A fossil book—covered with bark, almost camouflaged with a trunk—has been exhibited at the 50th edition of the Buenos Aires Book Fair, which closes this Monday with great public success. It belonged to the library that Ernesto Blanco’s family buried in 1976 in the patio of their house in San Gregorio, in the Argentine province of Santa Fe, out of fear of the military who had taken power on March 24 of that year. The books were by Joaquín, a student and socialist activist. They spent 42 years underground. When they were unearthed, they could not be read, but they were unique objects, memories of a past in which books and songs were banned and thousands of Argentines were persecuted for their political ideas. Those who did not manage to escape in time, .
The exhibition Planned censorship. Books in the sights of the dictatorship showed the ways in which the military regime attacked culture between 1976 and 1983. The military raided several publishing houses – such as Eudeba, the Latin American Publishing Center and -, ordered their closure and seized everything that seemed subversive. On June 26, 1980, 24 tons of books—the equivalent of one and a half million copies—were burned to ashes.
The couple behind Ediciones La Flor, Daniel Divinsky and Ana María Kuki Miler, were imprisoned because the wife of a general interpreted that one of the books they had published was a mockery of the army. They spent 127 days in prison. They achieved their freedom thanks to the solidarity of national writers and foreign editors. They went into exile until democracy returned.
In those years there were also books stripped, guillotined and thrown into the trash. “They were personal and human reactions of self-defense against fear,” says the exhibition text. “Those who went through those dilemmas remember them with pain and shame,” he continues.
The fear was so fierce that some writers don’t even remember how they got rid of their libraries. This is the case of . Negroni was 24 years old, a law student and political activist when the dictatorship began. “We read Marta Harnecker, Mao, Malraux, Mariátegui, José Martí, Abelardo Ramos, Hernández Arregui, Juan Gelman, John William Cooke. And we listened to the records of Víctor Jara, Violeta Parra, Mercedes Sosa; we watched the films of Pino Solanas. That was the world in which I circulated and, when the military coup came, I can say that I had a library disappeared: I don’t remember how I got rid of those books, those magazines, those records,” he recalled in one of the round tables of the cycle 50 years of writing and reading in Argentinacoordinated by the writer and journalist Verónica Abdala. “I went into exile in a house in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires and in that house there were no books. I have no memories of being a reader because I was very busy trying not to get killed,” she said.
The writer Clara Obligado was saved by the skin of her teeth. He said that in 1976 he was a Literature student and was about to become an assistant in French literature, when he saw that everything around him was becoming rarer and decided to go into exile to Spain, where he lives to this day. Within 24 hours of leaving the country, the military went to look for her. Vicente Battista had already crossed the Atlantic before the start of the military regime, but he was not spared persecution and looting. Two weeks after the coup, members of the Navy surrounded his parents’ house, broke down the door and stole everything they wanted. “They took all my photos, my writings, my love letters, they didn’t leave me anything, not even a photo of my childhood,” Battista recalled at the table he shared with Negroni.
At the Fair’s exhibition, dozens of books that were censored by the regime were exhibited. The selection included political essays but also novels –Earn deathby Griselda Gambaro, The little bottleby Luis Gusmán, among others- and children’s stories, such as An elephant takes up a lot of spaceby Elsa Bornemann and The tower of cubesby Laura Devetach. The copies in circulation were seized and destroyed in one way or another.
Also on that list were the works of , whose son, Ezequiel Martínez, presides over the Book Fair today. “My father was on all the most dangerous lists of the dictatorship, including the last one in 1983, when only 46 names remained,” Martínez stressed when inaugurating a reading marathon of banned books. He recalled that in the prologue of Passion according to Trelew He left a message that resonated during that dark page of Argentine history and is still valid today: “The memory of the people will always be longer than the cunning of those who repress them.”
Writers and editors invited to the Fair recalled the fear they had to overcome in those years and warned against current censorship attempts, as ordered by the Government of Javier Milei or in schools last year.
Some authors, like Luisa Valenzuela, made the decision to go into exile at the end of the seventies when they did not dare to show anyone what they wrote for fear of putting them in danger. Others decided to stay and face threats and job layoffs imposed from above, like Liliana Heker. They could no longer meet in bars or cafes, but they did not stop writing, or inventing ways to circumvent censorship or sharing culture. One of the cracks were the workshops, converted into refuges to talk about literature, writing or philosophy, like the one taught by the thinker Santiago Kovadloff in his home. “They came one by one because many were suspicious and there were some who never came back,” Kovadloff recalled.
The activities linked to the 50th anniversary of the coup were one of the central axes of. The public accompanied the festivities of the largest literary event in Buenos Aires, with 1.3 million visitors, almost 10% more than the previous year.
