Resonance and the Echo Chamber of the Argentine State

The term “the state” makes one think of a monolithic entity—an immense, inaccessible nexus of power, a leviathan. The five books considered here address the topic of Argentine state formation from a range of disciplinary perspectives, unpacking its complexity and materiality on many levels. In them the state can be found in visual allegory, in museums and archives, in the act of waiting for social services, in mass consumption habits, and in the everyday, ongoing negotiations among businesses, labor unions, and politicians.

Javier Auyero’s Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina grows out of his previous work on clientelism in Argentina, and it demonstrates the power of a seemingly banal daily activity that poor people who are dependents of the state must endure: waiting in line for social services. Drawing from an interdisciplinary corpus of work by theorists such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and well-known writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett and from contemporary sociological theory about the dispossessed and the state, Auyero argues that daily nuanced lessons in political subordination are learned by the destitute in the act of waiting. These lessons eventually become productive phenomena in their own right. The dispossessed in Argentina are subjected to repeated delays over time and, as a result, have learned a “particularly submissive set of dispositions.”

The book starts with the story of Silvia, a woman who spent over five years trying to get her pension. Auyero argues that the all-too-familiar runaround in public agency offices is a temporal process “in and through which political subordination is reproduced.” Accordingly, time itself becomes an important agent in the dynamics of clientelism, defined as a symbolic exchange network with its own set of formal and informal, tangible and ephemeral components. “Domination works,” he argues, “through yielding to the power of others and is experienced as a waiting time: waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others.”

Auyero’s work focuses on ways in which the urban poor (the “dominated”) wait in line for services from a poorly functioning state (the result, in no small part, of three decades of neoliberal economic policies that have “generated massive dislocations and collective suffering in Argentina”) not because they live outside of or have a different appreciation of time (as some have argued about the “culture” of poverty) but because state agencies use time and bureaucratic waiting as a “successful strategy of domination.” The book is filled with what Auyero refers to as “ethnographic portraits,” notes and personal stories drawn from his years of fieldwork in Argentina. These portraits are woven into the fabric of his analysis to help illustrate the Kafkaesque universe in which the collective nightmare of uncertainty, physical and psychological violence, arbitrariness, and insecurity is centered around the experience of subordination. Subordination is complete, he argues, when waiting without questioning becomes normalized.

It is doubtful that anyone who has ever visited Argentina has escaped waiting in line in one way or another. That said, contemporary Argentines might disagree with Auyero’s lumping—with the help of Loïc Wacquant’s work on the management of mass poverty in the United States—of the Peronist assistance programs of the 1940s, the police and military repression during the dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, and the state regulation of the poor in the post-1990s neoliberal informal wage economy as ideologically similar forms of management of mass poverty. One might also take issue with the somewhat heavy-handed suggestion that regional “pink tide” governments employ a rhetoric of being concerned about the poor but act in an opposite manner or with the implications of the argument that requiring waiting is a successful strategy of domination. Auyero must have anticipated such criticism, however, because he makes passing mention at the end of Chapter 2 of a “collective action tactic that has become quite common in the last two decades in Argentina.” Indeed, collective action brought down the government in the wake of the 1999–2000 financial crisis in Argentina and has been at the heart of many social changes in the country, including factory takeovers. Criticisms aside, the power of Auyero’s argument lies in his committed scholarly focus on a subaltern group enduring the monotony of daily bureaucracy—while in line at the welfare office and the national identification card office or on a list for housing relocation from toxic poor suburbs such as Villa Flammable. Such stories seldom become material for documentaries like The Take, directed by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, or its Argentine-made counterpart Corazón de fábrica, by Virna Molina and Ernesto Ardito.

There is something to be said about the terrifying lexical resonance of waiting as well, as Marguerite Feitlowitz points out in her brilliant book on the Argentine Dirty War, A Lexicon of Terror, now in its second edition with an updated epilogue. Feitlowitz argues that ubiquitous terms such as parrilla (a traditional grill for cooking meat), submarine (a hot chocolate drink for children), and zona de detención (waiting area) made up part of the military junta’s apparatus of domination. After “eviscerating the best-educated generation in the history of Argentina” (11) with the help of national security resources from the United States and French intelligence, a rhetoric complete with its own lexicon of everyday words was developed largely under the guidance of Admiral Emilio Massera, a former student of philology for whom “language would remain a lifelong obsession” (21). Feitlowitz writes, “Brutal, sadistic, and rapacious, the whole regime was intensely verbal. From the moment of the coup, there was a constant torrent of speeches [some of the over 600 concentration camps featured recorded speeches of Hitler playing in the torture chambers], proclamations, and interviews; even certain military memos were made public. . . . Argentinians lived in an echo chamber” (22). She makes use of archival research, her own notes from attending some of the ongoing trials of the repressors, interviews with survivors of the concentration camps and relatives of the disappeared, and interviews with ex-military personnel and their family members to piece together the political and cultural terrain of present-day Argentina, a country that is still, in many ways, under the influence of the lexicon of terror.

