On remembering and silencing the past: the adult children of the disappeared in the Southern Cone of Latin America.

A comparative study of Argentina and Uruguay

Gabriela Fried

UCLA Department of Sociology

Paper submitted to the UCLA Comparative Analysis Workshop, May 8-9, 1999

February 24, 1999

 

If human beings had no memory, they would be happy F. Nietzsche.

-But would they realize?

He who controls the past controls who we are David Middleton

Abstract

This paper explores the remembering processes and practices of children of victims of repression in the Southern Cone post-authoritarian societies of the 90s. Despite the adverse cultural and social situation posed by the transition government’s official "policies of oblivion" in Argentina and Uruguay in the last decade, the adult children of the people disappeared by the dictatorships have formed groups that still remember the past and its legacy of unsolved problems.

Through an historical analysis of their emergence and character, plus interpretive analysis of interviews with children of the disappeared (hijos de desaparecidos) in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, I compared their memory-building efforts. I found very distinct "meaning making" processes, social relations and practices towards rememoration and commemoration in hijos groups in Argentina and Uruguay.

Remembering is an ongoing effort to articulate and reconcile the tensions between the inner world of emotion and the intersubjective world of social relations in which remembering is embedded (Prager 1998). Because they are intensely embodied, personal traumatic memories generate a powerful inner motivation to be remembered and expressed, that persists over time. People are bound to remember, but they do not do so in the same way. The distinctive character of collective memory in Argentina and Uruguay yielded different symbolic and social practices in each "community of memory."

My analysis of these exemplary cases of the resilience of traumatic collective memory brings to sharper focus that memory is not only is a cognitive product of the social context but that it can be better understood as intersubjectively constructed, socially embedded and emotionally embodied. Thus, my theoretical contribution points to the importance of designing an more comprehensive, intersubjective theoretical approach on memory that exists to this day.

La represión se alimenta de silencio

Introduction

The aftermath of twentieth century authoritarian regimes have revealed an unsuspected danger: political regime’s systematic attempts to control collective memory and forget. Post-authoritarian governments have ruled through official politics that attempted to ignore, erase, disguise or transform the traces of the past. Howeve, where authoritarian legacies have put a ban on the past, keeping the collective memory alive has become a form of contention for opponents and victims (Nerone 1989, Schudson 1989, Todorov 1995: 9-11).

For over a decade, societies in transition from dictatorship to democracy in the Southern Cone have been confronted with the challenge of dealing with the authoritarian legacy of the unprecedented systematic uses of terror and the human rights abuses -- particularly the legacy of the people dissapeared [1] -- of the 70s and 80s.[2] The transition governments in Argentina and Uruguay have ultimately implemented "policies of oblivion," intended to control memory and silence debate about the abuses committed by the military, that have led to the impunity (lack of punishment) [3] for past human rights abuses in both countries. The human rights movements --and very particularly the Mothers and Relatives of the disappeared political prisoners -- have mobilized for decades to contest official policies on ethical grounds, demanding "truth and justice" for such abuses and continued the keep memory alive.

Collective memory, a constitutive thread weaving selves and the social is an important theoretical and analytical tool, has been until recently under-analyzed in the social sciences. Predominant social theories of memory stress that memory is constructed from present needs (Halbwachs 1992, Mead 1932, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1985). This would imply that memory is at the mercy of powerful control by political regimes. However, recent research on historical social trauma suggests that collective or popular memories are highly resistant (Perelli 1994, Rapaport 1997, Schudson 1989, Schwartz 1997, 1991, 1982). My paper argues that the cases of traumatic memory pose a challenge to the constructionist Halbwachsian argument that memory is a present social construction. I argue that even if the past is necessarily filtered through the lens of the present, such lens is in turn colored by the past (Rapaport 1997). I propose that a comprehensive theory of collective memory that theorizes the mutual interpenetration of past and present is a needed analytic tool to illuminate all processes of remembering [4] and commemorating in their full complexity and dynamism.

My empirical cases focus on the relationship between collective memory and commemorative practices of groups of adult children of the disappeared (hijos de desaparecidos) in the Southern Cone societies of the 90s. In the context of oblivion and impunity in Argentina and Uruguay, the efforts of these groups of hijos to seek out the memory of what happened during the dictatorship are exemplary cases of the resilience of memory, to observe how the traumatic past haunts the present in both cases, to study their different efforts to reconnect the present to the past as well as to show the limitations to the full manipulation of the past from the present in each case.

1. Theoretical approach

Towards a comprehensive social theory of collective memory

Until recently, the debate over collective memory in the social sciences has distinguished between two dichotomic views of the on the basis of the different emphasis placed on the relationship between the past and the present (Schwartz 1991a). This debate developed mainly between a Durkheimian traditional conception of the past, which assumed that the past has a permanent and resilient influence in shaping the present (Durkheim [1915] 65), and the contrasting "presentist" Halbwachsian approach in which the center of gravity was the present (Aguilar 1995, Schwarz 1991). Halbwachs' ([1950] 92) enduring contribution was to conceive the past as a social construction constantly reshaped on the basis of the present. Each theory has "a half of the truth" (Schudson 1989, see also Schwartz 1997, 1991a).

For Halbwachs, only the present framework counts and therefore necessarily excludes all others, assuming that there is incongruity between past and present constraints. When people forget painful memories, he wrote, "by definition, a past constraint has ceased to be operative." But he did not specify how or why the past purportedly "ceases" to constrain present life, as he even recognized that traumatic memories have "an incomprehensible attraction on the person who has survived" and "recur in our present with the force of the moment when they happened" (Halbwachs 1950/92: 49-50). If the past is a continuously evolving product of social definition, his theory cannot clearly account for these types of memories.

By contrast, contemporary critics coincide that constructivist theories fail to fully capture the continuity of historical traditions and inherited sensibilities that feed social solidarity alongside with historical innovation. Remembered pasts do not always serve present interests. Communities have to remember, but how they remember is molded in part by the socio-historical, cultural context of the remembering practices that went on before them as well as by their contemporary social and relational milieu. New generations rewrite history, but they do not do so "on a blank page" (Coser in Halbwachs 1950/92: 34). Under certain constraining conditions, the past resists the efforts to manipulate it at will. By locating the significance of events exclusively from the standpoint of the observer, the presentist view falls short of the relativist trap that the past is entirely at the mercy of contemporary conditions and that nothing in history transcends the particularities of the present (Schwartz 1982: 376). Even if the meanings that motivate the interpretation of the past are grounded in contemporary concerns, Schwarz has demonstrated that the construction of the past does rely on some of the original meanings, that factual events "can only be selectively exploited"(Schwartz 1997: 396, Schwartz 1991, Middleton 1990, Schudson 1989). Similarly, empirical studies on the legacy of traumatic events -- such as Holocaust and genocide studies -- have provided historical evidence that resilient elements in the past limit its full construction or manipulation (Gordon 1997, Prager 1998, Rapaport 1997, Shils 1981, Todorov 1995), and have conceptualized how the remembered pasts shape and constraint the present (Schwartz 1997, 1991; Schudson 1989, Olick and Levy 1997). Recent work on the sociology of memory has converged in pointing towards a more complex theorization to transcend the past-vs-present dichotomy (Schwartz 1997, Schudson 1989, Olick and Levy 1997). Because memory is central to personal and social life, social studies of memory need to explore further the ways in which remembering is integral with (symbolic and material) social practices, which carry an important cultural legacy of both tradition and invention (Middleton and Edward 1990: 1, Olick 1997). Since inherited and invented memories coexist and limit each other, it is not useful to have two different theories to give account for each (Schwartz 1997:377, 1991 b: 234, 1982). Memory's contents, processes and experiences cannot be understood by reference to contemporary mental processes alone, but in the context of the mentalities and ideology of everyday symbolic and communicative cultural and social practices (Middleton 1990: 19, Olick and Levy 1997) which are inherited, re enacted, resignified and (re) invented. In this light, collective memory is understood as an ongoing socio-political-cultural process of negotiation over meanings through time, neither unchanging and absolute nor wholly contingent to contemporary need in the present (Nerone1989; Olick and Levy 1997: 923, drawing from Bergson [1896] 1991, Prager 1998).

