“You’ve got infiltrators,” the commissioner tells the municipal delegate of a small town in Buenos Aires Province, and then pompously warns him that the Justicialist Party has sent a “normalizer” from Tandil. “Normalize what — you’re reading too many papers,” the countryman replies in astonishment. Then the officer drops a chilling revelation: “Mateo is a Marxist Communist.” A few pages later, the official and the under-suspicion employee ready themselves to withstand a violent assault: “They say we are bolches,” explains the municipal delegate, loading a shotgun, and Mateo is perplexed: “Bolches? But I’ve always been Peronist… I’ve never meddled in politics.” It is the legendary opening of No habrá más penas ni olvido, the small yet immense novel Osvaldo Soriano wrote in 1974 on the edge of the most brutal and dangerous current events, and which he could only publish after exile and during the dawn of democracy: all his work is returning these days under the luxurious Seix Barral imprint. That bloody turn mocked the Peronist war and the crude, McCarthyite language of its right, which would later turn the very language of the dictatorship into the language of the state. A few days ago, Marcelo Larraquy, a historian of the seventies era and narrator of a thrilling saga about the sinister Aníbal Gordon (the factotum of the Triple A), recognized in the new libertarian phrasing that same lugubrious bluntness. It was then that he heard the President of the Nation assert that there exist today “terrorists disguised as students, journalists, professors and researchers: people have to know that Antonio Gramsci’s strategy of taking over education, the media, culture, and the state has moved to a 2.0 stage. Cristina Kirchner opened this door.” The quote resonates with an ancient, similar reference by Videla (another curious reader of Gramsci) and with the ending of the recent meeting with Flávio Bolsonaro, who told Milei: “We will fight terrorism together.” The Descabellado, who revived the label “leftist” as an insult to wield at will and piacere against any dissident and who now only needs to bring back from the past the word “subversive,” replied with great enthusiasm: “Exactly!” To fight against terrorists disguised: the watchword of the hour. The control and surveillance bodies of the national government would already have launched a witch hunt against these “infiltrados,” and we suppose so because the United States government itself—the new mother country of the libertarians—was the one who asked him to “identify and map” (sic) the threat of what they call “red terrorism.” It happened in a mid-July meeting, and Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno was listening to the directives. They are, in truth, a very serious attempt to anathematize any reporter, columnist, intellectual, artist, or scientist who questions the “values” of the New Right, and to resurrect in passing the nefaste Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional that allowed the White House to coordinate intelligence services and promote illegal repression in Latin America during the Cold War. After an anachronistic nod to Montoneros, FARC, Sendero Luminoso, and Tupamaros, Marco Rubio explained during that summit in Washington that “today we face a new wave of this old evil.” He called for building, through information exchange, “our anti-terrorist architecture,” thereby effectively steering political espionage in every nation and marking anyone who is critical of imperialism or capitalism in general, not forgetting—of course—the “Marxist Communists,” as Soriano’s dreadfully ignorant creature used to say. “It is a rebellion of the worst against the best,” proclaimed the Secretary of State on that occasion, and suggested that any bearer of “poisonous resentment” with the “language of equality, justice and liberation” is very likely to slide into extremism. His wishes are orders, mister. The libertarian phrasing, which resonated in Larraquy’s trained ear, is much more than a mere rhetorical blunder: it obeys a concrete action driven by Donald Trump.
The last military regime did not distinguish between guerrillas and foot soldiers, or between Guevarists, antifascists, or social democrats: to all of them, without distinction, they considered potential enemies of Western Christian civilization. And they acted accordingly. The new generations of liberals never felt represented by those grim coups or by Krieger Vasena, Alsogaray, or Martínez de Hoz. They drew their reference, instead, from their European counterparts, modern states that had built a prosperous liberal democracy. That is why, when the Kirchnerists tried to vilify them as replicas of twentieth-century tyrannies, they grew indignant and were careful to avoid any term from that hateful jargon, now reduced to parody. And they showed a certain modesty about the sufferings of adjustment, and a restraint that hardly matters anymore. Milei’s faction, by contrast, uses and abuses that language of ignorance, revels in its bad manners and lack of social empathy, and seems eager to fill those shoes and confirm every prejudice: someone needs to organize the Pride March of the Reactionary. Azuzados now by Marco Rubio, these right-wing populists tend to think that any progressive is a potential member of red terrorism. Denouncing a “campaign anti-Argentina” (a concept of sad memory) and inventing mechanisms to sanction to detect “hatred against the country,” and devoting themselves to identifying those phantom “terrorists” that no one saw, enables them to spy on and arbitrarily criminalize anyone, especially if a colossal colonization of justice is planned. Hatred and terrorists will be whoever the ruling party decides they are, and their new judges will validate them.
The drive of these ultramontanes to push us back fifty years and to revive repugnant forms of politics that seemed definitively buried does not end there: pleasing and benefiting, at all times and everywhere, with rhetoric and with concrete measures, the wealthiest, while neglecting the middle class and the poorest, is an obscene and growing phenomenon—a hallmark of the era. Our own foreign minister also confirmed the worst biases this week when he admitted that the new land law would allow any foreigner to “buy a town or an entire province,” and by insisting that this would produce notable benefits for the homeland. Wearing servility as a badge of honor is part of the spectacle of the worst. And to be complicit with a politician who, as happened these days, jokes about the color of the “cabecitas negras” and proposes for the conurbation a policy of “sterilization,” “a wall with snipers,” and “napalm every morning,” exposes the temperaments that truly lie at the core of power. And I won’t continue because I don’t want to be accused of being a “red terrorist,” although I imagine it will happen sooner or later, since “paranoia feeds on itself,” as Arthur Miller noted about the Salem trials.
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