The most explicit example is the 1994 Argentine constitution, foundational docu-
ment of post-dictatorship electoral democracy, which includes a provision for the
recovery of Malvinas.

Vitullo collaborated on a recent documentary, La forma exacta de las islas (dir. Daniel
20

Casabé and Edgardo Dieleke), in dialogue with Gamerro’s line.

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Keywords: Fogwill, Los pichiciegos, Falkland Islands, war, sovereignty, democracy.

Palabras clave: Fogwill, Los pichiciegos, Islas Malvinas, guerra, soberanía, democracia.
574 Shannon Dowd

Date of Receipt: April 24, 2016
Date of Acceptance: January 28, 2017