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

Afterword

249 u Afterword David William Foster The editors of this volume state very precisely the important fact that the circumstances of the rise of authoritarian regimes in Spain and, subsequently, in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile (to place them in chronological order) were owing to diverse internal and external historical circumstances, and they go on also to point out precisely the equally diverse factors that influenced the transition from authoritarianism to democracy and the variegated nature of institutional processes and cultural responses that must require one to bear very much in mind that an impulse to homologize the events of the four countries in question undermines any adequate historical perspective. Since internationally there is, in fact, a significant underdifferentiated perception of the nature of the various Latin American societies and their relationship to Spain, one does well always to articulate such considerations forcefully—especially in a society such as the United States where most people cannot even get the capitals of Latin America right. Yet, there is a continuity between the four countries that goes beyond just the question of authoritarianism. That is, if only authoritarianism were at issue , one could question why these four countries. Or, why Spain and these three Latin American countries. What about the many faces of authoritarian- 250 DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER ism in other parts of the continent, from the pseudemocracy of the PRI era in Mexico, to the fossilized revolution in Cuba, to the long legacy of strongman dictatorships in Paraguay and other societies. One might also want to take into account how the 1964 coup in Brazil was something like a mid-twentieth century ur-tyranny for the Southern cone. The answer is an intriguing one, for it has to do with the way in which the neofascist regimes in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, despite singular textual differences between them (such as policies of detention, interrogation, torture, imprisonment, liquidation, and disappearance ), all saw themselves as in some ways inspired by the fascist model of Francisco Franco. Franco’s regime, well into its third decade by the time of the neofascist coups in the 1970s in the three countries in question,1 was viewed as an inspiration, ideologically and executively, to the coup leaders of the respective countries. Franco’s death in 1975, moreover, provided for the quite ironic situation that, whereas Spain’s fascist legacy was renewed as an intellectual and political influence in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, the process whereby Spain was returning to democracy at the same time that these three countries were restaging the Franco experiment with renewed vigor and new technological resources, the mother country nevertheless became an important port of refuge for Latin American refugees from neofascism. While the latter played important roles in the consolidation of democracy in Spain and the revitalization of intellectual and artistic institutions (one must recall that Spanish literature was pretty moribund in the latter decades of Franquismo, which is why Spain provided important and welcoming publishing opportunities for Latin American authors and thus contributed materially to the so-called boom of the 1960s and early 1970s), these Latin Americans were not always welcome (especially academics who sought posts in the tight Spanish university market) and contributed to the emergence of the sudaca syndrome of Spanish mistrust of and often outright discrimination against the South Americans, the sudamericanos.2 It is this privileged historical relationship between Spain and the southern cone military dictatorships, both in terms of Franco’s legacy and the Spanish asylum, that lends particular weight to the conjugation of the four countries in this volume. The issues raised in the twelve essays in this volume—and I count myself privileged to be among them—are magisterially introduced by the volume editors, Luis Martín-Estudillo and Roberto Ampuero, and they raise important overarching issues that give cohesion to the book as a whole: 1) The nature of institutional transition and the difficulties of charting its boundaries, particularly as regards cultural production; 2) The different emphases of that cultural production as it relates to the daunting task of making sense of lived social AFTERWORD 251 history, such as the microrécits that have predominated in Chile vs. the macrohistories that emerge more prominently in Argentina; 3) the complex question of the Spanish Movida and the degree to which it represented something profoundly “contestatorial” vs. an opportunistic, market-driven, individualist continuation of capitalist-based circumstances of late Franquismo; 4) the imperative...