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Download date: 04. Oct. 2021 Country Report: Argentina

Mauro Greco

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

Introduction

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 1929 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

1 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 , 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?

Cazadores de utopias, David Blaustein. Histoire du cinéma, Luc Godard.

Before addressing this question, let us first summarize the main conclusions of recommendations of the current paper:

1. The last Argentine dictatorship, as both its previous social-political context and the subsequent Human Rights based democracy period, must be represented in a non-

2 piteous, complacent, Eurocentric way, as a horror and terror fallen from heaven – in the best case scenario – but rather as a continental and global example of the double objective of both eliminating the social struggle in the continent and of establishing the neoliberal version of capitalism in the region. Any representation, particularly if it is an academic one, that does not take these elements into account, will not be grasping the essence or complexity of what happened from 24th March 1976 onwards in Argentina, and instead perhaps even risks a neo-colonial interpretation of the issue.

2. Drawing on the previous point, expressions such as “”, “process”, and other similar examples to these, must be peremptory problematized and put out of academic circulation, given that those were not only the denominations created and circulated by the military personnel to self-depict their own criminal enterprise, but also that they efface again, in a new manner, both the socio-historical background and the ultimate economic and subjective aims of the enterprise begun in March 1976.

3. Building on these initials observations, given the fact that a numerous memory politics have been taken since December 1983 until at least December 2015 – we will analyze the complexities of what happened during the 2015-2019 period – the incoming Argentina government should focus on the implementation of a public memory politics aimed at ordinary citizens (whether or not they lived in proximity to a CDC) outside the established human rights community. The reasons for this suggested approach are twofold: firstly, because the survivors of the dictatorship, the relatives of those disappeared by state terrorism and those forced into exile during that period, are already familiar with the atrocities perpetrated by the military junta; and secondly, it was just such aforementioned ‘ordinary people’ who were the main target of the project of global dictatorship and who continue to be faced with the social, industrial and economic consequences of the coup.

If we can put in in these terms, the incoming Argentine government should leave “à la recherché de l’homme/femme commun/e” to work together with him/her on both how the dictatorship has affected his/her life as well as how the disappeared of the past are the working class boys – “pibes chorros” –, the feminized women, the marginalized indigenous people, and the murdered trans women and men of the present, to cite just a few of the oppressed sectors of Argentine society.

3 The Alfonsinist “Two Demons” Theory (1983-1989): Early Judicial Process, the Theory of Hierarchical Responsibility, and the Beginning of Juridical Impunity

Let’s compose first an introductory summary of the main memory politics enacted by different governments since 1983. To begin, the first memory politics that must be highlighted is the very formation, during Ricardo Alfonsín’s Radical Party government, of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP, in its Spanish acronym: Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas), during the first months of its government which began its term of office on 10th December, 1983. This commission, consisting of nationally recognized writers, intellectuals and public figures – the best-known member, still remembered today, being the writer Ernesto Sabato –, took as its task to investigate, write and present to the new president deep and thoughtful research about the disappeared of the recent dictatorship, based on the contemporaneous and previously disregarded complaints of relatives and on fieldwork in the CDC´s environments. The product of this investigation was the report Nunca más (Never Again,

1995), published by EUDEBA, the publication house of the main and biggest university in Argentina, the University of . The book, published on the 28th of November 1984, was an absolute commercial success, with forty thousand copies sold on the very day of publication. Since 1984 it has been republished numerous times, reaching the amount of four thousand copies sold and it has been translated into more than eight languages (German, English, French, Italian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Russian, Finnish and Vietnamese).

From early 1985 onwards, the book became a national best-seller and a common addition to the bookshelves of most Argentine homes. Never Again has circulated widely within Argentine society, shaping its memory and Human Rights culture.

