Voices of the Survivors

Testimony, Mourning, and Memory in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (1983-1995)

Liria Evangelista, David W. Foster, Liria C. Evangelista

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134826216
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By blending personal memoir and critical analysis, Voices of the Survivors explores cultural and human responses to the violence of political repression and social disintegration perpetrated in Argentina during the so called Dirty War of the late '70s and early '80s. Central to the theoretical and critical corpus is the work of scholars writing in response to the historical trauma of the Holocaust (Adorno, La Capra, Shoshana Felman), which posed questions regarding social trauma, the links between mourning and memory, and the role of artistic creation and its value as testimony. The book traces shifts in discursive formations and social practices critical to understanding the origin and impact of the Process of National Reorganization (as it was known by the military government) through analysis of a broad range of sources, including poetry, fiction, memoirs and testimonies, popular music, and journalism. These texts explore the persistence of issues of memory and mourning within the particular conditions of Argentine culture in the aftermath of the dictatorship. This significant new work will be essential reading for scholars interested in issues of violence, political and cultural disruption, memory, and historical consciousness.

CHAPTER I

Testimonies of Defeat

Y si mañana es como ayer otra vez/ lo que fue hermoso será horrible después.

—Charly García, Cerca de la Revolutión

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

How are we to approach, from the standpoint of the present, the failure of a national liberation project that was once considered not only viable, but imminent? I must confess that such an undertaking implies, for me at least, methodological problems that conceal fears and contradictions that are anything but merely theoretical. On the contrary, they correspond to old, unresolved conflicts lurking in the shadow of a past which, from somewhere that eludes my grasp, continues to resist, in a painfully cryptic fashion, every reading that might illuminate it.

One of the problems—and by no means the least daunting—in addressing these texts is the need to avoid, on the one hand, an approach in the purely textual terms of l'écriture. On the other, one must prevent perverse uses of a theoretical framework that doubtless belongs to the outlook of an era in which other discourses and ideologies prevail. Frederic Jameson warns against these risks, in the purely textual terms of l'écriture. On the other, one must prevent perverse uses of a theoretical framework that doubtless belongs to the outlook of an era in which other discourses and ideologies prevail. Frederic Jameson warns against these risks, attributing them to a “properly antiquarian relationship to the cultural past” (Jameson, The Political Unsconscious, 17), in the course of heralding his motto, “Always historicize!” Thus, following his example, my intention is none other than that of “respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day” (ibid., 18). To proceed in any other way would, I believe, entail a political and ideological falsification of the very real struggles and complex imaginery of a generation exterminated in the concentration camps of the last military dictatorship.

The theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, as set out in “The Problem of Speech Genres” (1953), along with those of Shoshana Felman bearing on her conception of testimony as a discursive practice, have proven highly instructive for me in organizing the corpus of texts that comprise this chapter. By recovering the historical density of the linguistic statements (énoncés) that constitute the substance of literary genres, the Bakhtinian approach enriches the notion defended by Felman in her Testimony, Crises of Winessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), who regards the testimony not as a genre (which would be to narrow its scope), but as a speech act or discursive practice inscribed in multiple ways within the different genres. In this way, both theories allow the testimony to be conceived as the material traces of some voice(s), thereby bringing into relief the complex relations between the statement, the subjects who make statements, and history.

My aim in the present chapter is to follow the traces of those voices which in various ways bear witness to the Montoneros' defeat both as an armed organization and as a movement capable of mobilizing broad masses in pursuit of an emancipatory project, a movement that succeeded in gaining political control within the universities and over important sectors of the labor movement.¹ The texts that I shall be analyzing record the decline and destruction of the armed groups, with special reference to the Montoneros: La novela de Perón [The Perón Novel, 1986], by Tomás Eloy Martínez; Recuerdo de la muerte [Memory of Death, 1984], by Miguel Bonasso; No velas a tus muertos [You Keep No Vigil For Your Dead, 1986], by Martín Caparrós and Montoneros: final de cuentas [The Montoneros: The Final Reckoning, 1988], by Juan Gasparini. Drawn from a variety of genres, the texts that make up this corpus register different moments of the defeat, from the narration of extermination within the concentration camps to later reflections concerned with evaluating the causes of the failure. The polyphony of these statements stems from the complex dialogues that the texts strike up with one another. They are voices engaged in a dialogue among themselves, but voices which also communicate—and in a most remarkable fashion—with the texts that articulated the thought of the Left,² and with those voices belonging to the founding fathers of that imaginery whose hegemony was to define this generation.

