Response to "Memory is not history"

The Economist's Bello column this week has a column entitled "Memory is not history", which argues that "there are dangers [in South America’s] intellectual fashion for “historical memory”." It goes on to accuse "the left" of "rewriting history" - in fact, of imposing "memory" over an accurate "history".

I would argue that the piece contains several important distortions, aside from trying to lump together a region from Colombia down to the Southern Cone.

The historical truth silenced by “memory” is that the cold war in Latin America was fought by two equally authoritarian sides.

But it was not. To take the example of Argentina, yes, there were Montoneros and there were incidences of left-wing violence before the 1976 coup. But to suggest that the small leftist group, which was largely destroyed before the military took power, was in any way equivalent to the forces of the State is very far off the mark.

The Economist points out that some human rights groups in Argentina tend to use the figure of 30,000 disappeared and it contrasts this with the nearly 9,000 victims recorded by the CONADEP commission. It is inaccurate and unfair to use the CONADEP list to undermine estimates of the disappeared, and I explained why in detail years ago. See also here for more on the numbers.

None of this mitigates the inexcusable barbarity of Pinochet or of the Argentine junta. 

The problem is that it does. You can't equate State terrorists with their victims, suggest that calculations of the disappeared are deliberately inflated, and then claim that you're not weakening the accounts of the dictatorships' crimes.

Memorials are a shorthand, yes. You can't include the whole complexities of a country's experiences on a plaque. Memory, in its wider sense, tends to include the testimonies of victims and relatives and it encompasses a whole range of commemorative acts, both formal and informal. Pulling out the memory/history dichotomy and reiterating the dos demonios theory ("each side was as bad as the other") is a means of obscuring human rights abuses and seeking to paper over the crimes of the past.

Guardian special report on transitional justice

I thought it was worth linking to this special report from the Guardian newspaper on how various countries, including Chile and Colombia, have dealt with their traumatic pasts. The article is necessarily an overview so it doesn't reveal much to someone who is already well-read about a particular country - but I'd be surprised if anyone was well-read about all those countries, and the transcontinental comparison is really interesting.

[Colombian] President Juan Manuel Santos, re-elected in June to a second term, denies impunity is on the table, but says demanding full punishment would derail peace. "If you ask a victim today he would lean towards having more justice," said Santos. "If you ask a future victim, he will lean more towards peace."

Special report: Truth, justice and reconciliation (Guardian)

Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944-2013

A new exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York surveys photographic movements in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.

One of the images shows the word "Evaporados" - evaporated - pasted in huge letters on an expressway wall in Lima, Peru. As the Lens blog writes, the artist Eduardo Villanes put them there in 1995, to protest the abduction and murder of nine university students and a professor by a military death squad (this is referring to the La Cantuta case), as well as the subsequent amnesty granted to the killers by Alberto Fujimori.

The exhibition, curated by Alexis Fabry and María Wills, runs until 7 September 2014.


Tales of Many Cities (The Wall Street Journal)
Latin America’s Mutating Cities, in Photographs (Lens blog, NY Times)

"Staging" a coup

There was an outcry on Twitter yesterday over comments by the Wall Street Journal that "Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet". I'm not going to go on and on about my reaction to this. It should be obvious from the tone of this blog what I think about it, and it's been done well elsewhere.

Anyway, the BBC News Magazine ran an article this morning comparing the Egyptian coup with that of Pinochet in a rather different way, from the perspective of its staging/theatricality. A coup is, I would suggest, always a carefully-staged public event, often with a fairly long preparation period.

The BBC writes,

There are certain customs, established over many decades, to uphold when declaring a coup.

A rough-hewn general in a crisp uniform reads out a statement on state TV in which he declares that, reluctantly, the armed forces have decided to step in to save the country.[...]
First of all, the general has to get his image right. He needs a well pressed uniform, decked with medals. He needs a podium, or, at the very least, a solid table.
Sunglasses are optional. The general's look as he reads his declaration may become the defining image of his country to the outside world (it will certainly be the image for which he is most remembered by his own people).
The coup statement must follow a certain format. The general should stress that the military is responding to its patriotic duty. Above all, the coup leader must avoid calling his actions a coup - a word which may make him look like a gangster. More often, he will prefer to used the word "intervention". 

 It's true. The "sunglasses" element is of course most iconically represented by general Pinochet:

 Argentina's junta leaders tended to present a show of cooperation:

The military representatives in South America were generally serious, clean-shaven - aside from the neat moustashes sometimes worn - pale-skinned and - so obviously it almost goes unmentioned - always male. They talked about order, security, the eradication of terrorism, Christianity, upholding the family and the (Catholic) Church. Their paternal tenderness was backed up by tanks lining the streets of the capital and the immediate banning of public gatherings.