The second notable example of official memory politics performed by the same government, was the implementation, on the 24th of December 1986 and on the 8th of June 1987 respectively, of the Punto Final (Full Stop) and Obediencia Debida (Due Obedience) laws, through which Alfonsin´s government aimed to impose both temporal and hierarchical limits upon the legal responsibility for crimes against humanity perpetrated during the dictatorship. Both laws, in different ways, were a response to military pressures aiming to restrict or directly invalidate juridical process and the

4 resulting legal sanctions that had previously taken place or were ongoing in the country at that time. These pressures became evident in the Levantamiento Carapintada (Uprising of the “Painted-Faces”) of 16th April 1987, which lasted four days, and in which a group of largely middle-ranking military officers demanded an immediate end to the trials that had begun to impact this particular sector of the armed forces. The main consequence of this attempted coup, following a massive popular demonstration in defence of the country’s recently-recovered democracy, held in the Plaza de Mayo – the political heart of the country –was an agreement between Alfonsín and the Carapintadas which led to the Due Obedience law. These measures, immediately characterized as “Leyes de la Impunidad” (Impunity Laws) by the Human Right movement and progressive sectors of society, were already in place when the new Peronist administration of Carlos Menem took office on the 8th of July 1989. They were accompanied by the “Pardons decree” (decretos de indultos), through which the new government aimed to “pacify and reconcile” a society divided by the “phantoms of the past”.

The image that synthesizes this new official memory politics was the meeting – proposed by the new government – between Menem and Issac Rojas, one of the military officers responsible for the bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo Square on 16th June 1955, under the democratically elected government of Juan Domingo Perón – a bombing that foretold the coup which finally took place on 16th September of the same year. The implicit reasoning and message behind this official memory politics was: if we, as fellow Peronists, can forgive the military officials who overthrew us, why can you, the families of disappeared relatives, not forgive and forget the same military institutions that kidnapped, tortured and disappeared your sons and daughters?

5

Source : https://www.clarin.com/opinion/beso-menem-rojas_0_Yo7M0qsf.html

The Menemato Delarruista: Pardons, Impunity and “Truth Trials”

In Argentina, the 1990s were known as the “impunity decade”. With former and current members of the armed forces walking free on the streets, it was a common occurrence for the relatives of a disappeared person, survivors of a Clandestine Detention Centre (CDC) or militants who had returned from exile, to encounter the very person that had kidnapped, raped and tortured them or a close relative, this time in an everyday setting such as on the street or in a café. This traumatic national situation, in regard to the country´s recent past, led to incidents such as the physical attack that Alfredo Chaves, a survivor of kidnapping and torture in the Vesubio CDC during the dictatorship, launched upon the naval commander . As a former member of the notorious 332 task force, which operated from the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (Naval Mechanics School), ESMA (Feitlowitz, 20111; Sosa, 2016) –, Astiz was one of the most recognizable perpetrators of state terrorism and was responsible for the abduction, torture and disappearance of the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, and for the disappearance of the adolescent Swedish militant Dagmar Hagelin. Another way in which such trauma manifested itself was in the public declarations of cultural figures such as those of the rock musician Andrés Calamaro, based in Spain at the time, saying that he would kill – one of the three generals of the first Junta (1976-1979) – if he met him on the street. We can easily see how the edicts of forgiving, forgetting and reconciliation failed in pacifying a society with such open wounds, and had the opposite effect. Nevertheless, as has been said many times in several different ways (Crenzel, 2010; Feirstein, 2014; Ringer and Sznajder, 1998; Kaufman and Jelin, 2017; Griguera and

1 I thank Dr Brigid Lynch for this bibliographical reference.

6 Zorzoli. 2020), personal violence and vengeance were never advocated by the Human Rights movement, in many cases composed of former revolutionary militants who had come to terms with their radical former political views and now sustained a liberal human rights script (Casullo, 2007; Forster, 2014, 2011, 2005; Kaufman, 2018). In a context of juridical impunity, where the only two crimes still prosecuted were the robbery of babies and the theft of private property – indeed, this juridical focus on property cannot be overlooked – the way in which the main national memory politics was performed was through the implementation of non-punitive “Truth Trials” by the human rights group, the Madres of Plaza de Mayo. These trials, as well as the aesthetic depictions of recent history and its continuities in the present, coalesced in the social elaboration of what had happened in the past and how its consequences were still palpable in the contemporary present: the connection between the last military dictatorship and the implementation of a neoliberal economic program became crystal clear. When national political conditions changed after the 2001 crisis, with the failure of the neoliberal model of currency parity (where one dollar was equal to one peso) and the industrial apparatus of the welfare state was dismantled, the Human Rights movement was the only national political actor respected by civil society (Sarlo, 2011; Ohanian, 2017). The image that best captures this conjecture is the photograph below of the repression of Madres and Abuelas in the Plaza de Mayo by mounted police during the Radical Party government of Fernando de la Rua – an image that outraged the protestors demonstrating against the consequences of the neoliberal program also endorsed by the relatively new president-elect in December 1999.

