2023-05-02 04:00:00
Every speculative disorganization, every ego or personalism that has been entangling or trapping political parties or conjunctural electoral associations, in a way that is as tumultuous as it is intuitive, is institutional violence.
By the way, how else can we understand the recurring intrinsic violence, the struggles or latent disputes that we perceive in each misfortune, in each coming and going between the binomial of the current national government? How to understand the more than recent and unfortunate demonstrations against the current electoral legislation for the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Caba), paradoxically uttered by the highest opposition caciques, resisting its legitimate exercise, precisely in charge and by from one of his more than conspicuous “co-religionists” (current presidential candidate); Is this when in Argentina, constitutionally, political parties are fundamental institutions of the democratic system?
Institutional violence also refers and applies to systemic situations of institutions and/or their detachments; For each case, when the complaints or claims of older adults for the poor personal care they receive in public hospital, banking or social security agencies occur or grow.
It is enough to mention our older adults standing in vain queues or very long lines between 4 and 9 in the morning, so that (how many times it happens) they are received with a “shifts are over”, “the system fell”, ” come back next week” or “we are on strike / assembly / working according to regulations”.
Institutional violence also includes those state mechanisms, active or omissive, that guarantee impunity, obscene illicit enrichment of officials, legislators and magistrates; money laundering, the use of the State to favor the interests of large economic groups or the contracting country, the criminalization or extortion of legitimate social protests (today, the just claims of teachers and health personnel throughout the national territory).
It is also institutional violence when, at the mercy of this ruling political class, in the last 40 years the people have become impoverished like never before in the context of unprecedented democratic flaccidity. The latter was nourished by a growing loss of prestige of what we understood as “politics”, which not only deteriorated the quality of life of the people, but seriously damaged it with the narcissisms of certain political protagonists. Incarnated in those who, rather than understanding the common good as the end, limit and amalgamation of the State, subordinated the general interest like a metonymy to a new and unjustifiable good life and to the personal enrichment of four generations, between relatives and friends or “families spending public”.
In short, said institutional violence does not end here. Indeed, more than frequent and invisible are those rebuffed citizen petitions on the occasion of trying to publicly and legally denounce some type of violence: physical, psychological, sexual, employer, economic insecurity (proliferation and sophistication of thefts and robberies), patrimonial, intellectual -ideological (lies, fallacies, deceit, post-truths) or ecological/environmental. Above all when the relevant authority or official (without reason or foundation) refuses to receive them, despite their specific powers that, institutionally, correspond to them and oblige them in a qualified manner in relation to such illicit acts.
Lastly, as a scandalous black fact, institutional violence reached its paroxysm when the then President General Juan Domingo Perón, after the death of his wife Eva Duarte, arbitrarily decreed and imposed mandatory personal mourning throughout the country, a month of mourning national as the change of the name of towns and cities, among many other of its abuses, typical of its absolute power.
* University teacher and researcher
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