In the Wake of Neoliberalism

Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina

Karen Ann Faulk

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780804782265
  9780804782258
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780804783910
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding the various meanings given to human and citizenship rights in Argentina is an important task, particularly so given the nation's prominence in global discussions. An "exporter" of tactics, ideas, and experts, Argentina has become a site of innovation in the field of human rights. This book investigates two prominent Buenos Aires protest organizations—Memoria Activa and the BAUEN workers' cooperative—to consider how each has framed its demands within a language of rights.

Fundamentally, this book is concerned with the complex interrelationship between the discourse of human rights and the neoliberal project. In exploring the way in which "rights talk" is used and adapted locally by various activist groups, the book looks at the mutually formative and contentious interactions between ideas of human rights, rights of citizenship, and the concrete and envisioned social relationships that form the basis for social activism in the wake of neoliberalism.

Chapter 1

Land of Equality and Assassins

Rights in the National Imaginary

The Idea of Rights

How have rights been imagined in Argentina throughout its history? This chapter focuses on the tension between individual and collective rights that has permeated the social field, exploring how the dominant political philosophy has tended to vacillate between one formulation and the other. This tension is crucial to contemporary debates, yet it is not a new phenomenon. Rather, individual and collective rights and the different meanings attributed to these terms have historically been essential features in the way the nation has been imagined and experienced by its members, and this history influences and is drawn upon by those who engage in these debates.

The idea of a national imaginary as fundamental to the formation and development of the modern nation-state was proposed by Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities. In it he traces how the modern nation came to be understood as an “imagined political community. . . both inherently limited and sovereign” through the use of new mechanized technologies by institutions of power, including printing, counting (of populations), and mapping (1991:6). A number of scholars have criticized Anderson’s treatment of the formation of the nation as too centered on the literary (i.e., elite, male) class, and for ignoring that these ideas existed within a field of power relations that extended beyond these privileged enclaves (see Guha 1985; Skurski 1996). In addition, and fundamentally, the pattern of development of the (European) nation-state is not a formula that can necessarily be applied in very different contexts across the world. Even if the form of the nation-state has been influential globally, the trajectory of its development in each place must be understood within the context of specific local conditions. While not contending that a national imaginary was necessarily compelling for all groups across Argentine society, nor that its development precisely coincided with Continental patterns, I draw on Anderson’s insights in considering the foundations of the philosophy of rights that took root in Argentina. Specific formulations of a national imaginary in Argentina have operated in conjunction with competing political philosophies in influencing public policy in practice, notably in relationship to ideas of rights. The formation of a creole identity as part and parcel of colonial subjectivity encouraged incipient understandings of the nation and, importantly, of the rights of its citizens.

Ideas of rights in Argentina have been inextricably bound to the political and ideological currents that have affected the formation and historical development of the nation from its inception. The idea of rights that took hold among liberals in the River Plate following independence closely mimicked that circulating throughout Western Europe. This was a particular idea of responsibilities and obligations developed in relation and reaction to monarchical society, growing out of and forming an integral part of Enlightenment ideals. Lynn Hunt has shown how changing conceptions of the self and the body toward the end of the eighteenth century led to the sense of these rights as being “self-evident,” and to their codification in formative political treatises and documents at that time (2007). The United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 clearly and explicitly delineated an idea of rights that was to mark an irreversible shift in the formalization of rights and the responsibilities and limits of the state. Essential to this conception of rights was their location in the figure of the individual. The individualist nature of rights marked a revolutionary difference from the monarchical social system that preceded it, where the sovereign held rights over the people as a whole.

European liberalist ideas greatly influenced the perspective of Argentine founding fathers like Bernadino Rivadavia, whose fascination with non-Iberian European culture was to profoundly inform his social, economic, and cultural policies in ways that continue to have repercussions today. Rivadavia’s “doctrinaire democratic idealism” sought to remake Argentina in the model of Enlightenment-era Europe, free from the influence of local oligarchs and ecclesiastic authority. While encumbered by virulent elitism, the Rivadavians nonetheless sought to encourage a brand of equality among men through peace, prosperity, and (European) high culture, with this final element to be achieved through the creation of numerous cultural institutions. The liberal fascination also served to further entrench the country in its colonial position as an export-based economy. The signing of the Anglo-Argentine Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation under Rivadavia essentially gave Great Britain unrestricted access to the nation’s markets, “devastat[ing] local manufacturing . . . and limit[ing] the country’s economic future to one of provider of agricultural goods and raw materials to an industrial power” (Shumway 1991:99).

