Blogging disappearance in Diario de una princesa montonera by Mariana Eva Perez
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In the foreword "On Memory and Memorials" in the book Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America, Luisa Valenzuela reminds us of a central question within memory studies: How do we keep remembrance alive without losing respect? (ix).1 The marketdriven present is at risk of creating and maintaining a self-negating practice, where the representation of tragic events are turned into an irreverent spectacle. Valenzuela states that even the words used to describe the traumatic past can be diluted by the market's substitutive nature. The word desaparecidos can allow us to expand on Valenzuela's question, as it is an example of the dangers of misrepresenting trauma for legal, political, or financial gains. The term desaparecidos was first used to hide the military regime's gross crimes against the Argentine people. It was only later that the boom of memory (1995-2003) made the word desaparecidos a common descriptor that refers to the victims of genocide in Argentina.2 The goal of human rights groups like Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio has always been to restore the identities of the disappeared, to recover the identities of the children of the disappeared, and to demand justice from those responsible for state terror. However, recent studies such as Gabriel Gatti's ldentidades desaparecidos, Ana Ros's The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, Cecilia Sosa's Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina's Dictatorship, and Nancy Gates Madsen's Trauma, Taboo, and TruthTelling have signaled a shift within the memory politics of Argentine human rights groups, identifying a complacent attitude that has led to a loss of respect for the complexities involved in remembering the disappeared.