March 24, a red on the calendar.
Holiday, whose etymology exempts us from any explanation.
A holiday, of rest, celebrated in the times of tourism and work.
In biblical terms, the day God rested from creating him.
Sacred or profane, the holiday is always a festive day, of joy, a celebration of life.
Never death
.
What do the drums, the thunder bombs and the slogans celebrate that, as in a pilgrimage that begins in the ESMA building, ends in a great act in the Plaza de Mayo, the traditional place of celebrations or protests, on whose tiles the white handkerchiefs are symbolized,
that moving feat
that has no proper name, when the mothers who were looking for their children, kidnapped and disappeared, settled in the public square, rebuked the power, in full dictatorship, to make visible what was deliberately intended disguise.
Times of silence, without hype or slogans. None of these mothers asked the other about her party
, religious, or social affiliation.
Mothers who were looking for their children, a female insurgency that altered their family and domestic lives, but also altered democratic life when its best-known leaders left the Plaza de Mayo to enter the Government Palace, where they received fair recognition.
But because of that confusion between State and government that survives among us, what should have been a recognition of all Argentines, represented in the state,
became a political banner of partisan adherence to the tenants of the Casa Rosada, the Kirchner couple.
There are no objections to personal, individual adherence to one government or another.
It is the democratic right.
Never in the name of the white handkerchief that transcends them
, it does not have its own name, it belongs to all of us, in that everything in which I include my mother and so many mothers who took to the streets in all the squares of our country when terror held them in handcuffs. and gagged to society.
They had a lot to do with the restoration of democracy in the most auspicious way, the historic trial that, by condemning the leaders of death, ended the impunity and violence that our history went through in the last century.
Some were installed in the square, the most visible and well-known.
Others, in silence, collected the denunciations of the survivors.
With the joy for the democratic recovery, there were many of us who on every March 24 of the first two democratic decades emulated the silence of mothers.
Alone, in a group, without banners, or bombs, or drums, in that incipient democratic liturgy, we created a shared ritual in which we showed ourselves as a hurting, plural community that, by hiding party and ideological flags, gave proof of consensus
. and confidence in democracy
.
Until that silence was replaced by the grandiloquence of the speeches, they invoke the Homeland, the bombastic gestures, the picture of the dictator Videla that President Néstor Kirchner took down at the Military College.
In the empty space on the wall they began to write an incomplete story at the service of a Kirchnerist epic,
without ever mentioning or acknowledging the responsibility of Peronism, not only in the crimes of the Triple A and the Montoneros when each death was avenged with another corpse, but in the self-amnesty agreed with the military, the refusal to join the Conadep, the pardon of Carlos Menem.
I arrived at the Chamber of Deputies in 2006, I witnessed that appropriation with laws that imposed the number of the majority, without listening to objections or seeking consensus on issues that should have left the narrow limits of human rights organizations, understandable in times of terror, harmful in democratic times because they deprived and took away from society the possibility of knowing and getting involved in dramas as sensitive as the appropriation of babies, or the same economic reparations.
They were imposing a way of naming, they canceled the debate about what happened to us, and the postponed question, What do we want to do with what happened to us?
Revenge or pedagogy.
Thus, on the holiday of March 24, they imposed the modification of the prologue of "Never Again", a public document, since it compiled the complaints that reconstructed the macabre puzzle of State terrorism that served as the basis for the accusation of the prosecutor Julio Strassera and the condemnations of the commanders who made up the three military juntas.
In the compound they imposed the number of the majority,
under effective emotional extortion.
Because for politics, in general, human rights have not cared much, confused with the violations of the dictatorship.
At the same time, the squares
were emptied of respectful silence
, expelled by the shouts, the slogans, the noise bombs to celebrate themselves, those who symbolize in the hype a party belonging.
March 24 will never cease to be what it was, the tragic day in our history, the one that incorporated our country into the repertoire of administered massacres of humanity, such as Nazism, fascism and Stalinism.
Systems of terror that in the Argentine case inaugurated the perversion of the disappeared prisoner whom no one saw die and left us a society without crosses or prayers.
A memory desecrated by party electoral slogans and this year, the celebration of an international mega-congress on Human Rights in which they never claimed for those who are now also disappeared prisoners in Nicaragua, such as Archbishop Rolando Álvarez, symbol of the resistance of the dictatorship
. of Daniel Ortega and Rosalía Murillo, whose relatives are crying out for a sign of life, since nothing is known of their whereabouts.
It is even incomprehensible that Unesco, a United Nations agency that presents itself as a defender and promoter of peace, has sponsored a Human Rights Congress
to celebrate the rulers
, not to echo the individuals who suffer from tyrannies.
If the same United Nations experts concluded that the dictatorship of the Ortega couple in Nicaragua commits crimes against humanity.
And human rights were born as a protection of citizens from the arrogance of states.
The rulers are the ones who must guarantee them.
By making this evocation coincide with forty years of democracy, we are before a new and grotesque appropriation that in its sectarianism and intolerance denies itself since a democracy of a single political color is undemocratic even by definition.
As soon as I write this note, I hear in the distance the drums and the bombs on the way to the Plaza de Maya that will be filled with shouts.
I remain silent because I feel alien to the commemoration and to that use of a past that dominates as
a vengeful historical memory instead of democratic pedagogy
to avoid new dictatorships and give meaning to the sacrifice of all those who died.
For this reason, in a year in which on December 10 we will celebrate forty years of electoral continuity, the candidates should know that in order to have a better life in our wounded country, it remains for us to ask ourselves.
And if we play the game of democracy?
To prevent those who shout the loudest from also robbing us of the illusion of living in a country of equals, willing to solve problems among all and in peace.
