Abstract
This essay compares postdictatorial transformations of former spaces of confinement for political prisoners into shopping malls, such as the Buen Pastor prison in Córdoba (Argentina) and the Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo (Uruguay). It places these within the context of past and current debates on the human rights of “common prisoners,” as distinct from those of “political ones.” Yet precisely the omission of the political is mirrored at the prison-malls in the architectural erasure of territorial marks of repression (the cells) but also of all material traces of a poetics of freedom within the site, such as a window through which political prisoners had once successfully plotted a mass escape. These erasures can be read, I suggest, within a program of invisibilization of acts of freedom in the reconfiguration of memorial practices and places. Here, I want to ask, How are escapes being remembered/forgotten in current sites of memory, where the dominant imaginary neutralizes political content? Can we conceive of an “architecture of affect” that would relate to memories of escape?
After more than a decade of key work on territories and memory in Argentina, the notion that the struggle for the memory of the recent past is a basic human right has become a widespread assumption. As such, this struggle is perceived to be not only a form of justice for the victims of authoritarian violence in the past, but also works as a link between the past and the future (Nunca más!/Never again!). However, we seem to be more at ease discussing human rights violations in relation to political practices of imprisonment in the authoritarian past than the violence related to present forms of so-called non-political imprisonment. That is, we seem to be uncomfortable with forms in which the violence of the past and certain forms of inequality and impunity continue to exist. Somehow, the link between acts of memory and the repudiation of human rights violation in the past has become naturalized, while the connection between the violation of human rights in the past and similar forms in the present has not.
When I recently had a conversation about these aspects of contemporary memory work with a member of Memoria Abierta, an association that is active, among other things, in forging virtual reconstructions of the clandestine system used by the military for the imprisonment and disappearance of militants, this idea condensed into an image. The setting, an arena used as a detention center for political prisoners during the dictatorship, which had remained a detention center, albeit one now holding other prisoners—the so-called common ones. Within this venue, the present-day, common prisoners started claiming that they were also victims of human rights violations, being beaten by the police and being held in inhumane conditions. However, these voices cannot be heard when mapping territories of a memory of the past in the present. Even though there clearly is a difference regarding both groups’ status of imprisonment (political vs common prisoners), the naturalization of inhumane conditions in both cases connects to the political situation of existence itself. What is more, the “common” prison population also marks the limits of human rights discourse, as the voice of this population remains outside the discourse of memory. Human rights violations are exclusively perceived as in the past and thus referring to a different prison population.
In “Memoria y democracia,” Elisabeth Jelin (2013) tackles the issue of how, from the 1960s onwards, the idea of a human rights movement became associated with the crimes of the dictatorship. This occurred despite the glaring fact that “human rights” refers to so many other subjects and problems (2013). The field of human rights in Argentina reflects this disconnect, where the idea of doing justice to the victims of human rights violations during the dictatorship does not converge with the idea of doing justice to the other victims of human rights violations (whether the common prisoners, the indigenous, women, etc.). In the words of Jelin,
for many of the protagonists in the struggles related to the memory of the past, the relationship between the memories of the dictatorship and the building of a culture of broader human rights, is not the dominant concern; rather it is the demand for more and more politics of memory. (pp. 136–137; author’s translation)
Can work on the memory of the past help us grapple with the erased ability to read the problems of imprisonment in the present? Can it help us to do something in relation to these current problems? Can the reaction evoked in response to the abuses of the past enable us to become more aware and active in relation to present abuses? I tend to think that a certain divorce between the past and the present has been naturalized, and that this process has to do with a separation inherent to neoliberal assumptions of divorce between “politics” and “economy” and its subsequent criminalization of poverty. Memory politics, I contend, has become divorced from social injustice.
