Being invited on to the jury of the Three Continents International Documentary Film Festival in Buenos Aires is one of the more interesting assignments that has come my way in recent years, for two reasons. The first is, how does one judge between the relative merits of a host of interesting documentaries covering a whole spectrum of differing issues in totally different environments?
The sheer scale and breadth of contemporary human experience contained in the films that were in competition was an eye opener, and a window into the many fascinating worlds that we inhabit, yet scarcely begin to comprehend.
The second reason that this assignment was of such interest is that it was to be my first visit to South America — although my brief foray would be limited to the Argentinian capital. Nevertheless, the fact of being in Buenos Aires was itself a mind-expanding experience.
In spite of the many contradictions of this society (some of which I referred to in my previous piece on Buenos Aires), one is immediately struck by the human tragedy that it is living through. The country’s immediate predicament appears to have been caused by years of state overspending, exacerbated by dwindling tax revenues, and the grand and petty corruption that accompany these phenomena. The rapid pace of its economic growth in the 1990s was outstripped by the debt the country was sinking deeper and deeper into as it continued to finance its economic miracle.
Something had to give way — and the International Monetary Fund was not about to throw the country a lifeline when the proverbial solids hit the equally proverbial fan.
The machinery that makes all these things happen, that somehow turns a prosperous, self-confident society into a dazed, vulnerable victim within a matter of weeks is way above most people’s heads. The majority of those of us who live in the Third World are used to living on next to nothing, so that when there is an economic crash, very little substantial change is felt by those at the bottom of the heap — that is the bulk of the population.
In Argentina’s case, it seems that there was a series of special circumstances that made the economic crisis unfold in a particularly dramatic way.
First of all, it keeps the Third World part of its personality at arm’s reach. Almost half the country’s population lives in the city and province of Buenos Aires — clinging to the dream of bourgeois stability that the city stands for.
How extraordinary, then, to see daily images on the television news of women and men, young and old, banging on the doors of the city’s many banks, demanding their money. Nine months after the crisis was first precipitated, that innate contradiction of capitalism has still not been resolved: people have deposited money with banks, but when they come to retrieve it, the banks simply do not have it. The currency was devalued, the banks had already invested innocent people’s shekels elsewhere, and there was no way to make up the shortfall.
All of this, according to the rules of the system, was perfectly legal.
So you walk around this grand city, with its stately boulevards and chic boutiques, and almost literally stumble over individuals and families who have been forced to take to living on the sidewalks. Begging is commonplace, and the chic boutiques now send touts into the streets to drum up business.
Banks are now hidden behind thick sheets of riveted steel to prevent their plate glass windows being repeatedly smashed — and still you can see thousands of angry dents in this armour where righteous citizens have vented their anger with sledge hammers and iron bars, to no avail.
Every day one or other prominent boulevard is blocked off because of another demonstration. The middle classes (which is just about everybody in the city) have taken to the streets in protest.
At around two o’clock one afternoon, walking down the long pedestrian street that cuts through the main shopping district, I was surprised to hear people starting to clap. The clapping grew steadily louder and deeper — and it certainly wasn’t for me. I suddenly realised that the whole city, as it seemed, was clapping its hands — but in the most solemn fashion.
This has become a daily demonstration of mute protest — against the government’s inability to contain the crisis, against the rising crime rate that has resulted from the economic recession, against the general sense of insecurity that plagues the country.
Two minutes of being among millions of hands clapping, unaccompanied by words or voices of anger, makes quite a powerful impression, I can assure you. And then it all stops, and the people of Buenos Aires go on about their business — if they have any business to go about, that is.
This spontaneous demonstration is a relatively new phenomenon. But there is another demonstration that has been running non-stop for more than 20 years.
At precisely three o’clock every Thursday afternoon, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo converge on the square in front of the shockingly pink presidential palace in the middle of town. They are dressed in black, and don white headscarves for the silent parade they will make round the square for the next hour.
Each headscarf bears a name and a date — the name of one of 30 000 mostly young Argentinians who disappeared during the army’s reign of terror between the mid-1970s and 1980s, and the date on which he or she disappeared.
Their vigil for their missing offspring has been going on for so long that they now call themselves the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo — many of them have other children who survived the terror, and who are now parents themselves.
And yet even the bounty of grandchildren can never completely fill the void that is left by the sudden disappearance of one’s child into the belly of an inexplicable terror, without any explanation, and without a word of apology or regret from the military regime once it had finally been sent packing.
The trauma of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo is an open wound that bleeds into the newly opened wound of Argentina’s latest crisis.
The spectre that lurks in the background is that the present crisis might precipitate a further intervention by the forces of military order –and a further plunge into the darkness of those unforgotten days of terror.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza