Systemic Violence in Claudia Piñeiro’s Las viudas de los jueves

Carlos Menem was inaugurated as president of Argentina in July 1989, six months before the official transfer of power was to take place. The country was in the grips of an economic crisis, as hyperinflation rates of up to 5000% had been eating away the salaries and savings of the Argentine people and paralyzing the national economy. As he had promised, Menem’s most urgent items for his first-term agenda were to reduce public expenditures and reassure both domestic and foreign investors of the stability of the country. In 1991, the Argentine Congress passed a convertibility law which further transformed the national economy and new neoliberal trade laws ushered in an era of visible wealth and spending—although both the wealth and the spending eluded large segments of the population. Writing in the early 1990s, economist David Erro noted that “investment is on the rise, capital is being repatriated, and foreign investors are beginning to return” (196). As had happened in Chile, pro-neoliberal economic policies promoting privatization and foreign investment were first adopted during the military dictatorship, but the unabashed promotion and expansion of these policies under Menem had the immediate effect of stabilizing the economy and spurring economic growth. In the face of what seemed to be a quick and impressive recovery, Menem and Minister of the Economy Domingo Cavallo promised Argentines that by the end of the decade Argentina would have joined the ranks of first world nations. During the first half of the 1990s, international financial institutions (among them, IMF and the World Bank) praised Argentina’s economic recovery and pointed to Menem’s adoption of classical neoliberal policies as a model for Latin America to follow. The moment, which would become known as “the Argentine miracle,” was not to last. By the second half of the 1990s it was already apparent to economists and informed citizens that the carte-blanche adoption of neo-liberalism was plunging the country into a serious economic depression. Poverty levels skyrocketed. By the end of the decade, the nation defaulted on its debts and banks closed their doors as the national economy collapsed.

During the earlier part of this decade, however, neoliberal economic policies and the sudden largesse of portions of the middle class brought into focus the nation’s rabid social conservatism, and particularly its class-conscious racism and xenophobia. Cultural studies scholar Pablo Alabarces notes that since the late 1980s, “contemporáneamente con el profundo giro neoconservador de la sociedad argentina, la exclusión y la desintegración han pasado a ser los síntomas dominantes” (21). Slavoj Žižek argues that the structures that promote class, race and ethnic inequality are in fact a form of violence against society’s underprivileged classes. In turn, he notes, the unsustainable conditions faced by those discriminated against accounts for much of the interpersonal as well as the political violence that makes headlines in today’s news (9). Aided by Žižek’s argument as developed in Violence, my essay proposes to read Claudia Piñeiro’s 2005 bestseller Las viudas de los jueves as an illustration of correlation between systemic violence and social exclusion. By depicting the construction of social mores that exemplify the “fetishist disavowal” that Žižek identifies as a central feature of any systemically inherent violence, Piñeiro’s novel recreates a society on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own unsustainable prejudices and (financial) expectations.

As a microcosm of the prejudices and inequalities that underscored the substantial gains amassed by the middle and upper classes during the early 1990s, the world of Piñeiro’s first novel is a commentary on the systemic violence hidden by the so-called “Argentine miracle”—the successful insertion of Argentina into global markets during these years. While gated communities proliferated, class inequality became increasingly more pronounced, as did the percentage of the population living below the poverty line. Additionally, I argue that Piñeiro’s novel shows the social fissures on which these artificial communities are generally built.

Gated Communities: Unexpected Venues for Violence

Las viudas...