Country Report: Argentina Five images (or more accurately, ten) to think about Argentine post-dictatorship memory politics: Towards a ?Never End? to Neoliberalism?

MAURO GRECO

2018-11-19/2020-07-31

Social

Ciencia y cultura-Cultura

It is difficult to recommend a form of public memory politics to be taken in and for Argentina. And this is not due to ? as has been suggested in some Latin-American studies samples ?any particular national ?exceptionality?, but rather because Argentina placed human rights and memory at the core of its own grammar of transition from the last dictatorship (1976-1983) to a rebirth of democracy (10th December 1983).This was atypical in the global context because, in contrast to other nations emerging from recent extreme experiences such as Italy, Germany, etc., Argentina, as a result of a revitalised human rights movement comprising the Mothers and Grandmothers of the disappeared (the Madres and Abuelas, respectively), instigated and carried out judicial process against its own perpetrators without the need for intervention or support from any external actors or governments. In any case, it was just such external forces which had aided and supported the Argentine coup d?état through interventions such as Plan Cóndor, through which the United States and a number of central European countries sought to extinguish the social unrest that had shaped América Latina ? Améfrica Ladina (Hellen Nunes da Silva, 2019) ? since the early 1960s (Buch, 2016). Argentina was hardly an exceptional case here: since the 1960s, in the midst of a ?calentamiento histórico? (Viñas, 1993) that the western world had experienced in the aftermath of World War II, a range of political activists, from Marxists-Leninists to left-wing Peronists, were advocating popular revolutionary struggle, armed or otherwise, with the ultimate aim of unseating the government. This social, political and ideological agitation, as well as the implementation of a neoliberal capitalist model that was put in place following the crisis of the welfare state after the 1973 crisis, were the reasons for the 24th March 1976 coup in Argentina, rather than the existence of a malign military sector that wanted only to destroy the naïve adolescents who dreamed of a better world ? the ?Lennonist incarnation? of the young people who were prepared to take up arms in the pursuit of a socialist revolution. Certainly, both national and international studies of the Argentine recent past, and particularly of its strongest Human Rights movement, turn a blind eye to this, thus presenting a piteous problematic view of what should be addressed in its social, historical and political history. This, of course, has not been the exclusive responsibility of certain either international or national academics studying the Argentine recent past: even some local symbolic productions, with the aim of building a human-rights attuned memory culture, effaced or downplayed the political background of those ideological struggles, presenting a depoliticised depiction of the agitated 1970s (Greco, 2019). Cazadores de utopias (Hunters of Utopia), directed by David Blaustein and released in 1996 on the twentieth anniversary of the coup d?état, is the perfect example of this: the scene in which a former female militant member of Montoneros, a left-wing Peronist armed organization, throws herself onto an old mattress in an attempt to recreate the conditions within a clandestine detention centre (CDC from now on), is indicative of how the last Argentine dictatorship was predominantly depicted until the second half of the 1990s. But what has changed from that moment?