The verb “to wait” can mean both “wait” and “arrest.” The zona de detención signs erected at bus stops throughout Buenos Aires to get people to form tidy lines and not cluster still have the power to strike terror into the hearts of many more than 20 years after the dictatorship. The parrilla, the metal table on which bodies were tortured, and the submarino, a form of torture in which victim’s head was dunked into a bucket of urine and feces to the point of suffocation, retain similar horrific powers of double meaning. What is worse, Feitlowitz cites many popular slang expressions from the Dirty War, among them Vos no existís (You don’t exist) and Vos no sos nadie (You’re nobody), Basta con la máquina (Enough of the machine), and Me cortás el rostro (You’re cutting up my face) that did not exist in popular culture until the 1985 trials of the juntas, in which thousands of hours of victims’ testimonies exposed the language of the torturers to the public.

While there are countless publications and reports available in Spanish on the Dirty War (including Los desaparecidos en la Argentina: Memorias, representaciones e ideas [1983–2008], edited by Emilio Crenzel [2010]), A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture is a must-read for any serious student of regional politics and culture in Latin America. Feitlowitz’s intricate study of the “stereophonic” rhetoric of repression in Argentina nods to ways in which the military dictatorship constructed its image in conjunction with outside forces (U.S. national security forces at the School of the Americas, French intelligence agents who visited Argentina, and the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller public relations firm), but its strength is its unwavering spotlight on Argentina, described by John Dinges (whose groundbreaking book The Condor Years [2003] is another excellent source on the web of collaboration across several Latin American countries during the Dirty Wars years) as the country that manifested the most extreme carnage and torture during the dictatorships.

The new epilogue to A Lexicon of Terror demonstrates its author’s argument that repression lives on in language in the deeply politically polarized landscape of contemporary Argentina despite the desire of certain social sectors (generally the elite and retired military) to let sleeping dogs lie. In 2009, as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo celebrated the recovery of their hundredth stolen grandchild, President Cristina Kirchner, elected to continue her husband’s hard-fought campaign for human rights for all and an end to impunity for military repressors, received a death threat over the radio as she traveled in the presidential helicopter: a male voice shouted “Kill the bitch!” while the official theme music of the military dictatorship played in the background. But far from focusing exclusively on sectors of society that might want a return to military authoritarianism, Feitlowitz’s new epilogue explores the efforts of many Argentine survivors of the concentration camps and their relatives to pick up where the disappeared generation left off, forging a new society based on human rights for all and battling the indifference to poverty and inequality that has long characterized sectors of society that uncritically embrace neoliberal economics.

Feitlowitz paints a more hopeful picture than Auyero. The people she highlights are not deterred by the amount of time it seems to take for justice to arrive for the participants in the torturous regime of the 1970s and 1980s, even as certain defendants use time-tested delaying tactics to be able to stay under comfortable forms of house arrest as long as possible. One lawyer who in 1984 had taken on a high-level case for the French government that involved the murder of two French nuns is quoted as saying: “I am a lawyer for the facts. But if anyone had told me then that it would take a quarter of a century to get to court . . . But turn the page? . . . Move on? It’s not possible. . . . A healthy society cannot be created based on the enforced, willing, or passive relinquishment to criminals—to state terrorists—of our defenseless dead” (310). The new epilogue brings readers up to date on the ongoing sentencing as of 2009 of military repressors, many of whom are currently being charged with the kidnapping of babies and illegal adoptions. In July 2012 General Jorge Rafael Videla was convicted of orchestrating a systematic plan to steal babies from female prisoners (who were then to be killed) and give them to military families to raise. He was given 50 years in prison on top of his previous convictions. Other top leaders include Reynaldo Bignone, the last leader of the military junta, the former general Santiago Riveros (overseer of death camps), Jorge Acosta (head of the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada), and Dr. Jorge Magnacco (who delivered most of the babies born at the ESMA). These recent convictions, groundbreaking on the national and international level, put an official end to the Argentine military’s rhetoric of “collateral damage” where children were concerned. For Feitlowitz, the struggle against impunity, which is at the heart of memory museums like the ESMA complex, the Olimpo museum, the Parque de la Memoria, parts of the new Bicentenario museum, and the hundreds of plaques throughout the city that mark the former homes of the disappeared and the hundreds of torture facilities, is a key factor in reinventing democracy in Argentina. In fact, she points out the extraordinary fact that even when the Argentine economy failed between 1999 and 2000 and democracy seemed to be on the brink of collapse, the struggle against impunity was not abandoned. In 2001 important laws that had protected many military personnel from prosecution (Punto Final and Obedencia Debida) were declared unconstitutional by a federal judge, opening the doors to hundreds of new cases.

