Unfinished Business for Kirchnerista Peronismo in Argentina

Unfinished Business for Kirchnerista Peronismo in Argentina
as the Arguments over its Legacy Commence

What is left for Kirchnerismo? The fight over its future and legacy are in full swing. In the Buenos Aires Herald Andrew Graham-Yooll took a look at the “good and bad bits,” in order “to be fair with the decade.” His “opinion on this government” is that “some good things have been done, and there may be some that are quite wrong.” He self identifies as “a liberal, which is an easy way into a bitter argument with those who cannot understand the context of freedom of action and debate which is involved in being a liberal.” To the question of what “might be seen as good governance” the Child Allowance (Asignación Universal por Hijo) “is a good measure, so are the twice-yearly increases for pensioners, even if the first slice in March was only 11.5 percent. And so are the cheapo computers for school kids, single sex marriages, legal access for some abortions, faster than ever issue of identity documents (DNI and passports), family subsidies and unemployment assistance.” The “new media law was, and still is, necessary.” It replaced “items dating back to the neo-Fascist military coup of 1943” and there were “clauses from Juan Perón’s nationalization program” from 1947. “Pity it is that the modernizing legislation was used for a battle between government and Clarín.” Also “deserving” of praise was improved funding of the national Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), and well as much arts spending.

But consumer spending is down, as the cost of living and inflation go up, and if one looks at crime statistics “you’ll run screaming to the departures lounge. Between 2005 and 2011 Argentina has the worst record in Latin America for robberies and burglaries per 100,000 of population.” And the “drug business, in which consignments of cocaine and marijuana have been shipped in, and out, by land, water and air, is not something that began a few months ago to annoy the president. It has been growing in worrying terms for ten years (the traffic was there long before, but it is growing).” And then there is “corruption,” which the Kirchneristas tend to blame on earlier administrations. “And in the end, after summing up the good, the bad, the dangerous and the rotten, the mystery will remain of this mis-named ‘won decade’ to be solved in 2016, when we may or may not be told what lies inside the package handed down to the next lot.”

In Página/12 of Buenos Aires Kirchnerista intellectual Ricardo Forster took his turn at plumbing the meaning of Kirchnerismo. When it emerged it was an “audacious challenge to the global hegemony” of neoliberalism. What Néstor Kirchner brought to the scene in 2003 from “windswept” Patagonia was a “shock” to the political system. He offered an “unexpected break in a story that seemed destined to eternal reproduction of our endless barbarism,” a “rupture” with the triumphal end of history crowd. “With passions that seemed to come from another time” his movement made it “impossible to escape the agitation and vigorous questioning” that was directed at society and politics, making the “the case for equality.” He “came to the rescue of lost traditions and experiences” that had been set aside by powerful interests, to the surprise of an “incredulous” society. Kirchnerismo “made it impossible to claim neutrality or academic distance” or “the supposed interpretive objectivity of journalistic independence.” It “continues to define the horizon of our conflicts and possibilities,” and this is what allowed Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to continue his work.

So as Argentines “approach a complex political crossroads, this mighty and transgressive experience” is under the old attack, to reduce it to a form from a “bygone” era, to return “Peronismo to being a conservative force” that “the establishment can spin” and make serve the status quo, as in the 1990s. The forces of the old establishment want to regain control of the conversation and take back their role as the ones who offer the only definitive and acceptable interpretation. Yet Kirchner “brought back debates that had remained absent or had been emptied of content.” Argentines “were able to rediscover the social question invisible in the nineties,” and recover the “missing or lost” elements of the social puzzle, “collected in books and stored in the farthest shelves of our libraries.” Argentines once again “talked of equality, distribution of wealth, the role of the state, of a united Latin America, of social justice, of capitalism, of emancipation, and people abandoning euphemisms and phrases formatted by the ideologues of the market.” Kirchnerismo “enabled us to dream again about a country that we had lost in the desert of an era by the proclamations of the end of history and the death of ideologies and even policy.” It shook “the inertia of repetition” that “inevitability sealed the speech of the dominators.” It called to “the invisible, the marginalized, the downtrodden…the poor and excluded indigenous peoples…the night dwellers and suburban youth and those who felt the awakening of political passion…and the sexual minorities.” Kirchner is a “name that cannot and should not be caught in the web of realpolitik or be appropriated by those who only seek to devalue it” and bring a return of the old Peronismo. For the Kirchneristas “there can be no retreat.”

ends

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