From his studies of the memory of the Holocaust in German contemporary politics, Olick and Levy (1997) have powerfully demonstrated prescriptions and proscriptions by which collective memory obliges the present, through taboos and duties (mythical constraints) and through prohibitions and requirements (rational constraints)(Olick and Levy 1997: 933).

Schudson (1989) furthers three sets of constraints by which "the past becomes part of us," powerfully shaping how individuals or groups think and act, construct or reconstruct "a history from which to act" (Schudson 1989: 109-112): (1) the materials available for memory building (that I will call sources and resources), such as formal and informal institutions, documentation, art, objects and literature (memory artifacts) that become popular or classic, reputation, and language (also see Schwartz 1997); (2) several psycho-dynamic, such as personal trauma,[5] transmissions from the past and the weight of people's investment in the past,[6] and (3) intersubjective conflicts over of the past, by which memories become a culturally and politically contested terrain (Schudson 1989: 112).

An intersubjective, embodied approach

The constructivist conception cannot explain why traumatic past constraints do not cease to haunt the present. It is not enough to say that individual remembering is influenced by the socio-cultural world in which the person is embedded. A more comprehensive, multidimensional approach that focuses on these interconnections and can account for the resilient inscription of the past in the present, would be a significant contribution to the cumulative social knowledge of memory. This implied conceptualizing the relationship between internal and external processes, and past and present in an innovative way, thus opening a fascinating path of research. While earlier theorists have explained the external constraints of remembering practices (Schwartz 1997, 1991a, 1991b, 1982; Schudson 1989), I argue that Prager has outlined a complementary theory of the internal pressures to memorialize by exploring the intersection of the subjective and social processes (and external constraints) of memory (see Prager 1998: 90). Prager's intersubjective theory has the potential to allow for one unified theory of collective memory. By building on the vision that memory is socially constructed and transcending dichotomic understandings, an intersubjective conception offers an important alternative to both types of distortion of memory: one that sees the present exclusively in relation to a determinative past, the other which sees the past as a mirror or projection of present interests (Prager 1998: 126). By emphasizing the reciprocal interconnections between past and present, individual and social, mental and body processes, and specifying the inscription of the resilient past in the present, Prager conceives the remembering experience not only as a permeable and multilayered social and cultural process but also as a process embodied in the interpersonal world, the (conscious and unconscious) psycho-dynamic forces that give it meaning, and the cultural frames available for "meaning-making" constitutive of the particular encounter of past and present, the self and the social (Prager 1998: 115-116). People actively engage in practicing remembering in (implicit or explicit) dialogue with others present, past and future, so memory is seen as located at the intersection of the rememberer with her/his interpersonal relations, which occurs intersubjectively through the encounters of the remembering self with its own self and others, with the socio-cultural world (Prager 1998: 125). Succinctly, interpersonal relations as well as socio-cultural contexts are generative, constitutive and reconstitutive of memories (Prager 1998: 89) An intersubjective approach can account for concomitant reproductive and innovative processes, to answer how memory-building and memory transmission practices paradoxically endure in our imaginations and yield new practices.

Memory is socially embedded, because the rememberer cannot be thought separate from the specific socio-historical cultural context that is its external source, resource and frame and informs the moral distinctions and meanings that people use to interpret, select and make sense of the past. But meanings are dependent not only on the social context but also on the subjective categories of perception and interpretation available for "meaning-making" (Prager 1998: 115-116). Memory is not only a symbolic representation but is also a personally embodied process, "inscribed" in people's bodies through emotion. Emotionally inscribed experience, both inherited and present, provides the internal motivation to rememorate, express and transmit (or commemorate) the experienced past to others (Prager 1998: 107-108). This notion of embodied memories in social subjects, that integrates a theory of mediating selves and emotions to the theory of collective memory, is one of Prager's main contributions that supports the malleability of memory in the present but at the same time specifies the internal constraints to the full construction of the past. While memory's social embeddedness throws light on the weight of the present in shaping the past, the motivation to remember stems from the past's embodiment through innerfelt experience(Prager 1998: 91-92, 143). The self, our own subjective understanding, in this rendering, is itself a socio-historical product (Prager 1998: 141).

Implications

My analysis of two cases of struggle to keep memory alive will lend support to Prager's recent insights on the intersubjective and embodied qualities of memory. My empirical cases of the resilience of traumatic collective memories in Argentina and Uruguay will demonstrate that memory is not only socially embedded but intersubjectively constituted, if my cases show that memory is differently processed and embodied in each group, embedded in demonstrably different social and cultural contexts in Argentina and Uruguay. If collective memory is tempered by its inscription in particularly distinct cultures of fear and oblivion, then my analysis should show different ways in which collective memory is experienced/ embodied, processed and expressed collectively and in personal accounts (both in public and in private) within each group in Argentina and Uruguay.

Furthermore, I argue that the resilience of remembering, commemorating and sacralizing the traumatic past in the groups of children of the disappeared in Argentina and Uruguay can be accounted for by its embodied quality, which Perelli (1994) has called blood(y) memories (memorias de sangre). Blood memories are traumatic memorialized experiences difficult to represent or transform meaningfully into a narrative or explanation as a results of extreme personal and/or collective emotional experiences of fear, pain and loss that violently disrupt people's lives into a "before" and "after" the event, so vivid that they become the criteria of distinction between friend or foe, what to remember or forget (Perelli 1994: 40). Drawing from similar experiences of blood memories, the children of the disappeared have gathered in groups to share and inquire about the fate of their parents and to somehow challenge the present impunity and silence about the past dictatorship. They share an undisputed sense that keeping the memory alive serves to prevent the recurrence of what happened to their elders (Nunca Más dictadura), a certitude that the unresolved problem of truth will not simply vanish or fade into oblivion, and the indignation at official policies and distrust of politicians for their pragmatic reasons for supporting impunity and withholding the truth.

Next, I compare the transition processes in Argentina and Uruguay in the 80s, to show how the contending versions of social responsibility and impunity regarding the past were later source and frame for the emergence of hijos groups in the 90s.

2. Memory, Oblivion and Impunity in Argentina and Uruguay

The discourse on memory first emerged in the Southern Cone in the context of the human rights struggle for truth and justice against impunity during the transition to civilian rule in the 1980s. I will sketch the contrasting socio-historical and cultural contexts of the remembering processes of the adult children that I will describe in the next section.

Repression, Transition and Impunity in Argentina (1983-89) and Uruguay (1985-86)

The Southern Cone countries went through intensely polarized processes of social change in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by institutional reactionary processes that culminated with military intervention, justified under the extreme nationalist ideology of the National Security Doctrine (NSD) [7]. The Uruguayan military coup 1973 came as an exception to a traditional democratic secular and consensual political system, while in Argentina, the 1976 coup was one in a country marked by political instability and military uprisals since the 1930s.

Both military Juntas used terror as a systematic means of political repression, but each regime developed idiosyncratic ways to instill terror in the civilian population [8]. While Argentinean generals aimed at the total physical annihilation of the enemy, resulting in the massacre of an estimated 30,000 people, brutally disappeared and murdered [9]; the Uruguayan Junta, instead, exercised an Orwellian vigilant control of the population,[10] ideologically screening all citizens, massively arresting people and experimenting with psychological torture techniques aimed at the destruction of people's personalities in prison (Roniger 1997: 36-40). Even if the Argentinean regime was disproportionally blood-thirsty, the Uruguayan Junta was the most totalitarian in its use of terror and silence to demobilize the population (Weinstein 1988). In setting democratic rules, transition governments of the 1980s were confronted with the challenge of the legacy of authoritarianism. This implied balancing the normative principles of democratic institutions with the pragmatic political contingency of the fear of a military comeback (Roniger 1997: 90), by dealing with the tensions from two fronts, the military pressure for immunity, and the ethical demands from the human rights movements.

