Tomas Varnagy[1]

History and Memory

Short stories of Argentine exercises of oblivion

Introduction

The history of Argentina in the twentieth century is full of lack of memory, attempts of concealment, oblivion and covering up of events, ideas and people. In the opinion of the Argentine historian Dora Schwarzstein, it is a characteristic of this country to impose, officially and unofficially, active politics of “forgetting”[2]. Argentina did not have a Holocaust neither a Stalinist regime, but irresponsibility, arrogance and evil lurked in different periods of its history through peoples and political parties in the government and the opposition, in the left and the right, in civilians and militaries alike.

We could review Argentine history in an aseptic and value-free mode, but the task of memory must evaluate what is right and what is wrong and there should be a moral approach to these phenomena. “Crimes, terror and repression”, be it in Nazi Germany, Stalinist regimes or Argentine dictatorships, must be condemned, memorized and kept for future generations. How many victims? 100 million, six, thirty thousand or just one human being… it does not matter, as the writer Jorge Luis Borges said on the desaparecidos (“missing or disappeared persons”) in his country, “if there is only one, that is a crime against all of humanity”[3].

Paraphrasing Saul Friedländer[4], there is a great difficulty involved in grasping events of the recent past and becomes truly formidable when you try to reconstruct and interpret the most terrible moments of Argentina’s recent history. Opposite to the paradox of the worldwide growing memory and consciousness of the Shoah, there is nothing similar or parallel in the case of Argentina; in fact, the tendency is to forget and cover up a painful local past.

In this paper I will examine a few cases of oblivion in the recent history of Argentina: the military coup of 1955 decided that there should be no memory of Perón and Evita; the failure of the left in the 1960s and 70s should be forgotten and is not a debatable issue; state terrorism and the desaparecidos should not be remembered, be it an authoritarian or a democratic government; and, finally, antisemitism, which “does not exist” –for some- in Argentina.

Antiperonism (1955)

One interesting example of trying to erase the past was when the democratically elected –but highly controversial- Juan Domingo Perón (accused by his opponents of Fascist leanings and being a “democratically elected dictator”) was ousted in 1955, after ten years of office, by a coup d´état. Taking a fiercely anti-Peronist stance, the militaries dissolved Perón’s old party and placed the labour unions under state administration. His name was, simply, forbidden to appear printed or pronounced. The media (newspapers, magazines, radio) could not mention him, therefore the euphemism “the fugitive tyrant” (because he escaped to Paraguay and, later, Spain) was used instead. It should be remembered that this action did not stop Perón to win, by absolute majority, the elections of 1973.

The militaries did not only forbid Peron´s name, but also dismantled or abandoned many institutions made by Perón or his wife, especially if they belonged to the Fundación Eva Perón. One example of this, which I recall very well because I worked closely, was the Evita´s Children´s Hospital project, intended to be the best in Latin America and almost ready for inauguration in 1955. It was simply relinquished and it became the Albergue Warnes (“Warnes Shelter”), a huge complex of buildings on Warnes street converted into a refuge for outcasts and homeless people. Decades later it was demolished because it was already useless.

The posthumous and morbid odyssey of Eva Perón´s corpse was another tentative of oblivion[5]. She was the second wife of Argentine president Juan Perón, who, during her husband’s first term as president (1946-52), became a powerful though unofficial political leader, revered by the lower economic classes and known as Evita. She won the adoration of the masses, and, after her death due to cancer, Evita remained a formidable influence in Argentine politics.

Perón preserved Evita´s body embalming it and planned, just as the Soviets had done with Lenin´s corpse, to exhibit it in a mausoleum. Her working-class followers tried unsuccessfully to have her canonized, and her enemies, in an effort to exorcise her as a national symbol of Peronism, stole her body in 1955 after Juan Perón was overthrown, and the embalmed corpse was hidden in a small cemetery in Milan, Italy, for 16 years.

