Challenges on the Road to Memory Author(s): MARIA LAURA GUEMBE Reviewed work(s): Source: The Public Historian, Vol.

30, No. 1 (February 2008), pp. 63-71 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2008.30.1.63 . Accessed: 14/02/2012 08:01
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Challenges on the Road to Memory

Maria Laura Guembe Translated by Maggie Russell-Ciardi
Abstract: Memoria Abiertas work responds to the need for a dialogue in Argentina among human rights organizations, the government, and civil society that will stimulate the formation of a collective memory about the history of State-led terrorism in the country. Processing documents, testimonies, and images related to the history of illegal repression in Argentina (c. 19741983), and creating a topographical reconstruction of the locations where State-led terrorism occurred poses diverse ethical, technical, and political problems regarding the recollection, description, transmission, and diffusion of the materials of memory. This article describes some of these challenges and how they affect and are shaped by the work of Memoria Abierta. Key words: Memoria Abierta, human rights, terrorism, Argentina, memory, sites of conscience.

Memoria Abierta is an association of five human rights organizations that work together to advance a collective memory about the history of the State-led terrorism carried out in Argentina from the 1970s until the end of 1983. These organizations were created, for the most part, during the military dictatorship (19761983), to search for the disappeared and to publicly denounce human rights violations. Over the past thirty years, in various political climates, they have been the primary impetus in the search for truth and have pressed for the continuation of judicial processes to identify and condemn those responsible.
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The Public Historian, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 6371 (February 2008). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576. 2008 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions Web site: www.ucpress.edu/journals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10/1525/tph.2008.30.1.63.

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Unlike similar events that occurred in other parts of the world, in Argentina human rights violations were not documented through photography; videos do not exist to testify to the repression; documents that could help to reconstruct the events that transpired have been destroyed or are carefully hidden. In most cases, the families of the 30,000 people who were disappeared still do not know what happened to those people after they were kidnapped. At the start of the new democratic regime, the government established the National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) to investigate what happened during the military regime, collect information, and initiate processes of justice. Today CONADEP is still the primary source of information, despite the fact that most of their work was carried out in 1984, and since that time their role has been effectively limited to processing denunciations, not actively searching for new information. Government policies in the past decade have oscillated between sentencing those responsible and granting amnesty by decree to each of the condemned; between seeking to preserve sites of memory and seeking to tear them down and build parks in their place; between dismissing members of the military who participated in the crimes of the dictatorship and allowing them to rise in the ranks of the Armed Forces. During the past thirty years, these shifts back and forth in government policy have made it necessary for civil society to assume a role of vigilance, to continually file complaints, and to search for and systematically piece together information. As a result, the information that the human rights organizations have collected over the years has a great deal of juridical and historical value. Though the search for truth and justice has not ceased, now that so many years have gone by since the dictatorship, there is a new imperative: to preserve the memory of what happened. In Buenos Aires an effort is currently underway, spearheaded by the national government and the Buenos Aires city government, to construct a museum of memory in the Escuela de Mecnica de la Armada (Navy Mechanics School), which housed one of the most renowned clandestine detention centers. Approximately five thousand people who are still missing today were sequestered there. To date, human rights organizations have participated primarily in an advisory capacity, but the documents we have collected will be essential to the future museum. Joined in Memoria Abierta, we can organize the information we have collected and ensure that it will be preserved and that the public will have access to it. We also have begun to test how certain documents exhibited to the public can serve to promote critical reflection about our countrys recent history. This new role for human rights organizations has, as various challenges have emerged, encouraged us to think about our work in new ways (how it relates to fields of political debate, museology, and education, for instance), and to recognize its inherent complexities, as well as the strength that can be derived from exploring those complexities.