Truth, Crime and Punishment in Argentina

Argentina's transition followed the military defeat in the 1982 Malvinas-Falklands war. The Junta's last act had been to issue a self amnesty decree, an implicit recognition of crime (Roniger et al. 1997: 89). As the first in the region, the Argentinean transition had no immediate regional referents, and the initial human rights movement’s expectations of justice were high. The initial transition government of Alfonsín (1983-1986) immediately revoked the military's self amnesty and implemented two unprecedented [11] human rights measures: the creation of a respectable independent commission (CONADEP) to produce an official report of the military crimes, which has had a deep and enduring impact on public opinion [12]; and the execution of exemplary trials of the Junta members responsible for human rights violations, that held public opinion expectant during most of 1995 and led to guilty verdicts [13].

No truth, no justice in Uruguay

In sharp contrast, the Uruguayan transition started when the Junta was unexpectedly defeated at a referendum election in 1980.[14] The Uruguayan Junta still had a relatively strong position to negotiate a certain level of power and immunity for the military in the transition, that was finalized during the secret negotiations of the Naval Club Pact in August 1984. A social consensus was formed to support the negotiations, while the human right movement and the rest of civil society were apparently unaware of any secret implications (Roniger et al. 1997:128). Despite his democratic public rhetoric, Sanguinetti, President-elect in 1985, never attempted any substantial human rights policy, military exemplary arrests or trials nor official reports. Appealing once again to the rhetoric of national security and democratic stability, the president passed a military amnesty law (the "Expiry" Law)[15], nullifying the power of the state to legally pursue crimes during the dictatorship.

The Legacy of Authoritarianism in Argentina and Uruguay

Growing civilian - military polarizations and an escalation of military rebellions ultimately led to a reversal of Alfonsín's initial human rights policy through the parliamentary approval for the amnesty laws (the "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" Laws) that absolved the middle ranks from all legal responsibility and put an end to all pending trials by 1987. The spiral of regressive measures towards impunity -- in spite of massive mobilizations against it -- was completed by successor President Menem granted full pardon to all military members by 1989.

In Uruguay, after the passing of the Expiry Law and despite the human rights’ unprecedented campaign led by the mothers and relatives of the disappeared (supported by 25% of the electoral signatures -- more than 600,000 in 2.5 million voters), 57% of the population ratified the Expiry Law in the 1989 Referendum, reflecting a sharp division among the constituency [16]. Paradoxically, Uruguayan voters legitimately waived their right to know what happened and to hold the military accountable for their crimes [17].

Even if the outcome in both cases was impunity, there are still crucial differences. Initially, Argentina and Uruguay were in most respects inverse cases regarding human rights policies and discourse on memory and justice. While Alfonsín publicly implemented the prosecution and exemplary punishment of the military during a process that lasted the first three years of transition, Sanguinetti -- having learnt the lesson from Argentina? -- fulfilled the terms of a secret pact within the first two years of government, granting immunity for any crimes committed by the military. In Argentina, the military openly threatened democracy and forced presidential legislation to grant them immunity, while the Uruguayan generals only had to support the government's policies and issue discursive "warnings" between the lines to achieve similar effects. While in Argentina an official truth report was promptly and widely publicized and distributed, with ample impact on public opinion, and became a crucial informational resource, In Uruguay there was official silence [18]. While the human rights movement in Argentina pressed the government for a deepening of official human rights policies of truth and justice that challenged military interests, the Uruguayan human rights groups had to mobilize against governmental policies of impunity. Finally, in Argentina despite the presidential pardons to the military perpetrators, the human rights and popular movement continued to actively and publicly demand and mobilize for truth and justice. In Uruguay, a majority of people ultimately voted for military immunity via referendum, and human rights supporters were defeated and demoralized, and tended to demobilize after 1989 [19].

Even when impunity in both countries pseudo-legitimized a powerful commandment to close the recent past, pragmatism seemed to have ultimately triumphed. Human rights issues seemed partly closed in Argentina and definitively sealed in Uruguay after 1989. I would like to underscore the importance of human rights policies in Argentina in contrast with the lack of official truth nor trials in Uruguay. The official report and public trials in Argentina provided a unique historical opportunity for both public knowledge and official acknowledgement of wrongdoing. This had the symbolic importance of a founding moment for Argentine democracy. Argentines are now publicly informed of what happened, and keep a potent symbolic image in their collective memory of nine army members sitting before the jury (Jelin et al. 1996, 1995) [20]. These distinct exemplary moral lesson in Argentina, despite its limitations, contributed to break the silence by allowing a social catharsis that opened up the debate about visions of justice and democracy, unprecedented worldwide [21]. As a result, even if in both countries the dictatorship literally scared people away from public expression and practices, in Argentina people engage in public practices of remembering and active commemoration more openly, while in Uruguay people show great reluctance and distrust of any communal public endeavor. These were very different -- almost opposite -- socio cultural contexts and political conditions for addressing truth and justice issues, and for the staging of impunity. There was partial justice and truth in Argentina, and unlikelihood of justice and truth in Uruguay. It is possible that these different experiences may have crystallized in different historical lessons drawn from the past experiences regarding mobilization in each country. I suggest these were crucial to generate and constitute qualitatively different types of dispositions and expectations connected to their willingness and trust to engage in practices of rememoration and commemoration.

However, official policies did not ultimately achieve the expected closure, even in Uruguay. The unresolved issues of the transition in the 1990s periodically resurfaced before the public eye and continue to revolve around the intensely debated sacred principles and demands of Truth, Memory, Justice, and Nunca Más (Never Again). The next generation, the now adult children of the disappeared -- in the distinct ways we shall see below -- adopted the moral and legal distinctions transmitted from Madres y Familiares and the families they were socialized in. The official interest in the control of information and memory is in itself proof that memory is intrinsically social and political (Todorov 1995), and an empirical demonstration that memory powerfully shapes practices. Analysis of the transition contending official and human rights cultures in Argentina and Uruguay has thrown evidence that the remembering resources, processes and practices of these groups of hijos are, indeed, very distinct. They are constrained and shaped by different cultures of collective memory, inspired by first generation human rights activists, and provoked by the official version and the politics of oblivion.

3. Comparative analysis of interviews with hijos groups in Argentina and Uruguay This paper asks about the relationship between collective memory and social practices. By collective memory, I imply ongoing (and contending) processes of negotiation of interpretations of the past. My paper empirically focuses on how the traumatic collective memory of the dictatorship and transition in the different social contexts of impunity in Argentina and Uruguay affects, shapes and/or frames the remembering and commemorative practices in each community of hijos in Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

In this section, I analyze the interviews [22] with children of desaparecidos or hijos in Argentina and Uruguay, to explore the relationship between the collective memory processes and the practices of remembering and commemorating the past in each country. I first compare the historical emergence and character of Argentinean and Uruguayan groups of children of the disappeared. Then, I observe the intersubjective quality of memory in the two groups by paying attention to the quality of social practices.

Under practices I refer to interpersonal communications, relations, and actions, including production/perusage of collective memory resources, materials or symbols, group interactions and emotions, activities and interpretations of the past. Accordingly, I have discriminated intersubjective "themes": (1) availability of materials about the past, at the interpersonal, social and institutional level, to trace what types of sources and resources for memory-building people access in each country; (2) quality of social and interpersonal communications, by looking at the emotions and language expressed (vocabulary, tenses, expressions) in relation to the past, trying to distinguish any parallel between direct word usage and more availability of resources. Paraphrasing Schudson, I explored whether "people do things with words, but not in circumstances of their own choosing" (Olick and Levy 1997: 922). I explore when and how memories are embodied, trying to trace the interactions, moments and/ or processes that triggered personal memories. And finally, (3) group activities, with special attention to whether they memorialize or commemorate publicly or privately. In the concluding discussion, I attempt to illuminate the relationship between collective memory in Argentina and Uruguay and hijos practices through my empirical findings, and draw insights for an intersubjective conception of collective memory. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to the children of the disappeared in Argentina as HIJOS, and to the children of the disappeared in Uruguay as Hijos.

