Eduardo Sacheri presents a novel about the “armed struggle” in Argentina and how that time is similar to the “Milei era”

Critically address the guerrilla issue in Argentina It is uncomfortable to this day. In 1975, in a turbulent Argentina, groups that believed in taking power by the grace of the rifle operated in the cities. Months later, the nightmare imposed by one of the bloodiest military coups, that of General Jorge Rafael Videla, would cause the Montoneros guerrillas or the self-proclaimed People’s Revolutionary Army to be remembered with a certain romanticism.

For Eduardo Sacheri, author of “We Two in the Storm,” a novel that addresses this violent situation based on the friendship between two friends involved in revolutionary activities, this idealized romanticization includes a symbolic disarmament of the guerrillas. “What was an option for weapons to seize power, becomes a social militancy of diffuse borders, of ideals, without any type of militarized base,” explains the author of “The Question in Their Eyes.” It is, in the author’s words, a “facelift” that is not very understandable, but socially very profound in the popular and middle classes, which has led to the invention of a different past for the country. “Our societies, fortunately, today do not consider violence as a legitimate political tool. At that time, yes. This tension between the consideration of past and current violence, instead of resolving it through understanding and comparison, is resolved through inventing a different past. That seems pitiful in terms of our knowledge of history, on this topic or on anyone.”, he points out.

—You return to the government of Isabel Perón in 1975, the year in which a good part of “The Question in Their Eyes” takes place. Are the moments leading up to a dictatorship more interesting for a writer than the dictatorship itself?

It happens to me that the moments that have been widely visited by literature and cinema are not very fruitful to me, in the sense that I feel that I have nothing more to say, nothing more to add. There has already been a lot of talk about it. It happens with the dictatorship, it happens with the moment of founding of the Peronist movement. I feel that on these topics, which have been widely visited for very good reasons, I have nothing to say. In that sense, I find it much more interesting to go to times not frequented by literature. And the whole return of Perón, his death and his replacement by Isabel, is a very uncomfortable topic for Peronism in my country. The savage confrontation within Peronism between the left and the right is not an issue that Peronism remembers with joy, nor does it like others, who are not Peronists, to remember it. That also makes it interesting.

We are talking about two young guerrillas, but also about their friends, their victims and their family. And from a father who knows what is happening with his son, but he doesn’t ask to avoid losing him. How much of your own father fears are in this novel?

Not only about my fears, my questions, my doubts, my desires, about all that as a father, there is a lot in my novels. My novels always have a space where beyond the fiction that I am telling you, I dedicate myself to thinking out loud about issues in my life and things that matter to me. Undoubtedly, my fatherhood is one of the things that matter most to me in life, that’s why it appears.

—Both guerrillas are committed to the “revolutionary conquest of power”; However, the fight for leadership within the party cell reproduces mechanisms of more traditional politics. Is it impossible to break that dynamic?

It seems to me that this absolute idealization that these young people made of their own possibilities, their own qualities, that grandiloquence with which they felt they were founding a new world, made it difficult for them to search for paths of possibility. That “all or nothing” that finally was nothing and that is so similar to some options today. I am writing to you from an Argentina that is approaching a presidential election and these things of “all or nothing”, everything new or everything old, everything pure or everything disastrous, the revolutionaries adopted that Manichaeism and that is how it turned out for them. And that’s how it went for us. And that’s how it goes for us.

—After 50 years, how different do you think the political demands of Argentine youth are today?

I think that today Argentine youth is much more invested in demands, sometimes from groups, sometimes from individuals. When I say group I think of the visibility of gender identity or feminism, which are quite strong. And sometimes in an absolutely individual way: before I told you that we are very close to a national election, where Milei, who is strongly identified with a very rabid, very angry individualism, will probably win. Well, it seems to me that it is not coincidental and it is not minor. It seems to me that the demands of today’s youth follow these paths. Far from the armed struggle and, above all, also far from collective projects or very comprehensive and generalized narratives.

—Do you think that today ideological radicalism has more to do with political correctness and the cancellation of the most divergent thinking?

I quite agree with the formulation. I get the feeling that, in all times, there is a longing for certainty. This desire to move according to an irreproachable and irreproachable morality. It is something that human beings carry very deeply, that it is very difficult to get out of it, and that in different times unique thoughts always seek to consolidate, express themselves and silence dissidence, whatever they may be. And in that a clear kinship serves, between some “unanimisms” and others.

—In an interview I read that part of your reading for this novel was “How difficult it is to be God”, a book by Carlos Iván Degregori, (a great sociologist that we greatly need) that warns of how a messianic or utopian project has the life of others. It is something we now see in Hamas attacks. Do you think that it is language, for example our ability to call “revolutionary expropriation” what is a simple kidnapping, that allows these groups to justify disposing of the freedom or lives of others?

In the novel I tried, when the point of view was that of these kids, to respect their way of seeing the world, which undoubtedly includes a language. A way of naming the world is a way of legitimizing certain things and condemning others. This link that you establish with Hamas continues along the same lines as the previous question: I suppose that providing your ideology, your political practice, with a pure, crystalline and perfect foundation serves to embolden you and free you from doubt and doubt. guilt, two things that, luckily, are also very human. The older I get, the more I harbor doubt and the healthier the guilt seems to me. Guilt is a necessary brake on our most destructive impulses toward what is different from us.

—Does language structure reality or rather an illusion of it? I think, for example, how the guerrilla in Argentina and Sendero in Peru felt triumphant, very close to taking power. These are closed groups, which moved in small circles, feeding each other, all thinking the same thing. Don’t you think the same thing happens today with social networks?

Language structures reality only up to a point. Then, reality demolishes those linguistic and semantic castles in which many ideologies take pleasure in building and enclosing themselves. I believe that the same clandestine revolutionary militancy favored this encapsulation. Closed groups, management documents that had to be analyzed, your only reference groups were those cells. Your distance from reality undoubtedly increased as your clandestine life grew and consolidated. As for social media, I partly think the same. One designs itineraries on the networks, circles that favor this cloistered vision of all people who think like me or feel like me. However, it seems to me that there is a broader dynamic in the networks, despite everything. Even if it is in denigration, there is a place for the other’s first-hand speech. In that sense, it seems a little less harmful to me than those cloistered worlds we talked about before. It’s not that I find networks wonderful, but it seems to me that they have positive elements: horizontal circulation, even if we bias it with our choices, is one of the advantages of social networks.