In 1971 the military government, bowing to Peronist demands, turned over her remains to his exiled widower in Madrid. In 1973, Perón returned to Argentina to run one last time for president and, after he died in office in July 1974, his third wife, Isabel Perón, hoping to gain favour among the populace, repatriated the remains and installed them next to the deceased leader in a crypt in the presidential palace. Two years later a new military coup hostile to Peronism removed the bodies; Evita’s remains were finally buried in the Duarte family crypt in the famous and exclusive Recoleta cemetery[6].

The unrepentant left of the 1960s and 70s

Some important components and characteristics of the leftist tradition in Argentina were full of authoritarianism, ignorance, unreasonableness, dogmatism, lack of knowledge and intellectual rigor, arrogance, disdain for democracy, fearful of discussion and debate, uncritical, irresponsible, suicidal, undemocratic, precipitated, triumphalistic, nightmarish…

These epithets were not pronounced by the Fascist right but by the leftist Argentine intelligentsia in the 1990s[7]. To understand what happened with the left in Argentina during this period we must make a short historical account.

Since 1955 Peronism was forbidden and the elected presidents were voted without the participation of Perón or his party. A new military government (1966-73) was resisted by the population through revolts and demonstrations that marked the birth of guerrilla coming out from different factions of Peronism and the left. The main underground activities were organized by a Trotskyite (at the beginning) group, the ERP or Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (“People´s Revolutionary Army”), and by Peronist groups, being the Montoneros the most important one.

In the 1970s the terrorist acts by this groups increased, and Perón supported the Peronist guerrilla. The military government prevented Perón’s own candidacy but could not stop the electoral victory of the Peronist coalition in March 1973. When the newly elected president, Héctor J. Cámpora, took office in May 1973 it was immediately clear that he was merely preparing the way for the return of Perón from exile. Tensions rose sharply among left (Montoneros) and right wing Peronists for influence. At the final return of Perón in June, there was a battle between right and left at Ezeiza International Airport. The union leadership and an associate of Perón, López Rega, launched a violent antileftist campaign through a death squad organization, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA, or Triple A), which had the discreet support of Perón himself[8].

Perón was elected president with his third wife, María Estela Martínez de Perón, known as “Isabel”, as vice president. Taking office in October 1973, he continued the campaign against the left, and in May 1974 the victims of the purge acknowledged the break with their former leader and passed into opposition. Montoneros activity increased, and the Triple A, suspected by many to be close to the police and intelligence branches of the administration, began to crack down on leftist political, student, and union leaders.

When Perón died on July 1, 1974, his widow Isabel was sworn in as the world’s first woman president. Under the influence of López Rega (leader of the Triple A), the government became even more inflexibly oriented toward the right, and violence reached new heights. López Rega, who used the rightist crusade to consolidate his power base, favored labor and army leaders who personally supported him, and this created hostility among union, political, and military leaders. The unrest deepened and, on March 24, 1976, military officers -again- deposed the president and took over the government

There were many different strategies adopted by the left in the beginning of the 1970s, one of them was the entrista (“entering one”) believing that they could “enter” Peronism and with the Peronist voters, the figure of Perón and Evita, they could make the socialist revolution. There was a lot of wishful thinking that projected all hopes in the Peronist working masses.

Others supported the Leninist idea of a party of professional revolutionaries. Did they read the Trotsky of 1905 or Rosa Luxemburg? Many self-proclaimed leftists not even read nor debated this issues, just imitated or aped the theories that produced the Gulag, Pol Pot or the Great Leap Forward. Were they aware of the social costs and the horrors of the grinding machine of ideas and flesh that was put in motion?

In those days nobody dared, in leftist circles (with few exceptions), to criticize the Soviet Union or talk about bureaucracy in “really existing socialisms”; it seemed impossible to be on the left and not praise the Kremlin and their satellites[9]. Stalinism in the Argentine Communist Party had been very strong, the Gulag existed, but everybody was looking somewhere else. The leadership of the party did not allow the minimal internal dissidence to their views, dictated from Moscow, but they were more flexible –for instance- with their policies at the university. That is why they were called oportunistas hacia fuera, sectarios hacia dentro (“opportunists in the outside and sectarians inside”). Today, what is the difference between Argentina and the countries of Eastern Central Europe? That in Argentina there is still a Communist Party, opportunistic and dogmatic as it always was.

