The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Recover a culture and an ethic of rights

2021-09-16T09:36:16.511Z


What can be expected of politics that today, like yesterday, is more inclined to pragmatism than to values, where crudely instrumental views of human rights and justice in general predominate?


Hugo Vezzetti

09/15/2021 8:26 PM

  • Clarín.com

  • Opinion

Updated 09/15/2021 8:26 PM

To address the issue of human rights in public discourse, it is worth briefly reviewing recent history.

To a large extent, the discourse of human rights emerged in Argentina as a reaction to the enormity of the crimes of the dictatorship.

A first narrative of democracy, reinforced with the Never Again and the social impact of the Trial of the Juntas, moved from the figure of "order" promoted by the military power and its civil partners to the evidence of the crimes and the victims: the scenes of the chupaderos, the anonymous graves, the faces of the disappeared forever burst in.

There are two observations.

First, all of this is born in society, from the space of the victims, family members and comrades of the militancy, in the face of the defection of a political class willing, as in the past, to negotiate a solution with the military leaders.

It is worth remembering that the “military party” was an integral part of a political system that from time to time admitted (or called upon) its intervention as guarantor of order.

Second, the human rights discourse was born from a defensive position.

It has been deployed in a practical culture of struggles and demands, sustained by claims of memory, truth and justice.

In that reactive origin, forged in action, an ideological or doctrinal substrate capable of founding a culture and an ethic of rights has been lacking.

That support could not be provided by the majority parties: both Peronism and Radicalism had shown in their history that law and law were subordinate values ​​to the ends of politics.

Even less could come from the lineage of the minority Creole liberalism, more concerned with business and markets than with citizen rights.

Nor, of course, could it be based on a Christian humanist idea, alien to the Argentine Catholic Church which, with some exceptions (and unlike the Chilean Church, for example) showed more affinity with the discourse of the "order" of the repressors than with their victims.

Given these conditions, it is not surprising that a propositional agenda or a foundational vision of human rights as "generators of democracy" (Lefort) has been absent from the discourse that legitimized itself in a demand for justice that only, or almost, focused on the crimes of the past.

A past that does not pass, on the other hand, since for many the fight against the dictatorship continues: once the punitive fury has been exhausted for the accused or convicted to die in prison, the combat now focuses on a supposed "denialism" that really points to cancel any discussion about political and moral responsibilities that does not end with the uniform domes.

Indeed, it has been the left (or "leftism", a classic term in Marxism) that provides some ideological underpinning to these battles.

The first consequence, towards the past, is a blind spot that suppresses the discussion about the role of the revolutionary left and the armed parties.

And in the present it promotes a vision in which only the others, the enemies, can violate fundamental rights.

José Aricó said that the left in Latin America is Leninist before reading Lenin. He was referring above all to an idea of ​​the power fixed in the State, either as a fortress that must be assaulted, or as its own stronghold that must be defended at all costs. A Leninist-inspired human rights militancy, beyond the contradiction in terms, makes it possible to explain that violations of rights are fiercely attacked where the enemy governs (in Colombia or the City of Buenos Aires) while covering crimes much greater where there is a State that is judged as its own, in Cuba or in the province of Formosa.

Of course, when the leftist momentum is deployed from power or privilege, an insurmountable component of imposture is added that may be a singularly Argentine feature of a history that repeats itself as a farce.

Now, if we go back to the beginnings of democracy, it should be remembered that there was a substantive discourse that promised, from the government, in the first cycle of democracy, a horizon of expansion and the creation of new rights.

What remains of that legacy?

Pablo Gerchunoff, a trustworthy witness, tells us in his dialogue with Roy Hora that Alfonsín, after the forced end of his mandate, did not even want to be mentioned about the Parque Norte Discourse.

What can be expected of politics that today, as yesterday, is more inclined to pragmatism than to values?

It goes without saying: crudely instrumental views of human rights and justice in general predominate.

The evidences of inequity, material and symbolic poverty, fundamental rights relegated or manipulated are in view, in a locked political scene, condemned to the repetition of the same.

Beyond the uses and forms that in fact establish inequity and the effective violation of the guarantees that are enunciated, what is crushed is that symbolic dimension of the rights that found the democratic project.

In the absence of a will to reform in the institutions and in the State, the horizon of a substantive culture of justice and human rights depends on initiatives that nest in society.

Perhaps it is time to rearm a transversal and autonomous movement of ideas, values ​​and actions that recover some of those promises that they projected, with democracy, freedoms and justice for all.

Hugo Vezzetti is a Consultant Professor at the UBA, Principal Investigator at CONICET.

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2021-09-16

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-29T09:45:08.646Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.