The emergence of networks of children of the disappeared in the mid 90s

In the impunity context described above, demobilization could be expected after 1989. However, two analogous social events in Argentina and Uruguay indicate that the memory of the dictatorship is still a haunting social: demonstrations commemorating the disappeared have surprisingly increased in numbers over the last three years [23], and not only existing human rights groups, like the legendary Madres y Familiares, continue to be active, but also new social groups have emerged in the 90s, particularly among the youth in the last few years, coinciding with the 20th anniversaries of the coups [24]. Among them, the adult children of the disappeared -- now in their twenties -- have renewed interest in raising the silenced moral and legal questions of truth and justice, identity and memory related the fate of the disappeared, forming groups and networks to question the realpolitik of oblivion and the legitimacy of impunity.

For both groups of hijos, the past had been an unfolding mystery since childhood. Some of them knew whatever truth was available about their parents' disappearances -- some even witnessed their abduction or were kidnapped themselves; others were not told what had happened to their missing parents. Most could not make sense of the meanings of disappearance and its political underpinnings until after the democratic "opening" (in their early or mid teens). Both hijos groups share an understanding that they still have an indelible right to know the essential pieces of the puzzle of their parent's personal stories, part of their own identities, that were stolen, and share the motivating principles to recover the silenced memories. Initially, in both cases hijos coincided in commemorative acts convoked through personal or human rights networks. Soon, spontaneous encounters born from the need to exteriorize memory led to meeting to get to know each other, share their stories and support each other.

A portrait of the distinctive character of hijos groups in Argentina and Uruguay

My impressions from the encounters with each group, its meeting environment and their relationship towards me as an "insider-outside" researcher were two very different images. In Uruguay, most people (12/ 15) received me in private and usually sought a quiet and reserved place within the SERPAJ building where they meet or at home where we could converse uninterrupted. It felt as if we were "plotting" something forbidden, breaking taboos, talking about silenced matters. Even though some people stated that they had never talked about some of the issues that came up in the interviews, they all tended to narrate their stories in a relatively detached way, "as if their parents had been historical figures" (Bar-On 1989: 328). In Argentina, in contrast, and despite the fact that they did not know me previously, they received me without reservations, open to talk either alone or in groups, in their meeting place or work place. Even though it was not the first time most of these people talked about their stories, these were told with emotion, loving, crying and cursing as if it "actually happened."

In Argentina, children of direct victims of the dictatorship first gathered during a commemoration in honor of the disappeared at the University of La Plata in April 1994. A network of groups formed in the capital and diverse cities of the country, and grew from their initial 350 to 600 members in their first year [25]. By 1995, they had named themselves after the agreed principles that form the acronym HIJOS (Children for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence) [26]. HIJOS - Argentina have since been very public and vocal about their founding principles [27]. They reaffirm their right to ask and talk publicly about their parents' and their own stories and their ideals. They reject the impunity and pardon decrees as immoral and unconstitutional, and work towards the moral condemnation of the perpetrators of their parents' deaths, contesting the military version that the crimes were justified for national security [28], openly calling them genocidal denying any possibility of reconciliation without truth and justice.

HIJOS - Argentina immediately started to appear both in progressive and mainstream media portrayed as an unusually committed, active, unique group, developing a relatively strong public presence in Argentinean society, promoting their principles by organizing a broad range of their own autonomous public activities from educational and commemorative to legal actions.

There have also been strong and unprecedented social reactions both opposing and supporting HIJOS in Argentina, from intimidating threats by undercover secret service agents to invitations by the mainstream media to participate in TV debates. After a commemorative rock concert on the 20th anniversary of the coup in Buenos Aires in 1996, 10,000 youth spontaneously formed a column and followed HIJOS to the Supreme Court to present a collective habeas corpus for the disappeared [29].

In July 1996, a visit of a small delegation of HIJOS - Argentina to Uruguay provided the opportunity for a handful of Uruguayan hijos to gather. By contrast, their small number slowly rose from the initial 6 or 8 to 17 or 20 throughout 1996 and 1997 [30]. Hijos originally met reluctantly, with no other aim than to talk about their story in lieu of the official silence. The only published newspaper article about the existence of Hijos in Uruguay emphasizes their normalcy, as the only distinction from the rest of their generation is that they have been denied the possibility of knowing what happened to their parents [31]. Here is an account of how Hijos perceive some of these differences with their neighbors:

These things don't happen from one day to another. In Argentina they are already 4 or 5 years old.... The timing is different, and in Uruguay the idiosyncrasies are perhaps a little different too... the different idiosyncrasies [between Argentina and Uruguay] change because of numbers, they are lots and we are very very few ...it is more like a small town here, [Argentina and Uruguay are] similar but we [Uruguayans] are more like a neighborhood, a small town feeling, right? In Argentina everything happens more quickly, more actively, more speedily, more violently. [Argentina] is bigger. We are more backwards. Not so backwards, but people's minds are more calm ... maybe more fearful (interview # 6, Montevideo)[32].

The crucial distinction between the Uruguayan and Argentinean groups -- as I hope the following interviews will demonstrate -- lies in the different ways by which each group of hijos presents itself, researches, and shares its remembering process and practices in Argentina and Uruguay. From the start, Uruguayans have tended to be cautiously private, while Argentineans have ventured more publicly and politically.

The quality of their interpersonal and social relations in relation to the past and the different images and interpretations they draw from the collective memory, have yielded qualitatively different practices in collective remembering and commemorating the traumatic memory of their parents contrast sharply from one group to the other.

In what follows, I observe the nature and quality of their remembering practices to examine whether and in what ways collective memory's constraints shape hijos practices.

The analysis of interviews of hijos in Argentina and Uruguay

I will here examine the distinctive intersubjective qualities of the collective memory of Argentina and Uruguay in relation to the past dictatorship.

(1) Collective memory sources and resources [33]

When questioned on how they learned what they know, interviewees in both countries have had different experiences. A large majority state that everything they know about the past is unspoken, and are not able to specify how -- from listening at home, on their own [34]. Others may even remember what happened and/ or had the opportunity to establish some sort of dialogue with their close family about the circumstances and meaning of the disappearance, and were able to relate it to the ideological activities of their parents.

However, there are indeed important differences both in the availability and the creativity of sources and resources (inherited or readily accessible) from one country to another. In Argentina, the interviews show a wide and growing variety of collective memory sources and resources available [35] that range from personal and familiar sources, to documents, to several organizations of family and relatives of the disappeared [36], as well as public and private institutional sources and resources such as the military, the governmental commissions and truth report, including testimonies and confessions of army members and government agents, professions and "artifacts" of memory; to a quite unique one, a team of forensic anthropologists. Argentineans seem to have not only more personal and familial collective memory sources to draw from, but also have accessed and produced a plurality of public, social and institutional -- even military -- resources. In Uruguay, instead, sources seem to rely more exclusively on the personal and private arena than in the Argentinean case [37].

The historical insights above tell us that in Uruguay, official silence has not been broken during the transition. This suggests that collective memory resources are more scarce, comparatively diminishing the opportunities to sustain collective memory. HIJOS in Argentina simply seem to have more collective memory to support their story, while Hijos seem to be gasping for words to fill in the gaps in their past. The capacity to publicly break the silence in Argentina seems to have led to more availability of words, testimonies, artifacts and documents to foster memory. This socio-political process seems to correlate with the evidence of the personal, familiar and institutional sources and resources as well. A plausible conclusion is that complete official silence in Uruguay may have had a diminishing effect on collective memory sources and resources; whereas the existence of an early and timely public report -- used for the trials -- in Argentina may have been instrumental to stimulate collective memory (re) production.

(2) The remembering processes and practices of hijos in Argentina and Uruguay

Intersubjective relations: emotions and language

Because I have posited that memory is intersubjectively constituted, I look at how the relational processes interplay with the communicational and practical realms. During my interviews I remarked that while Argentinean accounts seemed emotionally closer to their personal experiences and transmissions, expressing love and anger openly, Uruguayans, by contrast, seem relatively less vivid and more elliptical, emotionally detached and mutely indignant. HIJOS seemed to tell their stories with more psychological sophistication, more emotional elaboration than Hijos. The following distinct emotional expressions in the very beginnings of each group suggest that this is not merely a chronological or historical time difference.

