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‘The Other War’ is a journey through the enormous wound that the Malvinas war represents for Argentina. Written by Leila Guerriero, winner of the Gabo Foundation award for best journalist, the book has been circulating in France since May under the title ‘L’Autre Guerre’, published by Payot-Rivages editions. The author, who offered the scoop on her interviews in the French capital to ‘Layover in Paris’, says that she wrote it “trying not to underline the tragedy, because the tragedy was already enormous.”
Four decades after the end of the Malvinas war, the memory of the conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom is still alive, on the surface.
“It is a complex war, there was an exacerbated nationalism on the part of some people, even on the part of the relatives of the fallen who claim the deed of Malvinas as a just deed, and the shame or opprobrium that a part of the Argentine people feel for having participated in a war that was promoted by a military junta. The fallen were covered under the same cloak of the word heroes, which complicates things a lot”, points out the also author of ‘The Suicides of the End of the World: Chronicle of a Patagonian Town’.
At the end of the war, nearly 200 bodies of Argentine soldiers and officers remained in the Malvinas without being able to be recognized. The United Kingdom proposed at the time to facilitate the repatriation of these bodies to the continent. But “the word repatriate was the problem of everything that later determined 40 years of silence, because the dictatorship said that what is on one’s own soil is not repatriated.”
We spoke with Leila Guerriero about her style, a style in which she is the witness and transmission leash of an unknown being, the reader of ‘The Other War’. “Hundreds of relatives traveling in time without knowing where their children are, without being able to go see them, also hostage to a conflicting ideology. The tragedy was so great that I tried to temper the style, transform it into a very brutal, very dry, very direct”, tells us the author, who is one of the most outstanding current writers in the region.
‘L’autre guerre’ also narrates the genesis of an organization known worldwide, but whose beginnings were bizarre: the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, created in 1984. “Many were not received, they were barely 20 years old and the breath of the dictatorship was I still felt in the back of the neck, that is, there was no guarantee of the work they were doing, but they devoted themselves to the search for the remains of those who disappeared during the military dictatorship”, recalls Guerriero.
A team whose work is known worldwide and which has been key to clarifying the shadows of the Argentine dictatorship. A thankless job also because his rigorous and scientific search runs over memories and armed realities to cope with the worst.
It took decades for the names of a hundred of the soldiers who fell during the war to be engraved on a stele in the Darwin cemetery, in the Falkland Islands.
