MEMORY WAR

The truth around Argentina's 1976 coup has been indelibly smudged by politics.

On Tuesday, Argentina commemorated the 50th anniversary of the military coup that ousted the democratic government of President Isabel Peron and installed a brutal dictatorship that ran the country until the restoration of democracy in 1983. Those commemorations spotlighted how divided and polarized the country’s collective memory of the history, the context and the meaning of that period have become over a half-century.

Human rights groups with historic links to the period such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo along with the broad expanse of the Peronist political movement organized a public demonstration in Buenos Aires, portraying the period following the coup as a “genocide” and politically associating the government of President Javier Milei with the military dictatorship. In contrast, Milei’s government released a 75-minute video entitled “Day of Remembrance for Complete Truth and Justice” which attacked the political appropriation of “the tragic events of the decade of the 1970s” by factions within Peronism at the expense of “the entire history”.

What is underneath?

It should surprise no one who has followed Argentine politics for the past two decades or longer that this anniversary would put this sharp division in a spotlight. The political and social fracture in Argentine society, known as la grieta, while encompassing most aspects of social and political beliefs, is expressed most vividly in memories of events around the 1976 military coup.

That includes the events leading up to it, starting with the 1973 return of Juan Peron from exile, his election as president that year, and the chaotic and often violent government he and his wife and successor Isabel led (he died in 1974; she was his elected vice president).

There are also the circumstances and actions of the coup itself, both the contemporary sentiments when it happened and the mediated views passed on to later generations.

And there is the seven year period under the military dictatorship where thousands were arbitrarily arrested, tortured and forcibly disappeared by government authorities in a systematic and murderous program of repression.

There was not such a division in society about the actual facts back when nearly all of Argentina had collectively lived through it. Then and now the overwhelming majority of Argentines reject the dictatorship and hold a negative view of it. Most also did not see it the period through ideological lenses as a moral divide between pure heroes and evil villains - whomever each side represented.

They knew Isabel Peron was incapable of governing effectively and was using death squads against opponents. They knew the economy was falling to pieces and the leftist guerrilla rebels carrying out extremist violence needed to be stopped. They also knew or even witnessed during the dictatorship outrageous and immoral betrayals by some against neighbors, families and friends simply for their political beliefs in an atmosphere of state terror and extrajudicial murder. They knew the military government controlled the media and lied to them repeatedly, right down to the humiliating Falklands War that led to the dictatorship’s ultimate political collapse.

The dictatorship and its small faction of supporters in society held on fiercely to their blinkered justification of its crimes for a while. Most of them are no longer alive or active participants in the debate any longer. The younger set of leftist radicals - both the actual guerrillas of the Montoneros terrorist organization and their generational peers who did no actual rebelling but romanticized them — aged into prominence in the late 1990s.

This is where the story of la grieta took its fateful turn. Argentina entered into another period of economic and political chaos in 2001 without a Juan Peron to return on a magic carpet of myth and slogans. From the chaos emerged Nestor Kirchner and his wife, Cristina — both from that 1970s youth generation of non-guerrilla romanticists — to lead an outsider faction of Peronism into power. They knew how to co-opt the rhetoric and optics of their generation to great effect and in sync with social sentiments at the time. Nestor was elected president in 2003, and Cristina was elected to the same office in 2007.

After the transition to democracy in 1983, state institutions were set up that were dedicated to preserving the memory of the dictatorship. Some were tasked with collecting evidence of the crimes against humanity by the regime for use in civilian trials, including the details on some 9,000 persons documented as having been forcibly disappeared. Others were charged with identifying some 500 children who were stolen by the regime as infants from disappeared victims and given to pro-government families to be raised as their own without the child’s ultimate knowledge. Less than 200 have been identified and reunited with their families as of today.

