The Making of a "Slow, Silent Genocide" on the Edges of Argentina's Soy Boom

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – III

Abstract

Jacques Derrida opens "Spectres of Marx" with a nod to Hamlet’s temporal dislocation: “Time is out of joint.” In this talk, I also question the presumption of linear time marked by the cycle of life and death. My concern is that it risks eliding the ways prior episodes of unsettled violence get remade to fit the present. I take the case of agrochemical exposure in Argentina’s GM soybean belt to examine how Las Madres de Ituzaingó Anexo (MdIA) perform a type of citizenship that strategically indexes older human rights groups, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, as they make claims on the state. Not only does this next generation “causa madre” derive political standing from their activist forbearers, but they transform the question of Argentina’s soy boom from one of economic and geopolitical necessity to one of state violence through neglect. By marshaling ghosts of the prior, the MdIA expose the dark side of dual use chemicals such as glyphosate and 2,4 D and frame the unregulated status of agrochemical spraying as an act of violence. Their success in contesting the sociotechnical imaginary that underpins the soy boom lies in an intentional reshuffling of the temporal order at work in the co-production of agricultural knowledge and justice. It is from the MdIA’s understanding that violence is as slippery as it is structural that they begin to raise a state that might one day be capable of delivering the sort of justice they seek.

Author

• Geneva Smith, University of New Mexico