The struggles for human rights that began to be waged during the dictatorship and, at its end, continued in the CONADEP, the Trial of the Juntas and, later, in the trials resumed already in this century, these struggles have exhausted themselves
.
.
Even ill-informed conservatives no longer believe that the speeches of human rights organizations and the increasingly fragmented, increasingly melancholic, increasingly concise marches of March 24 carry some political dimension that calls into
question the state of things.
Born in the saddest hours of our recent past, the human rights movement was made up of people who put
their lives at risk
by opposing the common sense of a regime for which forced disappearances followed by torture, rape, plunder and death are they had become the naturalized way of resolving a violent political conflict.
If the protection and defense of humiliated human dignity, the care and restitution of human rights overwhelmed by the dictatorship was the main purpose of the organizations, to fulfill it they had to challenge a homicidal power, but also subvert the set of meanings that dominated to a public opinion that due to fear, comfort, misinformation and in some cases complicity
lacked awareness of the seriousness of the damage.
Multiple operation, therefore, at the same time political and discursive, waged in an adverse and dangerous context, made of misunderstanding, suspicion and threats.
Those fights could have kept their spirit.
Not only for the necessary remembrance of the victims and the condemnation of the perpetrators, but in the renewal of the issues and problems to be addressed:
acting on the present so that the future is better than the past.
But, sponsored by the State, crystallized in a bygone time, oblivious to the suffering of a multitude of men, women, boys and girls who today suffer dramatic violations of their rights and dignity (trafficking in persons, prison conditions, poverty and indigence , environmental, police and gender violence, to name just a few),
human rights organizations are not much more than a well-established part of the political establishment
.
The discourse of these organizations
lacks
the features that once gave it its political dimension and its moral height: the capacity to assume personal and collective risk;
the challenge to constituted power and its normalization of damage;
the will to disrupt the meanings that organize the public sphere.
“The history of orthodoxies, wrote Harold Rosenberg, shows that words continue to be repeated long after they have lost their original meaning.
In a state of decay (...) a corporate being more or less disguises his altered condition of
him under the phraseology of his heroic beginnings
of him."
Today, to use the words of Leon Trotsky, "a combination of dogma and opportunism"
made organizations lose the original drive to defend and promote human rights
, a combination that, paradoxically, leads them to look with idealized eyes. the victims of repression are further removed from that impulse that once gave them meaning.
But, in addition, it is a combination that, by contributing to the fossilization of ideas and problems, by obstructing any critical discussion about the past, by becoming guardians of the orthodoxy
of
a new common sense that is wanted, to In turn, unchangeable,
it has become an obstacle
to imagining a better future in a country that requires risk, imagination and the ability to think against the current.