After they took power, the Kirchners slowly took over those state institutions and the social movement organizations associated with their work (often with generous taxpayer funds) and turned them into militant political organizations at the service of their Peronist faction. They fed a narrative of the entire historical period that portrayed kirchnerismo as a morally pure and righteous political movement fighting against all of its evil opponents - foreign and domestic - rooted in an eternal battle of good and evil dating back to the founding of Peronism. The period of 1976 to 1983 fit neatly into that narrative, but it didn’t end there.

The Kirchners used every available mechanism of state to bully and sometimes terrorize critics of their government. Memory of the coup and its aftermath was no exception. Ernestina Herrera de Noble, the owner of the popular newspaper Clarin, which was critical of the Kirchners, was falsely accused by the kirchnerista social movements of having raised stolen - not adopted - children right at a moment when the newspaper was critical of Kirchner’s export tax policies.

The Kirchner government waged a state-funded defamation campaign against Clarin and Noble in order to silence them. Authorities raided her adult children’s home to force them to strip naked and hand over their underwear in order to obtain DNA. After the Kirchner government adopted a law sanctioning forced DNA testing of persons suspected of having been stolen children, Noble’s children voluntarily submitted to testing which proved they had not been stolen. The entire saga took years to reach its conclusion, and the government faced no consequences and the co-opted “human rights” groups rallied in defense of its actions.

Alas, this week the Peronist commemoration march was animated by the remnants of the kirchnerista-colonized social movement organizations, and the Milei government couched its “anti-revisionist” take on the coup anniversary in explicit opposition to kirchnerismo. This was a logic that serves the more recent history of Argentina much more than the events of 50 years ago.

Our take:

Much of what I’ve written here are my real time recollections of events or near-time observing of history from original reports close to when they all happened. I grew up in the 1970s and followed the news religiously from multiple sources, including short wave radio. I also followed the entire arc of kirchnerismo as it happened very closely since the Kirchners first emerged in politics in the 1990s. I find it extraordinary that so much of the complex, disorderly and contradictory facts of Argentina’s history have been whitewashed, obscured or simply forgotten in the wider discussion of memory and justice of the 1976 coup.

The memory of the Kirchners’ co-opting of official thoughts on all matters historic and current is very fresh, while the memory of the 1970s is quite faded. Defending the kirchnerista narrative of history is, therefore, somewhat existential for the militants struggling to hang onto control of Peronism itself. That memory has also been the launching pad for Milei’s own political rise, and he used public revulsion towards the Kirchners to great effect in his presidential campaign.

But here is where no one in this week’s conversation is serving the memory of Argentina’s history with any responsible aforethought. The social and political critique of the leftist appropriation of memory is absolutely justifiable, and the anger it carries is understandable. For instance, kirchnerista entities have worked to infuse global memory with falsehoods and exaggerations like the “30,000 disappeareds”, a number which has never been close to being documented and has been repeated irresponsibly to make it true anyway.

But Milei and his movement are not offering a “complete” history either, despite calling it that. The critique has become the entire story rather than a pivot point in a better collective consensus of the facts of history. This ends up discrediting those who were factually victimized by the violence of that period, including those kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Peron government and the leftist terrorists of the period. After having been forgotten or marginalized in the kirchnerista narrative, they end up having been co-opted for political effect today rather than reincorporated into a complete memory.

In the end, some basic rules of strategic communication apply to actually correcting the record versus simply doubling down on the disinformation battle. If you want to convince people something is really true, you have to acknowledge the complexity and welcome the messiness that is necessary in order for the general public to reach a consensus. Truth can only be noble if all of its good and bad is truthfully confronted, and accountability is taken.

Other societies have successfully confronted their painful pasts without social fractures, and many have been smaller, less developed societies than Argentina so there is no excuse for not achieving it there. The social fracture no longer serves the interests of the country today or in the future. One hopes its leaders will realize it’s time to turn the page and put history in the proper, truthful perspective as a necessary task for social, economic and political advancement. Otherwise, the senseless memory war will hold Argentina back.