Trying to reason out events in a Marxist-Leninist sect was something against all reasonableness and against any empirical fact or evidence. One of the absurdities of a Trotskyst fraction was denouncing the military coup of 1976 as a pro-Soviet maneuver of the Argentine armed forces. Another paradox was that the different Trotskyte factions fought (and still do) against each other with more zeal than against the bourgeoisie and the capitalists.

Argentina lacked a strong or significant “peasant” class, but when you strolled around university premises you could see posters, aping the Soviet Union or China in an incredible import of recipes, asking for the unity of obreros y campesinos (“workers and peasants”). Today, even the working class is a class in extinction in Argentina but some leftist parties still use this denomination.

The Maoist groups had an imaginary China, which was beautiful and it was not bad because it was completely false. It was an “easy” leftist position –as some militant defined it-, because they denunciated the Soviet Union and all the “real existing socialisms”, so they were to the left of the left, even to the left of the Trotskysts, who maintained that the “Workers State” had gone through a process of bureaucratization. It was the most radical and “leftist” position and they thought of the revolution in Argentina with Chinese categories and a total lack of the objective realities that separated these two countries.

Montoneros, the most important Peronist guerrilla, did not fight for democratic liberties and the constitution, as they used to state. They fought for a strange idea of “socialism” (they came from the right of the political spectrum and, as time passed, turned to use some Marxist points of view) to be discussed somewhere else, and, even with democratic elections in 1973, their slogan synthesized their position: Con las urnas al gobierno, con las armas al poder (“Get the government with votes, get the power with arms”). This slogan can be anything but democratic; therefore, their struggle for democratic liberties was false, a simple lie that tried to conceal their real aims.

When I mentioned suicidal irresponsibility, I was thinking of the methodology of the guerrilla (Montoneros and ERP) which went underground (1974) in a democratically elected government, avoiding a democratic debate in the organization and importing foreign theories without analyzing them properly. In many cases, there was a precipitated adoption of armed struggle[10], believing that Argentine reality could be assimilated to the ones in Argelia, China or Vietnam.

A couple of years ago I went to see a new documentary film, Cazadores de Utopías (“Utopia Hunters”), an eulogy of Montoneros, which show them as “freedom fighters” and as the “armed arm of the Argentine youth”. Young people at the movie were very enthusiastic about it and I felt uncomfortable, because it was a simplistic and manichean view of the world: the good ones (Montoneros and the Peronist masses) against evil (the militaries and the bourgeoisie), and they appeared as heroes in the struggle for freedom, when they were just a group of armed guerrillas with little support of the population, and much less from the Peronist masses after Perón himself threw them out of the Party in the Plaza de Mayo.

Due to these absurd positions, the leftist political parties were always, and still are, minor parts of the political game: their weakness was and is connate. Paraphrasing the joke on Gorbachev´s Nobel prize for chemistry (because he converted “socialism” in dust), it could be stated that the left in Argentina has been pulverized to almost its extinction, but there is a great abstention in debating this failure.

Some people on the left believe that what happened in the Soviet Union had no relationship with “Socialism” or “Marxism” but, undoubtedly, it strongly affected the whole left, if there is any left. This is an issue that must be discussed critically and kept in the memory of future generations to avoid bloody mistakes. Somebody must take up the responsibility of what happened, farther away or closer, but nobody seems to be referred to. Too many things, good and bad, happened since the term “left” was invented during the French Revolution, and some of the bad things that happened are their responsibility.

The left did not yet discussed nor debated the meaning of the fall of “real existing socialisms”, its connections and relationship with them, and the event itself was quickly annulled or simply assimilated as the result of the tergiversation made by Stalinism. This way, the intellectual certainties and politics of the left were not compromised by the Fall of the Wall in 1989. One hypothesis, mainly in Trotskyst circles, explained it as the sign that the masses were retaking the betrayed revolution and reincorporate those countries to the revolutionary struggle to establish a more radical democracy.

