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In Search of the Lost Decade. Jennifer Adair
Читать онлайн.Название In Search of the Lost Decade
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520973282
Автор произведения Jennifer Adair
Издательство Ingram
Hunger reflected a socioeconomic reality in the final years of the regime. Yet it also functioned as a way to malign the armed forces without direct reference to state terror. Talk of hunger evinced a national emergency that many Argentines could relate to—and voice indignation over—even if their lives had not been directly impacted by physical violence or acute hardship. In a letter to the newspaper Diario Popular, a local resident expressed his frustration: “The police banned the Hunger March in Quilmes. What a shame that the police cannot ban the hunger of the people who organized the march. That would solve all the government’s problems. The police can only make attempts to stop free men from exercising their rights.”40 Individuals like this letter writer used the deterioration of their material well-being to expose the recklessness of the regime and to demand a restoration of rights—a process that this writer described as inevitable. The frank letter, signed by the author, would have been unthinkable only a few years before.
Following the Hunger March, the pace of demonstrations in and around the capital accelerated. The most anti-dictatorial factions of the labor movement gained force and numbers. In November 1981, the CGT-Brasil organized a protest for “peace, bread, and work,” which drew ten thousand people to the neighborhood of Liniers, home of the annual San Cayetano pilgrimage. Echoing the aims of the Hunger March in Quilmes, organizers called on participants to “pray for peace, the restitution of the rights of civility and the reactivation of the productive apparatus.”41
Mobilizations occurred outside of traditional labor channels as well. One of the most dramatic expressions of this was a series of land takeovers that took place in the municipalities of Almirante Brown and Quilmes, where an estimated twenty thousand people occupied a stretch of land over five kilometers long. The groups included the recently unemployed, migrants from the interior, and an array of precariously employed workers—carpenters, mechanics, and others—who had been pushed out of Buenos Aires due to a combination of highway construction, shantytown eradication, and punishing rental laws, which made the capital uninhabitable for lower-income and poor sectors.42 The new residents set out to create neighborhoods, buy plots of land, and secure municipal services, appealing directly to state authorities for their entitlement to legal protections. In effect, they sought to reinsert themselves into a society from which they had literally and figuratively been expelled. As one participant summarized, “[We] are people without a roof over our heads. We are the workers and the unemployed individuals who produce (and produced) the riches of this nation. . . . Our right to life, which is defended by the Constitution, is in serious jeopardy.”43 By placing in stark relief the most extreme forms of hardship under military rule, the land occupations buoyed the broader moment of uprisings, even as they exposed deeper, more intractable structural crises.
The demands of shantytown residents were not limited to the most marginal sectors of Argentine society, however. In the months following the land takeovers, middle- and working-class neighborhoods throughout Greater Buenos Aires revolted against a precipitous decline in public services. Beginning in 1978, the regime transferred responsibility for public services from national authorities to provincial governments. As a result of decentralization, municipalities began to outsource trash collection and street cleaning, among other essential services, to private enterprises. The companies charged exorbitant fees and converted many municipalities into centers of graft and speculation. Local citizens bore the burden of tax increases in order to maintain contracts for deteriorated services, which they increasingly refused to (or were unable) to pay. By early 1982, many municipalities were on the brink of ruin. Shopkeepers, pensioners, housewives, and students, among others, moved to the forefront of public demonstrations to denounce local authorities and cost-of-living increases. These vecinazo uprisings, as Inés González Bombal has shown, gained momentum after the Malvinas War, but even before the outbreak of the conflict they had revealed deep networks of neighborhood associations that functioned as intermediaries between citizens and municipal governments during the dictatorship, which were now demanding civic redress and restitution.44 In a concise statement that would have been familiar throughout several Greater Buenos Aires townships at the time, the Federación de Sociedades de Fomento (Federation of Development Societies) of Lomas de Zamora declared, “We are suffering . . . due to the violation of official projects and agreements, and eternal promises that are never fulfilled.”45
Seen from afar, the capital region was a crucible of unrest on the eve of the Malvinas War. To be sure, authoritarian rule did not affect all communities at the same pace or with the same severity. Yet uniting popular uprisings—from union marches, to shantytown mobilizations, to neighborhood protests—was the economic violence of the regime. Demands for housing, industrial work, public services, and an end to hunger were affirmations of the right to a dignified life, which five years of military rule had torn asunder. In late March 1982, the center of Buenos Aires was flooded with protesters—the largest number since the dictatorship began—as an estimated fifty thousand workers, human rights activists, urban professionals, and politicians joined the CGT-Brasil in a historic march and strike for “Peace, Bread, and Work.”46 Similar protests took place throughout the country. In Buenos Aires, the armed forces detained hundreds in a show of force that recalled the bloodiest moments of the regime. Though often heralded as the beginning of the end of the dictatorship, in reality the march saw the culmination of several years of local and national movements against the junta. The call to peace, bread, and work demonstrated the powerful convening force of the socioeconomic toll of the regime, one that was intimately bound up with the realities of state terror. The signs and slogans of the day transmitted an unequivocal message: “se va a acabar la dictadura militar!” (the military dictatorship will end). Three days later, on April 2, 1982, war erupted in the South Atlantic.
TRANSITION TO A TRANSITION
The Malvinas War opened wide a half decade of impunity, abuse, and economic mismanagement.47 Since the nineteenth century, Argentina’s claims over the remote and rocky islands had fueled various nationalist causes. The goal to wrest the territory from Great Britain was the junta’s final attempt to restore legitimacy to the National Reorganization Process. The seventy-four-day conflict marked a surreal dénouement to the dictatorship. Almost immediately following the march for peace, bread, and work, the center of Buenos Aires filled again with many of the same individuals, now clamoring for an Argentine victory in the South Atlantic.
Widespread public support for the war did not translate into support for the junta, however.48 Human rights groups used the war as an opportunity to further expose the regime’s crimes. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo contributed one of the most enduring refrains of the conflict, which affirmed “the Malvinas are Argentine, so are the disappeared.” Labor leader Saúl Ubaldini, who had been arrested during the CGT march, traveled to Malvinas to attend the inauguration of the newly installed military governor. He and other union leaders used the opportunity to highlight the fact that the working class made up the rank and file of Argentina’s fighting forces. In these ways, the principal victims of the regime were inscribed into the national cause and made public. Although voices of dissent against the military’s campaign were few and muffled, the regime imposed a virtual media blackout on updates from the front. British forces quickly routed the Argentine conscripts, who arrived unprepared and lacking basic supplies. The restricted news of growing losses only made the shock of Argentina’s eventual defeat more bitter. Images of soldiers freezing and underfed on the frigid islands, and the slow trickle of information regarding the military’s misadventure, were the final blows to a weary public, whose own domestic battles to fulfill basic needs had already discredited the junta. On June 14, 1984, Argentina surrendered to Great Britain. In July the military regime announced its withdrawal from power and plans for the return to constitutional rule.
As we have seen, the junta was already weakened before the outbreak of fighting. A week before Argentine forces launched their attack on the islands, the junta announced a plan for the reorganization of political