You can see how General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi's television statement fits into this expected show, this tidying up of the messiness of public display. I hope the Egyptian people are not "lucky" enough to end up with a Pinochet on their hands.

Argentina: Operation Condor trial starts

A trial with pan-American importance has started in Argentina, focusing on Operation Condor, the cooperation network between South America states to persecute (perceived and actual) dissidents.

Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla is one of the defendants, alongside 24 others, including a Uruguayan accused of commiting torture in the Argentine clandestine detention centre, Automotores Orletti. Orletti was a Condor base in Argentina and, thus, many of the non-Argentine victims of the junta ended up there.

Like the ESMA megatrial, this case has symbolic importance. It is also likely to drag on, as all major oral trials do in Argentina, and of course the majority of the defendants are very old. However, the key will be to shed light on the workings of the clandestine partnership between the South American countries.


Comienza el juicio por los crímenes del Plan Cóndor (this article from Spanish El País includes a full list of the victims in the case, as well as the defendants)
El plan de la represión sin fronteras (Pagina/12)
Operation Condor on Trial in Argentina (IPS)

News round-up

Chile
A judge ordered the arrest on Tuesday of eight retired police and military officers in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, an American university professor who disappeared while hiking in Chile in 1985. 
Chilean Ex-Officers Charged in 1985 Kidnapping of U.S. Hiker (NY Times)

Colombia
Retired Colombian general Rito Alejo Del Rio has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of a peasant decapitated by a right-wing death squad in the late 1990s. Del Rio did not physically participate in the murder but allowed far-right militias to operate with impunity in the Uraba region, where he commanded the army’s 17th Brigade.
Retired General Sentenced for Death Squad Killing (NY Times)

Guatemala
A former head of Guatemala's police force, Pedro Garcia Arredondo, has been sentenced to 70 years in prison for the 1981 kidnapping of a student during the country's brutal civil war.
Guatemala ex-police chief jailed for civil war kidnap (BBC)

Spain/LatAm
This is not specifically about the disappeared children of Argentina, but a profile of Dr. José A. Lorente, whose genetics work has helped to identify missing children in various countries including Peru and Guatemala.
Putting Genetics to Work to Find Missing Children (NY Times)

Book Review: The Latin American Photobook

The Latin American Photobook, Horacio Fernández (Aperture, 2011)

There is no history of Latin American photography that gives due attention to its books. 

This is the status quo that Horacio Fernández, together with an advisory committee composed of Marcelo Brodsky, Iatã Cannabrava, Lesley A. Martin, Martin Parr and Ramón Reverté, sets out to change and the result is this book. It's not just an academic tome - it's big, heavy, hard cover, well-laid out, and stuffed with colour photos. But it's not just a coffee table book either - each book featured is carefully described and the beginning of each section pulls the different books featured in it together.

All the photographers are Latin American by birth or choice, rather than travel photographers or visitors. There were some old friends for me among the books here, such as Carlos Domínguez's Los peruanos, and some others that I was surprised not to have heard of, such as Guillermo Thorndike's Uchuraccay: Testimonio de una masacre.

Both of the above publications are highly relevant to the subjects of this blog, as are others like Richard Cross' Nicaragua: La guerra de liberacion. Cross, a photojournalist, was killed shortly after its publication. "Photographers have to take the initiative to try to have more control over the use of their photographs and they have to get more interested in the potential for combining images to make stories and to combine images with text," he said. 

Other fascinating finds for me were Chile ayer hoy, produced by the official publishing wing of the Chilean government in 1975, and Mirko Lauer's Ciudad de Lima with photos by Jesús Ruiz Durand, because I had come across some of the latter's work on iconic photographs before.

It's very interesting to see the various photobooks juxtaposed alongside each other and given a new lease of life, as it were, in this book - although of course, there remains a certain sense of frustration that the original publications themselves are, in many cases, difficult or impossible to get hold of. Fernández et al have certainly made a great contribution to the photobook genre themselves with this one, which, I would think, Latin American photography enthusiasts will want to have laid out on a table somewhere - it looks too good to consign to a shelf.

Memory/history and tourism

Yesterday the Guardian's "Comment is free" section ran a piece by Chris Jenkins criticising "conflict tourism" in Belfast, including viewing the sectarian murals and the euphemistically-named peace walls in the city, sites of bombing and the infamous Maze prison. Jenkins condemns this "gaping" as "deeply immoral" and maintains,

If this were history perhaps it would be more acceptable – but it's not. These lines are still a very real part of everyday life for communities in Northern Ireland.

 I've never been to Northern Ireland, but I have visited such sites in many other places, including Peru and Argentina. The comments from readers to Jenkins' piece generally disagree with him and draw comparisons with visiting World War I battlefields or former concentration camps like Auschwitz. But these would probably be acceptable to Jenkins since they count as "history".

I think the distinction is false. The sites referred to in this blog are certainly not part of any sort of "history" preserved in aspic - they are still changing, museums are only now being set up, legal proceedings continue, the perpetrators are still alive and live alongside their victims, and so on. That's why I refer to them as "places of memory". But at what point does memory become history? Do we somehow expect that there will be a moment when the development can stop, the period is finished, and then we can look at it in the history books and visit the memorials? It won't happen, and forgetting would be the only consequence of attempting it. Far better to engage with the issue while those affected are still alive to give us their testimony!

Then there is the issue of "gaping", suggesting that looking itself entails a lack of respect. I don't see this at all. I would suggest that actively engaging with the memory of conflict is important, yes, even if this is done by young people or those who are not particularly well-informed, such as foreigners. With cameras. Photos are a key way in which people in the twenty-first century deal with their surroundings and share them with others and photographing is not, I would say, inherently exploitative (the photographing of people might be, but I'm not discussing that here). Why would it somehow be more moral to visit a country as a tourist but ignore its very recent past, which as Jenkins rightly points out still affects large numbers of people?

I, for one, am going to continue seeking out places of memory wherever I go - but then, regular readers probably already guessed that ;-)

International memory trends

Just thinking aloud in more than 140 characters:

I was just looking at some pictures at the outing of dictatorship-era perpetrators on the Blog do Sakamoto, as pointed out by Transitional Justice in Brazil, and I noted the slogan "Se não há justiça, há esculacho popular". This obviously mirrors "Si no hay justicia, hay escrache" (Argentina) and "Si no hay justicia, hay funa" (Chile). I'm not claiming that it's surprising, in the digital age, that groups learn and share ideas across national boundaries, merely that it's heartening. It's kind of a counterbalance to all the Operation Condor stuff, no?

Latin American women who shake the world

Newsweek has published a list of 150 women who shake the world for International Women's Day. Here are the Latin Americans, along with some memory-related notes from me:

• Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. In her youth she resisted the dictatorship, was captured and tortured - read more about her experiences here.
• Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. A rather ambiguous figure from our point of view, what with disputes with the media and some strong-arm tactics, but on the whole, progress on the human rights front has been made during the administrations of CFK and her late husband Nestor. I'm thinking mainly of the major trials of the ESMA perpetrators and so on, and the memorial projects such as the museum in the former ESMA.
• Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The Abuelas are of course a constant presence on this blog and if you ask me, Estela de Carlotto should be one of everyone's role models. Their struggle for justice for their grandchildren is awe-inspiring.
• Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, now head of UN Women. Another formidable woman with a dictatorship history who is not consumed by bitterness but instead works for progress.
• Chilean student activist Camila Vallejo.
• Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez.
• Brazilian graffiti artist Panmela Castro.
• Guatemalan attorney general Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey. She leads the effort to prosecute human rights abusers under tough conditions.
• Mexican attorney general Marisela Morales. Another one where you just want to go "Well, that's not going to be an easy job...".
• Mexican journalist Adela Navaro Bello. Fighting the cause of press freedom in one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist.
• Mexican congresswoman Rosi Orozco. Particularly active against human trafficking.
• Mexican supreme court minister Olga Sanchez Cordero.

Take your pick of inspiration.

News Round-up

Here goes:

Latin American region
No military coup deserves a parade (Bloggings by boz)
A statement taken for granted on this blog but still worth repeating!

Argentina
Falkland tensions grow ahead of invasion anniversary (BBC)
This article touches on the complications of remembering both the Falklands/Malvinas war and the military dictatorship in Argentina.
Plus, in astonishing news:
Argentinian critics pan Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady (Guardian)

Chile
Chilean journalist charged with covering up human rights abuses in 1975 (Journalism in the Americas)

Guatemala
How will Montt defend himself in Guatemala? (Al-Jazeera)
By Mike from Central American Politics
Genocide Trial against Ríos Montt: Declassified Documents Provide Key Evidence (Unredacted)
Ríos Montt’s Incriminating Self-Defense (Latin American Thought)
A Testament From Guatemala’s War Years (Lens blog at NY Times)
With excellent photos by Jean-Marie Simon

Mexico
'In Mexico, reporters are hunted like rabbits' (Guardian)
This one is in here because the past issues I deal with on this blog are not gone, they keep happening in various countries - that's one (just one) of the reasons we need to remember them.

