Everyday Revolutions

Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina

Marina A. Sitrin

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781780320502
• eBook ISBN: 9781780320519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the wake of the global financial crisis, new forms of social organization are beginning to take shape. Disparate groups of people are coming together in order to resist corporate globalization and seek a more positive way forward. These movements are not based on hierarchy; rather than looking to those in power to solve their problems, participants are looking to one another. In certain countries in the West, this has been demonstrated by the recent and remarkable rise of the Occupy movement. But in Argentina, such radical transformations have been taking place for years. Marina Sitrin tells the story of how regular people changed their country and inspired others across the world.

Reflecting on new forms of social organization, such as horizontalism and autogestión, as well as alternative conceptions of value and power, Marina Sitrin shows how an economic crisis spurred a people's rebellion; how factory workers and medical clinic technicians are running their workplaces themselves, without bosses; how people have taken over land to build homes, raise livestock, grow crops, and build schools, creating their own art and media in the process.

Daring and groundbreaking, Sitrin shows how the experiences of the autonomous movements in Argentina can help answer the question of how to turn a rupture into a revolution.

ONE

A brief history of movements and repression in Argentina

Historical events are not points, but extend to before and after in time, only gradually revealing themselves.

(Jameson 2008: 1, cited in Zibechi 2008b)

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps.

(Said 1994: 3)

From what are new movements born? Are they ever entirely new? What role does the past play? Must it be a conscious past? What is the role of myth and stories in the historical and collective imagination? Must the stories be real? How, or indeed, are we motivated by historical events? Do the events of previous generations, events perhaps that we never learned about, live in our collective memories? Can history be carried forward in a collective unconscious? Can history and memory perhaps be, as Walter Benjamin so eloquently put it, a ‘secret rendezvous between past generations and our own’ (1973: 179)?

An action

It is growing dark. A group of young people begin to gather in front of a hospital. It is an old hospital, which now serves the general population and was formerly a military hospital. It is a hospital with a memory. It is a hospital that was not used to heal. This hospital was used by the military for torture during the brutal dictatorship that lasted from 1976 until 1983.

More young people arrive. There is a small stage erected. People grow quiet. Clearly something has been planned. Many people have masks and wear costumes. The mood is somber. No, it is not so much somber as chilling and quiet … we are waiting … the feeling is that you do not really want to be there, but you don’t want to leave either. It is a strange and powerful sensation. Like the pull of watching a suspenseful film, your heart begins to beat faster as you know something bad will take place, but yet you cannot turn away.

Photo 3 One of the weekly marches of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (the banner reads ‘No to the payment of the external debt’)

A performance begins. A woman is alone. She is in a cell. Three men in military uniforms enter the cell. She begins to whimper … the crowd begins to shift a little uncomfortably … I shiver, dreading what they are going to act out. As the men get closer to her, her whimpers begin to get louder – it becomes a scream as the two men hold her down and the third rapes her. She screams again, they change places, and again … and then there is silence.

The stage goes dark.

The stage begins to lighten, brighter and brighter until there is a harshly lit bed, surrounded by white lights. We are no longer in a prison cell but a small hospital room. The same woman is there. She is pregnant. She is chained to the bed. Her legs are in stirrups. She cries out again, this time in labor. Two men and a woman enter the room: they deliver the baby. A military man smiles widely to the crowd and takes the infant. He holds it up in the air for all to see, like a proud father. The woman screams – she is injected – her screams fade …

The infant is gone.

A speaker with a mask tells us that this was done at the military hospital that we have all assembled in front of – we are told that some of the doctors from the time of the dictatorship still work there. Ones like we just saw deliver the baby before the woman, the mother, was murdered.

The crowd erupts – things are thrown at the hospital walls that explode on impact, creating huge red splatters. It looks like blood is dripping down the walls. It moves down the wall, and the chill remains in the air.

This is an escrache.

In 2006, in an action against the dictatorship, Victoria, a daughter and one of hundreds stolen by the military as described in the above theater production, spoke:

‘A sector of society continues to respect beasts like Jorge Rafael Videla, who led this massacre. And that is why we are going to do the escrache at Videla’s house – because we don’t forget and we don’t forgive.’ Victoria Donde Perez is the daughter of a ‘disappeared’ woman. Thanks to the work of HIJOS and the Abuelas they have recuperated the identity of 82 sons and daughters.

Victoria continued, ‘We want to tell our dear disappeared compañeros and parents not to worry because we are here and we will find your children. Today we are 82 but soon we will find all of them. Along with your children we are recovering the dreams of the disappeared, their dreams of life, their dreams of freedom, because that’s who our parents were, they were builders of courageous dreams.’

