Objective/context:

The purpose of this article is to reveal and analyze the emergence of the Provincial Commission for Memory (PCM) in Buenos Aires (Argentina). The work is based on a historical reference that allows us to reinstate the context in which the institution was created, and, in particular, the way in which Argentine society has processed this traumatic recent past.

Methodology:

The study's design is flexible and involves crossed methodological strategies pertaining to sociology, history, and anthropology. The research question focuses on how the Provincial Commission for Memory entered the framework of the field of human rights and memory. To answer this question, we had to recover, through written documents, the institutional form that the Commission acquired, in order to understand its objectives, its internal regulations, its funding methods, and its composition. These written sources were, in turn, analyzed by cross-linking them with oral sources.

Conclusions:

The paper reveals that to understand the process of the emergence of the Provincial Commission for Memory, and some of the central features of the institution, we had to recap on the actors that staged the process and the context in which they acted. In terms of memory, what the PCM reinstated was an account centered on the horror; in other words, on that which the dictatorship had done with the victims, without addressing what these actors had had done before being victims: their political militancy. This implied the crystallization of the humanitarian narrative above other memories that highlight the importance of remembering the political projects embodied by the victims. With respect to the place of enunciation, the Commission faced a process of an “opening of the circle of those that remember” and of those that produce these memories. That is, from the PCM, it was thought that the families of the disappeared were not the only voice authorized to speak of the recent past; rather, and with the purpose of taking on the dispute, the institutions sought to support itself by a professionalized voice that could validate its enunciations, not so much in terms of personal experience but in terms of expertise.

Originality:

Studies of the recent past in Argentina are usually based on an enquiry into the relationship between civil society and the state, conceiving both as though they were self-contained areas. These analytical and methodological perspectives conceive social movements as actors that demand from the state from a position of exteriority, and conceive the State, from this same position, as an actor that responds more or less satisfactorily to these demands. What these perspectives do not show is an area of porosity that exists between civil society and the State. In this sense, this work is different from those perspectives that overestimate the distance between these spheres and resumes a careful examination of this area of confluence. This study attempts to account for a specific historical process, examining it with an analytical depth to prevent a simple description.