Revolution Reimagined, Fifty Years Down the Line

Things are starting to come unstuck. We are no longer speaking about the historical past in the same way. Here and there, little slippages. Added together, they constitute a qualitative shift. Situated within the history of how we speak about political violence in The Southern Cone, they signal the advent of a new sensibility.

This shouldn’t be surprising, considering recent historical and political developments, namely the dramatic surge of far-right governments that followed the recession of the pink tide. If the past is how it is interpreted, how it is signified, and how it is used in the present, then it follows that sea changes in the present would generate new interpretations, new significations, and new uses of the historical past.

In 2019 Veronica Garibotto had argued, in Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina: Beyond Memory Fatigue, that memory discourse had achieved hegemonic status within Argentine politics and culture.

The brief upsurge of hope sparked by the return to democracy in 1983 and the commencement of trials for crimes committed during the dictatorship in 1985 was bitterly disappointed with the Full Stop law in 1985 and the Due Obedience law in 1986, which ended the investigation and prosecution of crimes against humanity and granted amnesty to the perpetrators of those crimes. During the period from 1985 to 2005, the social movements that advocated for memory, truth, and justice occupied a subaltern position in Argentine politics and culture. In the struggle over the meanings of a collective historical past, memory politics served to refute and contest official State policies of amnesty, silence, and erasure. All of this, however, started to change in the early 2000s with the Kirchner administration’s adoption of a human rights platform, the Supreme Court ruling of 2005 that declared the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws unconstitutional, and the subsequent reopening of trials for crimes perpetrated during the dictatorship. Throughout the governments of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, many of the transitional justice measures advocated by the social movements of the 1990s were successfully incorporated into State institutions, as monuments were erected, memory museums inaugurated, public school curricula adjusted, and perpetrators sentenced for their crimes. On the level of civil society, mass media and the culture industry were quick to commodify memory within a specialized market of trauma tourism and merchandise. Up until this point, it is difficult to argue with Garibotto’s periodization.

She goes on to state, however, that the meaning of the dictatorial past had reached a point of stabilization and hegemony. A descriptive and normative interpretation of the dictatorship had achieved what Garibotto characterizes as “universal signification.” A discourse about the historical past had sedimented into a stable set of interpretations and tropes and representations. The State had violated the human rights of its citizens during the dictatorship and, by engaging in torture, forced disappearance, political assassinations, and the kidnapping of children, it was guilty of crimes against humanity. Furthermore, it is not possible to remain neutral in the face of such crimes. They must be denounced to ensure that such a sordid history doesn’t repeat itself. These presuppositions cut across party lines and political orientation. Certain discourses were simply no longer acceptable within the Argentine public sphere. Negationism, for example. Garibotto uses Mauricio Macri to prove her point. Despite his free-market fundamentalism and unshaken commitment to neoliberal economic policy, his administration found itself obliged, on the level of cultural politics, to uphold the State’s human rights policies.

It was settled then. In the dispute over the meaning of the country’s past, the advocates for memory, truth, and justice had won.

The problem with Garibotto’s account is that it projected its present onto the future. It assumed that the achievements of the recent past would perdure into posterity. It attributed a stability to History that it simply doesn’t possess. It underestimated, in short, the potential of the far right, its potential for destruction.

Within a few short years of the publication of Garibotto’s book, we saw the rise of Javier Milei and his anarcho-capitalism. Bolsonaro was an important antecedent in the region. Behind these two mouthpieces of this new Rebel Right was, of course, Trump and the MAGA movement. Following the lead of these antecedents, in their Right Gramscian war of position, Milei had no qualms waging his battles in the arena of culture. He showed no scruples about saying things that previously would have been unable to say in public. Unconcerned about the veracity of his claims and their ability to hold up to even the slightest scrutiny, he has been busily legitimizing political violence through an apologetics of dictatorship, going so far as to resurrect long discredited discourses like negationism and the “theory of the two devils.” Clearly, the place of memory politics in Argentine politics and culture is no longer secured. Its meaning is no longer stable.

Garibotto was certainly not alone in her tacit assumptions. Many of us, who participated in the social movements of the 1990s and 2000s, were of course aware that the gains of memory politics were not guaranteed. Few of us, however, suspected that they could be unravelled so easily and with the complicity of such a large part of the population. 

A specter is haunting The Southern Cone, the specter of fascism, of counterrevolutionary violence. A ghostly intimation of a past of State terror is overtaking in the present. With the collapse of the liberal democratic consensus, with the Right’s open disdain for democratic norms, with its legitimization of neofascist discourses, and with its willingness to resort to political violence, with its bloodlust, the stakes, for the left, are clearly not the same as they were just a few years ago. There is something new in the air. The threat of violence is palpable, close at hand.

