From the end of the dictatorship until today, no government had relativized as directly as that of Javier Mileithe criminal policy of The military who took power in 1976. In recent years, the theory of the two demons, the nomination of a war and the eternal questioning of the number of disappeared returned to the arena. A strategy that points to armed organizations and tries to lower intensity to state terrorism. Another conflicting chapter of the Government’s cultural battle.
Two historians and researchers at CONICETwhose object of study is the 1970s, Hernán Confino and Rodrigo González Tizónanalyzed in all their complexity the subject in a book called “Anatomy of a lie. Who and why they justify the repression of the seventies ”(FCE). In it, the various speeches that challenge the policy of memory, truth and justice and draw very interesting conclusions review. First, that despite the questions of the right, there is a great social consensus in Argentina in terms of the reality of state terrorism and its victims. And, secondly, they point out political use, within the framework of the crack, of this relativization of repression, as one of the most direct paths to hit Kirchnerism.
About Villaruel and Milei, the wonderful youth and Postulates of “Complete Memory” We speak, in depth, in this interview.
News: “Denialism” is a term that is born in relation to the Holocaust. Is it possible to apply it to the denial of state terrorism, during the dictataduta?
Hernán Confino: In Argentina it is very difficult to deny the existence of disappeared produced by the State. The call into the call “Complete memory” (the position that holds, for example, Victoria Villaruel) It does not deny the missing. What he does is stretch both historical processes, empty so much political contexts, that the effect is exculpating the perpetrators of state terrorism.
NEWS: From the end of the dictatorship, this is the first political moment in which it is challenged or questioned, very directly, state terrorism.
Rodrigo González Tizón: There are speeches that relativize state terrorism, the number of victims and even claim repression; Speeches that were previously bounded to a circle near the military family. But it must also be said that the consensus that were built in these 40 years are installed. It is no accident that today the most thriving organization in the “complete memory” ecosystem is Celtyv (Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its victims, founded by Victoria Villaruel) which is basically a copy of the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS). You have to imitate the categories, procedures and figures from which the Argentine human rights movement has claimed, in order to continue paying the “war” thesis. What you have to think about is what are the conditions that have generated, in recent years, that These relativizing speeches win more space in the public debate. And there is something that is fundamental: the recovery of the past serves for the political dispute of the present. Going against one of the flags of memory, truth and justice became an instrument to hit Kirchner governments. Another element to think is what place this “denial” is occupied today in the government. And what seemed some central in a moment, in the presidential debate, was diluted and becoming more circumscribed to those who are most committed to that cause, such as Victoria Villaruel.
News: Milei’s agenda, in relation to this issue, was never as clear and constant as that of Villarruel.
Confino: In La Libertad advances We have a pole like that of Villaruel, which we could characterize as a reactionary and conservative nationalism. And on the other hand, a figure like Milei’s that would be extremely neoliberal, libertarian. For me, both families from Argentine rights have an analogous position with respect to the recent past. The liberal right has also stated that there was a war in the ’70. That on the one hand. Then we could also see the question of the degrees of interest. Victoria Villaruel’s career as a political activist was embandy in the cause of “complete memory”, first with Cecilia Pando defending the perpetrators of state terrorism and, as of 2006, defending the victims of guerrilla violence. To her the structure is cause. Villaruel’s fight with Milei would show that he doesn’t need it to carry out that agenda, if he wanted.
News: The question of “number” is one of the most discussed and is linked to this kind of relativization of state terrorism.
González Tizón: It is a debate that has come for about 15 years. And there is a great heterogeneity of voices that participate. If we arm a dichotomy between those in favor of the number 30,000 and those against, we are closing the issue. Because we would be putting in the same bag, for example, Graciela Fernández Meijide and Victoria Villaruel. And are two personalities with different trajectories and interests. On the one hand, within those who criticize that number, there are those who do it with a willingness to relativize state terrorism and discredit the victims. Characters such as Victoria Villaruel, Nicolás Márquez and Agustín Laje try to transfer the burden of guilt of perpetrators to the victims. They are wanting to make us believe that victims are not worthy of trust and, worst of all, that behind that reconstruction there is a financial interest. That is a procedure that also appears in the denialism of the Holocaust. The idea was that the number of victims was enlarged to justify the existence of the state of Israel. Here, the idea was that it was enlarged to collect international subsidies and receive economic repairs in Argentina. On the other hand, there are critics such as Graciela Fernández Mejide and other voices that have been part of the progressive arch, who raised their voice against some reconstruction procedures that were carried out during the Kirchner governments. If we want to fit that debate within the scheme of the crack, which is what interests many to carry water for their mill, what we do is simplify it.
NEWS: Human rights policies are attacked today with Kirchnerism in the sights, although other spaces and parties, such as radicalism, have been essential in rescuing what happened in the dictatorship.
Confino: Milei’s rise is not understood if the poor performance of the previous government is not considered. The policy of memory, truth and justice has many very good things and is very broad. And the members of the “Complete Memory” framework want to delegitimize it. But it is difficult to delegitimize, for example, the signage of a clandestine detention center. Then, their narratives are going to try to detect the weak flanks of the narrative of the Kirchner governments. And one of them is the mystification of revolutionary militancy. The inability to think about certain responsibilities, which are totally incomparable to those of the State, but that existed. So, what did not square with the image of the “wonderful youth” was below the carpet. We know that some discussions that did not occur because “they made the game on the right.” And they were the opposite: it was the silence that made the game to the right.
News: Why do you think “the call” was so read “Leila Guerriero’s book about the history of Silvia Labayru, prisoner in ESMA, in this context of” denial “?
González Tizón: Feminism has made women who had been victims of abuse in clandestine centers, but perhaps they did not set in the archetypal representation of abuse, were considered. It was a low intensity abuse, which happened within the framework of a captivity and the subjective destructuring of a person, as is the case of the protagonist of “the call.” At another time, the idea that there was a consent behind that submission could be generated. This produced something that Ana Longoni works in her book “Traitions”: The social silencing of some stories compared to certain surviving narratives that square with the idea of the hero or the martyr, especially when that hero was on the side of the disappeared. Many of the stories of those who had gone through these most gray situations, with very long captivity and of enormous perversity, as was the case of the whole group that we have linked to Montoneros, arrested in the ESMA were silenced. I think that a book like “The call” had been impossible 20 years ago and not even speaking 40.
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