Architects of the new Argentina

Cristina and Nestor Kirchner, the president and ex-president of Argentina, visit the UK this week, leaving behind them a nation in the throes of an unprecedented cultural revolution. Richard Gott reports on how the country is at last discovering its true identity

by Richard Gott, Wednesday April 2 2008

The late Guido di Tella, the intellectual and Anglophile Argentine foreign minister during the corrupt government of Carlos Menem in the 1990s, used to express the hope that Argentina, after its tragic experiences in the second half of the 20th century, would one day become a "normal" country. Casting around for examples of normality, his eye fell on New Zealand and Austria.

Many Argentines coming from European immigrant stock used to subscribe to Di Tella's bizarre and unachievable desire. Such people had always believed their country to be a prosperous western outpost that had deviated from the European tradition of development and would eventually return to its original roots. Such a vision was conjured up by Argentine politicians and historians for more than a century; today it is coming under sustained attack.

Argentina has been waking up to a different reality. It has dawned on progressive elements within the ruling elite that they are firmly and irrevocably situated not in Europe but in Latin America, a continent that they share with many different peoples with diverse traditions. Already, in neighbouring countries such as Bolivia, these peoples have begun to recover and celebrate their long-lost indigenous heritage, reviving the ancient conflict between Indians and white settlers. This new-found perception in Argentina of its geographical circumstances, in a society of long-established and self-satisfied conservatism, not to say racism, lies at the heart of a slow-burning cultural revolution that is gradually transforming the country. Under the auspices of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, the husband-and-wife presidential team that have ruled since 2003 - Nestor since May that year, Cristina since last December - the image and reality of Argentina is beginning to change.

Contested and controversial, and hated by the traditional ruling class, this impressive political couple have presided over the country's economic recovery after the spectacular banking collapse of 2001, establishing the best and most popular government in more than half a century. Among their achievements is the promotion of a national re-examination of what it means to be Argentine in the 21st century. In 2010, the country will celebrate the 200th anniversary of its independence from Spain, and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has appealed for the construction, beyond party loyalties, of a "bicentennial national agreement" that will define the model of its future development. At stake are fresh readings of the country's history as well as of its ethnic composition, subjects that Argentines have traditionally been reluctant to contemplate.

Argentina is a country that I once knew well, and many of the youthful figures that I knew in the 1960s and 70s are now running the country. I have never forgotten an extraordinary night some 35 years ago, in March 1973, when the Peronists won their first electoral victory since their charismatic leader Juan Perón was overthrown by a military coup in 1955. The explosion of freedom after years of military rule, and the expectation of many young people that the country was about to change for the better, was palpable. On that autumn day in 1973, Héctor Cámpora, Perón's dentist, had won the presidential election, and I watched in the streets of Buenos Aires as the military police, sent out on motorcycles in anti-riot gear, were suddenly overwhelmed by the euphoria of the crowds. Forced to dismount from their machines, they were wildly embraced by demonstrators waving the light blue national flag. It was a revolutionary moment, one swiftly followed by others, including the release of all political prisoners, the re-establishment of relations with Cuba, and radical educational reforms. Among those caught up in the excitement of the time were two young law students at the University of La Plata, Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández.

As with most of Latin America's radical experiments in the 20th century, the Peronist government ended in disaster. Guerrilla opposition grew as rightwing paramilitaries sought to silence the left, and in a grim atmosphere of increasing violence, a military putsch in 1976 by General Jorge Videla inaugurated six years of a "dirty war", waged principally against young people. No one under 30 was safe. A terrible civilian slaughter, with 30,000 dead or "disappeared", was to mark the country until today. Although the military gangsters were expelled after their invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, devised by General Leopoldo Galtieri, Argentina has taken two decades to recover.

Before flying to Argentina on this present occasion I dug out an old Latin American contacts book from the early 1970s. As I looked at the names, I realised how many had been murdered in subsequent years. My notebook included Argentine journalists and politicians, Uruguayan senators, Bolivian army officers, Chilean academics and Brazilian peasant leaders - a typical cross-section of the people a journalist might expect to encounter or befriend. Some were "disappeared", others were shot or blown up. Several ended up on the grass verge on the road to the airport at Ezeiza, dumped there out of the Ford Falcons of the death squads.