Liberalist economic policies affected the emerging nation in other ways as well. Property rights were in many respects the foundation of the post-monarchical society. The original meaning of being endowed with rights in the River Plate was, to a certain degree, founded on shifting the notion of property from being a privilege to a right. The inherent individual nature of private property embedded in liberal conceptions of rights was born out of rebellion against the monarch’s abusive authority over its control and regulation. However, the protection of private property and its contractual basis required a stable and legitimized state capable of preserving legal order. This need illustrates the tension within liberalism between public representation and private property, where the government must serve as a legitimate representative of the interests of the people while upholding and enforcing private contractual property law. Thus, in Argentina as in other American countries, the formation and formalization of the nation was inextricably bound to creating and maintaining a balance between the prerogatives of political institutionalization and the right to private property (Adelman 1999).

Part of the formalization of this kind of state came with nation’s first constitution, enacted on May 1, 1853. A version of liberal idealism is embodied particularly in the first of the two major sections of this constitution, consisting of a set of rights and guarantees (derechos y garantías) laid out explicitly in its 31 articles. These include protections for equality before the law, rights to property, free circulation, and freedom of expression. This portion of the constitution was largely borrowed directly from that of the United States of America. However, it also contains certain important provisions that distinguish it from its Northern counterpart. Significantly, it has specific articles concerning the abolition of slavery and the establishment of free primary education, the latter moving beyond the so-called first-generation civil and political rights.

The 1853 constitution also expresses one of the foremost concerns of the Argentine liberalist philosophy. This is most famously contained in Alberdi’s phrase gobernar es poblar (to govern is to populate). One of the most concrete and lasting effects of the liberals’ vision was the change they effected in the composition of the Argentine populace. Immigration began to be encouraged as a means of modernizing the nation, and economic incentives were implemented specifically for European immigration. Accordingly, the preamble to the constitution declares that it is to apply to “todos los hombres del mundo que quieran habitar en el suelo argentino” (all those in the world who want to inhabit Argentine soil). Article 20 declares equal rights for citizens and foreigners, and Article 25 mandates state support for European immigration.

Behind these incentives and protections lay Domingo Sarmiento’s characterization of Argentina as the battleground for the forces of civilization against the powers of barbarism. This ideology of purportedly ethical domination influenced many of the political elites of his time, and promoted the idea that the nation would be built through the influx of (preferably Northern) Europeans, who would come to outnumber and override the “racial backwardness” of the gaucho and Native American populations. The devastating losses among indigenous populations through directed genocide under the Desert Conquest in the second half of the 1800s was a concrete and tragic result of this ideology. Disparaging the country’s Spanish heritage, which they saw as full of “stultifying piety,” Catholic superstitions, and “bereft of industrial capacity” (Alberdi 1852, cited in Shumway 1991:138), thinkers within this strain believed that an influx of Northern European immigrants would prove the key to the development of the nation as an agricultural and industrial power. The attempted erasure of the indigenous populations of the arable pampas was reasoned within the law that instigated it as justified since “the presence of the Indian impedes access to the immigrant who wishes to work.”¹ The brutal “desert campaigns” at once brought about the large-scale land expropriations that fueled the emergence of agrarian capitalism and left the indio as an absent presence in the national imaginary, to be reviled and feared (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003).

Concerns over the shaping of the nation’s body public were also embedded in Article 22 of the constitution, which was maintained even through the reforms of 1994. This article prohibits all forms of direct democracy, and reflects the drafters’ discomfort with the participation of the masses in public life. The equality of rights they proposed and enshrined in the document was not intended to be equally applicable to all, but rather to an entitled, educated, and elite subset of the citizenry. As Adelman notes, “the republic would only realize a robust notion of citizenship at the end of a very long process of social change—one the citizens were not necessarily invited to define or elect” (1999:215). The realization of equality of rights remains a work in progress.