7

Credits: Juan Marcelo Baiardi / Fototeca ARGRA

Credit: Ricardo Abada / Fototeca ARGRA

8 “We got out of hell”: Kirchnerism (2003-2015), Human Rights as Official Agenda and the End of its Neutrality Fiction

On the 24th March 2004, almost a year after taking office (May 2003), Néstor Kirchner, the newly elected president in the recent national elections (where he had only achieved 22 % of the popular vote), asked for forgiveness in the name of the State for the crimes it had committed during the last dictatorship. Even when Kirchner’s rhetoric adopted some avant-garde characteristics (Montero, 2014), stating for instance that the State had forgotten to tackle the radical recent past – and therefore erasing the Trials of the Junta and its convictions in the 1980s – it was the clearest stance adopted by an Argentine president since 1983. It opened the door, not only to a political alliance between Kirchnerism and the majority of the Human Rights movement – both strands of the Madres, Abuelas, HIJOS, etc. –, but also to the reopening of the juridical trials halted since the Alfonsinist-Menemist “Impunity Laws”. This, it must be said, was also achieved by two additional political and juridical developments that set the conditions for the aforementioned decision. On the one hand, during 2003, the National Congress declared the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws null and void in a piece of legislation known as Law 25791. Subsequently, on June 14th, 2005, the Supreme Court declared these Impunity Laws unconstitutional. Once more, the entanglement between social, political and juridical decisions permitted a return to a difficult past, and in doing so facilitated the resolution of certain unjust inherited legacies through measures appropriate to the social and political demands of the time.

This new situation, brought about by the 2001 neoliberal crisis and strengthened by the first Kirchnerist government, settled the conditions for a battery of memory politics that first refreshed the national human rights culture, and then reshaped macro-structural politics via its antagonisms against certain media and economic corporations. First, the “Day of National Memory” was sanctioned: every 24th March, the anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état, was declared a public holiday in order to commemorate, remember and condemn the civic-military dictatorship. All over the country, as it had been already happening since the first large public demonstration on the 1996 anniversary of the coup, human rights groups, progressive and leftist political parties and ordinary citizens came together in massive demonstrations against state terrorism.

9 Secondly, in 2006, a new edition of Nunca más was launched, now without the problematic prologue written by Ernesto Sabato which, having popularized what would came to be known as the “Two demons theory”, conflated state violence with the actions of the armed revolutionary left and denounced the latter as “terrorism” (Franco, 2014). The prologue was rewritten in a manner that highlighted the economic, ecclesiastic and media continuities between supporters of the coup and the precise political juncture Argentine was living at the moment.

Finally, to summarize and highlight only three main strands of memory politics in the midst of many: in the nullity and the unconstitutionality of Full Stop and Due Obedience laws a new cycle juridical process opened up; judicial trials that prosecuted not only the military personnel responsible for the coup d’état, abductions and so forth, but also those in sectors of civil society, such as business and the Church who supported and profited from the coup. With this “extension of the punishable” (Bovino, 2000) the discursive displacement from the “military dictatorship” to the “civic-military dictatorship” was officially embedded in public memory discourse: the last dictatorship was not an atrocity born of the “radical evil” of inherently wicked military officers, but a planned economic intervention – in order to institute a new neoliberal regime – which needs to be reconstituted in its historical roots.

