Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America

Foreword: On Memory and Memorials

Foreword: On Memory and Memorials l u i s a va l e n z u e l a t r a n s l at e d b y c at h e r i n e j a g o e One of the problems facing us in these times, defined by Zygmunt Bauman as Liquid Modernity, is that everything becomes diluted, in a constant, disconcerting flux. Even words, I believe. They either flow or they stagnate, losing their true nature. The word “memory,” for example, runs the risk of becoming a mere label or an empty signifier into which everything fits, so nothing has value. True value, not mere exchange value. I have consulted many texts to write these few words, for a good book always elicits further reflection and investigation. It will never tell us what or how to think, but instead broadens our horizons of thought and illuminates obscure areas of topics so familiar we tend to pass over them. This volume, edited by Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne, is one such catalyst. Both editors have been analyzing the issue for a long time, as shown by their scholarly work on the legacies of authoritarianism and the anthology entitled The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule. Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America represents a change of direction. It is not about remembering or avoiding the past, but about how to keep remembrance alive without losing respect. The various essays point to the razor’s edge we are treading, and to the chasms yawning on either side into which it is very easy to slip. There is a strong pull from those in favor of oblivion at all costs, those who accept the two Argentine laws known as “Due Obedience” and “Full Stop” as well as the pardons. They say we need to clean the slate and start over (borrón y cuenta nueva). According to them, nothing happened here; you cannot live in the past. They demand we turn the page. But when you turn that page the other tendency appears, the chasm on the opposite side: those who seek to profit in one way or another from others ’ pain and the morbid curiosity of some audiences. They degrade the word “memory,” misusing it to the point where it loses its meaning. We would not be able to concentrate on the razor’s edge if we did not x | Foreword point to these two extremes and give examples of them. At that edge, the recuperation of memory is working to obliterate a word that was imposed on us by state terrorism: desaparecidos (the disappeared). First coined in Argentina, the term spread to other countries with authoritarian regimes, and was used to cover the criminals’ tracks and make their victims in­ visible. From the very first marches of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to the tireless efforts of present-day human rights organizations in Argentina, the goal has always been to restore the victims’ identities and their presence in collective memory, and to pursue punishment for the perpetrators, which is essential to the health of society. The Space for Memory Institute (known as iem in Argentina) leads the recuperation effort today: recuperation of the children of the disappeared, and also of the clandestine spaces where the horror took place. There has been rigorous debate on the issue, debate that speaks to various tragic circumstances around the world. What to do, for example, with Ground Zero, which is in fact an enormous cemetery? The question echoes onethataroseinthissouthernlatitudeduringthefirstmonthsoftheKirchner administration: should esma, the Navy School of Mechanics, where so many were tortured, be made into a museum? A disturbing question, given the ever latent danger of banalizing evil. The controversy surfaced more recently in Argentina when March 24th, the anniversary of the start of the last, and most ferocious, military dictatorship, in 1976, was declared a national holiday. The decision caused widespread unease: should families be going out for picnics on such a day of mourning? I personally am in favor of the holiday; it is important to pause, to mark the day. That is what it is about, after all: marks, wounds that have turned into scars that recall the military coup. There will always be people who attempt to profit from those wounds, and so it is important to reflect on the paradoxes presented in this book. One of them is still ongoing in my country these days. It was reignited during...