As 2006 came to a close, the president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, made a televised address to the nation. Reading closely from his script in a thick, guttural accent, his cross-eyes scanning the pages, Kirchner angrily declared that he would stand firm in the defence of human rights and the rule of law. He would not, he said, be blackmailed by rogue elements into reversing his policy of bringing the torturers and killers of Argentina's notorious military dictatorship to justice.
Half an hour later, a man was thrown out of a car in northern Buenos Aires. He was Luis Gérez, a 51-year-old construction worker and left-wing activist who had gone missing two days earlier. Gérez had testified that he'd been tortured by a former mayor and police chief of Escobar in the 1970s. Earlier in the year, another witness in the trial against a police chief had gone missing and hadn't been found. Political kidnapping had returned to Argentina.
The use of the corpse as a political weapon has a long pedigree in Argentina. The country's most famous daughter, Eva Perón, was embalmed on the night of her death in preparation for display to her millions of followers. But her body disappeared when the military overthrew her husband Juan in 1955, turning up years later in a cemetery in Milan, where the generals had dispatched it, terrified by its symbolic power. To secure its return, left-wing guerrillas kidnapped the corpse of the former military dictator Aramburu, having murdered him for his role in the repression of Perón's supporters. Both now lie in Recoleta cemetery. Eva's tomb is now a premier tourist attraction, her body protected by vaults and trapdoors.
Juan Perón's body has also been fought over in the struggle over his political legacy. When he returned to Argentina in 1973 for his last fateful presidency, camouflaged snipers opened fire on militants among the vast throng at the airport awaiting his arrival, leaving scores dead. This tragedy was repeated as farce last year when trade unionists fought a gun battle over Perón's coffin as it arrived for ceremonial reburial in the town where he spent his summer. In 1987, his corpse had been mutilated in a bizarre ritualistic attack. His hands were chopped off and various artefacts were stolen. In their place was left a ransom note, signed "Hermes Iai y los 13." No one knows who did it.
Exile of the body signals an unbearable loss in the Argentinean national imagination. If the body is not in its proper resting place, the nation is incomplete. The remains of José de San Martin, the father of the nation, were brought back from Paris and now rest resplendent in Buenos Aires Cathedral, draped in the national flag. Even as late as 1989, the ashes of the 19th-century dictator General Rosas were repatriated from Southampton, where he had died a political refugee. National unity is symbolised in the bodies of dead leaders, disunity by their absence.
What explains this struggle over political corpses? The writer Tomás Eloy Martinez calls it a national necrophilia: "like tango, the pollen of necrophilia tinges the air of the country with melancholy," he wrote. But the Argentinians are not uniquely possessed of an overweening death drive. Nor are they prone to some Hispanic predisposition to celebrate the dead. In Argentina the body is political because of the diseases with which the country's body politic has been riddled.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. It had absorbed millions of European immigrants, welding them into a country replete with symbols of national pride and confident in its prosperity. After 1912, it had universal male suffrage, the secret ballot and compulsory voting. A healthy democracy seemed assured.
By the end of the century, this optimism had evaporated. Argentina had steadily declined, to the point of economic meltdown in 2001. At the heart of this prolonged crisis was a failure to cement a constitutional liberal democracy. For much of the century, Argentina alternated between authoritarian populism and military dictatorship, culminating in the terrorist state of 1976-83, when the techniques of kidnapping, torture and "disappearance" were perfected on the bodies of thousands.
The secret of Perón's success was his combination of the national and the popular. He hailed "the people" in the fight against oligarchs. He spoke to the flesh and blood of workers, not their rights as liberal citizens. His corporatism was authoritarian, but laced with social justice. As such, Peronism inhibited the formation of regular party politics of the modern European kind. When its populist appeal exceeded the bounds of the Argentinian elite's tolerance, the military stepped in.
The body symbolises this political stillbirth. On the one hand, it is charged with a ritual power long discarded by the rational discourse of constitutional democracies. Body politics represents the failure of constitutional modernisation. On the other, it bears witness to the modernity of military repression, in the apparatus of torture and the ghostly absence of young men and women whose bodies are still missing.
Kirchner is trying to cut through this history, to bring justice to its victims and to solidify constitutional norms. He can only hope that last year's kidnappings are the death throes of the old cuerpo político.