The modification of scholarly books, as well as numerous educational programs created and developed during those twelve years such as “Memory and Education” (Ministerio de Educación de la Nación, 2015; Adamoli, Farias and Fachsland, 2015), were examples of this displacement: the liberal human rights script replacing the revolutionary culture present in the country until the ends of the1970s, underwent a process of re- politicisation, thus destabilizing the “universal victim figure” foregrounded by the human right paradigm. The Argentine Human Rights movement, especially the groups of Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo but not exclusively, were, from 2008 onwards, no longer seen by part of public opinion as independent and neutral actors seeking truth and justice in regard to the past, but as partial and politicised actors in an ongoing political struggle. This struggle, by the way, is not embedded in the contingent opposition between Peronist Kirchnerism and liberal Macrism (from 2003 to the present), but between a social, democratic, welfare state and a (neo)liberal (re)organisation of the country. The image

10 that synthesizes the perceived politicisation of human rights in Argentine is the following one, in two different but related versions:

October 28th, 2015. Picture: CEDOC. Official act, 2015. Picture: Noticias (archivo)

“With me the Human Rights’ Curro Comes to an End”: (Neo)Liberal Macrism (2015-2019), Juridical Trials Deceleration and the Seeds of Negationist Discourses

On 22th November 2015, following the general elections of 25th October of the same year, a new government led by Mauricio Macri, a former businessman belonging to an Italian family with economic links to the last dictatorship, won the electoral runoff and Macri became the new president of the country, thus raising the specter of uncertainty in regard to the continuities of memory politics at that point. Even when these concerns have been problematized (Zaferstein and Goldentul, 2019), given that no explicit changes had been manifested either in the new government’s program or in the new president’s public appearances regarding the immediate past, an emergent understanding of Kirchnerist memory politics as “partial”, “vengeful” and “ideological” (Barros, 2017) alarmed numerous social actors who, even those with certain reservations concerning Kirchnerism (Hilb, 2012, 2011, 1984), agreed with the path taken by the former administration. It is still a matter of discussion in the field of Argentine memory scholarship whether one can even talk of the deployment of a new memory politics during the four years of the former Macri (neo)liberal government, but a set of preliminary findings can be articulated here.

On 4 May 2017, after a year and a half of disagreement between the Macrist government and the main Human Rights organizations and crucially, following the unilateral designation of two new Supreme judges by the Macrist administration, the Supreme Court

11 decided to apply the 24.390 Law, popularly known as “Ley del 2 x 1” (“Two per One Law”), to convicted repressors of the last dictatorship. The basic objective of the law, which aimed to ameliorate prison conditions and emphasized the reformatory potential of the penal system, consisted in counting each year of time served in prison as two in the overall total of the sentence handed down. A significant point here is that this reform, until the reformed Supreme Court’s decision, initially excluded criminals convicted for crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. One week later, a large demonstration against the new law was held in the Plaza de Mayo, in a fresh example of the capillarity both of memory and human rights culture in Argentine, obliged the Supreme Court to go backwards and overrule its own decision. One day after the rally, through the 27362 Law, the National Congress prohibited the application of the “two per one” benefit people convicted of crimes against humanity, genocide or war crimes. This series of events, in its various breakthroughs and setbacks, shows in its positive resolution the continued and continuing politicization of memory and human rights in the country, and, in its negative iterations, the “weak force” (Benjamin, 2007 [1940]) that memory and human rights politics nevertheless hold there, depending on the government as well as the consciousness and participation of civil society in deface of past conquests. Indeed, if we were to labour the Benjaminian metaphor here, we could say that, in Argentina, regarding memory human rights politics, one is constantly living “in a moment of danger”.

In relation to the 2015-2019 period, according to the testimonies of both workers and activists in the memory and human rights sectors, there were nevertheless a number of measures and actions that must be highlighted: for example, the slightly negationist official declarations of specific government figures (Barros, 2017); certain unsuccessful attempts to rehabilitate the “two demons’ theory” (Feierstein, 2018); the hollowing out of memory spaces through lack of funding (Bullentini, 2019); the lack of support for witnesses testifying at memory trials; the withdrawal of the National Secretary for Human Rights as a complainant in these trials; the halting of significant further prosecutions for civil complicity with the dictatorship (for example the investigations at the Central Bank, the “Truth and Justice Program”, the Papel Prensa case, and the Ulloa Centre); the abandonment and neglect of particularly symbolic sites of memory such as the ex-ESMA Memory Space and the Haroldo Conti Cultural Centre. What we have said shows not the intrinsic nor exclusive relationship between Kirchnerism – or Peronism – and memory

12 politics and human rights legislation, but rather how political parties and ideological sectors more inclined to (neo)liberal paradigms have found addressing the messy issues of the recent past increasingly problematic. This is particularly relevant in the current context, where the issues under consideration include not only remembering atrocities committed by human monsters, but also involve the political, corporate and ecclesiastical supporters of these monsters. Neoliberalism is a technology of oblivion that must erase memory in order to justify both the injustices of the past and the inequalities of the present.

