Abstract
In this chapter, I map the traumatic legacies of Argentina’s recent history on a societal level by turning my attention to the notion of haunting. I consider what happens to the psychic life of a society when it endures impossible, irresolvable and protracted mourning and loss in the wake of mass violence. When there can be no burials and thousands of families find it difficult to properly mourn their loved ones, society remains in a stasis of haunting and tied to the historical and social effects of disappearance. How does the notion of haunting, as a fundamental part of modern-day Argentine society, come into play when considering the factors that keep transformative and discursive possibilities from emerging between antagonistic memorial cultures?
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Notes
- 1.
Argentine investigators unearthed 43 Ford Falcons that may have been used to kidnap individuals during the military dictatorship in a warehouse at the Puerto Belgrano naval base, located near the city of Bahia Blanca in Buenos Aires province. The cars were searched for traces of blood, hair and other evidence that could be used in investigations of crimes against humanity (Henao 2001).
- 2.
Disappearance as a form of repression has been used in many countries and in many political situations. The term has been used to describe political repression in Guatemala from 1966, in Chile from 1973 and in Argentina from 1976 (Gordon 2008). Amnesty International traces the origins of the term back to the 1941 Night and Fog Decree enacted by the German High Command, which “ordered that, with the exception of those cases where guilt could be established beyond a doubt, everyone arrested for suspicion of ‘endangering German security’ was to be transferred [secretly] to Germany under ‘cover of night’” (Amnesty International, cited in Gordon 2008, p. 72). Disappearance in Argentina remains a significant case not only because it was systematically practised (as it was in Guatemala), but also because of the powerful mode of collective resistance to state terror it produced, in the actions of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Gordon 2008).
- 3.
In Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a young man, Dorian Gray, is the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. In the story, realising his beauty will one day fade, Dorian sells his soul to ensure the portrait would age rather than him (Wilde 2007).
- 4.
It is not certain whether the families had heard rumours and therefore decided to organise the demonstration in response to what was to come the following day, when the military junta issued a self-declared amnesty that prevented any legal penalties for crimes committed during the years of the dictatorship (Lewis 2002). If this was the case, it was perhaps an attempt by the families and human rights movement to reclaim the desaparecidosbefore they were legislated out of existence.
- 5.
Noemi Ciollaro, with whom I also spoke, has published a book of interviews she completed with wives and partners of the desaparecidos—Pajaros Sin Luz (2000)—and has raised awareness of their plight as a result.
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Stockwell, J. (2014). Haunting. In: Reframing the Transitional Justice Paradigm. Springer Series in Transitional Justice, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03853-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03853-7_7
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