Dialogue between social actors (2000–2001)

The people that forget their past are condemned to relive it. In memory lies redemption. 1

These quotes that affirm the importance of memory come from texts representing two opposite ideological positions, the right and the left 2 respectively. Interest- ingly, both sides recognize the importance of constructing a social and individual memory. The conflict of interests therefore does not arise from the need to remember rather it arises in the moment each side decides what to remember and how to remember it. That is to say that the social actors confront each other from the recognition of the importance of the past to their present political positions. The struggles for memory are unleashed because of a need to vindicate and re- appropriate a space that legitimizes their voice in the political arena. It is also true that these struggles are framed within a need to incorporate events into individual and collective identity that go against the self-image of the citizens and the nation.

1. The first epigraph is a quote typically attributed to Santayana that appears in Testimonio de una nación agredida (1978) Comando General del Ejército. The second one is cited in an essay by Hugo Achugar (1995) “La nación entre el olvido y la memoria. Hacia una narración democrática

de la nación” and is attributed to a thought by Baal Shem Tov at the memorial monument to the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in the city of Montevideo. 2. The difference between left and right, is based on the difference between the two in their conception of equality and inequality between people. According to Norberto Bobbio (1996) Left & Right, the principal difference that distinguishes these sides is that the left searches for greater equality between people and considers inequality to be the product of reversible social differences while on the other hand the right conceives these differences between people as natural and doesn’t search to reduce the inequality between people. In our case the difference in these sides with respect to the topic of human rights violations implies that the left strives for all citizens to

be equal before the law and that all citizens be subject to the same norms and laws. That is to say that the violation of the law and human rights (according to international agreement) should be valid for all and not relative to differences of power or hierarchy between citizens. For the right, differences between people exist and not all must be judged in the same way, those that belong to certain hierarchies have the prerogative of adjusting the laws to their needs.

฀ What We Remember This self-image is one of a nation with a liberal and democratic tradition. 3 The vio-

lent events of the dictatorship represent an anomaly for both the left and the right that is difficult to incorporate into the democratic vision of the country. How then can this past be incorporated into the historical continuity that helps to construct national identity? What can be done with the burdens or inconclusive remnants that emerge in current society? 4

The reestablishment of public conversation 5 about the dictatorship makes it possible to recognize the permanence and the changes produced in both the real- ity and the social actors competing for power in the political scene. The ways in which accounts about the past represent and evaluate these actors permit an inves- tigation of these actors’ political roles in the nation’s collective memory formation of the period. The struggle to impose a hegemonic construction of the past appears in the texts studied in this chapter. Different social actors use the past as material for the reaffirmation of their social and political identities. At the same time, they use the past as a presentation card that legitimizes their voice in the political scene.

A positive aspect of the discussion of the dictatorial past in the current socio-political context is that the chorus of voices is broader. During this period not only social actors representing the ideological right, who have traditionally monopo- lized the discussion, but also actors of the left whose accounts traditionally did not form part of the official history (members of non-governmental organizations, for

3. This was the first coup d’état by the military of the 20th century in Uruguay, with the excep- tion of the (self-coup) of Terra in 1933 (1933-1938). The social imaginary is constructed based

on myths of respect for democracy, order, and the maintenance of a state of law and a high de- gree of culture, among others. Therefore the dictatorship represents an aberration, an abnormal- ity in the self-image of this community.

4. The strategy of omission or forgetting of the dictatorship period was used in the period of transition to democracy but it failed in the present due to effects of the international historical

and political context as well as for the national context. The trials in Europe of Latin American dictatorships for crimes against humanity, the trials in Argentina of the military Juntas, the doc- uments of Operation Condor, etc. are some of the international incidents that affected the discussion of the subject in Uruguay. In the same way the change in the political panorama within Uruguay made it such that the left obtained more political power by gaining admittance to the municipal government of Montevideo for four consecutive terms and the presidency in 2005. These changes in the internal politics have opened spaces for the once history of the losers to be recognized. Today this translates into the construction of a monument to those who disappeared during the dictatorship and the naming of streets and plazas in remembrance of actors that op- posed the dictatorship.

5. This is a complaint made by some intellectuals of the left in the 1990s when the topic of the dictatorship was for some an already resolved one after the plebiscite of 1989. See Uruguay: cuentas pendientes, Dictadura, memorias y desmemorias. Compilador Alvaro Rico (1995). Mon- tevideo: Trilce.

Chapter 6. Struggles for memory 

example, relatives of disappeared detainees, FEDEFAM, and others) now have ac- cess to the struggle over the definition of the past and its meaning. In this moment the debate about how to construct an official history of the period takes account of contributions and criticisms from both sectors (left and right). In this sense one could say that the struggle for memory has democratized the political discourse since now a greater number of actors participate in its construction. However, these struggles for memory reflect a continuation of a Maniquean conception of historical truth. The majority of these texts distribute roles between good guys and bad guys, victims and repressors/terrorists. It is also interesting to see how society as

a whole appears as a participant in the discourse since the idealization of a nation or people permits both ideological sides to construct an ally that reinforces its posi- tion. At the same time this ideal people or nation seems to have been on the margin of events since it appears in the texts as either a defenseless victim of whichever side or as a pure body that must be defended from the aggression of the Other.

The objective of this chapter is to present how the social actor, the Armed Forces and its discourse, is represented or cited in the discourse of the Others. The Others are the political actors that share the stage with the Armed Forces and who compete for the right to construct a collective memory of the past in question. As has already been established, the struggles for memory of the dictatorship period continue to have relevance in the current political scene: How then is the Armed Forces’ version represented in the discourse of the Others? In what way is this discourse responded to or recontextualized? How can these struggles for memory

be better understood by investigating a series of texts from the press that represent different ideological positions? Military discourse about the dictatorship must be interpreted in relation to that of the rest of society in order to fully understand its meaning and value.

Dialogue between social actors (2000–2001)