Wendy Brown (2004) states that when one deals with human rights issues, one is always creating a “subject” for a certain form of right (p. 459). That is, the subject(s) of human rights is/are not a fixed, Kantian, idea but rather something produced. This something changes across time, in the same way as a subject of memory does. In “Esas memorias … ¿nos pertenecen?,” Ludmila Da Silva Catela (2014) points to the relation between memory practices and the subjects attached to them, by problematizing the sense of “property” connected to memory-acts. By asking “do those memories belong to us?” and explaining the battles fought at the Archivo Provincial de la memoria in Córdoba, Da Silva transforms the way in which we approach memory. In essence, she problematizes the sense of ownership assigned to this memory. We can say, memory belongs to the family of the disappeared. Memory relates to the victims. However, the creation and transformation of a social memory must pass from the individual and his or her family to the (socio-political) community in which the memory is activated. As Da Silva shows, in her essay, memory sites can help to incite this long-term process, which requires hard work. Both Brown and Da Silva, then, make us see that the “subjects” of human rights and the subjects of memory are not fixed categories. Our work as cultural interpreters is to open the fields of signification when the subjects become limited and fixed.
The question that follows from this problem is, What idea of politics is at stake when we talk about a “politics of memory”? I argue it would be reductive to reduce the politics of memory as located in the past from a memory politics of the present inclusive of other human rights violations. Such an understanding breeds a limited management of memory, in place of a practice of memory, which would force us to broaden the notion of the political at stake therein.
In this essay, I will engage a series of images in which different subjects of human right violations are brought into play. I shall pose questions regarding the forms in which the memory of human rights abuses during the dictatorship becomes unrelated to the ways in which human rights are being abused in the present. I therefore propose to analyze the discourse of redemption of rights by the Argentinean State. This includes at its core struggles against the fixation of meaning imposed at a moment in which memory and human rights become State institutions. I then raise the question of subalternity, that is, of those who do not count as political subjects in the former discourses, or as subjects at all. This is a difficult issue to tackle, continuously resisted at the political level. Perhaps this resistance arises from the problems of social injustice characterizing the present in which we live. And yet we must face the questions at the core of this problematic: Can work on the memory of the past help us deal with the naturalization of violence and abuse in present-day forms of imprisonment? Can it help motivate action? Can the affects that move us when we face the abuses of the past enable us to become more aware and reactive in relation to present abuses?
I take as a key example the transformation of the Cárcel de Buen Pastor prison at the city of Córdoba, Argentina, into a cultural and commercial center, as it entails a constellation of problems that, while exceeding the scope of this article, bring to the fore the subjects I would like to discuss. First, we see how women who had been political prisoners at the site worked with human rights activists in order to elaborate a series of creative reactions—resistance against the depolitization of a memory that the new economy was embodying in the same place. Second, I focus on the specters of the “common” prisoners, who are mentioned by the “political” ones in their actions but who can never emerge as subjects of those memory-acts. After all, the players in this scene are the State and the human rights associations who are engaged in a struggle over signifiers of a possible memory. Placed “outside” of this struggle are those who remain to be “named,” whose association with the place falls outside the situations recognized by then political prisoners: the “common” prisoners). In order to force out this dialogue, I will move from the case of Buen Pastor in Córdoba to another place: the Ezeiza prison facility in Greater Buenos Aires, where past and present problems collided as recently as 24 May 2014. At this key moment, “common” prisoners who had been kept in a low-security building where they could be with their children (Unidad 31) and take part in capacitation workshops were suddenly and violently transferred in order to make room for prisoners sentenced for crimes against humanity during the dictatorship (crímenes de lesa humanidad). The primary reason provided for explaining the transfer was that the facility holding these “political” prisoners had become overcrowded, and that the transfer to Ezeiza would guarantee their well-being. Paradoxically, the women previously held in the same facility were considered to be “healthier,” and thus their well-being “counted less” than that of the other, “political” prisoners. The anguish and anger provoked by the transfer also produced a body of poetry written by women prisoners, which I briefly analyze in the conclusion of this article.
The events at Ezeiza prison raise a series of questions, such as the following: Is it possible to imagine a site of memory for the common prisoners who suffered human rights violations? What would such a site look like? What would its purpose be? Can one have a site of memory pointing to a violence that persists, a violence that is not over? Or are these questions out of place within the field of “memory politics”? What kind of memory politics would care about the abuses committed in the present?