Obviously, for some Argentines, the rhetoric of forgetting, “moving on” (a euphemism for amnesty), is more persuasive. Some, like the father of Ricardo Miguel Cavallo (interviewed at his son’s sentencing by Feitlowitz), offer the familiar refrain that in a time of war guilt is difficult to discern. Feitlowitz reminds readers that this characterization of the Dirty War years, while still common, is far from accurate because it implies that the two sides in the war were somehow symmetrical when in fact the armed left had been broken by 1975, the year before the coup. The rhetoric of “subversion” and the terrorist threat it embodied “was a pretext for the radical reorganization of Argentina’s economy, concentrating wealth, resources, housing, healthcare, and education as a ‘privilege’ for those who ‘loved the dictatorship in the deepest chambers of their heart’” (313). Guerrillas who had detonated bombs in the early 1970s could have been charged and tried in the courts had they been allowed to survive. The fact is, she reminds us, the leftists were not state actors, nor did they have a systematic plan for repression (some call it genocide). Feitlowitz’s new epilogue leaves readers with the sense that the profound legal and cultural work being performed in Argentina today is not so much about memory (freezing it in the form of a museum or monument) as about the future. The ESMA survivor, trial witness, and Secretary for the Promotion of Human Rights Martín Gras says (331),

My work is oriented toward the future. We are in truth beset with threats to our security, the worst of which is inequality. In Buenos Aires, we have 410,000 youths who have neither work nor study. . . . The middle class feels vulnerable, victimized. These are the kinds of situations that encourage the rise of politicians like Macri [the right-wing mayor of Buenos Aires City] when what we need is a better societal sense of human rights.

Jens Andermann’s 2007 book The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil harks back to some of the earliest state-sponsored violence in Latin America as he traces the role of the visual imaginary in the formation of these two nation-states at the end of the nineteenth century. He closely analyzes museums, monuments, maps, and photographs in his exploration of the “way of seeing” they produced. This all-encompassing optic packaged complex social relations between indigenous communities, slaves, immigrants, and the “founding fathers” of the republics. It created a cultural universe that was “beyond individual or collective intervention . . . a natural or historical given, or rather, a ‘gift’ from history and nature to the state” (207). The Optic of the State is divided into two parts: museums and maps.

In Part 1, Andermann suggests that the institution of the museum was the “chief visual device” in the drive toward modernity in its capture (sometimes literally) and ordering of non-European bodies and material culture. The most grisly example of this ordering and then vanishing act (referred to by Andermann as “museum magic”) is the case of Museo de La Plata director Francisco Pascacio Moreno’s collection of around a thousand skulls and skeletons from native populations. After General Roca’s genocidal desert campaign to break the sovereignty of indigenous communities, a Tehuele chief named Inacayal was “rescued” from a detention camp by Moreno and installed, as a living specimen, in the museum. Inacayal spent his final days witnessing the processing of the bones of his community members into “ethnographic materials” for a “prehistoric man” exhibit whose gallery of anthropological anatomy his own remains would join upon his death. The space of the museum was thus, Andermann states, “a mausoleum and mass grave . . . the site of the emergence of national being from a space of death” (55).

Part 2 takes on the production of cartographic knowledge (“visual recapture”) in the final decades of the nineteenth century in Argentina and Brazil. Andermann argues that the cartographic archive served a function analogous to that of the museum in its ability to store the new nation’s “territorial substance” (125). Visual representations in the form of maps, landscape sketches, and photographs encompassed a new visual language of national space that was seen as superior and more immediately connected to “the real” than previous written representations. Once the nation-states had been formed, society and a national terrain had to be mapped. Not surprisingly, the end of the nineteenth century marked the “capture” of frontier spaces and spaces only marginally under colonial rule. The Argentine nation-state was founded in part on the southern frontier spaces that were captured after the military occupation of the Río Negro in 1897. In Brazil, large sections of the interior were deemed in need of “civilizing.” In both cases, exhibitions, maps, and photographs helped to create a “theater of national sovereignty.” To this effect, Andermann unveils a little-known historical connection between the spatial archive that had formed in early 1890s and the reorganization of national space that took place in Brazil in 1956 under Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.

Andermann points out that historiographies of the state in Latin America are not, as most conventional accounts suggest, the “necessary outcome of social or economic processes” (1–2). In fact, at the close of the nineteenth century, the type of modern nation-state that characterized Brazil and Argentina was but one of many possible options. In his analysis of the rise of museum culture in Brazil and Argentina in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in which important curatorial decisions were made about which souvenirs, relics, and material objects to rescue from obscurity and bring into “historical order” in the museum “collection,” Andermann posits an important connection between the construction of two nations and the development of their museum collections.