The miscalculation of the guerrillas (Montoneros, ERP and others) were several: first, they did not have the support of the population; second, the “objective reality” finally showed that the time was not ripe for “revolution”; and, finally, they were fighting against a much superior military force, and they were easily decimated. They hide the facts that show their failure and only memory will avoid to repeat this dangerous actions supported by a triumphalistic view which was nothing else than a childish fantasy that sent many young idealists to their deaths. Most of the left (be it Maoist, Trotskyst, Castrist or Soviet) was infatuated with a mystical revolutionary idea that failed in Argentina, a failure that can be extended to the Che Guevara in Bolivia.

On the one hand, most of the leftist survivors do not want to ask themselves about this painful events, do not want to know about them it because most of them –and it is perfectly understandable- were tortured, have dear relatives and friends in the list of desaparecidos, had to keep silent and hide, or leave the country in an arduous exile. This collective process was exultant at one time, and pathetically tragic some time later. On the other hand, some characters of the left dramatically shifted their views and today you can find them in high political positions in a “bourgeois” government or working in multinational corporations. These are some reasons for which the left, the responsible ones of past mistakes, failures and changes, prefer to conceal it.

Concluding, as the leftist academic Eduardo Grüner states: “I am very much worried about the resignation of important sectors of what we considered the leftist intelligentsia in Argentina to start a really deep debate […]. There is an outspoken, noteworthy, anesthesia in the Argentine intellectual environment…”[11]. This lack of discussion and not assuming the past, according to Leon Rozitchner, mistakes makes that “in this country nothing can be done to make memory play. They talk about the memory of the deceased: here we are all dead, most of the present Argentine thinking is dead”[12], because the ones who took part now they do not want to know about it, it is better to forget[13].

State Terrorism (1976-83)

The coup in March 1976, closed Congress, imposed censorship, banned trade unions, and brought state and municipal government under military control. They initiated the infamous Process of National Reorganization, known subsequently as the Guerra Sucia (“Dirty War”), in which some 13,000-30,000 citizens were killed, often following their imprisonment and torture. The Argentine military government, maintained that it was fighting a civil war and initially faced little public opposition, but this began to change in the late 1970s, with growing evidence of civil rights violations.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who lost children in the Dirty War, began calling international attention to the plight of the desaparecidos through weekly Thursday afternoon vigils to know the whereabouts of their relatives in the Plaza de Mayo, fronting the presidential palace. For the most part, however, opposition was choked off by rigorous censorship, strict curfews, and fear of the servicios (secret services of the armed forces).

The military dictatorship was responsible for thousand of desaparecidos: kidnapped, tortured and put to death. They did not want to have the world’s media against them like it happened in Pinochet´s Chile, therefore they planned a different way to treat the alleged “subversives”[14] (I put in quotation marks because most of the desaparecidos were not members of guerrilla or subversive groups): the militaries simply concealed the fact stating that they (the “subversives”) probably left the country or were hiding somewhere. At the end of the dictatorship the military officers allegedly destroyed (or hide) every document that could incriminate them.

When the militaries were accused in international forums for the abuses of human rights, the regime just disclaimed responsibility for brutality, trying to convince international bureaucracies, media and foreign administrators to ignore the veracity of the allegations. There was an instrumentation of a state terrorist machine, which acted anonymously and tried to behave as if nothing happened. Most of the population ignored or were unaware, at the beginning, what was going on as a consequence of the deep silence of the press. The ones who knew adapted by going about their lives as if terrible things were not happening[15].

Most of the kidnappings and murders happened in 1976-77 and, in 1978 when most of the guerrilla cells have been disbanded and have lost the battle in military terms, the dictatorship organized the World Soccer Cup, won by the Argentine team and which the militaries used to try to enhance the image of Argentina. There are accounts of detained people in unofficial jails that cheered the Argentine team and were enthusiastic with the winning of the World Cup.

