It is the first time that a round anniversary of democracy recovered after the bloodiest military dictatorship (also civic-business and ecclesiastical) will coincide with a presidential transfer.
In 1993, Carlos Menem celebrated the first decade in a Luna Park where the National Symphony Orchestra played La Marsellesa to accompany, in the video that was projected, the part in which the iconic photo of the Pact of Olivos – Menem and Raúl Alfonsín in a walk alone through the presidential mansion -, the delivery of the band by Raúl Alfonsín to the then current president and a hand that reaches the ballot box to cast the vote.
In 2003, when the presidential transfer could have coincided with the anniversary, the explosion at the end of 2001, the five presidents in one week and the early inauguration of Néstor Kirchner on May 25 separated the celebrations. As the main event of the day, NK announced the creation of the National Memory Archive. This newspaper then allowed itself a joke on the cover, imagining that Fernando de la Rúa put the sash on the new president and left by helicopter so as not to take away his prominence. Such was the relief after the traumatic – and also bloody – exit from more than a decade of convertibility, government of the markets and impunity for the genocidaires.
In 2013, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner celebrated 30 years of democracy with musical shows in the Plaza de Mayo when she was halfway through her second term. The background was the self-quarterings of the police forces of several provinces, with the epicenter in Córdoba, which have just calmed down after having favored or caused looting and destabilization. Extreme polarization dominated the country and the hatred against the first twice-elected female president was as strong as the love that half the country lavished on her.
The 40 years of uninterrupted democracy that will be celebrated on Sunday will be tied to the inauguration of an anarcho-capitalist president who assures that he is going to dismantle the state, has blind faith in the markets, says that social justice is an “aberration,” promises “ suffering” for at least two years, denies the systematic plan of State Terrorism of the last dictatorship and encourages his neoconservative friends in their desire to repeal the abortion law, annul Comprehensive Sexual Education, among others, and agitate political violence to whoever opposes
Until 1983, when President Alfonsín inaugurated this democratic period, 50 years had passed since the first coup d’état in 1930; During the middle of that half century, de facto presidents governed, to put it more simply, dictators. Democracy had its ups and downs in these four decades, but even so the National Congress never stopped functioning, the crises were resolved within the mechanisms contemplated in the Constitution; with their tongue hanging out due to the increasingly suffocating numbers of poverty and exclusion, if these 40 years were sustained it is also due to a social and popular pact that was sometimes silent, other times charged by the noises of the street that always set the pace for the governments, which made the memory of the crimes of State Terrorism a minimum floor on which to continue building other agreements that modified or recognized the changes in the lives, coexistence and expectations of citizens who expressed themselves to through protest, another democratic mechanism par excellence, and the various social conflicts that continue to demand the state as a common space in which to dispute everything from the distribution of wealth to the very existence of identities and ways of life, the balance for structural inequalities such as gender, racism or the rights of indigenous peoples devastated by a genocide that unfortunately is at the basis of the very constitution of the Argentine state.
In this low flight for each decade accumulated without coups d’état, we also notice the swings of two movements that go hand in hand: a neoliberalism that now names itself as “freedom” and the attempt to reverse the condemnation of the Crimes against humanity. And hand in hand with that social agreement for the defense of human rights that alternately wanted to be modified – in the Menem government with the pardon, in the Mauricio Macri government through denialism and denigration of the “Human Rights work” , in the incoming government again a denialism that the new president expressed directly by copying the defense in the trial of the genocidal Emilio Massera -, other rights were also expanded that organized their demands from the street and that, paradoxically, from the liberal right are put in Game. Two clear examples are the right to abortion and Comprehensive Sexual Education. The incoming government goes even further: it denies gender inequality, it denies the unpaid work that care tasks still entail, it has even gone so far as to insult, in the mouth of the elected vice president, Estela de Carlotto and with her all the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, those women who with their persistence, courage and politicization of their pain were undermining the power that at some point seemed absolute of the last dictatorship.
In this issue of Las12, we choose to take a tour of the laws that throughout these 40 years collected the demands constructed from feminisms as a social movement that was growing, expanding and radicalizing at the same time in its conversations, slogans, demonstrations, meetings. and also in their emotional and political experimentations. A social movement like this in its alliances with social, lgbtiq+, union, artistic, student, political, anti-racist, and defense movements for indigenous peoples and the land does not fit nor is it limited to achieving laws. But these, because they are written and are a point of agreement; also because we feel they are at risk; They are a possible journey through what democracy has recognized in these decades. In this issue we choose some of those laws to amplify them in the voices of those who participated in their construction from the ground up. These four years that begin on Sunday are a challenge that finds us under threat and with bodies hurt and tired by everything that seems to have gone backwards in relation to social agreements that found us as a people. But the threads of organization that were woven are active and their power is the seed that is planted to continue nourishing and growing in the conviction to transform everything until life together is just as we want it: worth living. As they say in the streets, We have each other, and that is the certainty that will continue to sustain us.
