Opposition to the Argentinian Dictatorship

One of the images that came back to me when I was reading the article of Ricardo Piglia was the role of musicians like Charly Garcia who also through art and metaphor managed to deliver a message of hope and a future of possibilities in the uncertain times of the Argentinian dictatorship. Particularly relevant to the theme at hand are songs like “Los Dinosauros” which refers as the dinosaurs as the hoary political structure that will for certain disappear when time comes. Part of the chorus says something along the lines that “the friends of your neighbourhood could disappear, the person that you love could disappear, but the dinosaurs will disappear.” In a sense the song tries to give hope to those who despair seeing that people are disappearing and nothing is changing for good. Those in power continued disappearing people, particularly the people around you; however, it is a fact that they “the dinosaurs” will disappear. Moreover, Charly Garcia is not the only one who used art to channel or express the fear, hope and uncertainty of those who felt overwhelmed by the oppressive State powers. There were also people like Juan Gelman, who although having lost a son and a pregnant daughter at the hands of Argentinian State forces, remained a faithful to the possibility of a world after the Junta.

Although the songs now seem more like historical documents of a few daring musicians who decided to take a stance on their political situations, there were also a few historical conditions that should be remembered when considering the mentioned songs and poems. The first one is that there was a strong censorship that decided what was to be heard in the radios and sung in public recitals, so the songs needed to deliver the message trying to use as much allegory and metaphors that the agents of the government were not able to see what was really being said, while managing to deliver the message to the listeners. Another factor that also contributed to the development of Argentinian music industry and the allegoric mechanism of delivering the message bypassing the censorship was the fact that around the war of the Malvinas Islands music and art in English was forbidden and that to a certain extent obliged people to explore the peculiarity of the circumstances that they lived as well as poetic mechanisms to bypass the governmental censorship.

Although I have focused mostly in music and a few poems mostly because it is the material with which I grew up, I simply wanted to point out that although the Mothers of the Plaza the Mayo are recognized as “the only visible oppositional presence during the dark years of the dictatorship” there were also people who although not so visible as the mothers, were also struggling to dissent from the powers of the Argentinian dictatorship, who perhaps had a greater range of influence.