Emotions

In Argentina, HIJOS initial reactions developed particularly intense emotional family-like relations and feelings from the very beginning:

We had barely met half an hour before and we were already all tied up together, hugging as if we had known each other for years and crying all together... that is the way the network [la red] was formed ... There was camaraderie, a need to share the stories that each of us had experienced and a lot of reencounters... It was wonderful (Interviewee # 6, Patricia, Buenos Aires; See Appendix for interviewee list)

The kids took to seeing each other all the time, every day. Calling each other, taking care of each other, minding for the lives of the others as if they were their own, loving each other frenetically. It is a very rare thing ... to receive whoever just arrived as if they were a sister or a brother...we fell in love with each other."[italics are mine] (# 8, Mariano, Bs. As.)

By contrast, highly distictive about Uruguayan Hijos is their profound initial distrust of the group and their reluctance to meet when compared to the Argentineans:

In the beginning people were a little distrustful, the "what is this for," you see?...that mistrust that we always talk about. We come to know each other and see who we are, sometimes we look at each other and sniff each other like dogs do, like saying "who are you? and what are you doing here?" (Interviewee # 6, Montevideo)

Contrasting with the Argentinean’s self-empowering sense of pride, Uruguayan Hijos’ emotional expressions about the group remain cautious and reserved -- apparent in most interviews -- even after two years:

Now we have ties...it is a little addictive, when we do not meet it feels as if there is something missing... There are things between us that are understood, that we do not need to explain (Interviewee # 1, Montevideo)

While Argentineans express themselves in a language of intense emotions, talking directly about breaking down and crying (including getting emotional and actually crying in some of the interviews), Uruguayans report mildly recounting their "sorrows" in the group (contarnos las penas), without openly expressing feelings in the group (or the interviews).

Language

Such distinctions are also apparent in the interviewees' different language about the past: while HIJOS use direct, explicit words to name situations, Hijos either use ellipsis and understatements, leaving sentences in mid air, or appeal to very rational descriptions. While HIJOS have recognized the tragic character of their recent history, Hijos tend to normalize, or even banalize, the extent of the damage suffered. Here is a Uruguayan example of such normalization of the experience of disappearance, a daughter who witnessed her father's abduction, but is stunned by a friend's direct comment on the situation:

She told me: ' Look, S... I think it would be really good for you to go to this group [Hijos] because I can see that one of your problems is that you deny...you deny the story of your life, what your reality is really like...and it might help you to realize that you are not the only one that went through that ... [no allusion to disappeared father] and that what happened to you was a tragedy...' Nobody had ever told me that my life was a tragedy! And I felt she was exaggerating! (# 3, Mvdeo)

In contrast, HIJOS in Argentina use explicit vocabulary of the past traumatic events:

When they killed my dad I suffered a psychological trauma and stopped talking. I didn't talk for a year and a half. What happened is that I fell in prison with my mom and they tortured her in front of me. I lost not only speech, I also lost the memories. The memories I have of my first four years of life I have recovered only recently...(# 1, Maria Laura, Buenos Aires)

Argentineans in general have coined a rich new vocabulary of nouns and verbs of terror, such as desaparecer (disappear), encapuchar (hood), escrache (to scratch, or denounce publicly) and others, to describe the new reality, pervasive in all interviewees. In Uruguay, people talk elliptically. Uruguayans have tended to fall short of incorporating new words for things related to repression in their daily expressions. Rather than dictatorship they tend to say "the process" (el proceso, shorthand for military process), they tend to say "they were taken away" (se los llevaron) more than "disappeared" when talking about their parents. Verbs like disappear, kill, murder, and words like killer, subversive, traitor, trauma, tragedy, or genocide (commonly used by HIJOS) are curiously almost absent from Hijos' interviews. Here is an example of direct language in HIJOS and of "lack" of words in Hijos:

Democracy betrayed me because the killers are free and they do whatever they like. I am very scared that this might happen all over again and that this time they may target us for being who we are, children of subversives[38] as they say and well, that they may do something to us... (# 9, Guadalupe, Buenos Aires)

It was good to meet, it was about finding a lot of common points, otherwise all this --the past-- could have been a fantasy! My context was really conducive to denial, so as I talked with others... it was transformed into something real... I just do not find the words to tell [to outsiders to the group] (# 4, Montevideo)

This language usage contributes to create a distinctive picture of the two groups. Hijos tend to keep the disappearance of their parents private, restricted to a personal circle or just for the group of hijos, more than HIJOS.

Communications: Silence and Publicity

Comparatively, the interviews repeatedly lend a sense that Argentinean HIJOS have been in an ongoing process of breaking the silence for years, the product of a different process of searching and coming to terms with a violent past. While Uruguayan descriptions of the past suggest that Hijos are just starting to break with a sense of denial of the drammatic consequences of the past in the present. The difficulty may be due to lack of public acknowledgment of the past and its unsolved issues. Accounts suggest that people have not felt a clear break away from the past use of silence and denial as a "survival strategy." Hijos are still conducting an inner struggle to defeat fear in their lives and not to let denial defeat them.

Another aspect of the different weight of silence in Argentina and Uruguay is their very different practices towards publicity. Fear and threats do not seem to stop HIJOS from being outspoken and making public appearances in demonstrations, commemorative acts and media events. For example, the daughter of a desaparecido acknowledged relief to have "come out of the cold," by giving a public testimony on national TV viewed by several million Argentineans (# 7, Raquel, Bs. As.). Another example, after a series of threats from undercover agents in Buenos Aires, HIJOS published a defiant letter in the national press entitled "Who protects us from those who protect us?":

We do not accept to be 'protected' by the same forces that have clearly demonstrated their institutional vocation for violent repression... These actions make clearly visible the continuity of the methodology of terror initiated during the dictatorship and later legitimized by this government through the pardon to the military murderers... [39]

In contrast, Hijos have extremely limited access to mainstream media and have seldom appeared even in the alternative media, to which they have responded reluctantly. For example, a Uruguayan hija voices their fears after a reporter photographed and interviewed the group for the first time:

I got scared, I thought what if they [the military] come for me now? What if they put a bomb in my house? I got all those fears you know from giving my name, my face...my imagination flew and I told myself: goodbye! I am done for ! But then I cannot live my entire life scared because I am not doing anything wrong, it is supposedly a democracy and well, I can talk, can't I? (# 3, Montevideo)

(similar reluctance to appearing in public, specially of being photographed or filmed, is expressed in # 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15)

Paradoxically, in spite of open threats, HIJOS still acknowledge a certain relief to be expressive, wanting to break the silence and abandon anonymity, while Hijos are cautious to break the silence nor abandon anonymity. Ancient threats seem to still be operative here.

(Inter) Subjective processes: the embodiment of past memories

Accounts from both countries show there is an emotional timing to "be ready" to assume the symbolically charged identity of being the son/ daughter of...(hijo/a de...) and to experience the stories of the past as embodied memories. Questions during childhood tended to ask randomly, as if young children were somehow aware of the silence, pain and fear involved, and they became specially vivid during their formative period (early teens and twenties), as they felt more prepared to know. Such processes coincided with the unfolding of the political transition, and became specially vivid as they hit the age of their parents’ disappearance. However, there are important differences in timing and embodiment of these processes in each country.

In Argentina, the vivid circumstances have made HIJOS face crude realities such as accepting the death of a loved one, including recovering and burying their remains [40] to put a conclusion to the story. Most HIJOS accounts emphasize the importance that such need to bury the dead had for their decision to search for the "truth". In this particularly Catholic country, burial not only literally puts a person in her place, but also symbolically places the missing person within their role and history in the community:

To find him and to bury him was like putting things in their place. Disappearance is bad for Argentina. It is a country of Catholics, and Catholics bury their dead.... Burying the dead is a human necessity. When you bury them in a certain place, that place becomes yours. You determine the limits of your territory when you bury your dead. These are such difficult feelings to explain, the sense of belonging... and you feel the responsibility towards what really belongs to you (# 1, Maria Laura, Bs. As.)

