"Rise up, rise up, the children are watching. The children are watching." (Ariel Dorfman, "American University")

Rabbits are an interesting breed; they are comical, approachable and the focus of Looney Tunes' favorite cartoon character, named Bugs. Yet this furry, lovable, creature, which is rarely associated with dictators, oppression, and worst of all disappearances, is the central theme of two Southern Cone texts. In Ariel Dorfman's La rebelión de los conejos mágicos (1986), these enchanting animals are outlawed from the regime of the lobo (wolf). Despite the intended young readership of this children's book, the eerie similarities between Pinochet's regime in Chile and his prohibition of the opposition are indeed evident. Twenty years later in Argentina, the theme of rabbits takes center stage again as Laura Alcoba recalls her brief stay with the Montoneros in La casa de los cornejos (2008). Like the rabbits in the previous work, the Montoneros were outlawed, hunted down and eliminated from Argentine society. In this testimonial novel Alcoba shows how the profession of breeding rabbits provided a smokescreen for the publication of resistance periodicals that were illegally distributed in Argentina's underground. Her memories of her youth in this novel, not only personalize the tender relationship that the protagonist had with the outlawed Montoneros, they also reveal the brutal environment of the dictatorship witnessed from the innocent eyes of a seven-year old girl. In this work I will explore the ways in which the tyranny of these regimes produced the emergence of the uncanny in the young protagonists revealing early manifestations of trauma. While Dorfman's fictional work provides an approachable symbolic text for La Capra's theories of "working through trauma," Alcoba's personal testimonial offers a keen glimpse into the manifestation of trauma and coping skills of young children in oppressive regimes.

The decade of the 1970s witnessed a dark and violent period in the Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Manuel Antonio Garretón describes these regimes as an expression or a new type of militarism involved in a distinct phase of the development of capitalism. As such, the military regimes were assigned with the denouement of a political crisis, characterized by a high degree of polarization between the active and mobilized sectors (15). This critic refers to the double logic or two dimensionality of this historic type of regime that on the one hand reacted against something, be it populist society, the state of compromise, or state activated popular mobilization, and on the other constructed something entirely new (15). In their pursuit to integrate into a US controlled geopolitical system of capitalism, military dictators conducted a vicious war against political leftists, and accordingly anyone who was associated with the opposition or remotely suspected of insurgence was persecuted. While the intensity of the reactive dimension varied from country to country depending on the degree of radicalization and polarization, a cornerstone of this reactive logic was repression, reinforced by unprecedented techniques of brutality (Garretón 15).

Because military governments of the Southern Cone perceived the disorder...