For a new year beyond its first day
This infant 2023 now closing its first week at least promises to be a new year insofar as it offers the chance of a new government at the other end but that does not justify sitting back for the next 11 or 12 months and awaiting that outcome. Yet that does not mean that this year is beginning with a clean slate because the baggage of the past has continued into the present and will need attention in the immediate future.
Yet instead of seeing these problems as continuous, there is a tendency to freeze them in time by identifying them with a certain period and group of people. Thus there can be no doubt that Kirchnerite corruption has occupied a perhaps artificially central place in the news agenda almost throughout this administration but few enough people stop to ask if there was corruption under the previous presidency and if there is really no corruption in this government?
Again any mention of human rights immediately evokes the 1976-83 military dictatorship but while it is true that the political violence in practically all the years between 1970 and 1980 was quite exceptional (and even more unprecedented that contradiction in terms of state terrorism confronting it), shortly to be followed by Argentina’s only international war in the last 150 years, have there really been no new problems of human and civil rights in the half century since?
Quite apart from such specific issues as prison conditions or indigenous rights, does not almost half the population lying below the poverty line open up vast new fields of problems which should be of more general concern than to picket groupings with the crises in education, healthcare and housing affecting even broader sectors of the population?
These narrowed categories go beyond being conceptual flaws to skew the overall perspective. Instead of challenging these categories, both sides have resorted to defence mechanisms implicitly accepting them while also isolating themselves from the broader socio-economic concerns of the general public. Thus there can be no doubt that the presidential onslaught against the Supreme Court by presenting an adverse ruling as “institutional chaos” is not a genuine (and long overdue) judicial reform nor even a reaction to that ruling but part of a constant bid to derail the process of trying Kirchnerite corruption – now that Vice-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has withdrawn her candidacy, President Alberto Fernández is perhaps seeking to recreate the conditions of his own 2019 candidacy and earn a repeat nod.
The opposition response to this has in recent days taken the form of highlighting a military presence in AFI intelligence, which can also be seen as a defence mechanism – against a general government drive to tag the Mauricio Macri presidency with an image of illegal espionage, against which the opposition has been curiously defensive, and more recently the problems of City Security Minister Marcelo D’alessandro since his part in last October’s meeting with Clarín Group executives and judges. But (apart from the government’s own use of illegal espionage to install the scandals feeding this espionage), the best defence is not denial nor attempting to identify military blasts from the past within current intelligence but to ask if this illicit snooping has not been chronic for several decades instead of being limited to the Macri years.
There is thus a need to view corruption as not just the Kirchners and illegal espionage as not just Macri but the two main coalitions also need to be informed that this point and counterpoint are dragging them into a battlefield which is distancing them from the electorate in an election year. The composition of the Supreme Court and a “military panel” within intelligence might obsess the politicians but they do not exist as priorities for almost everybody else, losing the daily battle against inflation, even within the growing economy with relatively low unemployment of the last two years. With 51 weeks left in this year, there is still time to change destinies but for that to happen, we need to start thinking out of the box.