Struggles against the depolitization of memory
The Buen Pastor prison in Córdoba (Argentina) was transformed into a shopping thoroughfare, a cultural and commercial “Paseo,” that places memory itself under the surveillance of both the State and the market. Different from the process of transformation of Punta Carretas, a prison turned into a shopping mall in early 1990s Uruguay, memorialistic culture at Buen Pastor was imprisoned within the imaginary of the new, camouflaged commercial center. Commercial redemption here appropriated the language of memorial practices, transforming the site into a form of quotation where women prisoners were referred to as victims and mothers, rather than political actors, in both the past and present. The omission of the political in the plaques placed by the authorities also related to the transformation of Punta Carretas into a mall a decade before. Not only did the renovation of Buen Pastor erase the territorial marks of repression (the cells), but also the traces of poetic of freedom expressed within the site (the window through which political prisoners escaped).
Different from the case of Punta Carretas, the female ex-prisoners of Buen Pastor gathered and initiated various actions in order to contest the form in which the transformation of the place was being carried out. A key issue here was the renovation’s erasure of the window of the escape, understood to be part of a process of invisibilization of acts of freedom in the reconfiguration of this memorialized place. However, after a long struggle and working in collaboration with the Archivo Provincial—the provincial human rights archive—the women were able to situate the window bars back onto the territory, thus re-engraving the escape on the memorial place, in effect differently signifying the newly renovated scene. This act was important because it contested the way in which certain forms of institutionalization of memory neutralize or even deny political content.
By bringing back the escape to a signifying chain that fixed easy labels on them, the ex-inmates created a constellation of images of an irrepressible past of affection and struggle in literary and visual works. My purpose is to use these interventions in order to theorize the possibility of thinking about the ways in which we can escape from the paradigms of memory politics, forging different ways of thinking about a poetics or an architecture of affect as a form of remembering alternative ways of doing politics. Moreover, I wish to foreground how the depoliticization at stake in the framing of the transformation of Buen Pastor (it’s becoming part of the discourse of “memory politics”) is today turning into the paradigm of a broader politics of memory. This in turn reproduces the schism between the defense of human rights as only in the past related to the dictatorship and the reality of ongoing human rights issues in the present.
Spatial embodiments of the rift: Buen Pastor and the escape toward the ineffable
Paying homage to the prisoners and victims of the past, Buen Pastor deliberately takes a distance from its oblivious forerunner, Punta Carretas shopping, offering visitors a cultural and commercial “Paseo” (literally “stroll”) that places memory itself under the surveillance of the market. There is a similarity between the two (both are early twentieth-century prisons transformed into commercial sites) but also a degree of difference, symptomatic of a process of whitewashing applied in the latter case to memory itself as a target for transformation. While Punta Carretas was turned into a prison-mall without paying any attention to the politics of memory—a monument, indeed, to selective amnesia—in Buen Pastor, memorialistic culture was incarcerated within the prison imaginary of the new, camouflaged commercial center. The newspaper Clarín promptly used the image of a redeemed site with the heading “From Prison to an Open Space for Culture” (“De cárcel a espacio abierto para la cultura” (Moya, 2008)). In a very different account of this transformation, Palanca Digital (2008) posted an online conversation with ex-prisoners who protested their exclusion from the opening of what was supposedly a space of “remembrance.” From these opposite responses (redemption or critique), the transformation of Buen Pastor begs the question: For whom and from where this memorial reframing is being performed?
The politics of memory may have ended up causing a fissure in the language of human rights, which just as much as it allowed the political to emerge also at times was being destabilized by its emergence.
Buen Pastor Prison was a key center for the detention of female political dissidents in the early 1970s. It became a symbol of resistance after the successful escape of 26 prisoners in 1975, in the lead-up to the coup when a state of emergency was declared in the province (medidas de pronta seguridad). The fact that Buen Pastor was associated, like Punta Carretas, with a collective escape and was subsequently turned into a camouflaged shopping and memory site ties it to the issue of the new economy of memory and the search for other forms of escape. The paradox here is that an escape also entails the possibility of a different form of administering remembrance and forgetfulness on behalf of both State and market. Yet, in the era of the politics of memory, “memory” itself, as a human capacity, is being confined, as it were, like the dissidents who advocated structural transformation decades before. Therefore, at stake here is the question of how a dissident practice of memory can articulate the possibility of imagining other temporalities.