The Kirchners escaped from the dangers that touched so many of their generation. Married in 1976, they moved out of immediate danger in La Plata to the far south of Patagonia, to Nestor's home state of Santa Cruz. Here the military repression of young leftists was less intense. The Kirchners established a law firm in Rio Gallegos, and gingerly re-entered politics after the collapse of the generals' regime in the 80s. Nestor Kirchner became the governor of Santa Cruz, while Cristina was elected to the senate in Buenos Aires. From these provincial origins, they both established themselves on the national stage, re-embracing the Peronist cause and not forgetting the radicalism of their youth. They moved into the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, in May 2003, and were given the teasing title of "the Penguins" in honour of their south Atlantic provenance. By rescheduling the country's massive debt of $84bn, and taking no further advice from the International Monetary Fund, Nestor Kirchner presided over a sustained period of economic expansion.

Many of the ministers in the Kirchner governments are the heirs of those involved in the ferment of the 70s, and they have played their part in ensuring that the past is not forgotten. Nestor Kirchner persuaded the congress in 2003 to abolish the amnesty laws that had protected the military from prosecution, while Cristina was the inspiration behind the creation of a "Museum of Memory" in the building that once housed the Escuela Superior de la Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the engineering school of the navy used as an interrogation and torture centre.

The dirty war remains a central, unforgettable and contemporary element in Argentina's history. It is fresh in many minds, not least in the Kirchners', who have given solid support to the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the formidable "mothers" who began organising in the first years of the Videla dictatorship to protest against the disappearance of their children. The Madres are now a powerful leftwing political organisation, and in the central square outside the congress, I found their prominently placed bookshop and coffee house.

I have seen members of the Madres hawking their consciences around the continent in various countries in recent years, from Ecuador to Cuba, and I used to feel that they belonged to an era that was over. Surely it was time for Argentina to get on with a new life? Yet that is not at all the mood in Buenos Aires today. Constant reference is made in the media to the events of the 70s, with memorial notices and church services to recall the names of those who disappeared. As well ask the Jews to forget about the Holocaust, or the Spaniards to forget the civil war.

The macabre story of the children born to prisoners here (and at a similar centre in La Plata) and then handed over for adoption to families of military officers has been told in a film by Estela Bravo, The Found Children of Argentina, recently shown on British television. The Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, a sister organisation of the Madres, was set up to mobilise the "grandmothers" to inquire into the fate of their grandchildren, more than 500 of whom were missing. DNA testing at the national genetic databank has eventually enabled 100 of them, now adults, to discover who they really are, and to rejoin what is left of their real families. They are never out of the news. One is a member of congress; others have embarked on high-profile prosecutions of their adoptive parents.

To discuss the fate of the prisoners at the ESMA torture centre, I called on Horacio Verbitsky, an old friend from my 70s notebook, locating him in a tiny book-lined study in a building close to the law courts. Verbitsky is a writer and investigative journalist who wrote a notable book, The Flight, describing the military practice of throwing their tortured victims, drugged and bound, from aeroplanes into the waters of the river Plate. These were the parents of the children subsequently adopted.

Known as "El Perro" for his terrier-like capacity to pursue his investigations, Verbitsky is now the president of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, a human rights organisation that seeks to address the abuses of the military government. He does not take such an extreme leftist line as the Madres, but is a passionate advocate of the Kirchner government, and a powerful critic of the country's prosperous middle class and its "social hatred" of the provincial upstarts from Patagonia. He praises the way in which the Kirchners have cleaned up the country's legal system, making impeccable appointments to the supreme court and bringing in women judges to challenge the traditional male supremacy.

Verbitsky is also a significant revisionist historian, arousing fresh controversy recently with a documented account of the misdemeanours of the Catholic church, long one of the pillars of the Argentine state. While some priests were imprisoned and killed, several senior bishops gave open support to the military. Refusing to concern themselves with the fate of the disappeared, they lunched regularly with army commanders. Verbitsky's revelations have made it difficult for the church to re-establish itself as an ethical reference point in Argentine society.

Another friend on the list of survivors in my notebook is José Nun, a sociologist I knew when he lived in exile in Chile. Today, aged 70, he is the minister of culture, a strategic position in a government seeking a redefinition of its historical traditions. I went to see him in the ornate old palace that his ministry occupies in Buenos Aires, and found him as enthusiastic as I remembered him, bubbling over with schemes and projects. Spurred on by the imminent bicentenary celebrations, he is financing a research programme that delves into the social history of the past two centuries. We need, he says, to explain "how and why we are what we are". Only then can the people of Argentina decide how their country's direction might be changed or maintained. The first fruits of this initiative are an immense two-volume collection of essays. Our central objective, says Nun, is "to re-examine and debate our successes and failures".