(Trigona 2006b)

HIJOS: an introduction to the movements

Where to begin with the history and context of the contemporary revolutionary movements in Argentina? Is it based in the anarcho-syndicalism of the 1930s? Is it grounded in the guerilla movements of the 1960s, in part a reaction to hierarchy but inspired by militancy? Is it a part of the complicated history of Peronism, both a rejection of gift politics and hierarchy, but also inspired by the mass popularity that affected day-to-day life? Is it not related to any of this, or is it related to all of it? What is the role of history and previous generations’ experiences on contemporary actions? What about the movements that took place only a decade or two ago: do they still somehow inspire contemporary action? The latter question is one that is argued by many in Argentina, particularly those who were a part of these movements. I am referring here to the MTDs that emerged in the 1990s as well as HIJOS (Hijas y HIJOS por Identidad y Justicia y contra el Olvido y Silencio; Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice and Against Silence and Forgetting) and the Mesa de Escrache (the ‘table’ of organizing the escrache). The latter two, discussed in this chapter, organized in ways that are quite similar to current ideas of horizontalidad.

History can deeply affect the ways in which people relate and organize, but this does not necessarily mean that history is repeated or imitated. Often historical experiences are rejected, as can be witnessed in frequent, drastic governmental shifts from Left to Right. Indeed, this has been seen in contemporary Argentina, where conscious rejections of previous ways of organizing within the Left have occurred. However, rejecting the type of hierarchical organizing that took place in previous decades does not necessarily equate with embracing the anarcho-syndicalism of the early 1900s. My argument here is that history is important, but one should be careful not to overemphasize or, worse, prescribe activities and organizations based on the past.

While the late 1800s and early 1900s have many similarities to the social movements in Argentina today, and will be addressed, the main focus of this chapter will be the more recent past. It is this recent past that most adults in Argentina either lived through themselves, or through which their parents lived. It is to these pasts and stories of the past that most movement participants refer and use as a point of conscious reference. There is no longer an active conscious memory of the movements of the early 1900s, but these stories still loom large in the current imagination. Interestingly, there is little direct research and information on exactly what took place during these early years of revolutionary foment, thus making it that much more mythical, and perhaps allowing it to loom that much larger in the collective imagination.

The beginning: the 1990s

Beginning with the most recent past, and the one which has had the most direct influence on autonomous movements today in their affirmative action (rather than rejection) are HIJOS, Mesa de Escrache and the Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC, Street Artists Group). All three of these groups comprise to varying extents the children of those who disappeared during the dictatorship; their contemporaries as well as the relatives of the children of the disappeared. With 30,000 disappeared, the number of children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc., the number of family members who could be a part of HIJOS could easily reach many hundreds of thousands – all touched directly by the dictatorship.

HIJOS is significantly different from the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Disappeared), who continue to demand that the government return their children and that those responsible are punished; or even the Abuelas, the grandmothers, who continue to look for those children stolen and ‘adopted’ from the prisons and torture chambers during the dictatorship. HIJOS is not placing demands upon the government, but rather speaks to society as a whole. Its members address society as a way of consciously breaking with the silence around what took place, what it calls a ‘social silence’ (Benegas forthcoming).

Most of the HIJOS generation were in their twenties during the 1990s. They were born of a rupture – not the sort of rupture that I discuss, from which new movements are created, but rupture in a much more literal sense. Most of the HIJOS grew up without a parent, aunt, cousin, or other close relative, that person having been literally taken from their home and family, tortured, and perhaps dropped into the river to die. Murdered – and murdered because of their ideas of social change, or their identification with those who wanted and sought change. These children grew up with other relatives caring for them, sometimes in Argentina, Brazil (as with Paula, who is quoted at length in this book), and Cuba (as with Diego from Colectivo Situaciones, a militant research and writing group in Buenos Aires, also interviewed for this book). HIJOS is a group of young people who grew up with an ever-present rupture: the mother who never came home, or the father who was tortured so badly that despite surviving, seemed only the shell of a human being. Perhaps worst of all, these children grew up in a society that did not blame or punish the people who tortured and killed their parents. They grew up in an atmosphere of silence and forgetting.

The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who have won respect from people all over the world for their struggle to win back their children, are demanding justice – and demanding punishment. Now their children, the children of the disappeared – HIJOS – are demanding justice. HIJOS is a central social movement actor in Argentina. HIJOS formed as an organization in 1995, but began meeting much earlier. It began in the time of ‘democracy’, in 1983, when people were taken much less frequently from their homes, never to be seen again. Repression and kidnapping did not stop but were reduced greatly. It was less a time of terror and more a time of repression. What it was not was a time of remembering or punishing those responsible for the dictatorship – quite the opposite.