Peru
Shining Path affiliate drops bid to become party (AP)
Movadef Ends Attempt To Register As Political Party (Peruvian Times)

News Round-up

Latin America
Human rights agenda has expanded (IPS)
IPS takes the conference of human rights defenders organised by CELS in Buenos Aires as its cue to survey the state of human rights in the region. It finds that the range of issues has expanded from a focus on authoritarian regimes to include environmental and other concerns. However, there is a broad range of threats as well:

"Today it is not only the state that violates human rights, but also companies, para-state agencies and organised crime," said [Gastón] Chillier [of CELS].

Human rights activism is still potentially deadly in Latin America, and I take my hat off to all those brave people who do it anyway.

Paraguay
US donation to help Paraguay fight guerrillas (Guardian)
U.S. Government to Help Paraguay Fight Guerrillas (Americas Quarterly)
The US government is giving Paraguay more than $1 million in equipment and training to help it combat a small guerrilla group, the Ejército del Pueblo Paraguayo (Paraguayan People’s Army–EPP. I know practically nothing about this group, which is estimated to have just 20 armed members, but will keep an eye out for more detail.

Peru
Keiko Fujimori: "Quizás está llegando ya el momento de solicitar un indulto" (El Comercio)
Keiko Fujimori: Moment Is Coming To Request Pardon For Father (Peruvian Times)
Keiko says her father is very ill and the time is coming to pardon him because "it would be terrible if he died in prison". My sympathy is limited, I have to say.

A map of Latin American dreams

I recently discovered the work of Martín Weber (thanks to Peru Foto). His photographs in "A map of Latin American dreams" are just beautiful, and several of them are relevant to this blog. Here is just one of them:
See more here.

Latin America Round-up

Here's some interesting stuff I've been reading over the past few days:

Latin America
Hey, it's an iconicity piece, so I'm going to link to it. Of course I agree that the region has icons (and I can't believe there's no mention of Che!) but I'm unconvinced that Latin America is obsessed with the past or indeed that this is a negative thing. In other circumstances we are always pointing out that countries are in a hurry to "move on" and sweep their pasts under the carpet. See also Greg's far more considered comments on the article.
In Latin America, dead leaders become icons (Washington Post)

Argentina
The Argentine election was so predictable that I've found nothing new to say about it. Here is just a tiny quirk from crooked ex-president Carlos Menem, himself just re-elected as a senator, stating that all he needs now is to be named pope. Shame about that whole arms-trafficking thing.
Menem re-elected senator says the only post he's missing is 'Pope' (Mercopress)

Chile
Two pieces on Robert Funk's blog about political pressure on judges and voter registration. The key stat as far I'm concerned:

In the 21 years since democracy, more than 90% of people aged over 45 vote, but just 20% of those aged under 30 do.

Colombia
A judge in Manhattan has sentenced two Colombian men involved in the kidnapping of an American citizen in Latin America, but the pair claimed to have been themselves abducted by the FARC as minors. The judge apparently believed them and criticised rigid sentencing guidelines.
FARC members convicted in American's kidnapping (NY Times)

El Salvador
In the new gangland of El Salvador (New York Review of Books)
Alma Guillermoprieto's piece is fantastically well-written.

Mexico
You know, one of the reasons that it's the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and not the parents is because the relatives in Argentina made a conscious decision to keep the group women-only in the hope that the State would respect the sanctity of motherhood (supposedly held in high esteem by the Catholic, ultraconservative junta) and not dare to attack the members. You only need to read about the infiltration of Alfredo Astiz and the murder of the original leader of the Madres, Azucena Villaflor, to realise that that was wishful thinking. Yet decades later, in Mexico, women continue to battle for human rights in the face of considerable risk.

Ninety percent of the non-governmental organisations in Mexico are founded and run by women, says journalist and women's rights activist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro

Women reject normalisation of gender violence (IPS)

Uruguay
Uruguay finds bones of possible dirty war victim (CBS)

Making tyrants do time

A fascinating opinion piece by Kathryn Sikkink in the New York Times compares prosecutions of human rights abuses across the globe. Often, one excuse given for not pursuing atrocities is that it leads to "destabilisation", including the threat of a (further) military coup (see the justifications for the introduction of the "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" laws in Argentina in the '80s). Yet, according to Sikkink,

transitional countries — those moving from authoritarian governments to democracy or from civil war to peace — where human rights prosecutions have taken place subsequently become less repressive than transitional countries without prosecutions, holding other factors constant. [...]
Of 100 countries that underwent a transition from 1980 to 2004 (the period for which extensive data is available), 48 pursued at least one human rights prosecution, and 33 of those pursued two or more. Countries that have prosecuted former officials exhibit lower levels of torture, summary execution, forced disappearances and political imprisonment.

