Why did Latin American civil societies turn toward the politics of memory in the 1990s?

Introduction

●      Latin American civil societies turned toward memory politics in the 1990s because political transitions created openings, civil society activism provided pressure and infrastructure, and traumatised societies required new frameworks to contest narratives and reconstruct citizenship.”

●      Context of the ‘Dirty Wars’ in the 1970s and 1980s

○      Disruptive Archives : Feminist Memories of Resistance in Latin America's Dirty Wars - Viviana Beatriz MacManus - usually used to refer to the repressive Southern Cone military regimes but MacManus extends the term across Latin America to encompass the unjust and disproportionate wars waged by the state

●      The politics of memory had existed for several decades before, but surged in the 1990s

●      The post-cold War and democratic reconfigurations of the 1990s necessitated societies to confront these violent legacies, but these processes were contested due to the fundamentally divisive historical memories and the relation of the new regimes to these authoritarian pasts

●      This was only possible as human rights organisations and other civil society groups had built strong capacities over the previous decades, allowing them to seize the moments of rupture and transition to bring memory politics to the forefront

●      Tying both of these arguments together, societies needed to turn to or pay further attention to the politics of memory in order to reconstruct their individual and collective identities after such traumatic fractures

PI - transitions and opening

The impact of the end of the Cold War and democratic transitions required societies to confront national violent legacies. This process was highly ambivalent and contested, reflecting the political uncertainity and rupture of the decade.

P1 - Stern on Chile

Stern convincingly argues that the Chilean government had no choice but to turn to the politics of memory which had previously been disregarded - while deeply ambivalent and wrought with contradictions, addressing the violent legacies of Pinochet’s regime was imperative to establishing their moral and democratic legitimacy and appeal to the electorate.

●      ‘key battleground for politicocultural legitimacy under the dictatorship’

●      Chileans had to reckon with the legacy of state terror during a period of uncertain democratic transition after Pinochet lost a plebiscite that was meant to ratify the continuation of his role

●      The new regime had to turn to the politics of memory in order to establish democratic legitimacy, as evading them or addressing them incorrectly would threaten this

○      This was particularly challenging as the transition had been inaugurated after Pinochet had lost a plebiscite that was meant to ratify the continuation of his rule - not a ‘fast track’

○      The duality of the memory question - ‘it undermined Pinochet and the regime, thereby making a reckoning unavoidable. It built powerful social loyalties to Pinochet and the regime, thereby making a reckoning dangerous’

○      Fundamental to the moral foundation of democracy - critical to the electorate base of the ruling Center Left Concertraction despite much contradiction and ambivalence from political elites

○      Could not just be forgotten - for example in 1989, Pinochet wanted a second amnesty but this wasn’t granted except on economic matters that could undermine 1980s privatisation as ‘the air force and navy realised that the moral and political legitimacy of human rights memory was too strong’

 

P1 - Weld on Guatemala

The case of Guatemala presents a similar pattern to Chile - Guatemalan society was only nominally democratic and human right activists sought to push the archival logic of ‘democratic opening’ against the state’s archival logic of ‘surveillance, social control and ideological management’.

 

●       ‘In the Guatemalan case, the National Police archives are a microcom of the country’s larger postwar dynamics: their existence denied, their rediscovery accidental, their future uncertain due to the threats faced by ‘human rights’ initiatives in the country, their rescue completely ad hoc in the absence of government capacity or political will to exercise its constitutional responsibility over them, their processing funded entirely from abroad’

●      Historical memory is intertwined with power - important in creating a more democratic, politically conscious society

●      The military’s use of Article 30, from 1996 on reveals  how, as Bickford writes, “the vulnerability and lingering authoritarian characteristics of new democracies might be profoundly connected to authoritarian pasts.”

○      Article 30 of the Guatemalan constitution which stated that military or diplomatic information was private was used to justify denials

○      Continuity in the exclusionary, militarised nature of the state despite the Peace Accords

 

P1 - Bustamante on Cuba

The collapse of the Soviet bloc destabilised the revolutionary narrative; socialism’s disintegration forced both the state and diaspora to turn - Cuba’s post-socialist memory politics differ from transitional justice in the Southern Cone. Signal explicitly what Cuba adds methodologically: e.g. “Cuba shows that even in non-transitional contexts, geopolitical rupture (collapse of the USSR) can force retrospective re-evaluation.”