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Shifts in Relations with the Government Historically, human rights organizations in Argentina have had a complex relationship to the government. They were formed in a moment of adversity, and this has shaped the organizations and their strategies for action. In 1984, when CONADEP was established under the government of Ral Alfonsn, many members of human rights organizations did not want to contribute information or submit depositions about the disappearance of their relatives because they did not believe that the commission was a viable way to search for truth and justice. Instead they encouraged the formation of a two-chamber system within the legislative branch of government that would guarantee the institutionalization of the process and the accountability of its participants. Years later, during the government of Carlos Menem, when a law was passed giving economic reparations to the families of the disappeared, new divisions arose.1 Some people thoughtmany of them continue to think this today that no monetary reparations could ever be acceptable; that taking people alive can only be redeemed by returning them alive. The main slogan representing this perspective was They were taken alive, we want them back alive. This was a resistance slogan with symbolic appeal; when protesters carried signs with this slogan, they did not actually still harbor any hope that the people who had been disappeared could still be found alive. The human rights organizations that learned over the years to work collaboratively, united in the face of adversity, have not managed to do the same when the government policies are favorable to their cause, as is the case with the current administration. Admittedly, in many cases, this was because the policies were not adequate or were not implemented in an adequate way. But in other cases, it was because there is no consensus about what is the best way to construct a collective memory of the dictatorship. From the time he took office, current president Nstor Kirchner emphasized the need to implement policies of memory to address the wounds of the recent past, and then backed up this rhetoric with concrete actions. One example is the restitution by decree of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) property, which had been in litigation for several years, to the city of Buenos Aires. Kirchner took the problem out of the judicial sphere and resolved it by executive decree, an indication of the type of actions that would characterize his administration. By then, human rights organizations had already begun to analyze the opportunities and challenges that locating the museum in ESMA would pose, reaching no consensus about this. There has beenand still is strong agreement that ESMA should become a site of memory. But some believe that the museum should be located in a building specifically constructed for that purpose. The ESMA property is very extensive (approximately 1,700 acres), and it contains more than thirty buildings, some of which are still oc1. It is necessary to clarify that the same government action approved by decree the pardon of the military and civilians found guilty in 1985.

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cupied by military schools. An old controversy has surfaced regarding the possibility of sharing the property with these schools. Some organizations see here the possibility of beginning a coexistence that will reaffirm the respect for human rights as a central theme in future generations of military officers. Many other organizations consider the possibility of sharing the place with the military schools to be an insult. The word reconciliation, which in other countries that have gone through similar processes goes hand in hand with the search for truth, has become unspeakable in Argentina. The difficulties in the search for justice have made it possible for the crimes committed during the dictatorship to go unpunished for long periods of time, and many of those responsible have maintained their positions in the armed forces for a long time. For this reason, the idea of thinking in terms of reconciliation is particularly complex in our society; this tension appears clearly in the debates about the future museum. Although there are some major controversies, like this one, that have emerged in our work with the government, the organizations that make up Memoria Abierta have found various ways to collaborate with the government and to secure its support in providing the resources needed to construct a collective memory about the dictatorship. One example is the publication of educational resources for teachers. We have created a collection of interactive CDs that cover the period from the years before the military dictatorship the time when many youth organizations were formed and, inspired by the experiences of other countries and their own convictions, began to think about other political models for Argentinaand tackle the entire period of the dictatorship through the first years of transition to democracy, ultimately emphasizing the importance of the processes of truth and justice. This collection, called On Memory: Testimonies, Texts, and other Resources about State-led Terrorism in Argentina, contains audiovisual testimonies of witnesses of each period in history, accompanied by newspaper articles, recordings of radio broadcasts, photographs, flyers, and other materials. It also includes a chronology of the international actions that took place during the period and a fairly comprehensive glossary. The production of these materials was carried out by a team of historians, educational consultants, and other specialists provided jointly by Memoria Abierta and by the Secretary of Education of the Buenos Aires city government. The collaboration on these resources permitted us to connect the resources to curricular requirements, to distribute the CDs to teachers at no cost, and to train teachers on how to use these resources. Another experience that is worth mentioning here was the production of an exhibition called Images for Memory, photographs with six audiovisual presentations, and a special section dedicated to the epistolary communication circulated during the dictatorship. This exhibition was motivated by the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup, on March 24, 2006. Although this project was not carried out in direct collaboration with the government, they did arrange for us to work with a group of sixty young people who were trained

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A teacher and some students discuss an image at Memoria Abiertas exhibition Imgenes para la memoria. (Photo courtesy of Memoria Abierta)

to serve as volunteer docents. In Buenos Aires, 3,200 local school children visited the exhibition. It also traveled to various locations throughout the country, and young people served as docents in each locationin the case of La Pampa, the docents were police cadets. This allowed us to disseminate our work to a broad and diverse public. These experiences have served as lessons for the utilization of resources in a museum. New questions have emerged about how to present the topic, dialogue with the public, and stimulate new questions that will open the debate about issues that are still not addressed in the public sphere.