One result of this shift is a reduction in the distance between the historical past and the present, between the revolutionary militancy of yesteryear and the political struggles of our times. All of a sudden, it doesn’t seem so crazy anymore, the revolutionary militancy of the 1960s and 1970s, what they fought for, what many of them died for. All of sudden, their decisions seem more reasonable. Their worldview, more intelligible.

There have been, over the years, many representations surrounding the figure of the South American revolutionary. In the early post-dictatorship years, when the full dimensions of State terror were coming into focus, they were saints. Here, the emphasis was often placed on their status as helpless victims. This corresponds, in Argentina, to the creation of La Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP) and the elaboration of the Informe Nunca Más. After this first phase, some of their political agency was gradually restored, in compilations of testimonies like La voluntad. In the 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon for the disappeared to be cast, in an epic register, as national heroes, despite the rather uncomfortable fact that the future that they fought for never came into being. Their youthful passion was extolled, which is say their naivety. Their errors, even, were acknowledged, their crimes. With the benefit of hindsight, the subtext, throughout the course of all these representations, was clear, as clear as it was patronizing. The revolutionaries were grossly misguided; an excess of passion and idealism, together with a lack of maturity and realism, had led them to miscalculate their odds and take poor decisions; if their intention to transform the world was admirable, it was also, in equal parts, irresponsible. The cultural production of second-generation artists, in particular, accentuated the distance between the two generations, between a revolutionary past and a post-dictatorial present. Leaning into their symbolic capital as family members of the disappeared, artists like Albertina Carri, Mariana Eva Pérez, and Félix Bruzzone ridiculed the worldview of their parent’s generation. Their iconoclasm, to be sure, was intended as a critique of the left from within its own traditions. It is one thing for the children of the disappeared to question the decisions of their parents. It is quite another to use the exhaustion of memory discourses to ridicule radical politics, dehumanize opponents, and advocate for violence, as the New Argentine Right is currently doing.

Vanquished. Victim. Saint. National Hero. The young and passionate. The intractable idealists. Taken together, these representations are predicated on the difference of the postdictatorial present from the revolutionary imaginary that they remit to. The dictatorship is the line in the sand. On one side, them, over there. On this side, us, over here. They had their concerns, which, for better or worse, had to do with revolutionary strategy. We have our concerns, which had to do with working within the neoliberal status quo to ensure that our rights are not suddenly trampled and withdrawn, like last time. Yet, when our present starts resembling the dictatorial past, in its dehumanization of its opponents, in its legitimization of political violence, in its disregard for the rule of law, then the line between the pre-dictatorial “them” and the post-dictatorial “us” starts to blur.

This is the point at which new discourses about the historical past start to emerge within the left.

Milei, as it turns out, is not the only one who re-signifying the region’s past. Last week, in an event to commemorate the 24^th of March of 2026, the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état that ushered in Argentina’s last and bloodiest military dictatorship, Myriam Bregman, representative in Congress and leader of the PTS, made a speech. In it, she did not talk about helpless victims. She did not talk about saints. She did not talk about an excess of passion or misguided idealism. She did not resort to the cliches of memory discourse. She did not fixate on loss or defeat. She did not speak of monuments or plaques. Instead, she drew a number of parallels, of shared dilemmas, between the present day and past attempts at revolutionary transformation. Instead, she raised the question of how to respond to violence from the right. Instead, she spoke of strategy. Instead, she spoke of revolution, suddenly on the agenda again.

The slogan, nunca más, Bregman argued, does not go far enough. If we want to commemorate the militants, then we have to recuperate the rest of the story. We have to realize, she continued, what they realized: in the face of political, social, and economic violence, we have the right to revolt. It is time, Bregman concluded, to start speaking about revolutionary strategy again.

More militant than mournful or melancholic, the speech was a departure from previous modes of speaking about the past. It represents an emergent type of memory and a reconfiguration of the relationship of a traumatic historical past to an increasingly troubled present. The past is not banished to the other side of an imaginary line in the sand, not far away nor unintelligible, but close at hand and comprehensible in a new way. Bregman’s past is not based on difference but similarity, not on rupture but continuity. She invoked the revolutionary past not only to inform the dilemmas of the present but also to envision a future that moves beyond them. In fact, her speech was more concerned with the possibilities of the future than with past pain. It was the closest we have been in decades to the revolutionary militancy of the seventies. Their concerns, their sensibilities, their strategies are not only theirs but ours as well, braided together in a new way, suddenly closer, intimate even, suddenly more intelligible.

Source: from the "Vallas" series of paintings by Diana Dowek