In Uruguay, instead, after an initial period of rejection or reluctance to assume the weight of being a hijo de desaparecidos in public, Hijos have just started to feel their traumatic situation. I have observed this embodiment of traumatic memory in progress in an important number of Uruguayan interviewees (# 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9). This is noticeable both through a more self-reflexive use of the language in the present tense, in contrast with past tense in Argentinean accounts:

[Going to Hijos] is making me think of things that I never...maybe I thought them before but I never allowed myself... I am not sure how to give you an example; it is as if I am now thinking them more inside of me ... I have even dared remember my father. I used to remember him superficially from the outside, but I never really remembered him... I don't know how to put this, with sentiment, I don't know... This way I learned to see him in a different way, too (# 3, Mvdeo)

Here is an particularly sharp example of this interpenetration of self and social relations in the process of placing oneself in relation to the past and one's own history which I am trying to illustrate. This Hijo felt connected to a new sense of himself, his position in the family and the community when he engaged in the process of making sense of his father's disappearance. He tells how, full of emotion, he found himself in the massive 20th commemoration of the disappeared, la Marcha del Silencio (Mvdeo, 1997):

It overwhelms me... there are some moments where it is so strong that I cannot deny it: so then I have to ask, who am I? That is the moment when you can start really seeing your father for yourself and accepting him. Only then you can go to a demonstration or wherever, not carrying the weight of your father anymore -- that is what you used to do when you were a kid and the whole thing went over you -- but you are now going because you are the son of such and such and that is it. You are now you... This [Marcha del Silencio] is the first time that I go knowing who I am. It was very special. I got home and I was punching the walls and I cut my finger. With my blood I wrote: 'dad, I love you '… I really don't know how this happens. You end up accepting your father as your father and...you start your own search. That will bring you to confront with others... because now you are grown up and you are asking questions, you want to know some things...You are now another person [italics are mine] (# 4, Mvdeo)

Such a passage illustrates an incipient awareness in many interviewees of the social implications of their parents' disappearance, through the realization that beyond their personal suffering, what happened was also a collective experience due to social causes, i.e. social commitments undertaken by their parents. In some cases, this embodiment unevenly fosters a sense of social responsibility that opens up the polemical question of what practices they should get involved in. These different relationship with their own personal history also reflect in the qualitatively different ways each group develops their activities oriented to remembering and commemorating.

(3) Remembering and commemorative activities

Quality of commitment: pride and weight of social responsibility

The Argentineans' embodiment of the past and the realization of the social dimensions of their experiences has been underway for a time and seems to be a powerful motivation to engage in public or even political action:

It seems we all reached an age when we said either I talk now or I remain silent forever...I believe this has a lot to do with the country. We inherited a real heavy weight.... My personal responsibility towards my parents has now become social because it has to do with the collective memory of the country... (# 15, Bs. As.)

HIJOS have developed a wide variety of activities towards the community directed to create social awareness of the moral issues at stake, and in fact use their socially charged position as a power in the reticent ears of society:

The best of HIJOS is, it is the first time we can say with pride, yes, we are hijos de desaparecidos, so what? (...) We feel, roughly speaking, as a "pain in the neck"...we think this "authorized" word we have to talk is important.... the fact that they [society, the army] cannot throw anything back at us, there is no excuse to tell us. We are not asking society to take charge of our pain, but to acknowledge that state terrorism existed (#15, Josefina, Bs. As.)

We said: let's come out and show ourselves so that people know that we remember our old people [parents] and that we want the others to remember. We will be like a little flea in their ears that says: 'Remember, this is what happened'... (# 11, Bs. As.)

As observed earlier, Hijos, again, differ qualitatively in this regard. While HIJOS in Argentina have generally shared feelings of pride from their inception, which translate into a sense of social responsibility, most Hijos in Uruguay initially feel uneasy with the weight of the public responsibility of being known as the daughter or son of a desaparecido. In sharp contrast with the Argentineans, they expressed reservations, distrust and reluctance to participate in anything reminding traditional political activism:

My initial reaction was rejection, I didn't want to know anything because I imagined that it was going to be the same all over, I was scared that they would force me to do something that I did not want to do (# 3, Mvdeo)

Our analysis has reached a full circle. The evidence has shown how the different contexts of collective memory in Argentina and Uruguay have yielded qualitatively different commemoration processes and practices in each group of hijos. We have looked at each group's interpersonal relations (emotions, language), communications (silenced or public) and actions (private or public, engaged or detached). This evidence has repeatedly suggested that while in Argentina HIJOS have tended to be active and publicly committed to the principles they named themselves after, Uruguayan Hijos are involved in a rather inward-looking, trust-building memory processes both personally and in their group, and so far have preferred to keep some distance from public involvement.

4. Discussion

I have looked at two cases of persistence of collective remembering of traumatic events and inquired about the relationship between collective memory and social practices, in cases of traumatic resilient memories. After more than a decade of the transition signaled by the politics of oblivion and the lack of accountability in Argentina and Uruguay, I have explored the remembering processes and practices of two groups of children of the disappeared, who have in the last few years renewed interest in the yet unresolved questions of truth and justice regarding the traumatic fate of their parents, disappeared in the hands of the military Juntas in Argentina and Uruguay in the late 70s.

This paper asked whether there is a relationship between the different socio historical contexts, the distinctive character of collective memory, and the different outcomes in contemporary practices of hijos in Argentina and Uruguay.

Shaped by the present needs of a formative moment, and by a powerful inner motivation, to "bridge the gaps" of their blood memories with meaning, haunting issues of memory can no longer be ignored in either society, because now the past for these young people has become "a part of their present" (Schudson 1989: 109-110, Prager 1998). As such, the past powerfully presents them with the choice to either embody or evade its memories.

But collective memory-building processes and practices in Argentina and Uruguay have also yielded vivid differences. I have observed memory's personal embodiment through timing and emotional processes, expressed through the language of timing and emotion; and memory's social embeddedness, by contrasting private and public practices of collective remembering/ commemorating and by looking at group, social and institutional resources available. The evidence suggests a different relationship between memory’s embeddedness and embodiment in Argentinean and Uruguayan hijos. By applying a comprehensive, intersubjective theory of collective memory, I have been able to account for these complex relationship in traumatic memories. If memory were only socially constructed from contemporary conditions, completely malleable, as the influential constructivist theorizations of collective memory in the past decades support, then these groups would be an anomaly. Within an adverse contemporary cultural and social situation, their presence is "going against the grain": as blood relatives of the disappeared, they are living proof of the resilience of the past because they are the embodiment of the past.

These empirical cases, far from being the exception that confirms constructionist theories, join other analogous historical cases of enduring traumatic memory struggles, in opposition to contemporary authoritarian political cultures that command the silence of their constituents [41]. This supports Prager's intersubjective theory of the articulation of an internal motivation to remember with the external social realm. Following Prager, I have argued that the motivation to remember is embodied, powerfully instilled from the inner world of emotion and meaning. I have indeed observed this need -- even if varied in form -- in both cases. The existence of these communities of memory of younger people at their formative stages in both countries suggests that the basic motivation to remember is not fundamentally constructed by the external social environment in which remembering occurs, although it is indeed affected and shaped by it. The emergence of remembering processes in Argentina and Uruguay shows that, at least in these cases of blood memory (Perelli 1994), memory cannot be erased or manipulated at will, because its embodiedness is a powerful inner motivation to remember (Prager 1998). These similarities, then, suggest that memory is, in effect, an intersubjective and embodied dynamic process.

People remember, although they do not remember in the same way. Because efforts to make the past a part of the present are embedded in different socio political cultures, building upon the existing inherited collective memory, Argentinean and Uruguayan hijos engage in qualitatively different remembering practices. A comparison of "intersubjective themes" of social and group relations, communications, sources and resources available for collective memory, and public/private in Argentina and Uruguay has yielded striking differences in the remembering processes and practices in each group. The adult children’s own version of the collective memory, in connection to their own stories, is crystallizing in very different paths of action for HIJOS in Argentina and Hijos in Uruguay. The sharp contrasts between these two groups suggest that the distinctive ways hijos in each social environment are interpreting the past (dictatorship) is indeed affected by the legacy of collective memory embedded in each society. The different ways in which people remember and forget can be accounted for by memory's essential intersubjective and socially embedded constitution. In turn, memories are embodied differently in relation to the different social relations and practices embedded in different societies.