What is more,

trials seem to project deterrence across borders. If a number of countries in a region pursue prosecutions, nearby countries also show a decrease in the level of repression, even if they have not held trials. [...] In Latin America, young military officers need only look to Argentina and Chile, where 81 and 66 individuals, respectively, have been convicted for crimes during previous dictatorships, to absorb the lesson that the possibility of punishment is much greater than it was in the past. This may help explain why military coups are now so rare in the region.

This is important stuff; let's have more cross-border comparison of post-dictatorship and post-conflict democratisation processes, please.

Making tyrants do time (NY Times)

News Round-Up

Latin America and beyond

I've linked repeatedly to the Journalism in the Americas blog over the past few days because, it seems to me, freedom of the press/pressure on and threats against journalists is one of the major threats to democracy in the region. Mexico and Honduras were named as particularly problematic countries in this regard (see also Nicaragua link below)
2010 press freedom report highlights setbacks and dangers for journalists (Journalism in the Americas)

Chile

Chile's draconian anti-abortion legislation is a legacy of the dictatorship
Chile: where abortion isn't an option (Guardian)

Colombia

Colombia may be able to move on from its extended period of civil conflict, conference attendants hope
A Chance for Peace (IPS)

Nicaragua

The headline speaks for itself
Nicaraguan journalist reports new death threats after investigating electoral finances (Journalism in the Americas)

Peru

Yep, filling your armed forces with violent criminals who didn't choose to be there sounds like an ideal way to create a modern, ethical army
Fujimori to evaluate military draft proposal for criminals, gang members (Peruvian Times)

Spain

No, Spain has not suddenly jumped continents, but it's interesting to draw parallels, and to my shame, I had never heard of the [attempted] coup of 23 February, 1981
February 23, 1981: "El 23-F" (Memory, Amnesia and Politics)

'Desaparecidos' by Gervasio Sánchez

The work of Spanish photographer Gervasio Sánchez is displayed in an exhibition being held simultaneously at three sites in Spain. Sánchez draws parallels between incidences of forced disappearance in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq and Cambodia.

El Pais has done a multimedia special on the exhibition, which looks beautiful.

Thanks to Kathy Korcheck and Amazilia for drawing my attention to this.

Tracing the Shadows of Operation Condor

Please check out this stunning photo slideshow by João de Carvalho Pina of clandestine detention centres, victims and perpetrators of the abuses of Operation Condor.

Tracing the Shadows of Operation Condor (NY Times)

(thanks to Prison Photography for drawing my attention to this)

Spain/Lat Am: Good News/Bad News

First the good news: Spain has approved the extradition of Julio Alberto Poch to Argentina. The Dutch-Argentine pilot is accused of flying some of the 'death flights' in which prisoners were thrown, still alive, into the Rio de la Plate estuary during the dictatorship. Ah hem, I am aware that I have reported this before, in January, but extradition procedures are long and convoluted things; at least it seems that progress is still being made.

Spain Approves Extradition of Pilot to Argentina (NY Times)

Now the bad: renowned Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón is apparently to face trial on charges of overreaching his powers in his investigation of the disappeared from the Franco regime. This will be close to the hearts of many Latin Americans, and others, who have followed Garzón's tireless pursuing of Pinochet and Scilingo, among others. One can only echo the words of the New York Times editorial:

The real crimes in this case are the disappearances, not Mr. Garzón’s investigation.

An Injustice in Spain (NY Times)
Spanish Judge Garzon Faces Trial over Franco Probe (BBC)
Profile: Judge Baltasar Garzón (BBC)

Latin America: Memory Museums

At their best, these museums are an attempt to inoculate societies against their basest inclinations. "We must consolidate a democratic culture that can save us from fanaticism and drive home [the idea] that terror cannot be combated with terror," says Mario Vargas Llosa, the novelist who heads the planning group for the Peruvian museum. The danger is that remembering turns into a political banner, reviving historical animosities and institutionalizing an ideological battle over who controls memory. "In Latin America this is not a disinterested process, much less an effort to work at forgiveness," says Brazilian political analyst Amaury de Souza. "It's a struggle over who gets to write history."

Newsweek has a comparative article on the various commemorative museum projects underway in Latin America. I could quibble on a few points (plus the word 'memoria' is sporting an additional accent!), but it's good to see a piece like this, and with a nice photo too.

The Politics of Memory Museums (Newsweek)