Most members of the military were left untouched by the transition to ‘democracy’. This protection was legislated with Law No. 23492 – the Ley de Punto Final of 1986 (the ‘Full Stop’ Law), which was passed at the end of the dictatorship. This law prohibited not only the prosecution but also the investigation of people accused of political violence during the dictatorship. New ‘democratic’ rule took place on 10 December 1983, and the Ley de Punto Final was passed three years later on 24 December 1986. As a complement to the law, Law No. 23521, the Ley de Obedencia Debida of 1987 (Law of Due Obedience) was passed, which included the exemption of subordinates from prosecution if they were carrying out orders. These laws were not repealed until 2003, and not removed from the Argentine Statute Book until the end of 2005.

One of the most emblematic of these pardons, although they are numerous, was Alfredo Ignacio Astiz, known as the ‘blond angel of death’. Astiz was the director of ESMA, one of the most famous torture and death centers during the dictatorship. Many Argentines refer to these places as concentration camps. It is believed that more than 5,000 people were tortured and murdered there under his command (Trigona 2010). It is unclear for which act he is most famous. He is responsible for infiltrating the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, kidnapping one of the founders, Azucena Villafor, on International Human Rights Day – the day that the Mothers published a list of the disappeared in the newspaper. Villaflor was never seen again, not after entering ESMA. Astiz’ actions resulted directly in the murder of two French nuns, a seventeen-year-old Swiss-Argentine citizen, and the journalist Rodolfo Walsh. Astiz was not only excused from standing trial, based on the Ley de Punto Final of 1986, but was promoted in the navy twice after the transition to ‘democracy’, holding an important military position as Argentina’s naval attaché in South Africa.¹ In 1988 he was made a full captain and decorated for valor in the ‘fight against subversion’. This was five full years into ‘democracy’.

There was no public outcry at the Ley de Punto Final, neither at the fact that military officials and torturers from the dictatorship were living, seemingly happily enough, among everyone else in society. People were afraid. People were silent. HIJOS organized to speak specifically to this silence. Many in HIJOS have, and had, little confidence in the government, whether ‘democratic’ or otherwise. When HIJOS formed in 1995 there were hundreds to thousands of known genocidas (those who committed genocide) living in society,² unpunished, free – and not only unpunished by the state, but living in peace in society as a whole. The term genocidas was chosen by HIJOS, as well as other human rights groups, to describe those who participated in the torture and killing under the dictatorship, and it since has become quite commonplace among those who opposed the dictatorship. HIJOS’ goal is not to speak to the genocidas, but their neighbors and society in general: those who were letting people who committed such atrocities live in peace and silence (Benegas forthcoming). The form that their protest took was more of a public outing than a protest, and part of a serious and long campaign which became known as the escrache. An escrache is this process of outing – a tactic for social awareness using direct action, theater and education against silence and forgetting.

Another important aspect of speaking to neighbors and community goes back to the time of the dictatorship itself, as according to reports in the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), the majority of the kidnappings occurred in the person’s home and in front of witnesses, usually neighbors.

Un escrache: an action

As mentioned previously, an escrache, or escrachar in slang, means ‘to put into evidence, disclose to the public, or reveal what is hidden’ (Colectivo Situaciones et al. 2009). Escraches begin with research. The person who is ‘outed’ has been researched in great depth. There are often people who can testify directly that they tortured them, or that they witnessed this person carrying out torture. There are oral or actual records of the person’s participation in or with the military. Once the person’s actions have been confirmed, education in the neighborhood begins. Maps are made, based on the city maps used by tourism or the subway system, and a location is pinpointed which says ‘AQUI’ (‘here’) – as many maps can indicate where one lives – then it says, ‘Aqui vive un genocida’ (‘Here lives a person who has committed genocide’). The map contains footnotes which go into detail as to who the person is, what atrocities they have committed, and so forth. These maps are pasted over local maps, on street lamps, newspaper stands, store fronts, walls, and throughout the neighborhood.

HIJOS and its supporters distribute information leaflets to the people who live in the neighborhood, asking if they know that a genocida lives there. The flyer campaign continues for a few weeks and then action is scheduled.³ Action takes on different forms. There is the one described above, outside of a hospi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A brief history of movements and repression in Argentina.
• 2 From rupture to creation: new movements emerge
• 3 Horizontalidad
• 4 New subjectivities and affective politics
• 5 Power and autonomy: against and beyond the state
• 6 Autogestión, territory, and alternative values
• 7 The state rises: incorporation, cooptation, and autonomy
• 8 Measuring success: affective or contentious politics?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index