Individual versus Collective Stories The period that Memoria Abierta addresses is very recent, and its consequences are still having effects in the present day. When adolescents begin to learn about the dictatorship and formulate questions about what happened, they can go to their parents to get first-hand information. There are many people who can find in their family history the traces of the repressive policies of the military dictatorship. In order to transmit collective knowledge about the subject, Memoria Abierta needs to highlight the connection between the individual and group experience, and the fact that many diverse groups were affected. If, when we speak about the labor organizations of the 1970s, we refer to a variety of occupations; if, when speaking about the clandestine detention centers, we are careful to mention the various centers throughout

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the country, it is possible that individuals may find a way to connect their personal history with the history of many others and can read their own experience in collective terms. When speaking about traumatic periods in history, a common strategy among people who prefer not to get involved is to distance themselves, to tell themselves that it happened in another time and to other people. In a way, labels such as subversives and lefties play a significant role in configuring certain arbitrary groups and naming them with stigmatized terms, and in this way facilitating their marginalization from society. These labels, which were created during the time of the dictatorship to invent an internal enemy and in this way justify the use of state violence, continue to have relevance today in the production of arguments to close the dialogue about the past and not re-visit history. One way to deal with these terms is to expose that which they hide, that is, to re-name in all of its complexity that which those labels simplistically reduce. If we speak of the disappeared, we must speak of their professions, their ages, and their particularities, emphasizing that which distinguishes them from one another and not that which made them the same, which was repression. If we speak of clandestine detention centers, we must emphasize that this term can refer to a highway patrol station in the northeast of the country, a school in a city, and even a military school in Buenos Aires. When speaking about the militants, we must consider those people who arrived at militancy through religion, through a labor union, or through a school or neighborhood association. In this way we can begin to return the complexity to a phenomenon that grouped hundreds of different situations under communal and stigmatizing labels. Without a doubt, when it comes to thinking about an issue in its totality and bringing it to the general public, the broadest possible perspective allows one to increase the possibilities of bringing the issue as close to home as possible. It is still necessary in our society to represent state-led terrorism and its consequences in absolute dimensions so that we can raise awareness about the damage caused and the complexity of the system with which the illegal repression was implemented. However, the opposite strategy is useful when addressing specific problems. Delving into the history of the appropriation of a minor and of his return to his biological family can be a very effective means of stimulating in young people who have doubts about their identity a desire to initiate an investigation into the matter.2 Memoria Abierta is comprised of organizations that work to promote reflection about a complicated theme. These organizations have worked for decades to insert the theme into society and, in order to do this, have some2. During the military dictatorship more than five hundred children sequestered with their parents or born into captivity were illegally appropriated by members of the security forces, and their true identity was hidden. Thanks to the work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, more than eighty of these children came to know their true origins, and some of these were returned to their biological families when they were still young.

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times resorted to necessary and effective simplifications. Today, we need to take a different road. This is clearly manifested, for example, in the use of photographs in public spaces. For years, the mothers of the disappeared have carried portraits of their children to demonstrations. In the beginning, in 1977 and 1978, they were small photographs that functioned as evidence of the disappeared children. In those years, they attached the photographs to their clothes or carried them between their fingers. Later the mothers began to blow them up and reproduce them, making posters with the name of the person and the date when he or she disappeared. These posters began forming a small constellation of individual cases which, when taken as a whole, raised awareness about the growing dimensions of the horror. At every march, the number of faces multiplied on the plaza. Just a few years ago, through a joint initiative of the government and human rights organizations, approximately four thousand of the images that passed through the streets during so many years were reunited on one banner, hundreds of meters long, reaffirming that the disappearances were a systematic practice organized by a terrorist government. In this way, the pictures have become today an emblem of the disappearances. As a strategy of representation, its efficacy is undeniable. This is because of its ability to construct a linear interpretation in the face of a possible medium of multiple meanings. This strategy has been proven useful as a way of introducing the topic into public discourse in the years when this was most difficult. Today the topic is part of the public debate. For the first time in the past thirty years, the government is encouraging its permanent inclusion in the public agenda. Going forward, then, the strategy of Memoria Abierta must be to identify the issues that are absent in the debates or that are obstructed by the inertia of silence. Re-examining the example of the portraits, they tell an important part of the story by speaking of the disappearances as part of a systemic plan of annihilation, which was a political project. Showing the victims makes one think of the perpetrators and the practices of terror. But as a synthesis of the issue, they leave out the rest of civil society. Memoria Abierta, along with other institutions that have various resources to address the issue, must work to raise awareness about these nuances and stimulate the search for and production of information to enrich the dialogue regarding the aspects that are not often discussed, and in this way return to society a problem that does not belong just to a small group of people who were directly affected by it, but to everyone. One way to make the resources tell the story in all its complexity is to construct better-informed museum exhibits. In his studies on photography, Jean Marie Scheaffer puts forth that, What the image tells me is, first and foremost, what I manage to see in it, and that is shaped by what I have seen in the world and how I have seen it. His insight serves to reframe the experience of viewing any medium as a process, not an isolated act. When dealing with historic events, it is hard to see objects as isolated. There always exist other materials that serve as context and provide additional information.