Becoming Liberal Citizens

With the passage of the constitution and the absorption of previously occupied lands, the government opened the door for immigration to Argentina. These measures, alongside concurrent civil and economic unrest within Europe itself, led to a vast number of immigrants making their way to Argentina in the ensuing decades. However, in practice, the majority of those who chose to make the journey did not depart from Northern Europe. Overall, Argentina saw an influx of 2.5 million immigrants in the period from 1888 to 1913.² Over half came from the Italian peninsula, another 20 percent from Spain, and the rest from France, Germany, Great Britain, and other Latin American nations.³ This influx would fundamentally change the national imaginary of who “the Argentine people” were. Surviving indigenous populations and the significant urban Afro-Argentine community (Andrews 1980) would be relegated into near oblivion in the new demographic.

The vision of nation-building that held sway during the last decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century assumed the ideal of assimilation as a means to achieving equality. Assimilation, while envisioned as the means through which immigrants could obtain full membership in the nation, carried the attendant implication of homogenization and minimization of difference (Grimson 2006; Halperín 2008). Proponents of assimilation endorsed a new national identity based on a melting pot model of culture (crisol de razas). Ultimately only certain immigrant cultures were recognized as formative of this new cultural mix, with influential sectors of society often dismissing “undesirable” groups like Jews as foreign and inassimilable.

Assimilation was encouraged and enforced through various means. An example is the approved lists of names which could be given to children born in Argentina, as a means of facilitating easy pronunciation and understanding. The laws providing for state education of all residents also formed part of the broad set of policies that were the codification of this ideal. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, public schools played an active role in instilling patriotism in the children of immigrants. This included the creation and promotion of national rituals and the standardization of the teaching of national history (Plotkin 2003). Policies such as school dress codes functioned to implement Enlightenment principles of egalitarianism while disciplining and defining the emerging citizenry. Inés Dussel argues that these policies spoke “of a particular construction of the nation, a construction that equated homogeneity with democracy, and equality of people with equal, identical appearances” (2005:101–102). New masses of people, many of them recent immigrants, were coming to understand and view themselves as citizens of the Argentine nation. Concern over the habits and political participation of these newcomers engulfed not only the conservative opposition but also those who supported egalitarianism. “The principle of equality,” Dussel argues, “had to navigate turbulent waters, and a safe port could only be reached if self-discipline and enlightenment were generalized and the enlightened citizens participated in public government” (2005: 109). As Donna Guy has also shown, the body became a focus for attempts to mold this new citizenry (Guy 1991, 2000a). The use of basic white smocks (guardapolvos) in schools was designed to at once provide a release from the markers of difference and to educate citizens as modern “enlightened consumers,” able to pick democratic, healthy, and affordable clothing, monitoring bodies in ways that readied them to act as producers in the emerging form of capitalism (Dussel 2005).

As immigrants built new lives, their labor transformed the nation they adopted as their own. Early in the twentieth century, Argentina was enjoying a degree of economic stability and prosperity that rivaled that of its Northern European interlocutors (Romero 2002). It was this prosperity and the ruling elite’s interest in cultivating architectural and artistic fame that endowed Buenos Aires with the nickname the Paris of Latin America. Yet, unlike the early economy of North American immigrant-dependent nations with their many small landowners, the Argentine economy was largely dependant on the exportation of grain and cattle produced on large latifundias controlled by the local oligarchy and worked by the influx of immigrants. As refrigeration and canning technologies improved, the profits from the cattle industry grew even larger. Due largely to foreign investment, industry, controlled by a small number of elites, began to develop, and Argentina continued to cultivate a privileged relationship with Great Britain in both infrastructure development and trade.

