Policies of "national reconciliation" in the Menem years: strategies to appease the bombing of Plaza de Mayo

Abstract

During the years of president Menem’s government, the public policies of memory were principally oriented to “turn the page”. The biggest example of this stance were the pardons given to the military chiefs of the last dictatorship (1976-1983), decreed and published between 1989 and 1991. A couple years later, another event made it especially visible: the president’s attempt to demolish the buildings of the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) and replace them with a “national reconciliation” monument. This awakened great controversy with Human Rights Organizations, the opposition parties, and between members of the governing alliance itself and was, furthermore, the trigger that gave room to what today is the Ex-ESMA Memorial Site. However, there were other public cultural policies during these years that show the will to set the memory of the political violence aside, which passed by unnoticed. This article proposes an analysis of the monuments and memorials referring to the 16th June, 1955, attack committed by members of the Armed Forces, placed during the 90s. Taking the treatment proposed for the ESMA as a comparative case, the text of the decrees - and, in a second place, the text of the pardons - will be analyzed in comparison to the content of the monuments.