And then this great gathering found its voice, and a single rebellious cry rose up from the crowds of grandmothers and high school students, motorcycle couriers and unemployed factory workers, their words directed at the politicians, the bankers, the IMF, and every other “expert” who claimed to have the perfect recipe for Argentina’s prosperity and stability: “?Que se vayan todos!”—everyone must go! Demonstrators stayed in the streets even after protesters were killed in clashes with police, bringing the total who lost their lives across the country to more than twenty. Amidst the mayhem, the president was forced to lift the state of siege and flee the presidential palace in a helicopter. As a new president was appointed, the people would rise up and reject him in disgust—again and then again, flipping through three presidents in just three weeks.
Meanwhile, in the rubble of Argentina’s democracy, something strange and wonderful started to happen: neighbors poked their heads out of their apartments and houses and, in the absence of a political leadership or a stable government, began to talk to each other. To think together. A month later, there were already some 250 “asambleas barriales” (neighborhood assemblies, small and large) in downtown Buenos Aires alone. Picture Occupy Wall Street—but everywhere. The streets, parks, and plazas were filled with meetings as people stayed up late into the night, planning, arguing, testifying—and voting on everything from whether Argentina should pay its foreign debts, to when the next protest should be held, to how to support a group of workers who had turned their abandoned factory into a democratic cooperative.
Many of those first assemblies were as much group therapy as political meetings. Participants spoke about their experience of isolation in a city of 13 million. Academics and shopkeepers apologized for not watching out for each other, publicity managers admitted that they used to look down on unemployed factory workers, assuming they deserved their plight, never imagining that the crisis would reach the bank accounts of the cosmopolitan middle class. And apologies for present-day wrongs soon gave way to tearful confessions about events dating back to the dictatorship. I witnessed a housewife stand up and publicly admit that, three decades earlier, when she heard yet another story about someone’s brother or husband being kidnapped by the junta, she had learned to close her heart to the suffering, telling herself, “Por algo será”—it must have been for something. They were trying to understand, together, how they had lost so much in the past, and building relationships to prevent those mistakes from ever being repeated.
And from below, they were changing the story of a nation.
The political changes that came out of Argentina’s uprising were far from utopian. The government that eventually restored democracy, headed first by Néstor Kirchner and then by his wife Cristina, was masterful at reading the street, and channeled enough of its spirit and demands to preside over more than a decade of progressive (if scandal-marred) rule. To this day, debates rage about how more could have been made from that unique political moment if the popular movements had been ready with their own plan for taking power and governing differently. Yet it’s undeniable that, in resisting de la Rúa’s austerity plans and defying his order to stay home, Argentinians saved themselves from years of economic bloodletting.
When Spain Said No
Another example of how historical memory can serve as a powerful shock absorber took place a few years later, in Spain. On March 11, 2004, ten bombs ripped through commuter trains and rail stations in Madrid, killing nearly two hundred people. Because it was an attack on a transit system that almost everyone in Madrid used, the sense that anyone could be the next victim spread rapidly through the city, as it would in Paris more than a decade later when simultaneous attacks terrorized that city.
An official investigation found that the attacks had been staged by a terrorist cell inspired by al Qaeda, reportedly in retaliation for Spain’s participation in the US-led invasion of Iraq. Yet Spain’s prime minister at the time, José María Aznar, immediately went on television and told Spaniards to blame the Basque separatists and—in a bizarre non sequitur—to support his unpopular decision to participate in the Iraq War. “No negotiation is possible or desirable with these assassins who so many times have sown death all around Spain. Only with firmness can we end the attacks,” Aznar said.
In the United States after 9/11, many, including most of the media, saw the “with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as evidence of strong leadership, and handed them enormous new powers to fight what would become the never-ending “war on terror.” (Turkey’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, would pull off something even more draconian after a failed coup attempt in 2016, later locking in sweeping new powers in a referendum.) And yet when Aznar tried similar tactics on his grief-stricken population, they were not seen as evidence of strong leadership but rather as an ominous sign of a resurgent fascism. “We are still hearing the echoes of Franco,” said José Antonio Martines Soler, a prominent Madrid newspaper editor who had been persecuted under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, which terrorized the country for thirty-six years. “In every act, in every gesture, in every sentence, Aznar told the people he was right, that he was the owner of the truth and those who disagreed with him were his enemies.”
So, over the next two days, remembering a time when fear had governed their country, Spaniards surged into the streets in impressive numbers, saying no to fear and to terrorism—but also to government lies and the Iraq War. All of this happened to be on the eve of national elections, and voters seized the opportunity to defeat Aznar and vote in a party that promised to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. It was the collective memory of past shocks that made Spain resistant to new ones.
9/11 and the Perils of Official Forgetting