One crucial fact discussed in these volumes was the arrival of 7 million immigrants from Europe in the half-century between 1870 and 1915. At the same time, although this is not a topic on which Argentines care to dwell, the local Indian population was slaughtered in successive military campaigns to make room for the settlers. Two under-visited museums in Buenos Aires tell part of the story.

In the old dock area, past the forgotten, once British-owned railway stations and across a crowded motorway, stands the National Immigration Museum, an immense, empty and almost inaccessible building. This is Argentina's Ellis Island, a "Gran Hotel" completed in 1911 that processed tens of thousands of impecunious European immigrants. More reminiscent of a concentration camp than an induction centre, its vast spaces accommodated an eating hall on the ground floor, and sleeping and washing facilities for men and women on the floors above. An exhibition of photographs shows the arrival of peasants from Friuli and Dalmatia, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were destined for settlement in the northern frontier provinces from which the Indians were being removed.

Another rarely visited museum stands a block from the Plaza de Mayo. The Juan Ambrosetti Ethnographic Museum, part of the university of Buenos Aires, contains photographs and artefacts concerning these same Indians from the north, while an exhibition about Tierra del Fuego in the south examines how Indian society was destroyed by European missionaries in the 19th century, a story reminiscent of the extermination of the Aborigines of Tasmania.

These museums represent two facets of Argentina's cultural heritage that are rarely considered together, except in the work of another revisionist. Osvaldo Bayer, after whom the coffee shop of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo was named, was notorious in the 70s as the author of La Patagonia Rebelde, an account of an army massacre of rural workers in Patagonia in 1922. Exiled in the 70s and now over 80, Bayer has turned his attention from the struggles of workers to the decimation of the country's original peoples in the 19th century. He is one of the few historians to link the dirty war of the 1970s with the dirty war against the Indians of the 1880s.

The chief author of the 19th-century massacres was General Julio Roca, honoured until recently as one of the country's most eminent figures. Twice president between 1880 and 1904, Roca is now remembered for his "Campaign in the Desert" in 1879, in the south-central zone of the country. Thousands of Indians were killed, and the great central area of the pampas was prepared for European immigration. Further campaigns took place on the northern frontier with Paraguay, and here too the land was cleared for immigrants. Some now consider Roca the "Hitler" of Argentina's "final solution", and Bayer has edited a book, The History of Argentine Cruelty, that paints a dark picture of the time. Roca's huge statue in Buenos Aires is regularly decorated with the slogan "Genocidio".

A more controversial subject is the ethnic makeup of the population, for so long considered largely white and European. The DNA centre that has reunited the children of the "disappeared" with their families has produced some interesting findings. Recent research into Argentines' DNA suggests that 56% have at least partly indigenous blood. "We are not as European as we think we are," says Daniel Corach, director of the Service of Genetic Digital Tracing of the University of Buenos Aires. A 12-year research project, from 1992 to 2004, examined the DNA of 12,000 people in 11 provinces. As well as noting that only 44% of the population were of European origin, it concluded that 10% were pure Indians.

Since the current population of Argentina is approximately 36 million, this suggests that 20 million people are of indigenous origin (of which 3.6 million are pure Indians), while only 16 million can trace their ancestry back to Europe.

This is far from the understanding that most urban Argentines have of the ethnic makeup of their country. They continue to believe that they live in a largely white country with a tiny handful of Indians sprinkled about in the furthest provinces. Yet step into the ancient and inadequate metro system of Buenos Aires and you are at once aware of a population totally unlike the children of Italians and Spaniards who travel above ground. Below, a large proportion of the travellers still have Indian faces and complexions. Join the almost daily demonstrations of the piqueteros, the unemployed organisation that enjoys as much support from the Kirchners as do the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, and you receive the same impression. Argentina is more of an Indian country than the history books have led its people to suppose.

Recognition of this fact is one of the conclusions that will emerge from Cristina Kirchner's bicentennial desire to re-examine the historical record. It will not bring about the "normality" that Guido di Tella envisaged, but accepting this reality in the 21st century will hasten the country's integration into a continent already rejecting its white settler traditions.