A Malvinas Veteran Onstage: From Intimate Testimony to Public Memorialization

Abstract

A Malvinas Veteran Onstage:From Intimate Testimony to Public Memorialization Brenda Werth (bio) The semi-autobiographical1 play Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio (Museum Miguel Ángel Boezzio) premiered in Buenos Aires in 1998 as part of Vivi Tellas's theatre experiment Proyecto Museos (Project Museums). In the framework of Proyecto Museos, directors envision museums as theatrical spaces filled with performative elements and theatres as spaces for memorialization and display. The process of crisscrossing and reconceptualizing the functions and intentions of these spaces draws attention to the politics behind the memorialization and display of past events and experiences. Directed by Federico León and inspired by his visit to the National Aeronautical Museum in greater Buenos Aires, Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio stars Malvinas War2 veteran Miguel Ángel Boezzio playing himself. Boezzio's performance of his life can be interpreted as an act of self-memorialization, and, as I seek to demonstrate here, the discourse of memorialization ultimately provided the lexicon, symbols, and architecture that have proven essential for breaking the public silence that has surrounded the Malvinas War in post-dictatorial Argentina. In the performance of Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio, Boezzio generates bonds of attachment and intimacy with audience members to create a sense of shared experience that transcends the personal. Drawing on Boezzio's autobiographical performance, I analyze the ways in which affective bonds created through cultural production are not only integral to processes of memorializing the Malvinas War but are also key to negotiating ongoing claims regarding the geopolitical status of Malvinas. In late 1981, as a last ditch effort to regain popular support for the foundering dictatorship, Argentina's military regime summoned the nation's historical identification with the Malvinas Islands and fueled an emotional campaign to reclaim the Islands from the British, who had established a permanent colony in the South Atlantic Islands since 1833. On April 2, 1982, Argentine troops invaded the Islands but the British Royal Navy was quickly able to overpower and force the Argentine military to surrender after just 74 days of combat. Because Argentine media accounts before the invasion promised a certain victory, the fast and crushing defeat left the majority of Argentines feeling stunned, [End Page 83] humiliated and betrayed by a military government, by then much dis-credited. In the months following the defeat, the ostensible rationale of the war (to recover national territory) became overshadowed by what the general public grew to perceive as an attempt by military officials to secure an exit strategy that would detract attention away from the systematic detentions, tortures, and disappearances they had committed during their six years in power (1976-1983). Put simply, the Malvinas campaign was designed to allow the military government to purge their "dirty war" with a "clean war."3 The Argentina the Malvinas veterans came home to was not the country they had left just two months earlier. In the lead-up to the war, they were hailed as heroes shouldering the legacy of the country's founding fathers and Independence fighters, Generals San Martín and Belgrano; upon return they were no longer perceived as future fathers of the nation, but instead were referred to as the "chicos de la guerra" (the boys/children of war), who found themselves re-assimilated into society as victims.4 While the disappeared could not physically reappear to incriminate their victimizers, the Malvinas veterans could and did, and their mere presence made the military uneasy. Eager to bury their humiliating defeat and unethical actions in the past, the military tried to remove the returned vets from the public eye. They loaded them onto covered trucks and sent them to bases in remote locations, where they were confined, sometimes for weeks, and prohibited from contacting their families.5 These tactics for making Malvinas vets invisible after the war were disturbingly similar to the ones undertaken during the operatives to kidnap and detain socalled "subversives."6 How to address the war during the transition presented a unique challenge to government officials, intellectuals and artists; the war was in many ways emblematic both of the dictatorship and of the transition to democracy; the soldiers who were sent to Malvinas to fight were members of the...