Source: nuevoperiodismodigital.com2

Recommendations

For all that has been said, and regarding the above-mentioned changes in the national politics of human rights, the main memory politics we would like to recommend is a more complex and grey zone-attuned relationship with civil society, and particularly with the neighbours – common ordinary people, not former revolutionary militants – who live in the areas surrounding the CDCs. This is important, not only due to fluctuations in the varied representations of civil society as either a victim of the crossfire between

2 https://nuevoperiodismodigital.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/macri-los-derechos-humanos-no-son-un-curro-400- corredores-moronenses-alzaron-su-voz-por-memoria-la-verdad-y-la-justicia/.

13 “subversives” and state-sponsored terrorism or as an heroic victim resisting a neoliberal dictatorship, but rather as a via regia to consolidate a national human rights culture. This culture should concern itself with not only the crimes of the past – with their undeniable continuities in the present – but also to the most contemporaneous human right violations, namely, police brutality, institutional violence, gender violence, discrimination against indigenous peoples, and the wide range of current injustices though which the former crimes of the dictatorship are actualized and reinforced.

The Argentine politics of memory are characterized by several elements: 1. CDCs have already been “recuperated” (Olmos, 2018) into memory spaces and museums; 2. Memory parks and “memorials with endless lists” have been built from the second half of the 90’s onwards (da Silva Catela, 2001, 2010: 47); 3. Schools have been renamed in honour of disappeared revolutionary militants; 4. Graffiti and drawings have been painted on the streets, as have brightly decorated paving stones commemorating important places in the everyday lives of the disappeared; 5. Publications, school textbooks and videos have been produced by official Educational and Human Rights offices (idem ant: 48); 6. Research competitions/contests have been instituted both by the Human Rights movement and majoritarian teacher unions and by official Human Rights Secretaries (Alonso, 2009).

All these initiatives have taken place not only in Capital Federal, Buenos Aires or Tucumán provinces but also in Santa Fe and Cordoba provinces. This report suggests that they should be, in the first place, allowed to continue/be preserved. In case they had been interrupted or underfunded during Macrism, they should restart. Following these recommendations, these memory policies should be organically extended to other provinces where initiatives of the kind have already taken place, but this should be done with improved coordination and communication between official bodies and civil society.

There are five provinces where this approach could be focused initially.

14 Firstly, in the province of La Pampa, where the author completed his PhD fieldwork; then in Neuquen, which was the destination of large numbers of former militants in self- imposed internal exile, as they sought to avoid large urban centres (Jelin and del Pino, 2003)3; Tierra del Fuego, a vast and sparsely-populated province in the south of the country, where the oil industry is a major employer and the issue of sex-trafficking is becoming increasingly prevalent; San Juan, a province with compelling ecological issues due to the open cast mining activity there; and finally, Jujuy, where exploitation and violations of the rights of indigenous peoples by official authorities are commonplace.

In adopting this approach, the connections between past Human Rights crimes and the abuses currently being perpetrated against the environment, women and indigenous peoples will become crystal clear, not only to people already aware of these issues, but also to the broader community. This will coalesce towards a progressive building or extension of a concept of citizenship that is more sensitive and conscious of rights violations against powerless majorities in the present: popular militants, indigenous people, nature and women.

The national administration, regardless of political stripe – unitarist or federal, liberal or conservative, Peronist or Radical, populist or neoliberal, to summarize the main divisions that have characterized Argentine political society for the past two centuries now – should place the pursuit of the rights of the afore-mentioned minorities as central to the construction of a more equal society. In combining this human rights-based culture and a state-sanctioned memory politics, it is important to complicate the general perspective on the past, in particular that of the ‘neigbours’ of the CDC, clarifying that the injustices they witnessed did not end on the 10th December 1983, but rather inscribed themselves in a “longue durée” (Bergson, 2007 [1907]) whereby the recent past is continuous within

