The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country's people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the ...state's trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror?In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past.With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina—and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum—Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.
Postmemories of Terror focuses on how young Argentineans remember the traumatic events of the military dictatorship (1976-83). This fascinating work is based on oral histories with sixty-three young ...people who were too young to be directly victimized or politically active during this period. All were born during or after the terror and possessed an entirely mediated knowledge of it. Susana Kaiser explores how the post-dictatorship generation was reconstructing this past from three main sources: inter-generational dialogue, education and the communication media. These conversations discuss selected and recurrent themes like societal fears and silences, remembering and forgetting, historical explanations and accountability. Together they contribute to our understanding of how communities deal with the legacy of terror.
Bodies in Crisis Sutton, Barbara
2010, 20100218, 2010-02-18, 20100101
eBook
Born and raised in Argentina and still maintaining significant ties to the area, Barbara Sutton examines the complex, and often hidden, bodily worlds of diverse women in that country during a period ...of profound social upheaval. Based primarily on women's experiential narratives and set against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis and intensified social movement activism post-2001,Bodies in Crisisilluminates how multiple forms of injustice converge in and are contested through women's bodies. Sutton reveals the bodily scars of neoliberal globalization; women's negotiation of cultural norms of femininity and beauty; experiences with clandestine, illegal, and unsafe abortions; exposure to and resistance against interpersonal and structural violence; and the role of bodies as tools and vehicles of political action.Through the lens of women's body consciousness in a Global South country, and drawing on multifaceted stories and a politically embedded approach,Bodies in Crisissuggests that social policy, economic systems, cultural ideologies, and political resistance are ultimately fleshly matters.
This volume is devoted to Jewish Argentines in the twentieth century, and deliberately avoids restrictive or prescriptive definitions of Jews and Judaism. Instead, it focuses on people whose ...identities include a Jewish component, irrespective of social class and gender, and regardless of whether they are religious or secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardic, or affiliated with the organized Jewish community.
Few tasks are as crucial for the future of democracy in Latin America—and, indeed, in other underdeveloped areas of the world—as strengthening the rule of law and reforming the system of taxation.
In ...this book, Marcelo Bergman shows how success in getting citizens to pay their taxes is related intimately to the social norms that undergird the rule of law. The threat of legal sanctions is itself insufficient to motivate compliance, he argues. That kind of deterrence works best when citizens already have other reasons to want to comply, based on their beliefs about what is fair and about how their fellow citizens are behaving. The problem of free riding, which arises when cheaters can count on enough suckers to pay their taxes so they can avoid doing so and still benefit from the government’s supply of public goods, cannot be reversed just by stringent law, because the success of governmental enforcement ultimately depends on the social equilibrium that predominates in each country. Culture and state effectiveness are inherently linked.
Using a wealth of new data drawn from his own multidimensional research involving game theory, statistical models, surveys, and simulations, Bergman compares Argentina and Chile to show how, in two societies that otherwise share much in common, the differing traditions of rule of law explain why so many citizens evade paying taxes in Argentina—and why, in Chile, most citizens comply with the law. In the concluding chapter, he draws implications for public policy from the empirical findings and generalizes his argument to other societies in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Under violent military dictatorship, Operation Condor and the Dirty War scarred Argentina from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, leaving behind a legacy of repression, state terror, and political ...murder. Even today, the now-democratic Argentine government attempts to repair the damage of these atrocities by making human rights a policy priority.
But what about the other Dirty War, during which Argentine civilians--including indigenous populations--and foreign powers ignored and even abetted the state's vicious crimes against humanity? In this groundbreaking new work, David Sheinin draws on previously classified Argentine government documents, human rights lawsuits, and archived propaganda to illustrate the military-constructed fantasy of bloodshed as a public defense of human rights.
Exploring the reactions of civilians and the international community to the daily carnage, Sheinin unearths how compliance with the dictatorship perpetuated the violence that defined a nation. This new approach to the history of human rights in Argentina will change how we understand dictatorship, democracy, and state terror.
The Invisible Poor Demombynes, Gabriel; Verner, Dorte
2010, 2008, 04-14-2010, 2010-02-01, Letnik:
v.No.183
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
Many of the poorest Argentines are invisible in official statistics. Four million rural residents and another 12 million in small urban areas lie outside the reach of the Permanent Household Survey ...(EPH), which is the basis for poverty figures and most data on social conditions in the country. According to the best estimate, roughly a third of rural residents, more than a million people, live in poverty. The urban bias common too many countries have been accentuated by the lack of data on the rural poor. With little information on their condition, it is exceedingly difficult for policy makers to design policies and programs to help move people out of poverty. The report is organized as follows: chapter one profiles rural poverty base on the limited existing data, including the first in-depth analysis of rural poverty ever conducted with the 2001 population census. Chapter two presents findings from the new qualitative study of the rural poor conducted in the first half of 2007. Finally, chapter three concludes with a discussion of methodology for rural poverty analysis, focusing on the issues related to expanding the EPH to full national coverage.
Victor Mirelman, in his study of the greatest concentration of Latin American Jewry, examines the changing facade of the Argentinean Jewish community from the beginning of mass Jewish immigration in ...1890 to its decline in 1930. During this period, Jews arrived from Russia, Poland, Romania, Syria, Turkey and Morocco Each group founded its own synagogues. mutual help organizations. hospitals. cultural associations. and newspapers of particular vitality was the Yiddish press and the Yiddish theatre. Jewish immigrants were also especially active politically. particularly in the Socialist Party and in the workers' unions. Based on research in the Argentine archives. Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890-1930 describes the immigration and settlement process. studies the first generation of Argentine-born Jews. and provides an understanding of assimilation and acculturation. Mirelman discusses the religious life of the community differentiating between the Ashkenazim and the various Sephardic groups and devotes chapters to Zionism, to Jewish culture in Yiddish. Hebrew. and Spanish. to education; and to social action Issues that created conflict and friction are analyzed in detail.
As a “wild," drumming thunder shaman, a warrior mounted on her spirit horse, Francisca Kolipi’s spirit traveled to other historical times and places, gaining the power and knowledge to conduct ...spiritual warfare against her community’s enemies, including forestry companies and settlers. As a “civilized" shaman, Francisca narrated the Mapuche people’s attachment to their local sacred landscapes, which are themselves imbued with shamanic power, and constructed nonlinear histories of intra- and interethnic relations that created a moral order in which Mapuche become history’s spiritual victors. Thunder Shaman represents an extraordinary collaboration between Francisca Kolipi and anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, who became Kolipi’s “granddaughter," trusted helper, and agent in a mission of historical (re)construction and myth-making. The book describes Francisca’s life, death, and expected rebirth, and shows how she remade history through multitemporal dreams, visions, and spirit possession, drawing on ancestral beings and forest spirits as historical agents to obliterate state ideologies and the colonialist usurpation of indigenous lands. Both an academic text and a powerful ritual object intended to be an agent in shamanic history, Thunder Shaman functions simultaneously as a shamanic “bible," embodying Francisca’s power, will, and spirit long after her death in 1996, and an insightful study of shamanic historical consciousness, in which biography, spirituality, politics, ecology, and the past, present, and future are inextricably linked. It demonstrates how shamans are constituted by historical-political and ecological events, while they also actively create history itself through shamanic imaginaries and narrative forms.