Soccer became extremely important as a consequence of the regime’s program to improve its image in the outside world and, also, provided a strong incentive to overlook and forget domestic brutality. An overwhelming number of Argentines was easily manipulated to believe that the country was given a false image of abusing human rights and the population at large sided with the military regime. They thought that there was a “campaign against Argentina” and it was felt as an aggression against their country. During that period, almost everybody forgot, or did not want to hear, about the desaparecidos.

As a personal recollection, I must say that the day in which Argentina won the World Cup was one of the saddest of my life. We lived downtown Buenos Aires and there were so many people on the streets, chanting and jumping of joy, that we decided to take a stroll with my pregnant wife and my one and a half year old son in his little cart. We knew that very close to where hundreds of thousands of people met to celebrate the Cup there were desaparecidos detainees in underground parking lots[16].

Argentina was visited in 1979, against the wishes of the military regime, by the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights (CIDH in Spanish) to receive in situ the reports of crimes by family members of desaparecidos, mainly mothers which founded the association of Madres de Plaza de Mayo. The militaries still denied any responsibility of missing people, in fact, they invented the slogan Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos (“Argentines are human and upright”[17]) and made thousand of stickers which could be seen in cars and trucks, as a large portion of the citizenry supported the official thesis.

This slogan tried to cover up the fact of thousands of people detained, tortured and murdered in a concealed way. The idea was conceived to show that the “Argentine people” do not commit crimes against humanity, that no human rights were violated because Argentines are “human and upright”. Many people, who did not know about desaparecidos (because the media was forbidden to mention the issue) took it as an attack to their nation and tried to defend it sending letters to world leaders and organizations. The most popular ladies’ weekly magazine (Para ti) printed postcards to be sent to politicians and journalists of other countries with this slogan.

Many people, besides the ones who really did not know about the situation, simply decided to look the other way, as if pretending that nothing was going on would erase the violence and the pain. Acting as if everything continued to operate normally became customary in many Argentine circles. People stripped horrific events of their meaning and avoided direct confrontation with the most terrifying situations. A macabre example of this is when the union of undertakers in the province of Córdoba submitted a formal request to the military government to improve their working conditions due to the multiplication (ten to twentyfold) of the number of bodies unloaded from army trucks[18].

The corpses of this desaparecidos became an excuse for a bureaucratic step that would secure the undertakers of reduced work schedules, extended holidays and an early retirement. The massive murders had become routine, and most of the people regarded this massive killings (when they started to know) as inevitable, normal events. Everybody was “acting as if” nothing worthy of concern was actually happening; the regime’s strategy of denying its involvement in brutal practices was accompanied by the citizen’s avoidance strategy[19].

Paradoxically –or not so-, some variations of the “left” in Argentina (I put it in quotation marks because the “left”, here, had some lines of conduct which were against their own ideals) supported the military dictatorship. In fact the Communist Party of Argentina had a “critical support” for Videla, the first dictator in 1976. Something worst happened with the Socialist Democratic Party led by Américo Ghioldi, who openly supported the militaries and was rewarded with a diplomatic mission in Europe.

The main customer for Argentine wheat during the dictatorship was the Soviet Union, because there was a worldwide embargo due to the invasion of Afghanistan. When the United Nations wanted to punish the Argentina military government due to the violation of human rights, the Soviet Union vetoed it concealing a situation that the democratic and liberal countries of the world were worried about. In this case, probably, the reports of the Argentine Communist Party to the Soviet Union and the economic interests of both countries had a large influence on the decision.

By the beginning of the 1980s the military dictatorship was failing in social, economic and political issues. The fact of missing people started to appear in the media and Galtieri, one of the last dictators, seem to have read Aristotle and his suggestions to tyrants to keep in power (I do not think that he read the Politics, but he did follow his advice). The Stagirite mentions that if the tyrant has too many problems, the best way to make people forget about them is to start a war, because with a war everybody will follow their leader and think about the war and not other problems[20]. With popular support at home, Argentine troops landed on the Malvinas/Falklands in April 1982. A British naval force sailed to the South Atlantic and retook, after a brief land campaign, the islands.