THE VOICE OF THE ORIGIN

When does the rupture occur, where is the discourse in which the historical contradictions that will lead to defeat materialize? Most of the texts analyzed in this chapter refer time and again, obsessively—as though driven by a ghost-like compulsion—to the speech delivered by an old, and well-nigh moribund, General Perón from the balcony of the Casa Rosada on the afternoon of May 1st (International Labor Day) 1974.³ On this occasion Perón accused the young Montoneros, once those “wonderful youth” of the “special formations,” of being “idiots … Juveniles… mercenaries [imberbes] in the service of foreign money,” and threatened them with “punishment.” In the internal clashes among the various factions of Perónism, the leader had, at last, taken sides.

This speech has been extensively analyzed by Eliseo Veron and Silvia Sigal in their book Perón o Muerte. Los fundamentos discursivos del fenómeno peronista [Perón or Death, The Discursive Foundations of the Perónist Phenomenon, 1986], along with the Montoneros' response to Perón. The bulk of the activists present abandoned the Plaza de Mayo and, in time, the leadership chose to go underground in order to pursue armed struggle against the reactionary core of the Perónist movement. What I wish to emphasize in this connection are the focal points that structure this discourse as a signifying mechanism, and one which articulates the Montoneros' subsequent conduct, determining those decisions of political strategy criticism of which is inscribed in the various texts to be discussed. Despite their length, the relevant passages are worth citing in some detail:

Comrades: It was twenty years ago today that from this very balcony and on a day as bright as today I spoke to the Argentine workers for the last time. It was at that time that I recommended that they fix up their organizations because hard times lay ahead. I was not mistaken in my appraisal of either the days which were to come or the quality of the labor organizations, which sustained themselves over twenty years, in spite of these idiots who are shouting. As I was saying, over these twenty years the labor organizations have remained unshakable, and today it turns out that some juveniles claim to have more merit than those who fought for twenty years. It is for this reason, comrades, that I would like this first Labor Day rally to pay homage to those organizations and those wise and sensible leaders who have maintained their organic strength and seen the fall of their slain leaders, though the punishment has not yet been dealt. Comrades: for nine years we met in this very plaza, and in this very plaza we were all in agreement in the fight that we waged for the demands of the Argentine people. Now it turns out that there are some who do not agree with all that we have done … And so, comrades, this gathering, in this plaza, as in the good times, must affirm the absolute determination that in the future each shall take his position in the fight which, if the scoundrels do not let up, we must initiate … The coming days will be for national reconstruction and the liberation of the Nation and the Argentine people … not only from colonialism … but also from these infiltrators who operate from the inside and who, with their treachery, are more dangerous than those who operate from the outside, without taking into account that the majority of them are mercenaries in the service of foreign money (Emphasis added).

This May Day speech relies heavily on references to elements of the Perónist imaginery and Perónist folklore. To begin with, it refers to the Plaza de Mayo as the founding space of Perónist culture, the locus in which the discursive interchange between the leader and his people took place in the early years of Perónism, and which was interrupted by Perón's lengthy exile. The ritual reference to that mythical time implies, on Perón's part, a twofold endeavor. It is, first, an attempt to discursively reorder the history of the movement, eliminating what Perón sees as its doctrinal impurities. That is, it represents a return to the originating logos, understood as a reappropriation of the discourse by its original speaker. At the same time, this gesture corresponds to the need, on Perón's part, to reinscribe this history within a teleology that guarantees him the power to legitimize the discourses in conflict. To be young is no longer “wonderful”; instead, it is to stand outside the game of legitimation on account of an inability to demonstrate one's adherence to a doctrine, and participation in a history, that chronologically cannot belong to those who are “juvenile.” When the Montoneros columns abandon the Plaza to the chant of “Aserrín, aserrán, es el pueblo que se va” [Ho ho, Hey hey, It's the people who walk away], what becomes clear is precisely the discursive rupture in the relation between Perón and the left wing of his movement. Obviously, something in this history had been misinterpreted. The logic of the semiotic system that had founded Argentine thought and politics for years had now been shattered beyond repair.⁴