3 Actually the whole series of this collection – about military memories in the Southern Cone (Hershberg and Agüero, 2005), separate asthetic representations of the repression (Jelin and Longoni, 2005), memory and education in school elaborations of the recent past (Jelin and Lorenz, 2004), monuments, memorials and territorial marks (Jelin and Legland, 2003), archives of the repression (Jelin and da Silva Catela, 2002), television depictions of the Never Again juridical trial (Feld, 2002), and the disputes around (un)happy commemorative dates (Jelin, 2002) – shows both the advanced state of memory processing in Argentina by the second half of the 90’s and how Kirchnerism, in the first years of the new millennium, drew on this previous development to re-legitimize the political class, political action itself and, obviously, its own government. I focused singularly and meticulously on each one of these books in my PhD dissertation recently published as a book (Greco, 2019).

15 the present, and consequently that their responsibilities, both ethical and political, remain in place. The concept of responsibility has been under strong fire lately (Agamben, 2006, 2004, 2000; Butler, 2009) but, as long as we keep our distance from the neoliberal definition of responsibility (where the individual is considered to exist in isolation from their social milieu), the principle of responsibility (Jonas, 1995) is inseparable from a culture grounded in historical memory and human rights4. We are, or we should be, citizens with rights and obligations, and not merely consumers with rights (to consume: goods, memory policies, memory tourism) but without obligations. (Lewcowicz, 2008:23). If you, as a government, and we, as society, are able to achieve a fraction of the above-mentioned points, the society in which we will live would be one in which living – and not only surviving – would indeed be a worthy endeavor.

References

ADAMOLI, Florencia; Matías FARIAS; FLACHSLAND, Cecilia (2015). “Educación y memoria. La historia de una política pública”. Historia de la educación. Anuario SAHE, Vol. 16, N 2, pp. 225-241. AGAMBEN, Giorgio, (2006 [1995]). Homo sacer. El poder soberano y la nuda vida, trad. Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera, Pre-Textos: Valencia, puntualmente: “El bando y el lobo” (135-144) ------, (2004 [2003]). “El estado de excepción como paradigma de gobierno” (23-70), Estado de excepción. Homo sacer II, I, trad. de Flavia Costa e Ivana Costa, Adriana Hidalgo: Buenos Aires. ------, (2000). Lo que queda de Auschwitz. El archivo y el testigo. Homo Sacer III, trad. Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera, Pre-textos: Valencia. ALONSO, Luciano (primavera 2009). “Memorias sociales y Estado en Santa Fe, Argentina, 2003-2009”, política y cultura, núm. 31, pp. 27-47

4 If we would like to complicate this version of Argentinean neoliberalism, in which it seems that everything wrong that happened in Argentina in the last forty years is due exclusively to the neoliberal turn, we can always consider the work of León Rozitchner (2009), a former Marxist and Freudian psychoanalyst militant exiled in Venezuela during the last Argentine dictatorship, where, analyzing Kirchnerism (2003-2015), he characterizes it as “national neoliberalism”. Another critique of that period can be drawn from Maristella Svampa’s (2006) sociological work, which had already denounced, from the very end of Kirchner’s government and the start of Fernandez´s first mandate, the ecological destruction and repressive outsourcing of the provinces that Kirchnerism put in place in order not to conflate such neoliberal operations with its human rights-based rhetoric.

