T
uesday’s 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup – National Memory Day for Truth and Justice for almost all this century since 2002 – merits being a special occasion and earlier this month there were insistent rumours that the government would be making this anniversary unique in the worst possible way with a pardon for military officers convicted of crimes against humanity. Never say never, but there is every reason to conclude that this will not now be happening with the government too embroiled in scandal and infighting to fly in the face of such a huge and long-standing consensus against military dictatorship – nor are their problems so great as to require the distraction that such a vindication of torture, murder and forced disappearances would surely trigger.
While trivial in comparison with the ‘$LIBRA’ cryptocurrency case (or for that matter the mega-corruption of the ‘Cuadernos’ trial requiring former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to interrupt nine months of house arrest for the first time in order to testify last Tuesday), the outrage over the insertion of Cabinet Chief Manuel Adorni’s wife into the presidential entourage for Argentina Week in New York preceded by his Carnival jaunt in Punta del Este is a good example of how scandal and infighting feed into each other. The leak of videos exposing the latter flight was variously attributed to the SIDE intelligence controlled by star spin doctor Santiago Caputo recently ousted from a dominant presence in the Justice Ministry or to a Security Ministry still very much under the thumb of its previous head, Senator Patricia Bullrich, apparently in the process of being replaced as next year’s City mayoral candidate by Adorni.
Meanwhile, the New York flight continues to erode the credibility of the government’s austerity drive – President Javier Milei’s arguments about the minimal “marginal cost” of an extra passenger do not address the ethical objections to privileging a minister’s wife ahead of somebody who might have boosted the New York investment drive or an exemplary member of civil society. Adorni sought refuge in his Punta del Este holiday being his “private life,” but this can cover a multitude of sins – there is surely little more private or personal than reading a newspaper like this one but would this justify Cristina Fernández de Kirchner apparently having used presidential aircraft to ship her newspapers to her Patagonian retreat? While other factors have led to the government’s confrontation with AFA, the Argentine Football Association, being placed on the backburner, Adorni’s double standards certainly do not help any tirades against the opulence of AFA bosses. Nor do the limitations decreed by this government on the law of access to public information contribute to an image of transparency in this case or others.
Meanwhile the $LIBRA cryptocurrency scam has returned as a festering sore. The information now coming to light is perhaps not that different from what was being aired this time last year but the current context of a stuttering economy seems to be conducive to greater public receptivity. Since President Milei’s promotion inflating this bubble cannot possibly lend itself to any positive interpretation – he was either a fool or a crook – this cannot have a happy ending for the government with a passive prosecutor the best possible outcome, but for now it remains one issue among various.
Back to Tuesday’s anniversary. Scant chance of a pardon for military human rights offenders (and if there were, it would be a tremendous feather in the cap for Vice-President Victoria Villarruel, who is very much on the wrong side of government infighting) but there remains the sustained and more insidious erosion of denialism. Advocates of “complete memory” would have more of a case if they prefaced their arguments with the clarification that there were a couple of dozen victims of state terrorism with its infinitely greater destructive capacity for every death caused by guerrilla violence (with a shorter list of crimes not including babysnatching or the forced disappearances agonising families) but we should nevertheless not forget the latter. But this they do not do, instead reviving “two demons” theories.
Tuesday is sure to feature Memory Day marches by human rights organisations with the counterpoint of some government video urging reconciliation and oblivion but it should not be a one-day wonder. Throughout the next 93 months we should remember every day that 50 years ago there was a military dictatorship and count our blessings for a democracy equally capable of electing leftist populism and the far right libertarian administration now ruling. Without downplaying the landmark importance of Tuesday’s 50th anniversary.
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