5. Conclusions

Although the evidence confirms the classic argument that memory is essentially collective, the evidence of resilient traumatic past in the present sets limitations of a fully constructionist/presentist approach, which needs to be qualified.

This paper has been a modest demonstration of how a more comprehensive explanatory framework, combining both constructionist, critical and intersubjective insights [42], can fruitfully apply to all cases of memory in their complex interpenetration of the personal and social, past and present. In my cases of political and historical dislocation affecting two community’s collective memories in Argentina and Uruguay, this approach has shown more explanatory power to account for the dynamic interpenetration of personal and popular memories within their contemporary and archaic elements. Further explorations need to be done in other cases.

In sum, a comprehensive intersubjective theoretical perspective applied to my specific cases has provided the following insights: (1) When memory is embodied, it effects a powerful inner motivation to remember. Cases of autobiographical traumatic memories, such as Madres or hijos in Argentina and Uruguay, are more likely to be captured by collective memory precisely because they are embodied. This internal constraint helps understand their resilience. (2) Memory is socially embedded, simultaneously socially constructed (in a narrow sense) and intersubjectively constituted. Demonstrably different socio-cultural and group contexts of emergence yielded qualitatively different collective memory processes and practices, as a result of memory's social/intersubjective generative embeddedness.

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Appendix Interviewee list [43]

Hijos-Uruguay

__________________________________________________________________________

Interviewee Birthyear&Age in Sept 1997 Parents disappearance data Interview Place

___________________________________________________________________________

1. E. V. 1974 23 Both parents, 1979 in Buenos Aires Montevideo

2. N. S. 1975 22 Paternal Uncle, 1977 in Brazil/Paraguay Montevideo

3. S. A. 1965 32 Father, 1977 in Montevideo Montevideo

4. L. G. 1975 22 Father, 1974/ 1975 in Montevideo Montevideo

5. L. G. 1973 24 Father, 1973 in Chile Montevideo

6. *A. G. 1971 26 Both, murdered in 1974 in Argentina Montevideo

7. A. C. 1975 22 Father, 1978 in Buenos Aires Montevideo

8. N. B.M. 1977 20 Father, 1977 in Buenos Aires Montevideo

9. P. B. M. 1975 22 Same Montevideo

10. J. R.W. 1977 20 Non-relative (boyfriend of # 8) Montevideo

11. A. D. 1973 24 Grandfather, in Montevideo Montevideo

12. A. 1974 23 Non-relative (girlfriend of # 11) Montevideo

13. L. M. 1962? 35? Both Parents, 1973 in Uruguay Montevideo

14. M. B. 1977? 20? Father, aprox. 1977 Buenos Aires

15. L. D. S. 1967 30 Aunt, 1977 in Argentina, nephew (reappeared) Mvdeo

*A. disappeared in Argentina, lived with a military family, restituted to his family in 1985.

___________________________________________________________________________

HIJOS – Argentina

___________________________________________________________________________

Interviewee Birthyear&Age in 1995 Parents disappearance data Interview Place

___________________________________________________________________________

1.Maria Laura & Silvina 1971/ 1975 24/ 20 Father, 1975 in Olevarria, Argentina Paris

2.Esteban 1969 26 Mother, 1977 in Buenos Aires Bs. Aires

3.Dario 1970 27 Both parents, 1977 in Buenos Aires Bs. As.

4.Fernando 1955 40 Father, 1976 in Buenos Aires Bs. As.

5. Federico 1965 30 Father, 1977 Mendoza, Argentina Bs. As.

6. Patricia 1968 27 Father, 1976 in Cordoba, Argentina Bs. As.

7. Raquel I 1972? +23 Both parents, 1976 in Argentina Bs. As.

8.Mariano I 1973 22 Same Bs. As.

9. Guadalupe 1980 17 Father, 1976 in La Plata, Argentina Bs. As.

10. Gabriela 1970 25 Father, 1977 in Buenos Aires Bs. As.

11. Maria & V. 1975 20/ 20 Father/ Mother in 1977 in Bs. Aires Bs. As.

12. P. 1976 19 Father, 1977 in Buenos Aires Bs. As.

13. Marcos 1977 21 Father, 1976 in Buenos Aires Bs. As.

14. Marcos & R. 1975 20 Same Bs. As.

15. Josefina 1970? +25 Both, father in 1976, mother in 1977 Cordoba

16. Victoria (& Lilia) 1975 20 Mother, murdered in 1976 in Bs. As Bs. As.

17. Roberto 1976? +24 Non-relative, co-worker of # 16 Bs. As.

18. Andrea 1965 30 Mother, 1975 in Buenos Aires Bs. As.

19. Raquel II

20. Mariano II

________________________________________________________________________

Endnotes

 

1. Dissapearance was the euphemism for illegal political abductions and murders of political opponents by the military, whose fate the military claimed not to know. It was an innovative way for these Southern Cone military regimes to legally "get away" with their crimes (because there was no proof of the crime, no information oon the person's whereabouts and no corpse), and also to rule by terror. Disappeared, detainee-disappeared, or desaparecidos were the political opponents illegally made prisoners by the army.

2. These abuses have been thoroughly documented in Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports. See also Nunca Más Report (1984) in Argentina and SERPAJ Report (1989) in Uruguay; Weinstein 1988, Weschler 1991 and Corradi and Garreton 1994.

3. Impunity is defined as "lack of punishment" for human rights abuses (Amnesty International 1994).

4. I will use remember and commemorate for the purposes of this paper as almost interchangably. However, I would like to note that remembering is commonly associated with the realm of thought, i.e. bearing in mind; while commemoration involves honoring the memory of, either by thought or action. I tend to use the latter to convey the realm of practices, including symbolic, emotional and material ways to remember. Remember in its Latin etimology in Spanish, recordar (re-cordare), literally means "to revisit the heart"(Galeano, 1994).

5. Traumas are defined as past experiences that people (or organizations or nations) cannot ignore "even when they would like to." Put in a psychoanalytic terms. "The past becomes part of us, and shapes us, it influences our consciousness" (Schudson 1989: 109-110).

6. In economic terms this has been described as "sunk costs": "There are some facets of the past we cannot ignore or forget without feeling the loss of some part of ourselves" (Schudson 1989: 111).

7. The National Security Doctrine (NSD) sustained that the country was in an internal state of war - referred to as "dirty war" by the media- set against a purported pervasive Marxist Conflagration Against the Nation, that was threatening the moral values (and private property!) of the Western Christian Civilization. In such a situation, the armed forces purportedly had no choice but to assume their "moral duty"as Guardians of the nation by any legitimate or illegitimate means to sop the enemy (Roninger 1997: 95).

8. Demographic conditions should be noted here. Uruguay is a small country with an easily controllable and visible population of 3 million, 2/3 highly concentrated in Montevideo and a few other urban centers (Weinstein 1988). Argentina, instead, because it is a much larger and spread population of above 36 million distributed in several large urban areas is more prone to "covert violence and overt denial" of state violence (Roniger et al. 1997: 60; Rial, in Corradi 1992).

9. Argentina: Nunca Más, 1984. Estimates vary between 8,000 and 30,000 depending on sources.

10. Even when 300 -- a relatively much smaller number -- people were disappeared or murdered ,Uruguay had the highest ratio of political prisoners in the world. One in 500 citizens were imprisoned, 1/ 50 were arrested at least once (Americas Rights Watch Report 1989; Uruguay Nunca Más, 1989. Disappearances vary between 140 and 300 depending on the sources.

11. At the time, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were the only such precedents.

12. The CONADEP Comission, led by renowned writer Ernesto Sabato, published a summary report in Argentina: Nunca Más (Never Again) in 1984, otherwise known as Informe Sábato. It includes details of the dictatorship's horrifying repressive tactics and methods, testimonies of survivors, lists at least 8,961 verified desaparecidos, 365 clandestine detention centers, and names of 1,350 identified perpetrators. The report became an all-time best-seller when it was published in 1984, selling over 250,000 copies in 20 editions (the last one appeared in 1995). (Argentina: Nunca Más: 1995, 20th edition).