The “redemption” of Buen Pastor used the language of the politics of memory and human rights by paying homage to the women who had been imprisoned there. This is exemplified by two plaques placed at the renovated prison: one declares that the site is a homage to the memory of the prison victims; the other proclaims its transformation as a work of progress (from dark prison to colorful consumer site). The first plaque says,
Now that the Paseo del Buen Pastor is coming into existence, we would like to pay homage to all those women who suffered here unjust imprisonment on behalf of the dictatorship and the horrors of torture and imprisonment … To the mothers, to the ones who suffered, to the ones who were here and who should not have been here.
The second plaque states, “Paseo del Buen Pastor. A work (una obra) of the Government of the province of Córdoba for everybody.” Past and present, selective memory of the dictatorship and redemption of the place for the citizens of consumerism, meet in a language that was absent from the Punta Carretas mall a decade before. The commercial redemption of Buen Pastor calls on the language of memorial practices, transforming the site into a quotation where women prisoners are being referred to as victims and mothers, rather than as political actors, in either past or present tense (Tello Weiss, 2010).
The omission of politics on the plaques has an interesting architectural counterpart that connects the site yet again to the transformation of Punta Carretas mall. Not only did the renovation of Buen Pastor erase the territorial marks of repression (the cells), but it also covered up the traces of a poetics of freedom within the site (the window through which political prisoners escaped). Although the escape had been organized by the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores-Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (PRT-ERP), it also involved prisoners from another organization (Montoneras) and the help of approximately 200 people from the community outside the prison. Of the prisoners who escaped, many went into exile later on, others went back to prison, and nine were killed and/or remain disappeared. This erasure of the window that could have pointed visitors to other, resistant aspects of prison life can be read as part of a process of invisibilization of acts of freedom in the reconfiguration of memorial practices and places. They point to the limitations of the site’s transformation into a place for memory—one that, in this case, performs a double erasure: the depoliticization of women prisoners, all subsumed under the stereotype of mother and suffering victim, and the erasure of any sign that would point to the event of the escape. The transformation of the site, then, did indeed perform the erasure of the political I have referred to earlier in this essay.
Which presents and pasts are promoted by museification and marketing embodied by discourses of architectural redemption? Who stands to benefit from these processes of memory marketing? It is quite surprising that in a cultural and commercial site aimed at exploiting memory, the part of the building that was demolished had comprised the cells where women prisoners were being held for much of the century. The architectural transformation resulted in the emptying-out or plain destruction of a space that was crucial for people’s memory of the prison (the shape of the cells and the structure of the cell block). The creation of this vacuum angered some of the surviving detainees, who protested the erasures despite their fear of repercussions (the protest took place at the moment in which anti-terrorist legislation was being discussed). Some ex-detainees attended the opening event and took the floor, interrupting the scheduled programming. They decorated the barriers protecting the Paseo with ribbons bearing the names of the prisoners who were killed or disappeared after the escape, reciting their names and chorusing “presente ahora y siempre” (“present now and always”).
This constituted what Mariana Tello Weiss (2010) calls a counter-act to the planned and scheduled event, and it posed a series of questions regarding the conflictual role of memory vis-à-vis politically framed narratives of the past. The counter-event staged a different form of connection between past and present because, by bringing ribbons with the names of the dead women who had escaped, the survivors were paying homage to the disappeared, seizing on the poetics of the escape as their main trope of resistance to museification. The protest becomes even more interesting when read alongside a video clip created by the authorities to represent the past and present of the place as a linear continuity (from the dark, old place of containment and repression to one of free consumption and modernization). In the video, prisoners are objectified in typical photographs depicting them in line, being registered at the entrance, suggesting that opening the former prison as commercial center is tantamount to redeeming its dark past into a modernized space of consumption and free gathering. The lines of prisoners, the clip suggests, have now turned into lines of consumers using their freedom to enter the place. However, the video was counter-acted by a documentary whose title points to the erased parts of the past: Buen Pastor: Una fuga de mujeres (Buen Pastor: a Women’s Escape) (Torres and Herrera, 2010).
