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This article analyzes the significance municipalities reached within the Political Plan of Argentina's last military dictatorship. Through the study of secrete, classified and public documents that were produced by the highest spheres of military power this paper shows that municipalities served as a fundamental link to the regime's Political Plan in different ways: as a political instrument of territorial and social "capillary" control characteristic of the dictatorship; as an authorized space for the participation of a local reaching, apolitical "municipal citizenship;" as a laboratory of political openness and as a sphere which nurtured "natural leadership" in Argentina. Finally, this paper identifies common and differing elements of the municipalization of the Chilean dictatorship with the Argentinean case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the economic model was not decided, one of the tasks of the official publishing house for the Chilean dictatorship, Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral (1973-1976), was to spread information about budding neoliberalism. This could not be achieved without banishing the language of --and identification with-- social classes, which was rooted in Chilean mentality. Using examples, this article explores how publications from the ENGM silenced and described social classes through themes such as folklore, anti-Marxism, national history or economics, thanks to its informative nature and to the procedural and cognitive possibilities of its texts. This paper proposes that as a latent subtext in those publications, the silencing of social classes could have been a metaphorical and aesthetic symptom of neoliberalism during the dictatorship, becoming in this manner a sign of its peculiar way to aestheticize politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]