In an interview with the newspaper Página 12 published in October 1993, the Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau refers to the figure of Perón as

the empty signifier in which every charge against the system was expressed … he became the pure signifier of the anti-establishment. The problem is that when he returned in '73 he was no longer an empty signifier but rather had to put into practice a certain politics. Yet the savage logic of the signifier had so profoundly penetrated the symbols of Perónism that the possibility of anchoring them in stable institutional forms no longer existed.⁵ (29–32)

La novela de Perón, by Tomás Eloy Martínez, lays bare this notion of the figure of Perón as an empty signifier, and the question, Who is Perón?, thus serves to organize and give meaning to the novel. The text is structured around a temporal game: on the one hand, the narration's present, which is the moment when the General returns to Argentina after 18 years of exile, on 20 June, 1973; on the other, the past. Through innumerable flashbacks, a story is told which we know to be unfathomable, one in which all voices are heard—that of Perón, those of witnesses who have known him throughout his life, as well as the voice of his secretary, José López Rega, the future Minister of the Interior. What this text revolves around (besides the implicit question which I have already mentioned) is, significantly, the palpable demonstration of what would become the discursive rupture of 1974. If Perón is that land of opacities in which the generations of the 1950s and 1960s inscribed the logic of sense governing modes of thought and political practice; if his speech in May 1974 makes explicit, on a linguistic level, a confrontation with the Movement's Left; then, paradoxically, the material flipside of this discursive defeat occurred earlier. At the Ezeiza airport, on 20 June, 1973, an attack took place that would go down in history as the Ezeiza massacre.⁶ This is the guiding thread toward which the text leads us, the occasion that provides its articulation. With flashbacks that stage a period of the country's history and with forward flights that presage and illuminate a violent future, the massacre is the core toward which all of the texts' strands converge: the voices of the Perónist Right; the dreams, at once messianic and mystical, of a dark, sinister figure like José López Rega; and the hopeful dreams, similarly mystical and messianic, of a whole generation, the generation of the Montoneros.

Who, then, is Perón? asks the text silently. This is the question that runs throughout the text, the enigma with which it opens and closes. It is also the question that never receives an answer. Who is Perón?, the narrator asks himself as well:

… the name of the one I was alone with now … was Perón. He wasn't just a man. He was twenty years of Argentina, for better or worse. I could see the blotches on his face, the sly glint in those little eyes, hear his cracked voice. My whole country came through in that body. Borge's hatred of him, the Libertadora executions, the revolutionary trade unions, the labor bureaucracy, and, although I didn't realize it at the time, the Trelew dead, too, came through. I said to myself: This is the man to whom millions of Argentines pledged their lives in the Plaza de Mayo. Remember: “Perón or death?” … I asked myself, How is it possible to stand up under a weight of that magnitude? (258–259)⁷

In this passage, Perón's body ranges over the cultural geography of Argentina, as the text lays bare the relationship between a leader and the history of a country, as well as his relationship with his own history. This is, without a doubt and as indicated by its title, “the Perón novel,” for with this text Eloy Martínez seeks to inscribe new meanings in the biography of this opacity that was the General. It is also the “the Perón novel” in that it is his fiction, that is, it belongs to him. The word “novel,” therefore, effects a dual movement: it alludes, on the one hand, to a leader's relationship with his own history; on the other, to a dense relationship with that of the nation. It is not Perón's biography, but his novel. This is the point of the story—to offer a testimony in the face of this first great defeat, which was the Ezeiza massacre, and to uncover Perón's status as an empty signifier, as a nontransparent space, an obscure zone in which a country's desires, hopes, Utopias and imaginery could be inscribed.

Given these considerations, we might well ask, Who writes history, How is it written and How is it construed? This text plainly makes use of the notion that the writing of history resembles the writing of novelistic fiction, as it too rests on a plot, on rhetorical devices, on voices which are superimposed and dispersed in the laborious construction of that which would become a myth.⁸ How, then, is the “Perón novel” to be written? On the one hand, the materials are drawn from the a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Latin American Studies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Voices
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Testimonies of Defeat
• Chapter II: New Identities, New Stories
• Chapter III: Memory
• Snapshots
• Bibliography
• Index