Co-produced by Cine El Calefón and a group of former political prisoners and participants in the 1975 escape, the documentary starts with two images of passage: first, the narration dramatized by the video clip in which the successful opening of the Paseo implied the passage from the dark history of the place to the new realm of consumerist freedom. Second, a kaleidoscope of prison memories focuses on the window that was used for the escape three decades before. Here, a different meaning of the word “Paseo” surfaces, referring to the “walk” of former prisoners who try to locate themselves in the transformed place in order to recreate the layout of the prison where they had once lived. Recording former inmates in the process of trying to locate themselves, the documentary shows a dialogue of competing memories, as women argue about their memories regarding the layout of the place, the location of their beds, the bathroom, and so on.
As if to teach viewers another itinerary of Buen Pastor, a singular act takes place in the documentary while people are eating and shopping. Temporal layers mix as the women progressively transform the place into a site of struggle in which different diagrams of remembrance take place. Remembering the resistance of the past, the polyphony of voices reinventing history in the present is an act of resistance to the present physiognomy of the place, not only as a space for consumption but also as one that confines the female inmates’ history to the easy stereotype of victim and suffering mother. The new, clean and colorful center becomes the backdrop for a collage that tunnels to a different narration in which the women’s struggles in prison and the preparations for the escape encourage them to start escaping from the commercial center while the documentary goes on. This reaches a climax when one of the former prisoners being filmed, Cristina Salvarezza, starts writing graffiti on the walls and pillars of the former prison. Remarkably, all her graffiti refer to women inmates who disappeared after the escape, and after she inscribes the pillars with phrases such as, “Here, Tota used to sing and Mariana danced,” Salvarezza starts to sing and dance the songs she remembers, creating a strange point of temporal crossing on camera where the memories of resistance in prison encounter a present in which resistance is being held captive in the commercial center that can act as homage only for victims.
The remembrance of a repressed prison history within the commercial center becomes a source of inspiration for the present in which the neutral museification of the past has become a form of imprisonment in the logic of marketing. What is interesting here is that the survivors introduce a kaleidoscope of past images that resist easy categorization as mother, militant or suffering victim. They resist the stereotypes in which their pasts have been frozen by the politics of memory marketing, as if escape had to take another form in the present, one able to carve out some space in previous signifying chains that left no room for variation. In this sense, the documentary counteracts the afterlife of confinement in Buen Pastor by introducing another set of echoes of the past. By bringing back the escape to a signifying chain that affixed easy labels to them, the ex-inmates create a constellation of images of an irrepressible past of affection and struggle. In Buen Pastor, the marketing of memory that confined the past to a set of comfortable stereotypes made former prisoners transform the site of memory into the place of a struggle over meaning. I would even go further and say, a struggle that attempts to keep open a space for the possible re-signification of the political in nonstereotyped ways. As I mentioned above, the insistence on bringing up the topic of escape was a struggle over the place and over the politics of memory itself. After these protests, the former escapees successfully lobbied for the Archivo to allow them to place a plaque remembering the escape, thus opening up a form of historicization that does not limit their imprisonment to a passive form of suffering, and recovering the search for freedom that led to their escape. The struggle to add other meanings continues.
Once they had secured authorization, the ex-prisoners also started to mark the site, configuring an interesting pastiche in which the restaurants and stores are being interrupted by inscriptions on the ground remembering the disappeared women. The most prominent figure within this is the installation of the window from where the prisoners escaped, emplaced at the spot where they considered it had been located previously. This creates an interesting image in which past and present collide in a silent dialogue: the window (the bars), located close to the tables of a fancy restaurant, mark the border of the former prison, bringing to the present a trigger to remember and re-imagine those parts of the site that have been erased: the cells, the patio. The window is inserted as if coming from a different time, gray and old, and coexists with the colors of the market, leaving open the metaphor of an inside of prison that is now the place for consumerist freedom. Former prisoners questioned for whom the Paseo had been built, since the homage to prisoners was erasing their struggle against injustice. One of the forms of afterlife of confinement is a camouflaging of the past in order to avoid addressing injustice and the structural transformability of society, in a present that can see such questions only as a problem of the past. Here, the question of equality and freedom is posed from within the struggle over the signification of a space that reproduces the limitations of a depoliticized language of human rights (a depoliticization that reflects on an over-politicized gesture).
