2024-08-05 03:01:00
“Beyond the quality of democracy we have and its debts, imagine that whoever won in 1983 had to assume and only face the drama of the missing and the children born in captivity, or only face the consequences of Malvinas, or only face the foreign debt, or only face the deindustrialization of the country. (Raúl) Alfonsín had to face all of that at the same time. It was no joke…”, he points out. Page 12 Juan Pablo Csipkajournalist, researcher and author of An everyday battle: How we regained democracy in Argentina (Marea editorial), where narrates the stage of the democratic transition from the Easter uprising as a point of condensation of the recent past and multiple consequences for the future. “It had some tailwind because the Armed Forces were completely disjointed, with no possibility of returning to the coup but with a very strong capacity for resistance, and it had to solidify a democracy that had been in trouble since 1930,” he points out.
Csipka wanted to write about the 1980s and had already worked on the first Carapintada uprising, but he felt that Semana Santa in itself was not enough for a book. So he came up with the idea of approaching it from the perspective of the democratic transition, with Semana Santa as the axis. “You have the military internal affairs, the tensions that have accumulated since 1983, but above all since the sentencing of the commanders; the economic issue, because the Austral Plan is beginning to go under; the internal affairs with Peronism, which gave the Ministry of Labor to a unionist two weeks earlier, after denouncing a military-union pact. It seemed to me that there was an issue there,” he recalls. “And the pending issues were resolved by (Carlos) Menem in the style of Menem, with the pardons. And everything was put on hold until 2003,” when the Punto Final and Obediencia Debida laws were repealed during the government of Néstor Kirchner, and the trials of the repressors were resumed.
-How did you come up with this book? There is an impressive amount of data, with Holy Week as a pivot point to go back in time and to what comes after those events.
-Holy Week is a common thread. I wanted to talk about the democratic transition, but when did it start and when did it end? Nobody knows exactly. I see unresolved tensions before Malvinas and after Holy Week, that’s why I go from ’80 to ’90, ’91. In ’80, the dictatorship was faced with a financial crisis, which was brutal because the plank fell apart, and they began to fight among themselves for a political solution. (Leopoldo) Galtieri was the guy who was going to make the process implode, breaking the political dialogue that existed with the parties. In addition, the dirty work was finished, there was no one else to repress because they had exterminated all the resistance, but the task forces were debased, they dedicated themselves to extortionate kidnappings. The extortionate kidnappings of the ’80s are the offspring of that. The Tablita, the heart of the project of (José Alfredo) Martínez de Hoz, had already generated deindustrialization. That’s where the tensions are. And where is all that resolved? In the summer of ’91. The end of the carapintada threat with Menem repressing as Alfonsín had not done. (Mohamed Alí) Seineldín imprisoned, (Domingo) Cavallo makes the 1 to 1, which is the tablita taken to its maximum point of rigidity, and the pardons. We return to 1980: the impunity of the officers is crowned; the economic order of the Tablita is reestablished, perfected; there are no rebellious military; democracy questions nothing. It is a terrible end.
-In the book you dismantle several myths about those days. One is that Aldo Rico wrested the law of Due Obedience from Alfonsín at Campo de Mayo. What really happened?
-There is the final pre-point, which is the Instructions to the prosecutors, and it is something that is completely forgotten. In April 1986, he instructed the prosecutors to group everything together and to apply due obedience ad hoc. There was a mess, they had to back off. Tensions continued, Alfonsín went to Las Perdices, a town in Córdoba. A typical event for a president… Under the rain, he says that he is going to send a bill to Congress to limit the responsibility of the military troops. He does not say due obedience, but he says that there are soldiers who acted under coercion. Immediately after Easter, the event in Las Perdices was forgotten. Alfonsín was about to send a bill (at that time, the sessions began on May 1st). He could have sent it to extraordinary sessions, but they were discussing the fine print and Rico got ahead of them, who most likely knew that they were putting together this project, and he sells it as a triumph of his. The government is affected, it pays a political cost worse than if it were a mere corrective of the Punto Final. In fact, (Horacio) Jaunarena told me when I interviewed him in 2017: with the Monday newspaper, neither Instructions to the prosecutors nor Punto Final, we would have had to order the Obediencia Debida the day after the commanders were sentenced.
An everyday battle (which will be presented in September) recounts, with many details but very dynamic in its narrative construction, the moment of the democratic transition led by Alfonsín as president, with the events of Holy Week as a historical-discursive Aleph, where events spanning the last 50 years of national history converge and depart. It goes back and forth in time with those days of April 1987 as a pivot, in a detailed and precise chronicle of the past that allows us to feel the adrenaline that was experienced at the time and, despite the time that has passed, to place us at the crossroads that Argentina experienced in the face of the first military uprising after the return to democracy and the Trial of the Juntas. With different sources (books, academic works, documentary series, newspaper and magazine articles, official documents and speeches, but also testimonies obtained in own interviews), Csipka pieces together the puzzle page by page, and each topic addressed enables the next to emerge.with a solid fit.
-The title is a fragment of a speech by Alfonsín, but also a slogan. Nothing should be taken for granted. And he also said that with democracy one can eat, one can heal, one can educate. What happens when democracy cannot guarantee these things? Today the democratic question seems to be an open topic for debate…
-Democracy consolidated the political system, the rule of law. The coup threat no longer exists, but the economic matrix of the dictatorship, which is the large outstanding debt, has not been reversed.. When Alfonsín says in his campaign that democracy allows us to eat, heal and educate, he is laying out the basic coordinates of a minimum welfare state. He cannot do this because that welfare state has been destroyed by the dictatorship. Neoliberalism and its most frightening form, financial capitalism, come into play. The country is deindustrializing; it is more profitable to mess with the interest rate than to open a factory. The Argentine political system does not understand what happened during the dictatorship in economic terms. Menem does understand it, and boy does he understand it. It is the total deregulation of the economy. That is where democracy creaks, because if it cannot satisfy basic needs, the system is complicated. The worst thing that can happen to a system of representation is that the relationship between representatives and represented breaks down. And worse: if the represented begin to feel that they represent themselves, then they shoot in any direction. Milei, who also did not come out of a cabbage. Economic crisis, pandemic, failure of the right with Macri, progressive failure with Alberto and Cristina…
A democracy under guardianship
For Csipka, the crisis of the last dictatorship that led to the restoration of democracy, the Trial of the Juntas and the Easter uprising began before the defeat in Malvinas, and one of the reasons for this crisis was the discussion about the possibility of a political solution to the military regime. And he recovers the proposal that Ricardo Zinn, the “architect” of the Rodrigazo and a reference for the right at that time, made in his book The second foundation of the republic: a supervised democracy with candidates approved by a “Council of Guarantees of the Republic”. “If they had given Zinn any attention or if any of the ideas of the political solution of that time had germinated, today we might not be talking about this book”, speculates the author. “There was a moment, 1978-1979, when if they called elections and ran, they would probably win. (Reynaldo) Bignone said it. They had everything in their favour: they had overthrown Peronism, Perón was dead, they could compromise with the right…”, he recalls. “Zinn says that to institutionalise the dictatorship the constitution must be reformed, and they don’t dare because the Argentine right always saw the 1853 constitution as untouchable. If it were up to them, they would have to modify the current one and return to that one. But when there were coups d’état, they didn’t say anything!”, he concludes.