The waves of new immigrants, however, were for the most part not easily incorporated into the existing structures of oligarchic domination. The new mass of urban workers, furthermore, could not fall back on subsistence agriculture to weather fluctuations in the global market for exports. Rapid industrialization brought on in part by new technological innovations and the expanding urban populations led to ever louder demands for stronger protections for rural and urban laborers. Increasingly, these demands came to focus on the inclusion of immigrants and other non-landowning residents into the ranks of full citizens. The passage of the Sáenz-Peña laws in 1912 fulfilled this demand, making voting obligatory, secret, and universal for all males (though not yet for females).⁴

The attempts to expand first-generation rights to ever greater swaths of the populace were accompanied by movements that sought to place economic and social rights in the center as well. The idea that these rights must be attended to if a true equality was to be achieved gained increasing support in many places throughout the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Argentina, ideas of social entitlements and group rights were joined to notions of popular sovereignty and found a ready constituency in this mass of urban immigrants, presenting a challenge to existing patterns of representation and governing institutions (Adelman 1999:290–291). These currents found their strongest expression in the growing numbers of activists in socialist and anarchist political (or anti-political) organizations.

The most visible face of this activism in Argentina is in the figure of Simón Radowitzky. In the Buenos Aires of the early 1900s, Chief of Police Coronel Ramón Falcón was infamous for his brutal repression of workers and activists. Enraged by his actions in response to the May Day demonstrations of 1909, which left at least five people dead and dozens more wounded or imprisoned, 19-year-old Russian immigrant Simón Radowitzky shot and killed Falcón in reprisal. The assassination turned both men into legendary figures, to be remembered and memorialized by different factions of Argentine society. It is worth noting how such events hold contemporary relevance. Meaning remains contested and inescapable for the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, embodied in the materiality of the urban landscape, the street signs, cars, and buildings of their everyday travels. The current police school for the Federal Police (Policía Federal), took on Falcón’s name in 1928, as proudly displayed on its website and television recruitment commercials.⁵ As of 2009, a monument to Ramón Falcón, in the porteño (Buenos Aires) neighborhood of Recoleta, bears graffiti that reads “Simón lives” above the anarchist symbol.

In part as a result of the growing unrest, by 1919 the “liberal consensus” had begun to crack.⁶ A reactive nationalist sentiment had developed against the growing tides of immigrants and the policies of Radical president Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916–1922 and 1928–1930) that benefited the urban working and middle classes.⁷ In particular, the conservative oligarchy feared the spread of communist and anarchist ideologies, and led media campaigns focusing on the supposedly destabilizing influence of Jewish (Russian), Bolshevik, and Catalonian immigrant activists. This culminated with the Semana Trágica or Tragic Week of January 1919, when President Yrigoyen backed away from his earlier support of labor’s demands and sent police and military forces to break an ironworkers’ strike. This sparked a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment, and murderous bands incited by the ultra-nationalist Liga Patriótica Argentina (Argentine Patriotic League) rampaged through Jewish and Russian shops and neighborhoods, leaving some 850–1,000 people dead and thousands wounded.⁸

In 1930 a military coup—the first in a long series of coups in Argentina history—brought a premature end to Yrigoyen’s second term as president. This so-called Conservative Restoration of the 1930s also saw a withdrawal from international markets in reaction to the increase in protectionism in European and North America, as the world economy was drastically altered by the effects of the Great Depression. The conservative government’s harsher policies toward union and labor activism increased popular unrest and arguably set the stage for the emergence of the Peronist movement in the 1940s.

The Right to Collective Well-being

Juan Domingo Perón won the elections of February 1946 to become President of the Nation, shortly after the massive demonstrations of his popular support on October 17, 1945 (James 1988a; Plotkin 1995). Perón’s first two governments (1946–1955) adopted many contradictory policies, but overall expanded first-generation political and civil rights to include women and indigenous groups (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003). The Peronist vision of social justice, based in large part on the assurance and protection of collective rights, is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the 1949 reforms to the constitutio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Defining Rights
• 1. Land of Equality and Assassins: Rights in the National Imaginary
• 2. Spaces of Corruption and the Edifice of Impunity
• 3. Streets, Plazas, and Palaces: Asserting Justice and Work as Rights
• 4. The Right to Collective Well-being
• 5. Conclusion: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index