Argentina is still recovering from the political violence and State repression perpetrated during the Videla regime (1976–83). Chicas muertas invites a rewriting of the collective memory to include the victims of gender-based violence and femicide in the country. In this regard, the testimonies surrounding the murders of the girls and other women lead the reader to consider to what extent violence against women and the impunity over it show the continuity of the repressive system, a legacy of bygone times, which silences the deaths of the marginalised in Argentina. In this way, the book can be taken as contributing to the narrative corpus of Argentinean testimonial literature, as we shall see next.
María Celeste Cabral presents the periodicity of the testimonial literary corpus in Argentina since Videla’s dictatorship in her article ‘
Chicas muertas de Selva Almada. Nuevas formas de la memoria sobre el femicidio en la narrativa Argentina’.
1 María Celeste Cabral, ‘Chicas muertas de Selva Almada. Nuevas formas de la memoria sobre el femicidio en la narrativa Argentina’, Orbis Tertius, 23.28 (2018), e094. Drawing on Sosnowski,
2 Saúl Sosnowski, ‘Políticas de la memoria y el olvido’, in Cartografía de las letras Hispanoamericanas: tejidos de la memoria, ed. by Carlos Gazzera and Alejo Carbonell (Villa María: Eduvim, 2015), pp. 131–49. Celeste Cabral argues that authors used narrative ellipsis and metaphorical allusions to address the political violence during the time of the dictatorship. Novels such as
Respiración artificial (1980) by Ricardo Piglia and
Nadie nada nunca (1980) by Juan José Saer, among others, belong to this group.
3 Ricardo Piglia, Respiración artificial (Buenos Aires: Editorial Pomaire, 1980); Juan José Saer, Nadie nada nunca (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1980). In the mid-1990s, authors returned to realism to present in the first person the family lives of the military and their civilian accomplices. These novels included
Ni muerto has perdido tu nombre (2002) by Luis Gusmán,
Dos veces junio (2002) by Martín Kohan and
El fin de la historia (1996) by Liliana Heker.
4 Luis Gusmán, Ni muerto has perdido tu nombre (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2002); Martín Kohan, Dos veces junio (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2002); Liliana Heker, El fin de la historia (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1996).The December 2001 crisis in Argentina, also known as the Cacerolazo, was a humanitarian, representative, social, economic, financial and political crisis that caused the resignation of the then president of Argentina, Fernando de la Rúa. It happened within the framework of a major emergency situation that lasted between 1998 and 2002, caused by a long recession. During the crisis, 39 people were murdered by State and private security agents, including seven children aged between 13 and 18 years old. Elsa Drucaroff states that this social outbreak initiated a third stage in the testimonial literature, led by authors born after 1970. These authors do not present the assassinated and disappeared militants as innocent victims of Videla’s State apparatus. Instead, they portray the enthusiasm of the military and the heroism of the many activists who participated in the armed conflict.
5 Elsa Drucaroff, Los prisioneros de la torre. Política, relatos y jóvenes en la postdictadura (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2011).Resulting from the progress of the trials of the repressors, some authors also addressed the memories of clandestine childhoods and their impact on the present using irony, humour and parody. Such is the case with Raquel Robles, Félix Bruzzone, Mariana Eva Pérez and Pola Oloixarac, among others. Others narrated the family lives of the militants and portrayed them in an affective dimension, with references to their pasts before they entered the political arena. These works include those by Laura Alcoba, Leopoldo Brizuela, Julián López and Marta Dillon.
In the investigation of María Luisa’s death, Almada argues that ‘a police with the vices of the dictatorship bogged down the case’.
6 Spanish original: ‘una policía con los vicios de la dictadura empantanaron el caso’; Chicas muertas, p. 152. María Luisa’s case was full of inaccuracies and was based mainly on presumption and rumours. We learn that the police continued using repressive measures to obtain relevant information: ‘This gallery of alleged murderers and accomplices is joined by the policemen accused of obtaining false statements by force of blows, officers who were quickly sent on vacation until things calmed down’.
7 Spanish original: ‘A esta galería de presuntos asesinos y cómplices, se suman los policías acusados de conseguir declaraciones falsas a fuerza de golpes, oficiales que eran rápidamente enviados de vacaciones hasta que la cosa se calmara’; Chicas muertas, p. 153. There is also an indication of corruption in the investigation of Sarita’s femicide, as the girl had links with local politicians of the Comité Radical (Radical Committee): ‘She had a portfolio of clients from the Radical Committee. She and her friend Miriam García became party members, two pretty young girls who immediately captured the attention of older men, with good social positions and a double discourse’.
8 Spanish original: ‘Ella y su amiga Miriam García eran militantes del partido, dos muchachas jóvenes y lindas que enseguida acapararon la atención de los señores mayores, de buena posición social y doble discurso’; Chicas muertas, p. 57. These scenes testify how the corrupt State forces take advantage of girls and women, who do whatever is necessary to escape structural poverty. Almada delves into how poverty often enhances violent conduct against women and reveals some degrading rituals for girls that objectify them and annihilate their identities. For example, there is the custom or game of ‘marking a calf’. The goal is to mark a girl from a low class, have one of the group seduce her for a few days, and then trick her and lure her to a solitary place, where all of the group can rape her.