At the same time, as novel forms of resistance against the erasure of the political emerge, other contradictions such as the co-presence of so-called common prisoners can likewise come to the surface and force us to think about how to open up the meanings of equaliberty. In what follows, I would like to mention two other cases that I consider to be flashes, images interrupting the struggles of the present and illuminating alternative layers of past and present that refer to the limits of what is deemed tolerable and intolerable for the language of rights and the language of the market. That is, they shed light on the limits of that which can and cannot be remembered, reinvented or re-articulated in a process of signification.
On the limits of memorial culture
As part of the program marking international women’s month of 2012, an art exhibition entitled “Inapropiada/inapropiable,” curated by Sofía Chaij and Juan Manuel Burgos, had been scheduled at Paseo del Buen Pastor. Works challenging stereotypes of the female in patriarchal society were going to be exhibited and works created by feminist, lesbo-feminist, transfeminist and queer groups questioning gender stereotypes processes had been selected. A few days before the opening, the Paseo’s authorities decided to cancel the show, in the belief that it was going to disturb families, children and Catholic visitors of the space. 1 Almost as in a Russian doll game, this site which had previously been a center for the detention and punishment of female political as well as common prisoners was now deemed appropriate to serve as a cultural and memory as well as a commercial center but not for showcasing works criticizing present-day precarization of the life of those who fail to qualify as heterosexual subjects. Here, then, it became clear that the struggle against stereotypes of woman as victim and mother of ex-political prisoners must extend also to areas where these stereotypes cannot yet be challenged. The exhibition showed the precarization of the “trans” world, of injustice and inequality, by means of the defense of their rights in the field of meaning. The authorities’ censorship revealed the limits of what can be tolerated as “culture” and defense of “women’s” rights.
My second example illuminating the limits of the culture and politics of memory refers to the screening of Buen Pastor: Una fuga de mujeres (Buen Pastor: a Women’s Escape), the documentary produced by (Torres and Herrera: full names here), at another former Clandestine Detention Center in Córdoba, Campo la Ribera, now also a memory site. In the documentary, the ex-political prisoners refer many times to “the common ones” (common prisoners), both in pragmatic terms simply stating their presence and in despective terms (the “common” prison population as embodiment of the abject). During the discussion following the documentary, a local woman asked, puzzled: “What are the ‘common’ ones? Who are they?” Her intervention caused a long silence, since probably most of the people watching the documentary on that occasion had been or were strongly related to the “common” prison population. The scene creates an interesting dialectic image in the present time that forces us to ask about the sense of an “equaliberty.” The semantics of the “common” demand re-thinking the areas erased by the official human rights discourses that remain blind to economic inequality but often also by discourses attempting to re-define the political in nonstereotyped ways. How we might answer the question about “the common ones” impacts on the ways in which the struggle for a politics of memory may be re-signified in the present, as a memory of the possibilities for recasting the political. The question about the common emerged in a lower-class neighborhood, inhabited by people who are not necessarily familiar with the dictatorial past in the same way as middle-class, urban audiences. It highlighted areas and subjects that continue to remain outside the language of memory and the defense of human rights. The distinction introduced here between the “political” and the “common” (that which remains outside the political and the rights of the human) points, then, to the need for a politics of the common other than a politics of the subtraction of the political from the common.
How does this politics of subtraction mark the limits of the framework of democracy and of the form of human rights this conceptual crisis has produced? Between “liberty” (demanding the freedom of prisoners of conscience regardless of their politics, and thus also stripping them of specific political identities) and “equality” (a demand that refers to the very conditions of production and reproduction of existence), between the human right and the right to politics, an area is thus opened which links the demand for democracy to the re-shaping of the “common.” The “common” encompasses those deprived of politics in order to be “human” as well as those who fail to qualify either as political or human (in the terms of human rights). In this new area of commonality, it becomes necessary to forge another form of thinking liberty and equality with respect to a common right to re-shape the political. A new horizon may thus be opened in which our own present is inscribed.
