Listen to this note:
Wealth dreams of robbing the poor.
The poor dream of being able to dream.
Poetry dreams of frightening with beauty
the sadness of these days.
‒ Vicente Zito Lema
After hours of congregating on Avenida de Mayo; of crowding the road that, in a straight line, links the National Congress with the Casa Rosada, the executive headquarters; of batucada and combative cumbia villera; of choripanes, beer, water and soda; of waving flags of parties and their subdivisions, of unions and organizations; of mockery of power, defiance of arrogance, the popular counterargument, the carnival that ridicules in posters, banners and graffiti; of the historic arrival of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), adhering for the first time to this mobilization; From the Grandmothers and Mothers protected by security delegations and applause of admiration, from the platform the last statement of unity of the march for the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice outlines a defined rival: Javier Milei, and clearly establishes a purpose: to maintain the active struggle and to reverse the decree of urgent need, a multifocal tool with which the President of Argentina seeks to weaken the State, cut public work positions and advance an ambitious privatization agenda with the argument of seeking the reconstruction of the national economy.
It is March 24, 2024 in Buenos Aires, 48 years after, in the early hours of that day in 1976, the armed forces forcibly deposed President María Estela Martínez de Perón to install a military regime and a policy of state terrorism through the persecution, detention, torture and extrajudicial execution of thousands of political dissidents. That regime, which extended its dominance over Argentine society until 1983, maintains impunity among several of its political agents while the current vice president, Victoria Villarruel, seeks pardon and house arrest for several of them, although the trial of the military leadership responsible is an example of transitional justice worldwide, as portrayed in the celebrated film Argentina, 1985, directed by Santiago Miter.
The constant struggle for justice and memory of Argentine society —which throughout the country, in internationally acclaimed tourist walks or in lost alleys, remembers with plaques organized by neighborhoods the names and places of kidnapping of the victims—, despite its sustained efforts for almost half a century, has not achieved a stable guarantee of non-repetition, to the point that today Villarruel exercises constant violence against memory, denies the figure claimed by the organizations of the total victims of the dictatorship, around 30 thousand detained and disappeared people, and describes the leftist movements that persecuted the military juntas as terrorists with pending punishments.
Thus, despite the overflowing festivities in the streets during the day of protest this Sunday, March 24, both President Milei and Vice President Villarruel did not cease their direct confrontation against the protesters from their natural discursive terrain: social networks.
"The march for 'memory, truth and justice' had nothing to do with memory, because they erased the victims of subversion from history.(1) “There was no truth to it either, since they manipulated statistics and hid information… and there is no justice either, since terrorists continue to occupy positions,” retweeted from a semi-anonymous account, identified as a militant of La Libertad Avanza, the president of one of the most complex states in Latin America, in a prolonged inflationary crisis that weakened the Kirchnerist candidate, Sergio Massa, to such a degree that it allowed Milei to win the popular vote in 2023, grouped with one of the main debt acquirers in Argentine history, the magnate and former president Mauricio Macri.
For this reason, because of this constant provocation against the social movement, accompanied by a strategic attack against public areas, such as the Télam news agency, now closed, the National Institute of Film and Audiovisual Arts, or the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, Milei is the visible rival of the march for memory of this 2024, together with the vice president and the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich (The dinosaurs can reappear, says a poster attached to the walls, in reference to the anti-dictatorship anthem of Charly García, which shows Milei, Bullrich and Villarroel with tyrannosaurus bodies).
Thus, the protesters, who although they work for the past do not settle in it, interpret that the current president's economic program is homologous with the wave of privatization that the government of the military dictatorship operated, in the international era of application of the neoliberal project sponsored by Thatcher and Reagan, and carried out by Miguel de la Madrid or Augusto Pinochet. Perhaps that is why the Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta, issued on the punctual first anniversary of the coup d'état, on March 24, 1977, by the writer and journalist Rodolfo Walsh, is quoted from the platform. The next day he disappeared.
In the text, the author of the celebrated Operation massacre, a report on an extrajudicial execution carried out in 1956, after analyzing the torturous cruelty with which the uniformed men terrorized their victims, does not lose sight of the fact that the regime's greatest violence was its thirst for privatization, since its economic policy condemned millions of Argentines to poverty, precariousness, uncertainty, and exploitation.
So much time later, this is the climate in which Argentines live today. World soccer champions, their homeless population is multiplying, precarious salaries force prudent spending, street vendors are proliferating, who, between jobs or a plea, seek to earn a few coins, from one moment to the next since Milei took office, money is going to go for less, a new radicalized episode of an inflationary path that his predecessor in the Casa Rosada, Alberto Fernández, also could not contain.
