Jujuy and Argentinian History

One of the FLACSO staff members suggested that I interview our guide about human rights in the province of Jujuy as part of my work with Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo. As some of you have figured out, we made a facebook page for Las Madres, so he thought it would be a good idea to post the interview there. I was somewhat hesitant about the idea, since our guide is an archaeologist, and neither of us had any idea about his human rights knowledge. Nonetheless, the interview ended up being one of the coolest parts of the trip.

First, I learned about the dictatorship in Jujuy. He said the general perception in Argentina has always been that most of the disappearances occurred in Buenos Aires, but more and more information has come out in recent years about massive disappearances and other human rights violations throughout the country. Similarly, there are also formidable, if less internationally famous, human rights groups in the interior of the country. Many of these groups formed before the dictatorship to deal with systematic mistreatment of the mostly indigenous workers in this part of the country, and took up the cause of the disappeared people when it arose (two intimately related problems, as I will explain below). This is different than the Buenos Aires-based human rights groups, which universally formed in the middle of the dictatorship, when syndicates, political parties, and other traditional advocates of the oppressed were being silent. Both versions are pretty damn impressive, but I find the differences interesting and telling of the politics in the different parts of the country. In Buenos Aires, the levels of oppression that workers, poor people and their supporters experienced during the dictatorship was new. Under Perón, they'd been the most important political group, and they'd benefited hugely from his policies. They actually had a lot of power to negotiate, and their standards of living had risen hugely when he was in power. Although this had changed from 1955 on, lots of the social programs he'd put in place were still there. I'm not saying the working class in Buenos Aires had it easy, but compared to the workers of Jujuy, they were powerful. In contrast, people in the poorer northwest of Argentina have dealt with flagrant human rights violations for all of Argentinian history, starting in 1880 when the Argentinian army went off on a mission to kill as many indigenous people as they could. The ones that survived, as large communities in the northwest did, had pre-established human rights groups before the dictatorship because they had more human rights problems.

The most infamous incident regarding the dictatorship in Jujuy regards Ledesma, a sugar and paper-producing company in the region. At the time of the dictatorship, its workers lived in absurdly bad conditions. They had to live in the company town and receive credit rather than money, forced to buy whatever they needed from the company store, running up huge debts and finding themselves forever bound to the company. On top of that Ledesma has polluted the surrounding environment, making many of its workers sick. During the dictatorship, workers began to fight back. Many of them denounced company practices and tried to hold it legally accountable for the deaths it had caused. A docter, Luis Aredez, also famously denounced the company after treating many of its sick workers. The dictatorship and Ledesma teamed up to get rid of their shared problem on one night, now called la Noche del Apagón (Blackout Night). Ledesma turned off the electricity, while representatives of the dictatorship stormed the town and kidnapped hundreds of workers (somewhere between 200 and 400, depending on who you ask). A lot of them eventually survived, but many are still disappeared, and the mothers and family members of those affected still hold a march every year.

The guide also told me about his personal human rights work. There's a building in the Buenos Aires Province that was an important detention center - a place where the army would bring people to torture and kill them during the dictatorship. Toward the end of its regime, the government knocked down the building to hide the evidence, so our guide (an archaeologist) went in with a team of archaeologists and architects to reconstruct the building plans and show how it had been used. Through their work, they eventually got the site declared untouchable. Now, nothing can be built on top of it, so that the government's plans of covering up the evidence won't succeed. I found it really inspiring to listen to him talk about using his seemingly unrelated occupational skills to accomplish something so important. In general, he was an extremely passionate, well-spoken, intelligent man. I was so happy that I got to talk to him about things we never would have discussed otherwise.

One of the major things that never fails to amaze me about Argentinian history - and something that the interview highlighted - is the power of class divisions. The political environment of Wesleyan has made me automatically skeptical of simplistic historical interpretations that pit the rich vs. poor, capitalists vs. workers, landholders vs. peasants, oppression vs. freedom, in neat alignments. Of course, things have not been so simple in Argentina either. Nonetheless, the degree to which the rich - whether they be landholders, industrialists, or army generals - have aligned against all forms of poverty and freedom of expression in violently oppressive, dictatorial governments is astounding. The most recent dictatorship is the most extreme example, but only one of many such regimes. The alliance of Ledesma and the dictatorship is a perfect example of this dynamic. It's important to add that even the most worker-friendly government - Peron's first term - was pretty censorship happy. Nonetheless, the rich have been uniformly more authoritarian and repressive throughout Argentina's history.

Ironically, despite the terrible things the Argentinian government has done, in particular to its poor and liberal people, it is these very people who still consider the government the answer to their problems. It is these people who block the streets and cancel school on a weekly basis, protesting for more government spending in health, education, social security, unemployment, etc, etc. This, also, is a simplification of the issue, as Argentina has an incredible amount of NGOs and ridiculously dedicated volunteers (something I plan to write about in another post), but people nonetheless seem to expect a lot of their government, even though it has disappointed them repeatedly. I'm not sure what they should be doing instead, but it seems like there has to be a better way.

I have no conclusions yet, but these are some things I've been thinking about a lot lately.