Argentina: the past won’t stay away (II)

Buenos Aires Herald
monday, july 2, 2012.   
   
LIBROS:

       De la culpa al perdón

Cómo construir una convivencia democrática

sobre las intolerancias del pasado.

Norma Morandini

Former Herald editor reviews a recently published book and essay, reminders that the desaparecidos remain at the forefront of Argentine's minds and that answers are still needed.

by Andrew Graham-Yooll
for the Herald.
 

If Argentina’s people are really intending to live in peace, we must be prepared to understand what happened to us in the seventies and before, and admit our share of responsibility.  Admission of this will take us to a measure of self-compassion and forgiveness.  That is the main message of an essay by a journalist and now a senator in Argentina’s congress, Norma Morandini.  She should know, her two younger siblings were “disappeared” in September 1977.

Norma Morandini’s recently published essay is a stream of personal and moral exploration and a search of Argentine society to try to explain recovery from a state of denial. It is a revealing account. Her own story begins in comfortable middle class Córdoba, then moves through the loss of those dear, exile, and from a distance she sees her mother grow out of grief, first, then enter battle to seek her lost children as one of the Mothers of the disappeared.  The next stage in Norma’s life as a journalist is a return to Argentina, guilt-ridden for having survived, rejected for jobs and discriminated against for having dead or “disappeared” members of her family, finally to re-invent herself as a campaigner for a new culture  and to enter politics.

Morandini’s  book, De la culpa al perdón, published by Sudamericana; is a painful personal essay written ten years ago, only published now. It has a challenging sub-heading, “How to build an open society above the intolerance of the past”.  The idea of forgiveness for the dictators of the past prompted an irate reader of Clarín’s Ñ cultural weekly to write in reply to a review and refuse compassion and pardon “for the criminals” of the dictatorship.   But Senator Morandini is not suggesting we all go into an exercise of religious pardon of the sins of the monsters.  She does propose that each one put their feelings in the balance and try to come to terms with their past as a necessary step into the present and beyond.

Senator Morandini said, “During the trial of the Juntas in 1985 the figures and statements of the victims were usually put in doubt.  For example, in those long hard six months of the trials of the Juntas, former captives said that prisoners were drugged, tied, and dropped into the sea. Nothing happened. It was more than ten years later when the executioner, naval officer Adolfo Scilingo confessed to Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain, that the account of the bodies thrown from planes was true. Then it was believed. Human behavior makes it reasonable to give credit to the killer but not the victim…” There is no reason to accept Videla’s figures that “seven or eight thousand had to die”, Morandini argued.

“(In Argentina) we are a country that has not had a state policy to deal with events in our recent past.  Our education does not include the construction of a culture of human rights.” These two sentences in part define the aim of Morandini’s book, to develop a democratic “society above the intolerance of the past.” 

“We have had thirty years of democratic formalities and we do not have democratic values.  This is because society has leaders who do not want to recognize their part or the role of their parties in the civic failure that led to the worst dictatorship in our history.   Here people are still trying to convince themselves that we are a peaceful nation without admitting we were cutting each others’ throats throughout the nineteenth century and killing people because we didn’t like what they said in the twentieth. 

“We have not been able to see the difference between guilt and responsibility."  

Morandini has not lost hope for recovery.  “For the first time in decades we are beginning to look at ourselves, our own mistakes.  This change is coming from a new generation, the youngest, the children, and even grandchildren of the activists, sometimes utopian, and the disappeared of the seventies. This makes me feel we are on our way to a political culture that includes responsibility.  At present we still have many bad old habits. We look at the crises in Europe and delight in their suffering, seeing it as a failure.  What we don’t see in their plight is also that the protesters are demanding more democracy.” 

“We have to find a balance somewhere between being sucked down into evil which destroys us and choosing departure, escape, which robs us of the humanity needed to overcome.  It is a difficult balance.  The book has ‘washed my soul’ as the Brazilians say. 

We must try to learn the concept that one man is all men, the behaviour of one belongs to us all.” 

* http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/105077/argentina-the-past-won’t-stay-away-