And yet, despite the reiterations of memory to vindicate the meanings of pain, there is a good group of Argentines who voted in majority for Milei and who in street conversation reiterate that they not only support him, but also celebrate his rhetoric as an aggressor, a bully, his provocative style that speaks of the left as “lefties,” that blames public spending for economic instability to prolong the cut in rights, that paints the financing of the collective as a waste that would be corrected by privatization and its alleged market competitiveness, and that consumes as a television spectacle, as a comedy show —of course available on TikTok—, the mocking ways in which the presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni, exchanges words with the press, between disqualifications, minimization, ridicule, denial of the microphone and other scrapes.
It is against this climate of denial in the vice presidency —“Carlotto, no one voted for you, they voted for Javier Milei. Respect the Argentine people, who said no to you too. It wasn’t 30,000,” Villarruel tweets in the middle of the march—, this repressive policy of Bullrich, that the voices of a demonstration attended by thousands and thousands and thousands of Argentines, from children around five years old accompanied by their parents, to smiling elderly women perhaps already in their eighties, or more, who hold hands to support each other as they walk through the streets.
“Memory refutes lies”, “We are more people than soldiers”, “We do not negotiate or reconcile”, “Neither behind nor to the right”, “Without public education there is no future”, “Thirty thousand comrades detained and disappeared… Present!… Now… And always!”, “Never again”, exclaim the attendees, the graffiti in the streets, the posters stuck to the wall.
And there is a repeated, common political reading that exposes Milei's promise of capitalist efficiency, his projection of operating against the political caste, and interprets it as truly making the elite pay the debt to the working class, while the rich in politics and the private sector gather around him, comfortable, simulated under the president's shouting.
Thus, in the vicinity of Plaza de Mayo, a man holds the presidential effigy with a reversible face between Milei and Macri and a slogan: "The lion ended up being a cat."
“Milei is the real estate market.”
“The caste has a servant.”
“The debt is not mine.”
The echo of the congregation is clear in its demands: Peronism, the recently deceased Hebe de Bonafini, who presided over the organization of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo —“Hebe lives in the plaza”—, the audacity with which these women alone went out to the streets taken over by the military to demand clarification of the whereabouts of their children, Diego Armando Maradona who joined them, the soup kitchen with which solidarity cushions the rise in prices, the collection of signatures in opposition to the privatization of the Banco Nación, the repudiation of the International Monetary Fund, the defense with one's life of democracy, restored 40 years ago.
“We, organized workers, have memory. We remember who took our jobs, who liquefied our wages, who devalued our currency. We remember who made us disappear and killed us. No one here forgets anything. We think about each other, we regroup with strength, happiness and unity. We are still here. With love, tenderness and organized hatred. We will be your worst future. Fraternal fire, imprinted strength. We will fall upon you with the weight of History. We remember. We will win,” reads a statement printed in red letters on white and stuck to the walls.
The CGT, which is accused by certain groups of collaborationism both with the anti-communist actions of the 1970s and with the current government, is explicitly called upon to call for an imminent second national strike (the first took place in January 2024) to ensure that its position does not remain rhetoric and that the current government is problematized from the working class: “Enough of beating around the bush: set a date, CGT!” they shout from the platform, urging action to applause.
And if the voices of protest claim the January strike and the women's march on March 8 as two days adjacent to the mobilization of March 24, chapters in a general plan of struggle, towards the end of the day (6:14 p.m., local time) they demand the outline and exercise of a constant strategy of struggle until the president's attempts are stopped.
The festivities, the massiveness of the mobilization, the beauty of the mothers' and grandmothers' scarves stylized in an installation open to the wind, the conversion of the vehicular zebra crossings into Argentine flags for memory, truth and justice, the agitation between drums and jumps that he who does not jump is a soldier, he who does not jump voted for Milei, well, they draw only one episode in the prolonged social clash that Argentina is resisting today. And as soon as Monday, March 25, the day after, enters, the president makes it clear that he will maintain his narrative confrontation against the left and the victims' organizations of the country.
With just over a hundred days in office, everything is yet to happen for the South American nation and its forces in conflict and resistance.
But there is one slogan that makes the protesters smile:
Ole, ole.
Olé, olá.
Like the Nazis
It's going to happen to them:
where they go
we will go find them.
(1) It is the discursive strategy of the right in Latin America, whether in Peru, Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay or Argentina: to label the guerrillas as terrorist groups, to give a touch of irrationality to their armed mobilization, to ignore the social reasons of deep inequality and cancellation of political rights by the traditional means that led them to radicalization and to leave out of the frame, of course, the systemic violence, designed, budgeted many times with the open support of the United States and in disproportionate force, with which these movements are persecuted, terrorized, punished or annulled, with a constant balance of innocent people tortured and murdered by the armies in charge of the repression, as in the case of the Party of the Poor of Lucio Cabañas, in Guerrero, which motivated an excessive deployment of armed forces in that entity in southern Mexico, or the actions of the Peruvian uniformed men against peasants in Ayacucho in their persecution against the Communist Party of Peru. Shining Path.
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