16 BARROS, Mercedes (2017). “Cambiemos pasado por futuro: loa derechos humanos bajo el gobierno de Mauricio Macri”, in: PIÑEIRO, María Teresa and BONETTO, María Susana, Tensiones en la democracia argentina: rupturas y continuidades en torno al neoliberalismo, Editorial CEA/Colección Cuadernos de Investigación: Córdoba, Argentina. BENJAMIN, Walter (2007 [1940]). “Sobre el concepto de historia”, Conceptos de filosofía de la historia, trad. de H. A. Murena y D. J. Vogelmann, Terramar, La Plata. BERGSON, Henri (2007 [1907]). La evolución creadora [L’évolution créatrice], Translation of Pablo Ires, Cactus Press: Bs As. BLAUSTEIN, Isidoro (1995). “Cazadores de utopías”, Argentina, film. BOVINO, ALBERTO (2000). “Delitos sexuales y justicia penal”, en: Birgin, Haydée, El género del derecho penal: las trampas del poder punitivo, Bs. As: Biblos, pp. 175-294. BUCH, Esteban (2016). Música, dictadura, resistencia: la Orquesta de París en Buenos Aires. CABA: FCE. BULLENTINI, Ailin (2019). “Lo que dejó el macrismo en el área de Derechos Humanos. Entre la indiferencia y el deprecio”, Página/12, 15/12/2019. BUTLER, Judith (2009 [2005]). “1. Dar cuenta de sí mismo”, en Violencia ética y responsabilidad, Amorrortu: Bs. As. CASULLO, Nicolás (2017). Las cuestiones. Fondo de Cultura Económica: Argentina. COLECTIVO SITUACIONES (Comp.) (2009). Conversaciones en el impasse. Dilemas políticos del presente, Tinta Limón: Buenos Aires. CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas) (1984), Nunca más, Argentina: Eudeba. CRENZEL, Emilio (September 2010). “Politics of Memory in Argentina. The History of Report”, Papeles del CEIC, Issue 2, Spain. DA SILVA CATELA, Ludmila (2010). “Exponer lo invisible. Una etnografía sobre la transformación de Centros –clandestinos de Detención en sitios de Memoria en córdoba—Argentina”, en: Heinrich Boll Stiftung, Recordar para pensar. Memoria para la democracia. La elaboración del pasado reciente en el Cono Sur de América Latina, La Fundación Política Verde, Ed. Böll Cono Sur: Santiago de Chile, Chile. ------(2001). No habrá flores en la tumba del pasado. La experiencia de la reconstrucción del mundo de los familiares de desaparecidos, Al Margen: La Plata, Buenos Aires.

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18 ------(1984), « Quelques réflexions sur la démocratisation des régimes autoritaires ». In : L'Homme et la société, N. 71-72, Modes de coercition politique. pp. 55-64 HERSHBERG, Eric and Felipe AGÜERO (2005). Memorias militares sobre la represón en el cono sur: visiones en disputa en dictadura y la democracia. Siglo XX: Madrid- Buenos Aires. JELIN, Elizabeth and Ana LONGONI (Comps.) (2005). Escrituras, imágenes y escenarios ante la represión. Siglo XXI: Madrid-Buenos Aires. ------and Ponciano DEL PINO (comps.) (2004). Luchas locales, comunidades e identidades. Siglo XXI: Madrid-Buenos Aires. ------and Federico LORENZ (Comps.) (2004). Educación y memoria. La escuela elabora el pasado. Siglo XXI: Madrid-Buenos Aires. ------and Victoria LEGLAND (Comp.) (2003). Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales, Madrid, Siglo XXI: Madrid-Buenos Aires. ------and Ludmila DA SILVA CATELA (comps.) (2002). Los archivos de la represión. Documentos, memoria y verdad. Siglo XXI: Madrid-Buenos Aires. ------(2002). Las conmemoraciones: Las disputas en las fechas “in-felices”. Siglo XXI: Madrid-Buenos Aires. JONAS, Hans (1995 [1979]). El principio de responsabilidad. Ensayo de una ética para la civilización tecnológica, Barcelona, Herder, trad. Javier M. Fernández Retenaga, puntualmente: “Capítulo Cuarto. III. La teoría de la responsabilidad: los padres y el político como paradigmas eminentes” (172-184). KAUFMAN, Susana and JELIN, Elizabeth (2017). Layers of Memory: Twenty Years after in Argentina, CRC Press. KAUFMAN, Alejandro (January 2th, 2018). “Towards a molecular agenda for the left”, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. (27) 1, pp. 25-41. LEWKOWICKZ, Ignacio (2008). “Del ciudadano al consumidor. La migración del soberano”, en: Pensar sin estado. La subjetividad en la liquidez, Paidós: Buenos Aires. MINISTERIO DE EDUCACION DE LA NACION, FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS SOCIALES DE LA UBA (2015). Relevamiento nacional: Las representaciones de los jóvenes sobre el pasado reciente. Presidencia de la Nación: Buenos Aires. MONTERO, Ana Soledad (2015). “Del joven militante al viejo sabio: Relatos sobre el pasado reciente y ethos discursivo en Néstor Kirchner (Argentina, 2003-2007) y José

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