13. The heads of the first Junta received prison from 4 years to life sentences, although four of the nine members of the other Juntas were acquitted and released, to the disappointment of the popular movement. The trials were televised, and there was even a weekly publication exclusively devoted to the trials, El Diario del Juicio, (May 1985-January 1996), that sold 250,000 copies weekly at the time (Roniger et al: 1997).

14. The 1980 referendum in Uruguay is one of the few paradoxical cases worldwide in which a dictatorship not only lost its own election, but it also accepted its results at the same time as it delegitimized itself.

15. The Expiry Law or "Ley de Caducidad de la Pretension Punitiva del Estado" is an unconstitutional law popularly known as the "Impunity Law." The Argentine Amnesty Law, called "Due Obedience" law, was based on more pragmatic considerations of the difficulty of determining institutional and personal responsibility for middle ranks purportedly obeying hierarchic orders.

16. It must be noted that voting is not only a civil right but also a duty enforced by law in Uruguay.

17. Such defeat of the human rights movement remains a haunting issue for Uruguayan progressives. The implications of this defeat may be more apparent in the analysis of the lessons that the hijos de despaparecidos draw from the past in Uruguay below.

18. SERPAJ- Uruguay, the well respected human rights umbrella non-governmental organization, did produce a "truth" report in 1989, almost four years after the transition was on its way and after the referendum campaign, with limited resources and diffusion of only 3,000 copies (in 3editions). ("Uruguay Nunca Más," September 1989). SERPAJ (Servicio de Paz y Justicia, Peace and Justice Service) has hosted the Madres, mothers of the disappeared and now Hijos also meet in their basement.

19. Incidentally, 1998 marked an important dent on the impunity regimes with the international prosecution of Chilean Gral. Pinochet as responsible for state violence, and of other Argentinean generals for kidnapping of children of the disappeared in process.

20. Furthermore, and in deep contrast with the Uruguayan case, the Law of Due Obedience has been recently revoked in Argentina.

21. Since the 80s, Argentina has become one of few cases worldwide of a civilian government serving trials and guilty verdicts to a former military Junta for human rights violations, including Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala (McAdams 1996, A. James 1997).

22. The comparative analysis is based on a total of 35 interviews with children of the disappeared (See interviewee list, Appendix III ) in Montevideo and Buenos Aires (1996-97). I conducted 15 interviews with founding members of Hijos - Uruguay in Montevideo, from an estimated total membership of 20. In Buenos Aires, I conducted exploratory interviews with some members of the group of the children of the disappeared, HIJOS – Argentina. However, I did not use my own interviews for the analysis, but the more extensive and systematic material, comparable to my own, of 20 interviews with Argentinean HIJOS, published verbatim in the testimonial book "Hijos de desaparecidos: Ni el Flaco Perdón de Dios" in 1997, by Argentinean writer Juan Gelman and Mexican psychoanalyst Mara LaMadrid.

23. In Argentina, Plaza de Mayo demonstrations act as a sort of national thermometer. During the military uprisals in 1987, an estimated 5,000 people gathered to repudiate a military comeback. By 1996 even the conservative press announced the 20th anniversary of the coup gathered the largest concentration of people repudiating the dictatorship of the decade (an estimated 5,000 - 10,000 people, depending on the sources), and more than 7,000 participated in a "March of Resistence"or Marcha de las Antorchas organized by the Madres in 1997 (Clarin, Buenos Aires). In Uruguay, in 1997 the human rights groups also organized a "March of Silence" (Marcha del silencio) to repudiate the 24th anniversary of the coup in the memory of the disappeared, reported

to be the largest demonstration in recent years (a few thousand people) (Brecha, May 23, 1997).

24. In Argentina, there are at least nine Human Rights NGOs: Madres de Plaza de Mayo split into Linea Fundadora and the Hebe de Bonafini line, Familiares de desaparecidos, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos, Movimiento Ecumenico de Derechos Humanos (MEDH), SERPAJ-Argentina, Centro de Estudios Lgales y Sociales (CELS), and Servicio Ecumenico (Skaar 1993). In Uruguay there are five NGOs all under the umbrella of Coordinación de Derechos Humanos (Madres y Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos, SERPAJ-Uruguay, Servicio Ecuménico, SERSOC, and IELSUR).

25. Soon after, both real and virtual networks developed in Chile, Venezuela, France, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Mexico and the U.S.

26. H.I.J.O.S. in Argentina (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio). In Uruguay they name themselves after los Hijos ("the children") to distinguish from the Argentinean acronym.

27. H.I.J.O.S. Newsletter number 1, Buenos Aires Capital Federal 1995.

28. The military version or "theory of the two devils," as it has been called, is regarded as a cynical effort to place equal responsibility on the victims side for "threatening the security of the nation" to justify their crimes (the genocide of an estimated 8,000-16,000 Argentineans, and more than 150 Uruguayans in coordination with the Uruguayan army).

29. Marcha de las Antorchas, Buenos Aires, March 24, 1996 (see La Maga and Clarín, March 25, 1996 ).

30. Although it is hard to have accurate numbers of children of disappeared -since there has been no official report on the subject- Madres y Familiares have gathered a list of aproximately 50 children and Hijos estimate there may be as many as 80 in the country. Sources, Madres archives, Montevideo, Sept. 1997.

31. Brecha August 1, 1997. A second article appeared as I wrote this paper, Brecha, March 27, 1998.

32. All interviews cited, unless otherwise noted, are my literal translation from the Spanish original.

33. By source I mean original information (i.e. familiar eyewitness, neighbor, perpetrator, the army, etc.); by resource I mean tool, supply, means of production of information (social and institutional means to access information).

34. See Appendix III for a reference list of interviews. See interview # 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, in Montevideo; and interviews # 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, in Buenos Aires.

35. Such sources, or information originators are: (a)personal or familiar; i.e. at home or outside, dialogue with close relatives or remaining parent, friends, neighbors/ witnesses, former companions and survivors of that time, remaining personal documents from the past, such as personal letters, diaries, photos; (b) several organizations of family and relatives of the disappeared, as well as (c) military and governmental sources, including testimonies and confessions. Resources are public or private social institutional means to document and transmit the past, and include (a) social, legal and labor groups, political groups, human rights organization; (b) media; (c) professions and arts of memory; (i.e. psychoanalysts, journalists, historians, etc); "artifacts," including influential artistic productions such as documentaries, internationally renowned films (e.g, The official story) and novels; (d)the official resources, such as the CONADEP report and best seller Argentina: Nunca Más, and documentation of civil suits and public trials; yet another quite unique one, (e) teams of forensic anthropologists, made worldwide famous by their discovery and reconstruction of the Che Guevara remains in Bolivia, 1997.

36. See list of Human Rights NGOs in footnote 24..

37. Hijos in Uruguay researched information largely by their own means, listening around adults' conversations, at home, finding letters, photos. It is less frequent for them to find information from political groups, although some have benefited from trips to Argentina, Chile or Paraguay in search of clues, since many people actually disappeared abroad.

38. Subversive was the name the military used to demonize their "internal enemy," accusing political opponents of a communist conspiracy against the nation, to justify what they called the "dirty war." Being suspect of subversion was enough to disappear, be imprisoned or exiled (Roninger et. al: 1997: 133).

39. H.I.J.O.S. bulletin number 1, 1995.

40. It must be noted that accepting the death of a disappeared person has symbolically been equated to killing the person by most clinicians who have specialized in work with these kind of trauma (Lira and Kobalskys 1985, Viñar 1985).

41. Other cases in point are Eastern European, Central American and African/South African transitions.

42. See Halbwachs 1950/92, Hobsbawm 1985, and Mead 1932; Schudson 1992, 1989, and Schwartz 1997, 1991, 1982, Middleton and Edwards 1990, Nerone 1989, and Prager 1998.

43. Both sets of interviews present in similar order (1) childhood memories of the parents' disappearance, (2) fear and silence during the past dictatorship (when they remember), the transition and at present; and (3) the circumstances and meaning of their participation in the group of children of the disappeared. I reconstructed their process and paid special attention to why they chose to reopen the unresolved issues in spite of the impasse in each country after the institutionalization of the politics of oblivion and the final outcome of impunity in 1989.