HIJOS & "Escraches"

To see a video of this escrache taking place on May 21, 2008, click here.

 

 

In her article “Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past in Albertina Carri’s Los Rubios” Gabriela Nouzeilles explores the film “Los Rubios” in relation to postmemory and the problem of discourse in postdictatorship Latin America.  Also, in order to frame her reading, Nouzeilles brings up the topic of “the disappeared” and describes how “the widespread acceptance the term ‘disappeared’, coined by the military juntas, represents a second form of death, a symbolic one, for the victims of the dictatorship’s mass killings” (264).  Perhaps it is necessary to linger for a moment on what Nouzeilles is implying here.  For “the disappeared” to take on a second, symbolic death is radical in many ways—the first of which having to do with the concept of death as a term and within the human condition.  Death is the most finite of human states, an end to all possibility.  For the term “disappeared” to come about, a plurality must have come into being—a questioning of the state of being dead, which also must apply in parallel to the state of being alive.  The existential unhinging of both these concepts is brought about by resistance in the face of dictatorship and also the uncertain question of what it is to be alive or to be dead under dictatorship.  Is living under dictatorship truly living?  In that case, what does it mean to be dead under the same conditions—conditions in which you were never free to live your life in the first place?

Nouzeilles describes how the formation of the activist group HIJOS, an acronym for “Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence)” became one result and point of resistance in the wake of the disappearances (265).  This group was “formed by sons and daughters of the disappeared” and “has defined itself through the realization of estraches, performative street events whose goal is to reveal the scandal of yet another public secret, by denouncing the criminal behavior of those who collaborated with the military regime (physicians, torturers, military officers, etc.) and who continue to live among regular citizens unaffected by the consequences of their criminal actions” (265).  In this way, there is a provocative turning on the term and concept of “the disappeared.”  Through the estraches, these sons and daughters are forcing the opposite of a disappearance; they are imposing a reappearance, a revealing, a spotlighting of the perpetrators who erased their lost family members from their lives.  This spotlighting has necessitated itself because after the dictatorship, the military regime also attempted to disappear its entire tainted population—the “physicians, torturers, military officers” that Nouzeilles describes—back into society.  For the regime to erase its corrupted past and have a chance at rebirth, for their mistakes to simply disappear, but their lives to go on, is at the core of the injustice that HIJOS is pushing back against.