A different perspective

Thursday, August 14

Today, a classmate came it late with a bit of a bruise under her eye.  She was robbed on her way to the university my a motochorro (motorcycle theif).  It was sad news, but she was happy to be ok.  The professor took the opportunity to talk to the whole class about being careful and trying to camouflage ourselves so that we don't seem like foreigners or 'easy targets'.  I was warned about this by the person who came here before me, so I wasn't surprised; I was just sad for the girl who was robbed.

As far as class goes, it was very interesting today.  We looked at a little history of the last Argentine dictatorship so that we could have a context for the literature and cinema we were going to read and watch.  I had studied this a little in the United States, so I had a vague idea of what was going on.  However, what interested me was learning this from Argentina's own perspective, rather than from a distance like at Samford.

One of the biggest differences was talking about perhaps Argentina's lowest point of history- Los desaparecidos (the disappeared people).  During the military dictatorship, enemies of the de facto military government and millions of innocent people related to them were spirited away into clandestine detention centers and were tortured and killed. Many of the kidnapped were pregnant, and their babies were given to other families-no questions asked. It was terrible. In order to distract the public eye from this, the government used the World Cup as a nationalistic movement.  When the Cup was over, they picked and old scab and started a war with Great Britain over the islands off the coast (Las islas Malvinas vs Falkland Islands), all to keep this "Dirty war"(as it was called in the US) under wraps.

In my previous studies, this was called the Dirty war.  However, I asked the professor and he said that this is a bad label.  He told me to be careful with the word 'war.'  He said "war is when I can kill you and you can kill me.  We both have the power to fight.  This was not a war."  And that's true.  It's interesting how much a name or label can affect your perception of something.  I think I will like these classes.