Lucas Manuel Bietti

I am currently a PhD student in Linguistic Communication and Multilingual Mediation at the Pompeu Fabra University and in Linguistics at Macquarie University. Since November 2007 I have been working developing my PhD research project about the discursive reconstruction and uses of collective memory in Argentina. I studied literature and linguistics at the University of Buenos Aires before completing an MA in Cognitive Science and Language at Pompeu Fabra University.

Project: Discursive reconstruction and uses of collective memory in Argentina

Previous government's discourse (2003-2007) and current's (2007-2011) in Argentina promotes and legitimizes a very different ideological stance from that of the democratic government that came after the military dictatorship (1976-1983). I believe that this ideological stance about the “Dirty War” is becoming a new shared knowledge in the social space. This new perspective adopted by the government aims to consider the past standing on the present and projecting it to the future. It tries to make obsolete the cultural model by which a great part of society categorized the genocide experience as a WAR. In other words, according to this cultural model there were two conflicting factions but one of them, the right-wing led by the terrorist state, answered the other in a disproportionate way. The information obtained since the return of democracy proves that between 1976 and 1983 there was a terrorist state which resorted to torture and persons disappearance of people as methods of annihilating the “subversive enemy”. I believe, however, that the conceptualization of the experience in the private discourses (focus groups and interviews) about memory is still carried on through the cultural model of WAR instead of the frame of GENOCIDE, as the government suggests in its discourses since 2003.

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