Images of disencounter
As I was writing this text, I was suddenly confronted with yet another complex image related to issues of memory and commonality. On 24 May 2014, 40 prisoners held in a minimum-security facility (cárcel de mínima seguridad) for women and children at the Ezeiza Prison (the “Unidad 31”) were awoken by screams of police guards. The guards told them to get up in order to be transferred to other facilities, where they would face harsher conditions. The transferral was deemed necessary so that prisoners convicted of crimes against humanity under the dictatorship (locally called “genocidas”) could be held in the minimum-security facility. The reason for transferring the genocidas (previously held at Marcos Paz prison) was their supposedly fragile health.
Of the prisoners who had to make way for them, only the male ones were transferred with all of their belongings, as they had been advised in advance of the transfer. The female “common” prisoners were being taken away with nothing more than what they had been wearing on being woken up by the guards. They had to leave their belongings behind, as they had not been provided with any time to prepare for the move.
Some of the women prisoners had partaken in the “Yo No Fui” (“It Wasn’t Me”) poetry workshops, organized by a group of women from both inside and outside the prison, and they would subsequently describing the event in writing. This was published as “poetry from prison” (poesía en la cárcel) in the blog Lobo Suelto! on 6 June. I quote a selection of passages here:
It was 6:45am, when they entered the cells, screaming, We were all sleeping -Wake up, madams! On your feet, next to the bed, quick …! […] Now I know what many of our disappeared may have felt. Only the hoods were missing. Once again, the irony of our justice … Although the Unity 31 was a “good behavior” (cárcel de buena conducta) prison, we were being rooted out so as to leave the place to genocidas, “Human Rights” … Yes, walk “straight” (derechos), “Human” son of bitches … That is what I felt. A lot of manure (Estiércol) with helmets and shields, spitting on my dignity. Again, I see it from the inside, people’s indifference. […] Again, my memory activates. who will be able to defend us? Will there be justice? (Li, 2014; author’s translation)
All the poems suggest a connection between past and present, pointing to the crucial issue of the disparity felt at the level of human rights: these women had been treated as subjects with less rights (their human rights had been placed “below” those of the prisoners convicted for crimes against humanity). The women prisoner-poets thus play with a certain set of relations: they place themselves in comparison to the political prisoners of the past. However, they also distance themselves from the human rights discourse of the establishment. This distance also compels us to answer the question whether we would find it worth struggling against the wrong committed against them?
Elisabet Soria (2014) writes,
On May 25, the military celebrate their 2014 anniversary. As part of the joke (May 23), they evicted women from the Unit 31, a prison that was specially built to lodge women and children, in order to transfer old men (former genocidas of the Armed Forces). Of course, most of the people do not see anything wrong with this. As they do not see anything wrong in the precariousness in which people live in the slums, in the dismantled hospitals, in the fact that more and more people sleep on the streets … Is it going to be taking down Videla’s picture or defending Milani? (Author’s translation)
2
The question quoted here relates to a key issue: what kind of democracy and what kind of memory are at stake when we talk about a politics of memory? In this case, former genocides were given a privileged position above the women imprisoned in this facility. Their “health” was prioritized, as if the transferred women did not matter at all.
Here, then, a peculiar image takes shape composed of both the past of dictatorship and the present, with privilege bestowed upon those who had been in charge of the genocide. The poems written by the prisoners challenge the widespread indifference toward their situation. In the case of Palma Li, this experience made her feel connected to the way in which she imagined the disappeared had been treated. In the poems, injustice emerges at the level of poverty and precariousness—with indifference toward the fact that genocidas are deemed more worthy than the women. All the poems point to a sense of indignation and frustration with a social milieu in which this event can occur without discourse. In fact, in an interview days after this event, María Medrano and Liliana Cabrera (2014) from the association Yo No Fui, a nonprofit, civic association, which ran the poetry workshops, discuss their shock that human rights organizations did not voice any concerns in response.
What justice, what memory, what democracy? Placing the question of rights
According to Vania Markarian’s study (2005), demands for human rights have been gradually transformed into a language that avoided mentioning political activism and stuck to the individual and the biographic in order to make itself heard. This observation connects to the boom of hyper-subjectivism that followed on the heels of the memory boom. For the time being, however, I only want to focus on how the regime of struggle and defense of human rights victims affected a way of remembering that is still in dispute nowadays. The demand voiced during the dictatorship for the disappeared to appear alive became a demand for human beings’ right to life, which gradually presupposed the deletion of the figure of the political subject. In order to be considered a subject of human rights, it was necessary to “disappear” the militant status of the disappeared. That is, with the gradual naturalization of this discursive operation, the human right to live was gradually separated from the human right to politics. This involves a change in the narrativization of disappearance, in which what is left out is not politics but rather what I call “politicability.” Although time has passed, the process of depolitization of human rights has continued in different forms, ones that relate to the naturalization of the split between social justice and equality when we talk about the politics of memory.
