The formative years of this age cohort were impinged upon by processes of political activism and coming to terms with the dictatorial past. As a generational site, it is likely that this could have given rise to a ‘romantic’ generational narrative (I shall clarify that this plot was promptly blocked; see also Chapter Six for this narrative genre). This narrative structure would enclose a beginning (the Malvinas disaster), a middle (the awakening of public activism and processes of accounting for the past) and a promissory future: a true democracy. The narrative includes strong oppositions: e.g. a heinous military force and sacred, massacred victims (children and women). There were also many heroes: the human rights groups, the government’s first steps towards taking the past into account, and a great part of Argentine society which suddenly became politically active, condemned all the crimes, and quickly forgot the enthusiasm for the football event or the Malvinas/Falklands War.
Certainly, the majority of the respondents located themselves historically in such a narrative sequence. Nevertheless, taken as a generational narrative, the we-performative dimension is rather absent. Young people did appear as secondary actors or passive characters. Young political activism followed classical organizations that reproduced old divisions (e.g. Peronism-Radicalism youths).
Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit is mostly related to earlier traumas and conflicts. In other terms, amongst generational voices, they followed a former ‘canonical generation’ (Ben-Ze’ev and Lomsky-Feder 2009).
Contrafactually, the crucial point was allocated in the narrative ‘end’: the promise of true democracy. The performance of such a promise should have been exactly the site to enact romantic emplotment. Let me show a decisive sequence of events of illusion/disillusion that eventually blocked the future of such a narrative plot.
A new wave of trials against the military followed the initial procedures against the military junta, encouraged by human rights organizations and the effective performance of tribunals. Yet, these trials went beyond Alfonsín’s preliminary goal, namely, to judge only the commandants-in-chief and the ‘key’ perpetrators. Then, Alfonsín’s government passed in Congress a ‘Final Point’ or ‘Full-Stop Law’ which sought to end the human rights trials. The law had unforeseen consequences: a rapid rise in the prosecutions against the military occurred before the law was passed. As a reaction, a right-wing ‘uncivil movement’ (Payne 2000) emerged led by second-rung branches of the Army that rightly feared that all those who played a role in the dictatorship could be judged. The rebellion of the carapintadas (painted faces) aimed therefore to impede the continuation of justice and restore military honour. A sequence of violent conflicts again took place in Argentina, from 1987 until 1989.
The setting was diverse barracks taken over by military rebels.
The first event in this rebellion occurred at Easter 1987: a group of military rebels seized the Army quarters of ‘Campo de Mayo’, attempting to stop justice procedures.
As a civil counter-response, there was an enormous public mobilization in May square to support democratic principles. The setting was highly dramatic. Alfonsín – from the balcony of the government palace – asked for ‘time’ from the demonstration gathered in order to obtain a military surrender. He left the palace, went to the barracks and himself negotiated an end to the conflict. He returned to May square and from the same balcony announced their surrender, closing with the sentence:
“The home is clean. There is no blood in Argentina … Happy Easter.” In fact, the leaders of the rebellion were detained (though new forms of military rebellion followed). Yet, at the same time, the government took the opportunity to pass, a month later, a law of ‘Due Obedience’ in which responsibility for human rights violations was framed only to include maximal authorities. Such an event was lately narrated as ‘treason’ since it marks the beginning of the end of the first wave of state policy concerning human rights accounts. Let me offer Marcelo’s account in this context:
“Yes, at Easter (…) There was no information but among a group of friends we called each other and there we were, standing up for a radical (…) Despite what Alfonsín had shown, it was necessary to be there. 2) There we were, defending him with our own bodies. It wasn't like nowadays. Today people are armed with spoons and demonstrate by banging pots standing at the front entrances of their houses. Or they watch it on television or on the
Internet, they gather together, they "like" or "dislike" and that's it with participation. No, at that time it was about defending with your own body. 3) The turning point was this sequence of betrayals; you were betrayed by one side and then by the other, first Alfonsín then Menem and so on. My generation got more and more disappointed. So the 1980s have two sides, first a big discovery, followed at the end by great disillusionment.” (Marcelo, 1968)
Marcelo’s account was divided into three parts. The first paragraph entails the presupposition of their active (performative) role and presence in the story (it was necessary to be there). Here, it is observed a romantic end to the generational narrative in terms of it being a mission: the defence of democracy against military forces.
Moreover, the event is remembered as a generational performance: ‘we’ (with friends or schoolmates) were there supporting the democracy, in the same setting (Plaza de Mayo) as the Malvinas and human rights protests. They had to be there in spite of Alfonsín’s goals and intentions (already converted into a false helper or blocking character; for this narrative character, see Jacobs and Soberaj 2007).
In the second part, Marcelo drew a double distinction: the we-generational performance (we were, defending him with our own bodies) of those years should be distinguished from those currently banging pots (right-wing, upper-middle class) and those who use new technologies to participate (younger people). The generational narrative is primarily backed up by the body’s performance: our bodies testified to our participation and democratic compromise. The body acts as a memory support, reinforcing the ‘authenticity’ of the narrative (Giesen 2004a: 34).
The third step, however, recounted how such a romantic genre (the good hero against evil military forces) was rapidly converted into irony: we were betrayed/
defeated by false helpers: Alfonsín and Menem. The first one limited the scope of the trials, the second one will grant a general pardon. Indeed, the events which took place in 1987 were merely the beginning of the Argentine crisis with respect to the state policy of human rights. After Alfonsín’s law of ‘due obedience’, the new democratic president – Peronist Carlos Saul Menem – announced a general pardon for the commandants-in-chief of the dictatorship and leaders of the leftist guerrillas.
