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

5. Testimonial Narratives in the Argentine Post-Dictatorship: Survivors, Witnesses, and the Reconstruction of the Past

77 u 5 Testimonial Narratives in the Argentine Post-Dictatorship: Survivors, Witnesses, and the Reconstruction of the Past1 Ana Forcinito No existen en la historia paréntesis inexplicables. Y es precisamente en los períodos de “excepción” en esos momentos molestos y desagradables que las sociedades pretenden olvidar, colocar entre paréntesis donde aparecen sin mediaciones ni atenuantes los secretos y las vergüenzas del poder cotidiano. —Pilar Calveiro, Poder y desaparición (There are no unexplainable parentheses in History. And it is precisely in these periods of “exception,” in the annoying and unpleasant moments that societies seek to forget, put in parenthesis, that the secrets and the shames of daily power appear, without any mediation nor extenuating circumstance.) El asunto es ése: no acallar las voces discordantes con la propia sino sumarlas para ir armando, en lugar de un puzzle en que cada pieza tiene un solo lugar, una especie de calidoscopio que reconoce distintas figuras posibles. —Pilar Calveiro, Política y/o violencia (This is what it’s about: not to silence discordant voices with our own voice, but to add them in order to put together, instead of a puzzle in which each piece has only one place, a sort of kaleidoscope which recognizes different possible figures.) 2 Former detainees have, without any doubt, a central place in the Argentine redemocratization process that started in 1983. Their testimonies have been essential in determining the existence and location of Clandestine Camps, in 78 ANA FORCINITO identifying repressors, in making visible methods of torture, living conditions in the Camps, and especially in providing information about the desaparecidos, when and where they were held captives, and other information pertaining to them. Their presence in the public reconstruction of the past is also connected with the constitution of the disappeared as a figure that could no longer be ignored in the redemocratization process. Nevertheless, this central role of the survivors seems to be conditioned by the marginalization of some memories, meanings and interpretations. Adriana Calvo, a survivor of the Clandestine Detention Camp “Pozo de Banfield,” says about the silence that surrounds the figure of the former detainee: “A todos les pasó lo mismo. No había orejas dispuestas a escuchar, no querían saber, no podían soportarlo. No querían sentirse responsables de lo que estaba pasando” (Gelman 112) (It happened to everyone. There were no ears prepared to listen, no one wanted to know, they could not bear it. They did not want to feel responsible for what was going on). And later on, she ads: “Para esta sociedad existen las Madres y los HIJOS. Los detenidos-desaparecidos no existimos” (113) (In this society only Mothers and HIJOS exist. The detenidos-desaparecidos do not). Are the survivors—as those desaparecidos who can testify for those who did not survived—inside those parentheses that Pilar Calveiro, also a former detainee, proposes as what—and who—“societies seek to forget?” Even though their juridical role is widely accepted and unquestioned, are there other memories or senses attached to the very idea of becoming a witness that are not being listened to, as Calvo suggests ? Or is this displacement a dispute about the meanings of multiple memories that cannot form a single perfect figure of the past but instead the kaleidoscope in which Calveiro locates the various possible figures of the exercise of remembering? Memory as a social practice in the Argentine post-dictatorship continues to be open to new meanings, new questions, new recollections, sometimes conflictive , or even irreconcilable. Even though the recent commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the coup on March 24, 2006 took 100,000 citizens to the Plaza de Mayo (Página 12, March 25, 2006), the meaning assigned to memory, or better, to the plural memories of the past is still under construction. Once again, the concept of collective memory proposed by Maurice Halbwachs is challenged by approaches that privilege marginalized voices, individual stories and, as Michael Pollak suggests “underground memories” (4). The last years of democratic government in Argentina brought a number of changes in relation to the official politics in Human Rights. This official call for a politics of memory in the new millennium, thirty years after the last coup, is also opening new channels of debate that prove that memory, as Elizabeth Jelin points out, TESTIMONIAL NARRATIVES IN THE ARGENTINE POST-DICTATORSHIP 79 is a political struggle “not only over...