In addition to the development of museum collections, the late nineteenth century was an important moment for consumption in Argentina, as Eduardo Elena argues in Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption. His study shares a historical reference point with Andermann’s: the point at which Argentina was reinserted “into the global economy after decades of postindependence turmoil” and experienced “a host of modernizing forces at the domestic level” (23). The two works also share an important conceptual nexus—the optic power of the state. By outlining the cosmopolitan consumption habits of Porteños and other urban Argentines at the turn of the twentieth century, Elena sets the stage for his analysis of Peronism, a political party whose image was shaped largely through a powerful combination of visual and political rhetoric that stressed such central concepts as well-being and social justice. Andermann stresses, however, that Peronism relied heavily on audiovisual media such as radio and film that were not part of the optic of the state in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the “people” were not yet the political subjects that they became under Peronism. According to Andermann, “the notion of the state as a natural form, a living organism, was very much about the exclusion of the people as a political subject” (209). At that time “the people” were understood as spectators (Andermann), but by the mid-twentieth century, through the Peronist lens, they had come to be understood as consumers with certain inalienable rights (Elena).

Perhaps no political party in Brazil and Argentina has shaped its image through visual means more efficiently than Peronism. Peronist leaders oversaw a massive and unprecedented redistribution of income to wage earners, resulting in a surge in what Elena calls “collective” or “nonmarket” consumption. The visual and political rhetoric that accompanied this shift in economic power positioned women on the domestic front and men in the workplace as important actors in the liberation of the Argentine nation from the shackles of foreign imperialism. In The Politics of National Capitalism: Peronism and the Argentine Bourgeoisie, 1946–1976, Brennan and Rougier point out that historians of Peronism have, for the most part, ignored projects like Elena’s, which consider the influence of business on economic, social, and political forces. Business history, they point out, has been ghettoized in MBA programs and limited to historical analyses of firms and their management. And yet “the history of the modern world is largely the history of capitalism, and the agents of capitalism in all modern societies were their business classes” (xiv). Both Elena’s and Brennan and Rougier’s books attempt to connect business or market histories (from above and below) to global questions of economic development and class conflict, and both consider the central role of a national bourgeoisie and the radically expanded role of the state under Perón’s tenure.

Of all the books considered here, Brennan and Rougier’s radiates farthest beyond the Porteño sphere of influence to situate Argentina’s attempts to develop a national bourgeoisie in the context of similar struggles across Latin America. The dizzying array of acronyms representing political and business forces between 1946 and 1976 (CGE, FORJA, CGT, IAPI, SRA, UIA, ACIEL, TAMET, and so on) demonstrates the complex and arguably impossible task of linking business interests with Perón’s style of politics. The book brings together a range of often contesting theoretical approaches: “old institutional economics” in its exploration of economic policy and particular business organizations, “new institutionalism” in its analysis of the financial system, Marxist political economy, and dependency theory. Brennan and Rougier call their approach a “new business history.”

If Brennan and Rougier remind readers that business as usual is always political, Andermann suggests that the state is as much a visual and thus cultural form as a political one, one that “binds a certain gaze to a particular artifact” (2). Andermann suggests that museum collecting was a precursor to the destruction of Argentine and Brazilian society by the dictatorships of the twentieth century. Like politics under dictatorship, “collecting is concerned with impending metamorphosis” (17). Andermann’s book sets the stage for a deeper understanding of the important role that museums of memory (and references to the dictatorship in mainstream museums like the Bicentenario and the Argentine Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires) play in the experience of citizenship in postdictatorship Argentina. In a similar vein, Elena’s detailed historical look at the Peronist midcentury political lexicon, with its emphasis on dignity and well-being, cannot help but evoke this era’s struggles for social justice and human rights at a time when the country is under attack in the world consumer marketplace. As Elena points out, in spite of producing such divergent politicians as the neoliberal president Carlos Menem and his antithesis, President Cristina Kirchner, Peronism has survived as a political ideal (justicialismo) supported by the belief of the majority of the population in its entitlement to a better life.

Andermann’s analysis of what he calls the “visible allegory of the state”—one that is “magically invested with the sacred power of the invisible, which it both invokes and helps to keep at bay” (6)—resonates both with Auyero’s studies of state agencies’ capacity to veil their own power and make those dependent on services for survival wait, with Feitlowitz’s research on the lexical and ideological roots of disappearance, and with Elena’s and Brennan and Rougier’s examination of arguably the most “purposefully dramatic” political party in Latin American history (260). Each of these books emphasizes an attempt on the part of the state to hegemonize and control sectors of Argentine society. Together they paint a portrait of the state as a living organism made up of diverse and often hidden historiographies.