March 24th

Today there will be marches in the streets of Buenos Aires and in its Plaza de Mayo;

today there will be screams.

Today is March 24 again: it has happened once a year for 48 years, when tanks and trucks and soldiers invaded Argentine cities and imprisoned the president, took power, inaugurated the most criminal dictatorship in our history.

Since 1984, with the return of democracy, the date called for mobilizations of repudiation;

In 2006, the Government of Néstor Kirchner declared it an “immovable” national holiday, a day to close everything.

Later, the Government of Mauricio Macri demoted it to a “movable holiday” but the resistance of many made him back down, which is his thing.

Holidays – or festivals – are not just business windows for hotels, restaurants and other gas stations;

They are, above all, ways of putting together an idea of ​​nation.

The formation of these holiday calendars is, always, a display of ideology, the sketch of a future through the past.

In Spain, for example, there are eight national holidays, and half of them are Catholic holidays – and there are several regional or local holidays that are, almost all, saints and various miracles.

The rests change according to the eras, ideas, dominant creeds.

In the Argentine calendar there are twelve immovable holidays.

A quarter are Catholic –Good Friday, Immaculate Conception, Christmas–, another quarter are secular –New Year, two days of Carnival– and the other six define the profile of the patriotic spirit: the Day of the military landing in the Malvinas Islands, Labor Day , the Revolution of 1810, the Declaration of Independence of 1816, the “step to immortality” of General Belgrano and the “National Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice.”

Our idea of ​​the past has been mutating towards a new drawing, which is not so original either: of the six historical holidays, one is international and obligatory, two celebrate the founding of the country and the other three melancholicly commemorate defeats: the failed invasion of the Malvinas, the death of impoverished Belgrano and the most criminal coup d'état in our history.

That is today, March 24, Remembrance Day.

Every year on March 24, the largest mobilization of the Argentine left and its progressive fringes occurs;

It is, supposedly, the way to condemn that dictatorship.

I always thought that it was a mistake to focus the memory of those years on that sinister moment in which the military decided to take charge directly, without further intermediaries, of the repression and the change of structures: that it is a way of paying tribute to them, of continuing to be subjected to their decisions – instead of breaking that yoke and celebrating, for example, when they finally had to leave, on December 10.

But the error is loaded with meanings.

Celebrating March 24 means, first of all, insisting on the memory that the rich Argentines were – and are, surely – willing to do everything to remain so: if they did it then, ruthlessly, through their army, why? not at any other time and manner, if they see the need.

A way of stirring up the ghost to produce social discipline: guys, remember that, don't forget that if you want important changes you put yourself in danger.

Celebrating March 24 also means postulating the perfect innocence of democracy.

In these times when we are afraid to discuss it –even though it is the system in which so many are hungry–, saying that it all started with the coup of March 24 is a way of exonerating the previous democratic government of Juan Perón, Isabel Perón and limited company: a way of pretending that the democracy of 1974-75 did not democratically torture, kidnap and kill hundreds of people.

No;

We must present a brutal rupture where there was none and continue selling that democracy is pristine, immaculate, the best of all worlds, that the only bad guys were those ugly bloody soldiers who were a little disturbed, that neither the churches nor the businessmen nor many politicians nor so many millions supported them, and that all that was a parenthesis that is now closed, that is left in the past.

Above all that: that it was an outburst that is over, something that can be locked up in museums, and not the foundations of an Argentine era – which still lasts.

(To really remember that military and criminal dictatorship we should tell what the end of that coup was. It is not a question of forgetting or not forgetting but of choosing what we want to know about all that: whether to focus the “Memory” on the horrible atrocities or also remember the intentions of their victims and remember, above all, the intentions of the perpetrators: why the bad guys did their evil things. They did not torture and kill because they were perverse and were excited by the pain of others; perhaps someone combined pleasure with patriotic duty, but their goal was to turn around the social and economic structure of the country - for which, first of all, they needed to annul the unions and organizations that opposed it, which defended sixty years of conquests. That coup built this Argentina: on March 24th it The rich Argentines celebrate – with their perks, with their impunity, with their extreme benefits – every day.)

I insist: I always believed that it was a mistake to demonstrate on March 24.

Today, however, the Milei effect produces emergencies: with a genocide denier in the government, it is important to march against his vindication of that dictatorship.

President Milei not only exonerates the military murderers: he also resumes his work.

There is a historical line of neoliberal reforms: those generals started it, the democratic president Carlos Menem followed it, the same Macri tried to continue it, now his colleague is trying to do it with increasingly violent ways.

Thus this March 24, like everything in today's Argentina, changes its meaning: it is no longer a celebration of the triumph of democracy but rather its defense against new threats.

A few days ago two men ambushed a militant from the Children of the Disappeared Group in her house.

They waited for her inside and, when she arrived, they grabbed her and told her that “we didn't come to rob you, we came to kill you;

“We get paid for that.”

Afterwards, they tied her up, abused her and painted VLLC on the wall – “Long live fucking freedom”, Javier Milei's war cry.

The authorities did not intervene, not even to exonerate themselves with a protocol sentence.

And many rumors are circulating in Buenos Aires about a presidential pardon for the convicted soldiers or, at least, the granting of house arrest to all of them.

So, beyond the debate, today's march rises up against denialism or vindication of that sinister coup.

An event that was official, with all its problems, is transformed, by the work and grace of Milei and his accomplices, into a form of resistance, in the defense of a consensus that seemed established and is threatened: that those soldiers deserve to pay their brutal crimes, that citizens have the right to demonstrate for that – and for any other issue.

A large police deployment will try to repress them with their new “anti-picketing protocols” and it is possible that an event that was always peaceful will no longer be so.

Thus, this March 24th takes on a meaning that it didn't used to have.

Or several, unfortunately: this afternoon, in Buenos Aires, there will be three separate events from three sectors of the left?

That, among other things, explains why the president is who he is, why so much sadness.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_