Furthermore, Menem triggered a ‘future-oriented’ narrative discourse: leave the past behind, seek reconciliation and, finally, ‘look toward the future’ (for such a script, see Jelin 1994:50). Later, Alfonsín and Menem would sign a pact (el pacto the olivos) to agree on constitutional change, thereby allowing Menem’s re-election (Image 5,
next page). Henceforth, as Marcelo concluded, his generation (first mentioned by Marcelo as a noun) was getting more and more disillusioned.
Image 5
Alfonsín and Menem after the pact: false helpers
Source: http://lasimagenesretro.wordpress.com/tag/pacto-de-olivos
The end of Alfonsín’s government is engraved in the memory of my respondents, not only in terms of political ‘disillusion’, but also related to the financial situation around 1989. Forming a crucial part of Argentineans’ memory of economic events (Grimson 2012b), the country underwent harsh hyperinflation as a result of equivocal political management, capital flight and a budget deficit inherited from the dictatorship. As a consequence, Alfonsín had to resign earlier.
The widespread memories of hyperinflation involve several aspects. Firstly, this economic crisis easily links troublesome biographical aspects (for instance, parents’
critical situation as well as their own difficult first years of marriage) with the national, disruptive context. In connection with this, the hyperinflation particularly allows low-class respondents to develop their life stories. Indeed, while political events seem to occur ‘far away’ from their lives, the economic crisis was vividly
evoked by people living in poverty. For example, Flor remembered Alfonsín’s time only in terms of hyperinflation. She stressed: “In Alfonsín’s time … we referred to that time in Argentina as ‘malaria’ because we didn’t have anything.” A similar point is made by Luis:
“We arrived at Alfonsín’s time. There was no money, brother. How can I explain to you?
You had ten pesos and you went to buy one kilo of sugar, and you went to the same place later and the price rose to twelve pesos. Do you follow me? There was no stability, prices changes two, three, four times per day! And there was huge upheaval and hunger.” (Luis, 1974) Hyperinflation is also regarded by several respondents as a reservoir of practical knowledge for future economic crises (e.g. the crisis of 2001). After the hyperinflation of 1989, people were able to manage future economic situations.
When analysing young interviewees in Chapter Five, such characteristics will be more salient as young cohorts experienced the crisis of 2001 as a radical novelty (see 5.3). Ultimately, the memory of hyperinflation seems to be inscribed in daily life practices (Connerton 1989). Luisa– a young respondent born in 1986 – remembered discovering ten oil bottles in her father’s kitchen cupboard in case of new (hyper)inflation. In other terms, hyperinflation left traces, affecting even the management of and conversations about food (see Thießen 2009 for the generational boundaries provoked by table talk about food scarcity in Germany).
One aspect hardly mentioned is the illusion unleashed by Menem’s campaign in order to overcome hyperinflation and, broadly speaking, the fragile Argentine economy. Menem promised a new era of prosperity, proposing a classical script:
social justice and economic recovery through Peronism (Justicialist Party). For Francisca, taking part in an election for the first time, she confidently voted for Menem, encouraged by her father’s story of the classical era of Peronism. However, the concretization of this promise was not the state-oriented performance of classical Peronism but rather a strong liberalization of the Argentine market, leading to a transformation of the economic system. Menem sold off a vast number of public enterprises and his government both blocked a variety of civil organizations (e.g.
human rights organizations) and co-opted others (e.g. labour unions). Without hyperinflation, such radical neoliberal (narrative) intervention would not have been possible (Novaro 2009: 307-332).
Such a ‘promise’ was barely mentioned. Rather, Menem’s two periods of government (1989-1995; 1995-1999) were remembered by my respondents as a depressing political period. After the economic and political crisis of 2001, preceded by a visible increase in pauperization (new urban poverty), Menem became Argentine’s black legend (‘the country was destroyed’) and, indeed, all my respondents remembered his government as being corrupt and dreadful (see also the ‘hyperbolization of the evil nineties’ in young accounts in 5.2).
Breaking the illusion of social justice and having ended the policy of human rights, Menem’s period prepared fertile ground for narratives of disillusionment. All the respondents who remembered Alfonsín’s eighties as a period of political activism, experienced the nineties as an era of political deactivation. The illusion of youth militancy was death and an ironic stance was firmly instilled. Following narrative theory, an ironist is a character who assumes ‘flexible pragmatism’ and the
‘avoidance of illusion’. The sequence of course is not original, rather structural. As Jeffrey Alexander (2002:12) has already noted, disillusionment after the First World War brought about ‘irony’ as the master trope.
In such a structural sense, there is also a crucial match between the sequence of the life course and the narrative emplotment. During the 1990s, for all respondents, their life courses were impinged upon by processes of getting married (ten out of twelve), working and having children. Five of them continued at university, though working at the same time, though two of them never completed it. For Francisca, who gave up her study of psychology in order to work, the 1990s represent the period of bringing up her two children. The crucial point is that both processes coincide: on the one hand, the exit from the public space (due to the beginning of the adult period) and on the other the narrative of general political deactivation.
Definitely, both sequences reinforce each other: the 1990s become a place of individualism and minimal participation. Here emerges a sort of generational forgetting which is worth taking into account: whether their formative years were defining, later periods became less relevant and remain outside of the generational memory frame. I would finally suggest that those who went through the formative period of the 1990s could recount all sorts of resistance to state privatization or the strong policy of neo-liberalism carried out by Menem. Yet, for these respondents, there was little to tell.