It is interesting to mention that there were huge demonstrations against Galtieri and the militaries one week before the islands were invaded. One week later, there were huge demonstrations in favor of Galtieri. Surprisingly (or not so much), most of the left (although not all of it) favored the invasion because they saw it as an anti-imperialist war against colonialism, as if a right-wing dictatorship would transform itself in the standard-bearer of the oppressed in the world. This was another deceit to the “Argentine people”, in which most of the left and Argentines participated uncritically.

The issue of the Malvinas/Falkland is related to the fact, in my opinion, that a great part of the population in the country accepted the game created by the militaries and converted them in accomplices of the dictatorship due to their unconditional support of the war. It was part of another concealed “social covenant” that in the name of the “glorious” Argentine people took the islands if they close their eyes on the desaparecidos[21]. Nationalistic feelings were used –again- to cover up the “dirty war”.

Today no one wants to talk about the Malvinas/Falkland affair, and much less remember about their support to that lost cause. Veterans try to voice their grievances: lack of work, psychological problems, high rate of suicide and others, but most of the population and authorities conceal the issue, suffering a similar fate as the Vietnam war veterans in the United States. This process is called desmalvinización (“de-malvinization”) and consists of forgetting that other “little, dirty war”.

Restoration of democracy (1983 to present)

After the Malvinas/Falkland war the militaries lost power and under the last dictator, political parties were allowed to resume activities, and general elections were announced; meanwhile, elements of the armed forces worked to conceal evidence of crimes committed during the Dirty War. Democracy came back to Argentina in 1983, not because of civil society fighting for it but because the militaries lost the war[22]. The newly elected President Alfonsín promised to bring to justice and prosecute those persons responsible for human rights abuses perpetrated during the military rule. Eventually some trials were conducted, there were some convictions of high ranking military officers and some of them went to prison.

In 1984 Alfonsín created the CONADEP, an abbreviation of the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas [“National Commission on the Dissappearance of Persons”], a commission of “notables” or outstanding people (among them the famous writer Ernesto Sábato), which had to receive and compile denunciations on human rights abuses and dispatch them to the judicial power. Their labor was compiled in a book entitled Nunca más [“Never Again”] because that was their intention: avoid the repetition of similar events.

The people´s vision of what happened during the dictatorship shifted dramatically after the civilian administration stepped in 1983 and investigators and human rights advocates began to dig out hundreds of human remains of desaparecidos in clandestine common graves: many people, even those who supported the military, could not believe that things had gone so far. The media reported widely, specially on television, the recovery of hundreds of NN (unknown) corpses in different places around the country.

The well-known forensic anthropologist Clyde C. Snow came to Argentina in 1984 at the request of the newly elected civilian government to help with the identification of remains of the desaparecidos. He taught his Argentine associates to recover, clean, repair, preserve and analyze human remains. A year later he returned to give expert testimony at the trial of the militaries which helped to condemn many of them[23].

Some people even suspects that the trial of the military junta harbored real responsibility of other sectors that supported the dictatorship, like the economic power, the media, the judicial power, the Catholic church and the collaborationist political parties. In the same line of reasoning, the creation of the CONADEP symbolized that there was no need anymore of the many human rights organization, because –now- the government was taking care of human rights, now they were guaranteed and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and relatives of desparecidos can go home, stop worrying, and turn another page of Argentine history. The conclusion is that very few militaries were put in trial, all of them were pardoned and no supporter of them was ever molested.

The same government that put in trial some rights abusers made two bills, Punto Final (“Full Stop”) and Obediencia Debida (“Due Obedience”) in 1996 and 1997 which exonerated most of accused of perpetrating “atrocious” or “aberrant” acts. The final act of this humiliating drawback to military power and the process of erasing and oblivion of the bloodiest period of Argentine contemporary history was made by another democratically elected President in 1989, Carlos Menem, when he pardoned, in 1989 and 1990, officers convicted or indicted by civilian courts for human rights violations, drawing a veil over the past.

