The liturgy of memory

Every March 24 the same words return to Plaza de Mayo: Memoria, Verdad y Justicia. The march, the banners, the chant — and, above all, the white scarves, first worn by the Madres, now multiplied across generations into a living inheritance. For half a century Buenos Aires’ central square has served as the ritual center of the country’s reckoning with the dictatorship. It was the epicenter of Argentine politics before the 1976 coup, and it remains so today. But there is a before and after in the footsteps of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. The plaza is the same. Those who gather there are not. Fifty years after the coup, and more than four decades into uninterrupted democracy, “Memory, Truth, and Justice” has become a kind of national liturgy. Generations have grown up under its aegis. The phrase is repeated each year with the familiarity of prayer — and, like prayer, rarely examined for what it actually demands. Over time the ritual acquired the authority of something self-evident, even for those who never entirely felt included in it. Yet those who return, year after year, are never quite the same people. When many of us first marched, we did it by the hand of an older generation — survivors of the dictatorship and the ghosts of victims. Now we are the adults, accompanying those who remain and ushering new generations in their place.  The children of the victims are now middle-aged, far older than their parents ever got to be. The black-and-white images of victims younger than ourselves feel distant in a way they once did not. The white scarves of the Madres became one of the most recognizable symbols in Argentina. Decades later they were adapted, knotted on wrists, and painted the green of the feminist movement. A later generation did not simply inherit the language of protest; it brought memory into the struggles of the present, reshaping what remembrance could mean and whom it could speak for. Memory, it turns out, does not only preserve the past. It is also used by the living. For many years, Argentina believed it had settled the truth — though even truth, it turns out, is not as settled as we once imagined. The country achieved a measure of justice, bitter though it is; no reparation can repair the harm that was done. Both demands require continued vigilance. An institutional questioning This fiftieth anniversary arrives at a moment when the old certainties feel less secure. The meaning of the dictatorship, the scale of its crimes, and even the language through which the country remembers them have again become subjects of dispute. The liturgy remains, but the congregation no longer recites it with quite the same unanimity. In truth, it never did. The dissent we hear today echoes objections that were always there, even if less audible. What has changed now is that the ritual, which was repeated for decades as the moral foundation of democracy, also came to feel for some like an orthodoxy imposed by a specific political project. This current backlash feeds not only on denial of the past but also on resentment towards a narrative of memory that many experienced as ideology instead of shared history. That resentment is real, and worth understanding. It does not justify historical revision. The crimes of the dictatorship are not diminished by the politics of those who insist on remembering them. What is new is not the doubt, but the institutional form it has taken. In the past two years, official voices have publicly questioned the number of victims, rehabilitated language that democracy had retired, and treated the human rights architecture — built over four decades — as a partisan structure to be dismantled rather than a civic inheritance to be maintained. The culture war has gone from television screens to public policy. The distinction matters. And yet the persistence of the ritual suggests something more complicated. Even when it is questioned, the language of memory continues to structure how Argentina argues with itself about the past. Disputed or not, it remains the lens through which the country confronts its history. Truth has been established, re-established, and contested. Justice, dutiful and bitter, was pursued in the courts. What endured in the streets was memory. Increasingly, memory is what remains. And memory changes its character as it passes between generations. What began as an ethical orientation — an insistence that certain crimes must never be forgotten — gradually becomes something else: a story about who we are. The reshaping of memory Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit argued that certain acts of monstrous wrongdoing make an ethical claim on memory that humanity cannot simply allow to pass into history. Argentina accepted that obligation, and that decision shaped the institutions, legal and cultural, through which Argentine democracy came to understand itself after the dictatorship. Yet Margalit was skeptical about what nations can genuinely remember — memory, he argued, resides in individuals and in the relationships between them. But he also wrote about the moral witness: someone who has experienced evil firsthand and whose testimony makes a claim on the future that survives the witness, provided it is received as an address rather than preserved as an archive.  Argentina built institutions designed to do exactly that. The trials forced perpetrators to face witnesses, making testimony a public and permanent record. The ESMA became a place where absence gives testimony. What is now under attack is not only the memory of what happened. It is the conditions under which that testimony can continue to make its claim. Ex ESMA Space for Memory and Human Rights Inheritance is never neutral. Each generation receives the story under different circumstances and inevitably reshapes it. For those who first marched after the dictatorship, memory was something immediate, almost physical. The absence of the disappeared structured everyday life. A decade later, the demands for justice responded to impunity, to the state’s active sponsorship of forgetting. Another ten years and the march was one of celebration for a memory vindicated. For the youth of today, memory arrived already organized — through trials, memorials, anniversaries, and textbooks. What had once been a demand slowly became a tradition. This is precisely the vulnerability that revisionism exploits. Collective memory is always in some sense constructed — passed down rather than lived, received rather than experienced — and what is constructed can be contested, reframed, and dismantled. That claim is now under attack from multiple directions: institutions stripped of their purpose, language rehabilitated, and history rewritten in classrooms and on television screens. And it comes at exactly the moment when the generation that lived through the dictatorship is leaving us, and the constructed kind of memory is all that remains. This may be the quiet transformation that has taken place in Argentina over the past half century. Memoria, Verdad y Justicia began as a demand addressed to power. Over time it also became something else: a narrative through which democracy tells the story of its own origins. And like all inherited stories, its meaning is never entirely fixed. Traditions survive not because they eliminate disagreement, but because they provide a framework within which disagreement can take place. The rituals remain. The march returns each year. The words are still the same. But the country that pronounces them is not quite the same one that first gave them their force. The question each anniversary poses is not whether the past can be settled, but whether we are still willing to be unsettled by it. Nunca Más.