 

●      The collapse of the Soviet bloc prompted a reconsideration of the Cuban revolutionary narrative - forced both Cubans and the Cuban diaspora to renegotiate the meaning of the past

●      Inevitable ‘that hegemonic frameworks of national remembering and forgetting, as well as some of their components, underwent some rewriting’

●       For starters, Cuba’s government amended the island’s constitution, swapping references to the Soviet Union for more mentions of José Martí and recentering the long quest for national independence as the revolutionary government’s primary reason for being.

●      In the Cuban diaspora, the Revolution’s survival - albeit in adulterated form - was obviously a bitter pill to swallow. Many exiles and Cuban Americans had greeted the start of the 1990s confident that, after so many years of waiting, their moment of historic liberation had finally arrived’

●      Exiles viewed themselves as the last warriors against an anti-communist theory

●      ‘By the late 1990s, newer retrospective tensions were dividing the diaspora, too. The 1994 rafter crisis led to a diplomatic agreement facilitating more regular migration between Cuba and the United States. Thereafter, upward of 20,000 legal Cuban migrants began arriving in the United States each year, some of whom did not identify as ‘exiles’ at all. Even more so than with the Mariel migration, these ‘recent arrivals’ memories were not of ‘the Republic’ lost but of the socialism, or every-man-for-himself postsocialism, they left behind’

 

P2 - Civil society actors

However, this ascendance of the politics of memory in the 1990s would not have been possible without the enduring efforts of civil society actors.

●      Stern’s concept of ‘frictional synergies’ encapsulates this

○      ‘It was precisely the articulation of the social and the political, notwithstanding a climate of elitism and demobilisation, and not withstanding the structurally adverse conditions of transition, that allowed for creative moments of memory reckoning. It was also the insistence of civil society actors, and revived articulations with state and political actors, that kept the door open - or pried it back open - for new moments of reckoning’

○      Synergy did not mean harmony or unity, ebbed and flowed, different actors played different roles

●      Interdependence - united goal - needed state and civil society actors, human rights activitsts, lawyers and social workers compelled by a sense of civic duty

 ‘a fourth major conclusion to this study emerges from the foregoing: From a comparative standpoint, building persistent and insistent connections, whether confrontational or synergistic or both, of civil

P2 - Weld on Guatemala

In Guatemala, the turn to the politics of memory had emerged as the result of long-term frictional and synergistic engagement between activists and the state - despite oppression and repeated obstruction, civil society actors persisted in trying to uncover and publicise archives

 

●      Had been several attempts in the 1980s

○      Military coup of 23 March 1982 - crowds of anguished protestors stormed the home of interior minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz and found stacks of individuals targeted for elimination

○      In the late 1980s,  activists filed a complaint with the Guatemalan Supreme Court denouncing the state’s “kidnapping” of the archives of the police and the army, basing their demands on Articles 28 and 30 of the constitution

●      March 1993 -  personnel from the National Police’s Identification Bureau anonymously denounced plans to destroy DIT archives 

●      1999 - In a news item that dominated headlines for weeks, a 54 page file chronicling nearly 200 forced disappearances and political killings carried out by the Presidential Staff’s intelligence unit was smuggled out of the army’s archives and given to human right activists in the United States, who published it

●       1990-91 truth commission

○      Didn’t name perpetrators and didn’t ‘secur military leaders’ acknowledgement of atrocity as state policy’

●      In 1991–93, the Aylwin doctrine and the impact of the Alfonso Chanfreau case launched debate about proper interpretation of the 1978 Amnesty Law and the responsibility of judges to investigate rather than dismiss criminal cases.

○      Disappearances were ineligible for amnesty

○      ‘raised the heat on judges to apply the Alywin doctrine to new cases, were directly linked to the evidentiary findings and politico-cultural impact of the Rettig Commission

●       In 1995, the final phase of a judicial and political drama ended with the imprisonment of the dina head Manuel Contreras, sentenced for the murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Mott.

●       In 1997, Villa Grimaldi, the largest dina torture center, was inaugurated as a memory site rather than a commercial property obliterating the past.

○      ‘Required that civil society activists overcome the idea, influential in political elite circles after the cat-and-mouse chase of Conteras in 1995, that the polity would not withstand new memory initiatives on torture and disappearance’

P2 - Nelson on Guatemala

●      During the long and troubled “peace process,” some brave women and men began organizing as “sectors arising from the violence” to demand justice for the crimes so recently committed.

●      The Mutual Support Group for Families of the Disappeared (gam) was the first of many organizations to challenge state impunity and the deadly silences it contained.

●      Formed in 1984 primarily by widows, gam publicly challenged the military government with the demand “Alive they were taken, alive we want them back!” Others followed: Families of the Disappeared of Guatemala (famdegua), National Coordination of Widows of Guatemala (cona vigua), composed of rural indigenous women, and the Ethnic Council “Runujel Junam” (cerj) which resisted the civil patrols and the militarization of indigenous communities.

●      These groups, which had roots in the long history of “rising up,” laid bare the gendering and racializing of the violence, and their political pressure helped end the armed conflict.

●      They also paved the way for truth commissions and other projects for bringing justice to the war’s victims, including forensic anthropological investigations of mass graves, legal proceedings against human rights violators, and, as of 2004, the National Reparations Program.

P2 - Argentina

Argentina presents a different case - while survivors and their relatives, as well as civil society activists had attempted to bring the politics of memory to the forefront of the political agenda, this did not occur until the ‘memory knot’ of the Scilingo effect had occured.

●      Stern’s idea of ‘Memory knots’ - ‘the specific human groups and leaders, the specific events in time including anniversaries and commemorations and the specific physical remains or places that demanded attention to memory’

●      ‘These compelling knots in time and space galvanised appeals for moral or political awareness, drew people into identifying with one or another framework or memory

 

Feitlowitz,

●      Rather different reception - ‘survivors were hit again with the forced intimacy of the concentration camp’ - was very tormentous

●      The media attention to Scilingo and other enforcers forced society to “confront its own denial, its tacit approval during those years of clandestine crimes”.

●      The public consciousness of impunity, augmented by the televised confessions without prosecution, was viewed by some as alienating and atomizing, threatening to turn the moment into merely “the spectacle of impunity”.

●      Survivors lamented that their prior testimonies about death flights were ignored, but the confessions of perpetrators like Scilingo suddenly gained credence, highlighting a double standard in societal acceptance of testimony.

●      The legal struggle, led by groups like CELS (Center for Legal and Social Studies), focused on establishing the “inalienable right to the truth, the obligation to respect the body, and the right to mourn the dead,” citing international human rights conventions.

●      A major component of the politics of memory involved the legal and political difficulty of repealing the Due Obedience and Punto Final laws, which shielded perpetrators from prosecution despite international disapproval.

●      The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, through their steadfast activism, particularly their symbolic use of the white kerchief, represent the “prophetic power of maternal love” and remain an eloquent symbol in the struggle against the politics of amnesia.

●      ‘The struggle over memory is presented as a battle between those pushing for truth and public justice and those seeking to manage the fall out, maintain impunity or return to a narrative of national unity without accountability’ - ‘it is a process of forcing historical awareness onto a society that had previously engaged in denial’

 

P3 - Identity reconstruction

Memory was essential for societies to make sense of trauma, claim justice, and debate the meaning of citizenship and nationhood.

Stern’s concepts of emblematic and loose memory

●      Emblematic memory - drawn from wider experience, related to the four frameworks articulated

●      Loose memory - personal experience - ‘provides a rich lore of raw material, the authenticity of stories and symbols grounded in particular lives and useful for the making of emblematic memory’

 

The two are heavily intertwined - societies and individuals turned to the politics of memory in order to reconstruct or articulate individual and collective identities

P3 - Stern on Pinochet in Chile

Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006, Steve J. Stern

●      Memory was very divided in society, particularly in relation to the ‘soft’ civilian power and ‘hard’ military power

○      Military - saw the 1973 coup as ‘the salvation of a society in ruins and on the edge of a violent bloodbath’

○      Those who remembered it as cruel and a wound in their lives - those who’d experienced the disappearance of their relatives, victims, critics, human rights activists

