Continuing with the themes introduced in the previous chapter, Chapter Eight looks at Argentina's ‘Dirty War’, which commenced in 1976 and, in the UK, the miners’ strike from 1984 to 1985. Both events were undertaken in the defence of neo-liberal policies, yet they were committed by different types of regimes: the former being a rightwing dictatorship, while the latter was a right-wing democratically elected government.

Initially, though, the chapter will attempt to show how Argentina's ‘Dirty War’ represented a blatant (in terms of severity) yet relatively hidden example of a state terrorising its own people through violent abduction and execution. The chapter charts how – following Isabel Peron's use of excessive force and power to combat right-wing opposition – a military coup headed by Lieutenant General Videla took control of Argentina in 1976. Neo-liberal economic policies became the order of the day, while the opposition to such policies were branded as ‘subversives’, thus allowing for the use of violence as a means to repress and control the supposedly unruly, if not dangerous, negative ‘other’ (Bietti, 2011). Moreover, the chapter also demonstrates how the Junta had learnt from the violent, public atrocities in Chile (during Pinochet's dictatorship) and attempted to keep hidden their attempts to eradicate any possible Peronist threat. State-ordered disappearances were viewed as the best means to both eliminate the ‘enemy’ and to remain undetected. In the absence of corpses or public arrest records, the government was able to deny all wrongdoing despite the estimated disappearance of over tens of thousands of people (Wright, 2007).

By contrast, the chapter moves on to show how Margaret Thatcher, in pursuit of a monetarist, free market agenda, utilised British police (and the armed forces) to break the resistance of one of the country's most powerful unions, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). In order to show the gravity of the repressive actions taken by the government, the chapter focuses on events surrounding the NUM picket in 1984 of the Orgreave coking plant – situated near Sheffield – where organised violent attacks were perpetrated against picketing miners. In response to the accusation that the government had not preplanned the actions taken against the pickets, the chapter also broadens the debate to detail the aims and reasoning used by the Conservative government of the time to counter the effects of the NUM strike as a whole and thus justify and legitimise the tactics and measures deployed.