GENOCIDE DENIAL AND PUBLIC POLICIES. IS ARGENTINA EMBODYING A STATE GENOCIDE DENIAL?

Abstract

Only a few months from having commemorated the 41^th anniversary of the Coup D’état staged by the last civil-military dictatorship with a massive citizen mobilization to Playa de Mayo, we can point out the recrudescence of denialist discourses and also of banalization of state terrorism, as issues that were thought to be settled, sadly returning to the stage, but this time it is public officials who put them into practice: publicly mentioning and questioning the number of desaparecidos [disappeared people], as well as defining the State terrorism that plagued our country as a “dirty war.” In this work we will deepen the categorization of these expressions as negationist modalities, as objective denial of the number of victims and subjective denial that refers to the contexts of mutual violence. Emphasizing the importance and its political significance as a narrative political strategy consisting of: 1) hindering the real knowledge of the reasons for the genocide; 2) hindering the knowledge of those responsible for the crimes; to block the possibility of punishment, as a political strategy that seeks to guarantee impunity and 3) hamper political strategies to prevent new genocides eroding and obturating the sense or reason that the prevention of genocide is part of a national interest. The “State denialism” is one of the most serious and violent means of denialism and an inadmissible setback for a country that a few days ago was in the vanguard when it came to human rights, considered a role model in the region in regards to judging processes of the responsible for the State offenses. Ultimately, with these denialist expressions, what is disputed is the symbolic representation of the occurred, that is, the means of political appropriation of our recent past.