○      ‘A third and closely related framework remembered the past-within-the-present as an experience of persecution and awakening’

■      Paid particular attention to ‘mulitfaceted and layered repression

○      ‘Memory as a mindful forgetting’ - regime leaders and supporters

●      Ambivalence about the memory question - could emerge from personal weariness, complacency, trauma

P3 - Weld on Guatemala

●      Studying history is usually to look to the future - this is even more true when there are immediate real world stakes, such as the Guatemalan activists whose lives and labour form the subject of this book

○      Police and military officials walked free, fate of thouands of citizens remained unkwown

●      The military metanarrative of the war

○      ‘The state security forces heroically defended the fatherland from the evils of Soviet sponsored communism. Lives lost along the way, the story went, were those of naive youngsters brainwashed by vulgar Marxism, who would have done better to stay at home’

○      Particularly targeted trade unions, students and peasant activists

■      ‘But this interpretation could neither bury survivors’ contradictory memories nor quell their expectations that a purportedly democratic state should offer at least an opportunity at justice’

●      Guatemala’s archival politics

○      Awareness that Guatemalans were disconnected from their own history - promoted the ‘great man’ ideas, ignored victims claims and argued the past should be left behind

●      Memory became essential for reconstructing national and civic identities after periods of intense fragmentation, silence, and trauma.”

P3 - Nelson on Guatemala

●      A central component of the war’s aftermath has been challenging the dominant official story that people were fooled (engaños) by hope, or that the dead were dangerous subversives or fools. Those who rose up insisted they were not mistaken or wrong.

●      ‘The continual emergence of new seedlings with roots in different sediments of this past, and Guatemalans’ ongoing emotional, political and intellectual struggles to reckon responsibilities and remedies for its legacies, render such claims difficult to sustain’

●      Late 1990s - goal ‘was to rescue the victim sof the violence of the early 1980s by bearing witness to their suffering and recovering the historical memory of genocide’

●      Catholic Church’s Interdiocesan Project to Recover Historian Memory and the UN’s CEH

○      New stores of testimonies

○      Evidence, reparations, research

●      Estimates continuously rise

●      21 'Testifying can take many forms, some extraordinarily fruitful for those struggling with the legacy of the past. But it also can force identifications that sit poorly with experience or reinforce other forms of silence’

●      ‘Papers in this book suggest that ‘the coincidence of the transition to democracy with the implementation of neoliberal policies is not in fact coincidental, and urge reflection on how the ‘end of war’ has been inflected by a complex, subtle and omnipresent violence that makes it impossible to simply lay the war to rest’

 

P3 - Bustamante on Cuba

●      16 Exile account - ‘for many of those who left the island in the 1960s, Cuba’s turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost, transforming their homeland into an island in chains’

●      ‘But if popular visions of the Cuban Revolution’s legacies today seem polarised, that polarisation conceals more nuanced viewpoints, and it is the result of political processes that were and continue to be anything but neat’

●      ‘The past helped Cubans orient themselves amid, but also critically evaluate, extraordinary junctures of crisis and change’ ‘tracking the interplay between these processes of reflection across the Florida Strais pushes Cuban history beyond the dualistic visions we associate with either side, exposing the contradictions of both’

●      Particularly pervasive in the exile community

●      Idealised their homeland - political identity founded upon displacement and victims of the revolutionary state

●      Brought complex political language with them to the United States - divided over whether it was a communist plot, or had originally supported the moderate revolution

●      The concept of generation - particularly important due to the connection in Cuban history between political change and youth - younger generations increasingly questioned supposed historical truths

●      Cuban memory itself became a site of contestation - increasing sense of urgency

●      ‘Unlike in other cases of civil conflict, warring Cuban sides continued to share significant national idols, symbols and reference points. All of this made for processes of remembering and forgetting that were not only sharply contested but also deeply intertwined’

●      How to remember the events of the Revolution became a central point of contestation - were quite U.S centric - usually a bifurcated historiographical narrative of ‘Cuabn’ and ‘Cuban exile’ - complex disputes within each camp

●      Interplay - ‘there is an intimate relationship between the two. The latter is the former’s result, and Cubans’ arguments about their past fed and bounced off another, all claiming to speak for - and thus in effect constituting - the memory and history of the nation as a whole’