But there is another important issue to consider when looking at the testimonial value of Chicas muertas. Femicides are treated as non-important local phenomena by the national newspapers, despite the names of the victims adorning their front pages. This shows evidence of the double discourse operating in Buenos Aires and rural areas. Andrea, María Luisa and Sarita are humble girls from Chaco or Entre Ríos: they are young, inexperienced domestic workers, prostitutes or students, unprotected by their families and by the State. Their murders are not of any interest in the capital, where there is confusion around their lives. Consequently, their stories are silenced and relegated from the official memory of the country.
Almada therefore refers to two different realities running in parallel in Argentina. At the time when the girls’ femicides were perpetrated, Buenos Aires was celebrating the so-called ‘Primavera alfonsinista’, when President Raúl Alfonsín came to power on 10 December 1983. It was a moment of verve, and the public had high expectations of the new president’s promises for the re-examination of the armed forces, the ‘señores de la guerra’ (‘lords of war’) and their supporters. Almada writes: ‘While everyone was celebrating, the Quevedos kept looking for María Luisa’.
9 Spanish original: ‘Mientras todos celebraban, los Quevedo seguían buscando a María Luisa’; Chicas muertas, p. 26. Almada highlights that while the country was celebrating the end of impunity for those responsible for State terrorism, the new democracy kept silencing the killings of anonymous women and girls in a remote village in the interior of the country. Almada told Garrido:
This reflects how things are resolved in Argentina. […] When a violent death occurs, newspapers and television turn upside down, particularly if it happens in a town. But later, it is diluted, everything is forgotten, and nobody wonders who killed or why it happened.
10 Spanish original: ‘Esto tiene mucho que ver con cómo se resuelven las cosas en Argentina. […] Cuando ocurre una muerte violenta, los diarios y la televisión se vuelcan y si es en un pueblo con más razón. Pero después se diluye, todo se olvida, ya nadie se pregunta quién mató ni por qué’; Garrido, ‘Selva Almada’.The testimonial literature on femicide in Argentina aims to incorporate the victims into the official discourse of the country.
New stories and new remains of other women emerge through Almada’s investigation as part of the oral history of the area. For example, in the aftermath of a meal, her father-in-law refers to the murder of ‘la Carahuni’ and ‘immediately someone remembers a more recent case, from ’97, that of Andrea Strumberger, a 17-year-old girl, a student from secondary school’;
11 Spanish original: ‘enseguida alguien recuerda un caso más reciente, del 97, el de Andrea Strumberger, una muchacha de diecisiete años, estudiante de secundaria’; Chicas muertas, p. 86. a friend talks about a girl prostituting for food at the bus terminal; and a woman explains that María Luisa was abandoned a few metres away from the vacant lot Almada is photographing, which is in reality the site of the crime of ‘la Maira Tévez’, whose boyfriend shot her in the head before severing her body into parts.
12 Chicas muertas, p. 173. The cases of femicide are endless; Almada includes in the epilogue another ten reported femicides that occurred in the month before the book went to print.
Hardly anybody provides valid testimonies of the girls’ and women’s fears and hopes. Almada cannot use the testimonies of the victims, not only because they are dead but also because there are no records of them. There are no witnesses for their murders, and the testimonies presented do not reveal the identities of the killers. Their lives, like their deaths, are addressed vaguely, at family gatherings, with silence and rumours. Almada resents the missing testimonies of the girls. She is so eager to get them that she even rehearses a dialogue with the murdered: ‘Where are you, Sarita? Who is the other dead girl?’
13 Spanish original: ‘¿Dónde estás Sarita? ¿Quién es la otra chica muerta?’; Chicas muertas, p. 176. The lack of testimonial accounts from the victims triggers the narrator to use a set of strategies to prove the urgent need to address the issue. Almada recounts how when she was hitchhiking, a man tried to take her and her friend and how another offered to have sex with her in exchange for a few pesos.
She also tries to fill the void of first-person testimonies with inappropriate resources that are out of place in the crime investigation and testimonial corpus. The narrator remembers her childhood visits to the village healer, who cured her evil eye.
14 Chicas muertas, p. 46. The chronicler visits a tarot reader, ‘la Señora’, whom she visits regularly to ‘communicate’ with the girls and learn about their pasts. The character of ‘la Señora’ reveals how
Chicas muertas can be perceived as a testimonial book. She says in a tarot session: ‘If we manage to decipher our views on them, we will get their views on the world in which they lived’.
15 Spanish original: ‘Si logramos saber cómo eran miradas, vamos a saber cuál era la mirada que ellas tenían sobre el mundo’; Chicas muertas, p. 109. What is striking about this quote is that the second part of the conditional should be ‘we will find out who murdered them, how and why’. This makes it clear that Almada does not intend to discover the identities of the girls’ murderers but rather to give visibility to the dangers that girls and women have endured and still endure in rural Argentina.
Almada investigates the fragments of their past lives in an obsessive, almost detective-like way; consults police files and other documents; observes portraits and areas of houses and gardens; talks with relatives; walks the paths of the dead girls; and, ultimately, looks at the same things the girls looked at. In this way, Almada achieves her objective. Chicas muertas manages to draw attention to the femicides of girls and women in contemporary rural Argentina, a place marked by the inheritance of violence and corruption from the Videla dictatorship.