Mar 24, 2026
3 min read
The old "Alfonsinist Consensus," which condemned state terrorism without condoning left-wing armed organizations, has reasserted itself in Argentina and refuses to accept a believer in denial.
Few things have changed since before
The old "Alfonsinist consensus" of condemning state terrorism without unleashing left-wing armed organizations has returned to Argentina and refuses to accept the title of denial.
Few things have changed as much as they did in the past.Indeed, past events do not change.But the cuts people make, the things we decide to forget, the things we decide to remember, and the ways we remember the things we remember all change with the intensity of current concerns, interests, fears, and axioms.
Neither memory nor history are synonymous with the past.Memory is a feeling and emotion, a fragment of that individual and collective past.It is a methodical commentary and history of the past, but cut and defined by contemporary issues.
Societies use the past.They all do it.All the time.Ideological conflicts are provoked by narratives that choose to interpret the past in some ways rather than others.Ideologies are ordered, sorted, hushed up, legitimized.This is something specific for each era and for each social and political figure.Everyone goes into the past to justify themselves in it.Whatever we think, whatever we defend.Whatever we condemn, we are going to create a version of the past that fits all those decisions.
Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976–1983 does not naturally escape these interpretive differences.In the 50 years since the military coup, there have been different approaches to the heat of different political options.
The first major narrative construct about dictatorship was the government of Raúl Alphonsín (1983–1989).As soon as he took power, the UCR leader implemented one of his key election promises: Far from accepting a military self-amnesty (to which the Peronist candidate Italo Lüder agreed), he ordered the trial of military juntas that ordered illegal repression.To support this initiative, he launched the "National Commission of Disappearing People", CONADEP, which was tasked with collecting, organizing and publishing testimonies detailing thousands of cases of serious human rights violations committed by the military.That's right: Alfonsín also brought to trial two of the most important guerrilla organizations and the leaders of the moconucular organizations (moconeuros).From the beginning of the 1970s, the protagonists of the revolutionary war were through political assassinations, kidnappings, military units and attacks with explosives.Armed and security forces (with a large accumulation of kidnappings, torture, killings and disappearances).
Another explanatory structure was made by Carlos Menem (1989-1999) at the beginning of his term.He presented himself as a pacifist who ushered in a period of national reconciliation and used the constitutional instrument of amnesty (presidential pardon) to release both the military and convicted guerrilla leaders.He is also planning compensation for victims of state terrorism.Human rights organizations and the political opposition (the UCR, the left and progressivism in general) openly opposed the military amnesty, but neither the Peronist ruling party nor society in general (which was much more wary of the macroeconomic stability that Menem could consolidate after 1991) expressed an overt objection to this procedure.The amnesties did not deny the crimes committed: they freed the guilty to "turn the page": in this view, it was better to leave the 70s behind.Menem was re-elected in 1995 with 50% of the vote, where was the challenge to this strategy at the time?It says something about what happened (or didn't happen).
Argentina went through a deep economic and political crisis of representation, ending the government of Fernando de la Rua.2003.In the 2010 elections, Nestor Kirchner was elected with a very modest 22% of the vote (he became president because Carlos Menem, who got 24%, refused to run in the second round).One of the pillars Kirchner chose to legitimize this initially meager power was the self-defense of human rights.He, like Menem, interpreted his presidency in a principled way, albeit of a different nature, until he declared that human rights "had been done" before he took office.He repealed military amnesties (although he retained guerrilla leaders) and laws limiting the criminal liability of junior soldiers.Since then, military trials have resumed and expanded, Kirchnerism has gained unconditional support from human rights organizations and progressivism in general.
In its own way, Kirchnerism opened up the old controversy that rocked Peronism in the early seventies between its traditional right and revolutionary left, which unleashed great violence during the Peronist Triennial of 1973-1976.Kirchnerism saw itself as the successor to that left-wing Peronism, and thus a new paradigm emerged in the definition of violence in the 1970s.Now the responsibility was limited to the army which came to power in 1976.On the other hand, revolutionary violence was renamed as social militancy and the violent nature of its actions and the revolutionary nature of its goals were relaxed.
Although Kirchnerism succeeded in consolidating strong electoral support (winning the presidential elections in 2007, 2011 and 2019) and its interpretation became influential in the 1970s, it was unable to completely overturn previous views. The only people who defended the "pax menemista" were those who wholeheartedly justified the actions of totalitarianism and stuck to their beliefs.However, there were also many social and political actors who adhered to the Alphonsian interpretation (an interpretation that also condemned revolutionary violence).
The 2010s were the scene of a powerful symbolic conflict between the two interpretations.There were several actions of great symbolic content that helped Kirchnerism in this debate.He made the day of the military coup a national holiday: a way of saying that before March 24, 1976 there was nothing objectionable or against the old Alfonsinista criteria.By the same token, he had "never again".Condep (the last famous report submitted to his inquiry) changed the preface because he thought it should not mention guerrilla violence.And when referring to the number of 30,000 people who disappeared, he insisted in every way to establish himself as the only one.This number appeared during the dictatorship, when human rights organizations were trying to attract the attention of international public opinion.They had (have) no real idea of the number, while the military was still in power and they were ignorant, in fact, not only of the number of cases, but also of the specific circumstances of the disappeared.CONADEP, for its part, approached 9,000 cases.In the face of this contradiction, the Kirchnerist paradigm was absolute: anyone who reached the number obtained by CONADEP (which was huge) would be called a "denier".The choice of words is not unexpected, until it is reserved for those who denied the Nazi genocide against the Jews during the Second World War.
In the last two years, Miley's arrival in government (and the displacement of Kirchnerism), instead of reviving closed debates, has partially changed the status of each of these narratives in the public sphere.I believe that the old Alfanzinism deal (the decade of unforgivable violence of the seventies, in which most of the burden of crime falls on those who run the state, but does not exempt armed left-wing organizations) is a return to that old deal of Alfanzinism.He refused to accept the traitor nickname and contributed to CONADEP.
Well, the last word has not been spoken.If the present is decided by conflict, it is natural that the past continues to be defeated by contradictory interpretations.I think that the most useful thing is to face the conflict (which is inevitable in a society open to contradictions) with the best logic.In this, the deep study of History (which includes, among many other things, the permanent evolution of history) is a useful and necessary tool, which allows us to approach more attention to knowledge than war.
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