This official strategy of impunity frustrated the high expectations posited in the trials. State crime was not punished, was pardoned without the apropiate repentance of the criminals. The democratic government failed to do enough about past human rights abuses and violations, and the authority of the judicial power to avoid future abuses (i.e., through punishment) was politically erased.

One of the last gestures of former president Carlos Menem was to propose the demolition of the ESMA building, Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (“Mechanical School of the Navy”), a place that was widely used to hold desaparecidos, torturing and murdering them, in many cases throwing their bodies (drugged, but still alive) to the river/sea near the city. There was an original idea of converting the building in a Museum of State Terrorism, but what Menem wanted to do was to make a “national reconciliation” park in order to forget the horrors housed in that building, which still belongs and functions for the Navy. The government’s proposal of pulling down the building was with the intention of “eliminating everything and putting into practice an active oblivion policy”[24].

The idea of making a Museum of State Terrorism would serve to the same purpose as the Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany, that is, to reproduce the military dictatorship’s past and the horror of the desaparecidos for “the purposes of education, remembrance, and entertainment” and, also, as a “therapeutic treatment of the descendants of the perpetrators and bystanders”[25]. This, of course –due to the politics of “forgetting”- is something very difficult to do in present day Argentina because the self-critical elements in influential parts of our society are lacking. Self-criticism is memory, the opposite is oblivion, the winner -until today- of this game.

A non-solved situation: racism and antisemitism

There is a sporadic display, by some politicians and public-opinion formers, of prejudice towards certain immigration groups, specially darker Latin Americans and Jews, in which the notion of a tolerant and pluralistic society, advocated by many, has not yet become a reality. But, if you ask any Argentine they will answer that they are not racists neither antisemitic, that the country is a “melting pot” of different “races” and cultures, and so on. An old, popular saying, states that “Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Peruvians from the Incas, and Argentines… from the ships”.

One fact is that the indigenous population, and some black Africans, melted or were practically exterminated in the XIX century and their total population today is less than 200,000, living in far away provinces with a standard of living well below the average and with higher rates of illiteracy, unemployment and chronic diseases than the rest of the population. There is a continued hostility towards the new immigrants, especially from Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru, some of whom have entered Argentina illegally for economic reasons and their skin is a little bit darker than the average Argentine[26].

There are historical roots of the relative intolerance towards Jews. Their immigration in the beginning of the XXth century was not regarded as particularly desirable and there were anti-Jewish pogroms in 1919. The strong influence of the French right-wing, Fascism and Nazism in the Argentine militaries and ruling elite produced anti-leftist and anti-Jewish biases in the 1930s and 1940s. In the post-war period Argentina received thousands of immigrants from Germany and many other Central and Eastern European countries, many of them with Nazi-Fascist leanings, among some war criminals.

During the 1960s there was a strong anti-Semitic movement, specially after Israel´s kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960, an episode generally regarded within the country as the Jewish state´s trampling in Argentine sovereignty. Of 313 anti-Semitic incidents recorded worldwide in 1967, 142 took place in Argentina, ruled at the time by a military regime[27].

During the period of state terrorism under the dictatorship of 1976-83 an estimated ten percent of the more of 10,000 documented cases of disappearance are estimated to have been Jews (more than a tenfold of their population proportion). The Jewish prisoners received “special” treatment in the clandestine detention centers that were found to have anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans on their walls[28].

There is a high number of unsolved attacks against the Jewish community (specially their cemeteries) in Argentina, including two of the most important ones: the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in March 1992 and the headquarters of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina [AMIA, “Argentine Jewish Mutual Association”] in 1994. This situation prompted a Catholic priest, Hugo Mugica, to wonder whether it was naive to expect that cases of Jewish concern would be solved. Both attacks are suspected to be originated in the Middle East with support from local (Argentine) groups, some of them –allegedly- related to the provincial police force in the case of AMIA.

