The setting of the film ties its characters to the political situation in Argentina in two different time periods: 1975 and 1999. The main events transpire in 1975, a year before the start of Argentina's
last civil-military dictatorship (1976–1983); the final year of the presidency of
Isabel Perón saw great political turmoil, with both leftist violence and
state-sponsored terrorist organization, especially at the hands of the
Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (usually known as Triple A or AAA), a far-right
death squad founded in 1973 and particularly active under Isabel Perón's rule (1974–1976). A U.S. supported
military coup in 1976 triggered the so-called "
Dirty War", which is foreshadowed in the character of Isidoro Gomez and his protection by the government due to his work helping that administration and its
judicial system to find (and later kill) left-wing activists and militants or
guerrilla members. The state-sponsored terrorism of the military
Junta created a climate of violence whose victims were in the thousands and included left-wing activists and militants, intellectuals and artists,
trade unionists, high school and college/university students and journalists, as well as
Marxists,
Peronist guerrillas or alleged sympathizers of both. Although in the period there was leftist violence involved, mostly by Montoneros, most of the victims were unarmed non-combatants, and the guerrillas were exterminated by 1979, while the dictatorship carried out its crimes until the exit from power. After the defeat in the
Falklands War,
the Junta called for elections in 1983. The
National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons originally estimated that around 13,000 individuals were
disappeared. Present estimates for the number of people who were killed or
disappeared range from 9,089 to over 30,000; The military themselves reported killing 22,000 people in a 1978 communication to
Chilean Intelligence, and the
Mothers and
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which are the most important
human rights organisations in Argentina, have always jointly maintained that the number of disappeared is unequivocally 30,000. Since 1983 Argentina has maintained democracy as its ruling system: in that year
Raúl Alfonsín was elected president and soon spoke out against the Argentine junta's use of torture and death squads who spirited away "the disappeared" and killed them, hiding their bodies in unknown locations. In office, Alfonsín set about punishing police and troops who were responsible for unknown thousands of deaths in the so-called "dirty war". By 1985 the government had promoted the
Trial of the Juntas, which prosecuted and condemned the men who were at the top of the military hierarchies during the country's last dictatorship, stopping short of prosecuting the other army men and civilians who were also responsible for the period's crimes. The second period portrayed is 1999, during the last days of
Carlos Menem's administration. During this time, the national laws known as
the "Full stop" law ("Ley de Punto Final") and
Due Obedience – sanctioned during the 1980s – were still in effect. These legal elements, popularly known as "the amnesty laws", had effectively blocked the investigation of thousands of cases of human rights abuses committed during the time of the country's last dictatorship. This period of Argentina's history is shown to stress the predicament in which the character of Ricardo Morales lived, since the impunity that criminals and human rights abusers like Gómez enjoyed at the time prevented Morales to bring the former to justice: the penal system would have convicted Morales for his past actions. At the same time, many former torturers and murderers of the dictatorship – who had previously been friends or partners of Gómez – were free at the time, and would have likely taken revenge on Morales. This fact further explains why Morales isolated and locked himself up with Gómez for so many years. In 2003
the political climate changed, and during President
Nestor Kirchner's administration, the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, along with the executive pardons, were declared
null and void, first by the
Congress and then by the
Supreme Court. These changes, promoted by the government in 2005, enabled the judicial power to prosecute and take to trial all the responsibles of
State-sponsored terrorism, also including politically motivated criminal acts committed between 1975 and 1983. The crimes of that period are still being judged as of 2024. == Production ==