Post-Authoritarian Cultures: Spain and Latin America's Southern Cone

Introduction: Consensus and Its Discontents

xi u Introduction: Consensus and Its Discontents Luis Martín-Estudillo and Roberto Ampuero In Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Spain there is still a debate about whether or not the complex processes that have been called “transitions to democracy” have ended. The growing insistence on the elaboration of historical judgments on those periods, as well as other recent relevant events—such as the death of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet or the trials of military officials in Argentina —may be a sign of their completion. But one could also mention elements of continuity which point to the currency of social and political tensions associated with the dictatorial heritage of those nations. Witness the Uruguayan initiative to reinterpret a piece of legislation known as “impunity law,” or the vibrant debates about so-called “historical memory” which are currently on various nations’ agendas. This would indicate that they also face the potential impossibility of completing the process, which would express itself in the never-ending conflicts between retelling the past and deleting it, or between justice and impunity. It is equally difficult to assign starting dates to transitions , especially when they are not defined as strictly political events. Operating with a relative autonomy from the government, cultural production in the above-mentioned countries often anticipated the kind of change and opening associated with the recovery (or reinvention) of democratic freedoms. Thus, the cultural sphere has proven to be a significant locus of debate and agency, xii LUIS MARTÍN-ESTUDILLO AND ROBERTO AMPUERO as proponents of different (and often conflicting) ways of dealing with the past and imagining the future contributed there to numerous civic projects. In this sense, it might be productive to recall Erich Auerbach’s notion of Retardierung as it helps to understand how art, and especially literature, allows for the possibility to explore history in depth by “slowing down” events and focusing on crucial aspects through aesthetic and intellectual lenses. This volume of Hispanic Issues analyzes the role of intellectuals and artists in the creation of postauthoritarian orders, while this Introduction tries to cast light on how opposing stances of acceptance and defiance of those orders were configured. While the scope of the problem (which articulates something as vast as culture in four different countries) prompts us to desist from the start from trying to reach encompassing conclusions, we believe that it is possible to advance some notions that are common to these processes. One of the main differences between the genesis of the dictatorship in Spain and those of the Southern Cone lies in the character of the conflicts which led to them. While in Spain there was a war involving a confrontation mainly between two regular armies, supported by their respective international allies, in the Southern Cone this situation was lacking, even if the military of Argentina and Chile sought to impose their version of such a war. Southern Cone regular armies operated within the Doctrine of National Security dictated by the Pentagon within the political frame of the Cold War, launching systematic repression against political parties, civic movements, and scattered armed groups which had advocated armed struggle under the inspiration of the Cuban Revolution, whose leaders offered moral and technical support. The asymmetrical military clash between antagonistic forces signaled the dirtiest wars ever directed against civilians in Latin America. Once in power, the armies closed congress, exercised control over the police, the press and the judiciary, and imposed a state of emergency to exert repression without legal limits. Hans-Otto Dill’s essay in this volume deals with several novels by Argentine author David Viñas and offers an analysis of an “insider’s” view of the military. Dill elaborates on the worldview and resentment of the Argentinean military regarding civil society, and also provides us a key for understanding the logic of its repression of wide sectors of the nation’s population. How this brutal repression and authoritarian control of the public realm affected demands for justice and memory and negotiated different forms of oblivion during the democratic transition is a subject that various other essays included in this volume explore in an oblique way. The character of a transition is also determined by how a dictatorship ends. In Spain, the ruling metonymy of General Francisco Franco’s natural death INTRODUCTION xiii while still in power tends to overshadow the severely conflictive reality of those years, when the regime was still imprisoning, torturing...