Some Jews are very unhappy with the “progress” of the investigations of the bombings and frequently challenge government officials. Laura Ginsberg, of the Memoria Activa group (Active Memory), which represents relatives of the embassy of Israel and AMIA bombing victims, spoke at a ceremony commemorating the victims of the attacks. Following her highly charged speech, Buenos Aires provincial governor and future presidential candidate, Eduardo Duhalde, was reported[29] as saying that Ginsberg´s words were an “understandable Jewish exaggeration”.

On the fifth anniversary of the Israeli embassy bombing, a Senator from the Peronist Party, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, along with the opposition parties, suggested that the second attack against Jews (AMIA) was linked to the government´s lack of will to clarify the first (the Embassy). The president of the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, one of the two most important political parties of Argentina in the XXth century), Rodolfo Terragno, said that the attackers had enjoyed a measure of protection from official “incompetence, negligence or complicity”. The Foreign Minister Di Tella considered that the results of the Supreme Court Investigation were “regrettable”. Whith such an inconclusive state of affairs the (then) Israeli ambassador in Buenos Aires, Yitzhak Aviran, warned about the possibility of a third attack.

Xenophobia and other prejudices cannot be ignored in Argentine society and, even though there is not a prevalence of antisemitism in the country, a survey made in December 1992 and sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the Argentine DAIA (“Argentine Delegation of Israeli [as synonym of Jew] Associations”) showed that 47 percent of the population did “not believe Jews to be a part of [Argentine] society”. If asked, many people believe in the so-called Andinia plan, an anti-Jewish myth about the takeover of Argentina by the international Jewry.

It is not casual that you cannot find Jews (there are some exceptions) in the armed forces: for many years aspiring professional soldiers had to disclose the religious affiliation of parents and grandparents when filling applications for admission to the Colegio Militar, the army´s officer training school. The requirement was aimed to avoid non-Catholic candidates. In the last years this requirement was dropped by the army leadership (General Balza), but the beneficiaries of this change have been Protestants, not Jews or other non-Catholics[30].

Final words

The elected governments weaknesses since the advent of democracy in 1983, including Alfonsín´s amnesties and Menem´s pardons for human rights violators plus the lack of a political decision to clarify the attacks against Jewish institutions, deepened the culture of impunity and covered the issues as if nothing happened.

To avoid future mistakes our past must be confronted and collectively memorized. Events must be given a certain meaning to have a decisive influence on the ulterior development of facts which will not allow their repetition, and -for this- we must have a total conscience of the horrors, and must be responsible to avoid them and this can only be done by keeping the memory of the events, not just in a neutral, value-free social science, but with an ethical stance and a strong moral attitude that will prevent, through education, the repetition of human mistakes that produce abuses of human rights. Education is a crucial point for future generations to awaken people’s conscience

The only way to modify authoritarian or totalitarian trends in any society, be it in Eastern Central Europe or South America, will be keeping the memory, the knowledge of the facts that have to be re-interpreted to enable a society to enter a path compatible with a rights-based democracy. This is not something which develops spontaneously, there is a requirement of an institutional remedy like the Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany, but also a due process of law in which criminal prosecution, punishment and repentance are voiced.

When we talk about memory in Argentina, the core, the articulating focal point from which all oblivion arise, is the question of the desaparecidos, because there it is possible to find the different levels and responsibilities of forgetfulness, the ones committed by antiperonism, the left, the militaries, the democratic governments. This memory has inside, dialectically and paradoxically, its own negation: oblivion, impunity, exclusion and fear.

I would like to finish this paper with the words of a dear Argentine professor of philosophy who died recently: “Even though death is the most powerful agent of oblivion, forgetfulness is not omnipotent, because you can always fight against it, in our case with the desaparecidos and the stolen children. Mankind has erected walls of remembrances in such a way that make paths which allow to follow its memories and, for sure, these are the signs of the existence of human culture”[31].

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