The idea of politicability is inspired by a series of questions proposed by Etienne Balibar in his study of France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. He starts with “the apparently irreducible split” between the concept of equality and liberty in the configuration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Equality generally belongs within the economic or social field, while liberty refers to the legal–political field. The question is how these are transformed into two almost mutually exclusive concepts. According to Balibar (1994), this exclusion results from the axiom shared by liberalism and socialism that “the realization of equality occurs through State intervention, because it is essentially a matter of redistribution, whereas the preservation of liberty is tied to the limitation of this intervention, even to eternal vigilance against its ‘perverse’ effects”(pp. 39–40). From this irreducible split between equality and liberty, Balibar derives the paradox implied by two types of rights: the rights of Man and the rights of the Citizen, as if replicating the two previous spheres (the rights of man as “the right to existence, the right of peoples to self-determination” and the rights of citizens as related to the political, technocratic and economic sphere). However, he challenges the split by suggesting an analysis of the founding text of the declaration of the rights of man based on the relationship “between the aporetical character of the text and the conflictive character of the situation in which it arises and which serves as its referent” (Balibar, 1994: 41).
Balibar’s argument for re-signifying the struggle for human rights as a right that includes the right to politics sheds light on the struggles for the past and present of the Left in the Southern Cone. It raises the problem of how a memory of politics and liberty can be imagined or reinvented without falling into a stereotyped and domesticated politics of memory. Besides, it also makes us wonder how we can critically and creatively approach the co-implications that have shaped in some cases a politics of memory and its appropriation by the State and the market (thus also producing a political economy of memory), as well as insist on the question of who qualifies as a “subject” or citizen of such a political economy of memory.
New questions could help us trace the formation of problematic images in which past and present appear connected in non-analogical ways. I say non-analogical because there is no “dictatorship” in the present, and, therefore, current forms of imprisonment differ from the massive, clandestine program conceived and carried out by the military. Nevertheless, very similar forms of rights violations continue to occur—at the very least in the precariousness experienced by individuals during imprisonment.
Returning to the problem of equaliberty, we should add that the limitation of the subjects of memory relates to one of the most salient characteristics of the neoliberal program: it naturalizes a divorce between economy and politics. Within this scope, the criminalization (and feminization) of poverty becomes regularized, but is usually left aside from the politics of memory. This creates an uncomfortable sense in which the subjects of the politics of memory become a social class, to the exclusion of many other forms of human rights violations.
The point here is not to assume that “all rights violations are the same,” but rather to open the notion of justice at stake so as to transform the management of memory into the questioning of memories, thereby including the subjects that as of yet remain outside. Here the distinction between long- and short-term memory proposed by Ludmila Da Silva Catela (2007) may help us connect the politics of memory with a memory of politics. With this notion, we can at once connect a long history of struggle for social (transformative) justice which has been systematically repressed; and connect the short-term memory of the dictatorship to a longer history. The way in which we “periodize” history is the way in which we delimit the problematic we are tackling. (Of course, the same question applies to what we understand as “human” and what qualifies as such.)
The case of Buen Pastor, just as that of Punta Carretas in Uruguay, helps us address this question because both sites were highly symbolic prisons related to the last dictatorships and at the same time places where many common prisoners were being held. However, at the moment of problematizing the memories of these sites, we tend to exclusively recall the politically detained—thereby making common prisoners irrelevant as memory subjects. Is it possible to change this connection we have “naturalized—one that reduces the “memory” of places of abuses to the memory of political imprisonment? And going one step further, is not this reduction a lasting remnant of the immense political paralysis left by decades of repression? The difficult task for us critics is to open up the field of questions, putting in relation political abuse and economic injustice in the past and the present, without imposing on either of these a simplified and reductionist view.