The War on Memory Begins in Argentina

March 24, 2016
The War on Memory Begins in Argentina

Within less than a month of the inauguration of the new Macri/Cambiemos government in Argentina, the new leadership, or gestión (management) as they prefer to be called, acted in a great sweeping hurry. Argentine congress, full of opposition parliamentarians from the Frente Para la Victoria Party that lost the presidential race by 2% of the vote, was closed for the summer holidays that take place in the ardent month of December, as much of the urban population of Argentina seeks to carelessly flock to the seaside.

Big layoffs, and new laws drafted to criminalize the protests against layoffs, coincided with the battle to close down as many cultural centres as possible. The first obvious target was the Nestor Kirchner Cultural centre, where theatre and music shows were provided for free with the intent of giving the poor and working classes access to high culture. More ominously, a battle is taking place to shut down the Haroldo Conti Centre for Memory, a cultural centre and museum built inside the former torture and disappearance centre, the ESMA, which functioned during the 1970s as a secret concentration camp. The Haroldo Conti centre is named after a lyrical Argentine novelist and prose essayist who, like the non-fiction writer and militant Rodolfo Walsh and the surrealist poet Miguel Angel Bustos, were among the writers who were murdered in targeted assassinations during the last regime period of the country. An absurd-seeming executive order from Macri also commanded the change of the images on the currency: using images typical Argentine wild animals to replace the human faces of past Argentine presidents, whether of the political right (often genocidal, Custer-type 19th century rulers like Roca) as well as of the political left (the face of Eva Peron, which was minted on the 100 peso bill by command of Kirchner-era treasurers) The measure of readapting the currency is called part of the ‘’de-ideologization’’ of the national money. Part of the campaign of de-ideologization, or of ideological purification, was the use of executive presidential power to take the first political prisoners in Argentina since the apparition of Democracy in the mid-1980s. The Jujuyan indigenous activist Milagro Salas is incarcerated for enacting the right to protest, a right formerly defended in the Argentine constitution before Macri’s hurried amendments which he enforced while Congress and the courts closed for summer holidays (arriving in December in the Southern hemisphere).

To ornament the structured erosion of memory and freedom of thought, a statement was issued by Dario Lopérfido—the new minister of culture—announcing that the numbers of the disappeared in Argentina had been exaggerated by leftists in order for them to extort subsidies and money from the state. Lopérfido insisted in articles, press conferences and twitter and facebook feeds that the real number was somewhere around 12000 and not 30,000 disappeared persons.

No Two Demons

‘’From the one, two, from the two, the ten thousand, many things’’ – Lao Tze

Long before the Culture Minister’s statements of revisionism, the Human rights groups such as HIJOS and the May Plaza Mothers’ Association have confronted the newly arisen Cambiemos government led my Mauricio Macri. They accuse Macri’s ministers of attempting the resurrection of ‘’two demons theory.’’

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/24/the-war-on-memory-begins-in-argentina/