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One way to make traditional presentations of these issues more complex is through the inclusion of other types of materials, such as personal letters, which transport us to a moment in a particular history. Through these types of documents, themes appear that in more general approaches to history remain concealed. In correspondence written to people in exile, for example, we can read the details of daily life during the military dictatorship. In letters from jail, we get the clearest manifestation of the way that information was circulated among political prisoners. Individual histories allow us to imagine the lives of the people and locate these histories in the context of the viewers own lived experience. Taking a concept from Paul Ricoeur, we could say that it connects the lived time of personal memory with historical time. In terms of the viewer, the central project consists of developing consciousness about the collective character of the traumatic events of our recent past, to allow that the history of any citizen whose fundamental rights have been trampled by the government is not just the problem of an individual, or of a family, but is also a social problem. In this sense, it is necessary to connect special and temporaral references in the history of each potential viewer to the larger history that we are telling: show the plot of complicity that is expressed in the historic issues of the newspaper that the viewer reads every day; tell him what the daily routine of a housewife was like, who waited for her children every day at lunchtime until the day when they were kidnapped by a paramilitary group; a routine the same as any that was transformed suddenly into history in that moment. And at the same time it is necessary to connect these histories together to show the evidence of careful and macabre planning of illegal repression. The ultimate goal is to promote in each citizen a consciousness that the history to which we refer is everyones history, and without understanding it, we cannot begin to travel down the road that we must walk every day towards the future.

How to Display the Documents One last challenge that we will mention here is how to display the documents and objects we have collected. Susan Sontags argument about the meaning of photography being contextual can apply to practically all historical documents. Traditional museological practice is to enclose objects to be displayed in a vitrine or behind a glass window, ensuring the best conditions for visibility and preservation; value is assigned to the objects by the mere fact of their being on display. But this approach does not take into account the fact that an object only acquires meaning in relationship to other objects. What we want to do is put the objects in their context, take them back to their time, as it were, so that from there they can tell their own history and also call into question the present day of the viewer. Exhibiting the bureaucratic refusal of a writ of habeas corpus filed by a mother who was looking for her son in 1977 can have an important effect. Ex-

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hibiting twenty identical responses that are only differentiated by the date and name of the disappeared in question produces a much more powerful effect. If, in combination with these documents, we see the images of the mothers of the disappeared on the Plaza de Mayo asking for their children, and if also from a nearby room we hear an audio recording of a documentary film about a protest, with people chanting, Ya van a ver, ya van a ver, van a tener que aparecer (youll see, youll see, they are going to have to turn up), time turns irrevocably backwards. The newspapers from the time period, the political proclamations, the military propaganda, the television speeches, the scarves that characterized the mothers struggle, the placards, the banned books, the pamphlets, the communiqus of the armed forces, the flyers calling people to protests, the lists of victims, the images of the people who were torturedall tell a story. The secret must be in the way we arrange these resources, bigger, smaller, alternating, alone, illuminated, in half-light, bare, or accompanied by large epigraphs. We have a lot to tell. The available resources are infinite. The question is how to tell the story. How can we tell it in such a way that our contribution will not be a unilateral narrative; in such a way that each visitor can find answers, but above all formulate questions that will encourage him or her to participate in a collective debate? How can we make sure that the debate that we spark will be constructive? How can we make sure that the effect that we want to bring aboutcreating a shared consciousness about the seriousness of past crimeswill always have a multiplying effect and will not end with each visitor? We do not want to establish just one perspective about the events, but rather open multiple perspectives, to enrich the way peopleincluding uslook at the issue. We want constantly to formulate new questions. We still have an extremely long road to travel. We want our documents to serve as a tireless stimulus of memory. We know today that working together, we are creators of collective memory for those generations of people who did not live through this time period or were too young to remember it. The task ahead of us, the reason we are working, is to arrange in the best possible way our documentary resources, add to them the greatest number of oral histories that speak from plural experiences about that which was lived in those times and until today, and have those archives transcend us and become part, not just of our private patrimony, but of the patrimony of memory.
Maria Laura Guembe coordinates the Photographic Archives at Memoria Abierta. She has a degree in communication sciences and is a member of the program of Education about Communication and Culture at the department of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. She is the author of the book Cruces, Idas y vueltas de Malvinas, with Federico Lorenz (Edhasa 2007), among other works on photography. She also leads a teacher training program for the elementary and middle grades in Buenos Aires and for the federal Ministry of Education.