| CEDES’ 30th anniversary > Opening remarks: Silvina Ramos, CEDES Director > Oscar Oszlak > Catalina Smulovitz > María del Carmen Feijoo > Roberto Bouzas > Closing remarks: Silvina Ramos, CEDES Director [To download pdf documents clic here] |
| CEDES’ 30th anniversary > Opening > Silvina Ramos, CEDES Director Good afternoon everyone. I wish to thank you for being here today. When at CEDES we started talking about how to celebrate our 30th anniversary, we thought of different proposals, different in size, and in how difficult they were to organize. We pondered about each one of them until we realized that what we really wanted to do was hold a party to share with our friends and colleagues, a get-together to celebrate pleasant memories of these 30 years, a party to thank the people for their inputs that have allowed us to sustain and grow our institution. Therefore we invited you to attend this celebration. And we have also convened to the party those friends who are sitting at this table so that they talk to us about their memories and, through such memories, about our institution. Institutions always go beyond their members but, however, live at the pace of the styles and histories of the people working for them. That is why during this celebration, we decided to share the stories of some of those who have been a part of CEDES at different times, and also a story of a colleague “outside CEDES” but with whom we shared many years of work; instead of discussing about ideas, which would have been another reasonable option to celebrate the 30th anniversary of an academic center. Before introducing the people who are with us today -which would be a bit redundant given their background and the fact that they are well-known to all of us- on behalf of all my colleagues at CEDES, I would like to especially thank the following persons for being here: Leandro Gutiérrez’ wife, Esther; Dorita Swartztein and Enrique Tandeter’s children, Leah and Federico; Juancho Llovet’s wife and children, Cristina, Juan Francisco and Agustín; María Grossi’s daughter, Gabriela; and Oscar Landi’s wife and son, Yenny and Martín. This celebration is also meant to pay tribute to those who helped build CEDES and left their traces at our institution. We thank their families very much for being here. We would also like to thank those sitting at this round table with us today: Oscar Oszlak, founder of CEDES who recently rejoined the institution, together with other enthusiastic male and female researchers who we will now introduce. Our special thanks to: Catalina Smulovitz, Director, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, who was a young CEDES researcher for a few years and a part of the political science team; María del Carmen Feijoó, who is currently the liaison officer at the United Nations Population Fund and was CEDES researcher in sociology, having shared with us the difficult years of dictatorship and also the joy of having recovered democracy; and Roberto Bouzas, a FLACSO researcher and the director of the Masters in International Relations and Negotiations, Universidad de San Andrés, who has also been our fellow traveler throughout these years. And before giving Oscar Oszlak the floor, I would like to thank Malba for so generously assigning us this space and enthusiastically assisting us in organizing this party. I would also like to say that, after this round table, there will be a cocktail where we will have time to celebrate with each and every one of you. [up] > Oscar Oszlak: It is remarkable for an institution to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in a country that on several occasions has proven to be unstable and to lack continuity. Despite having been created in dramatic circumstances for the country, we lived through and survived an authoritarian regime, exile, censorship, economic and institutional crises, the centrifuging that accompanied democracy or the contempt of some government officials for science; this has been a true miracle. Undoubtedly CEDES became firmly enrooted from the very beginning, maybe ever since its previous incarnation in the Instituto Di Tella of the old days, from which it is an indirect spin-off. As a survivor of the founding group, my colleagues entrusted to me –and I accepted with pleasure- the honour of evoking and rebuilding part of the history that surrounded CEDES’ creation. The Center formally started its activities on 1 July 1975 and was founded by Guillermo O´Donnell, Marcelo Cavarozzi, Horacio Boneo and myself. How young we were! Until the previous day we had worked, together with other cherished colleagues, at the Centro de Investigaciones en Administración Pública (Public Administration Research Center - CIAP). CIAP was created during the second half of the 60s, based on an Instituto Di Tella project that had a special subsidy from the Ford Foundation to finance the first research center in this area of specialization. To this effect, they used a stringent selection process to choose ten fellows to whom they gave grants to do their PhD at North American and European universities. In his capacity of director of the Instituto Di Tella, Enrique Oteiza was mainly responsible for that selection. By approximate order of return to the country the group was made up of Jorge Roulet, Horacio Boneo, Roberto Martínez Nogueira, Marcelo Cavarozzi, Oscar Oszlak, Julio César Neffa, Roberto Salomón, Guillermo O´Donnell, Jorge Federico Sábato and Dante Caputo. CIAP was the last of the Research Centers established by the Instituto Di Tella in the 60s. It was added to the existing Centers on Social and Economic Research, Education, Urban and Regional Studies as well as Visual Arts, the Latin American Music Studies Center, Audiovisual Experimentation and Neurological Research. Di Tella was the greatest creativity factory of those times despite the fact that the country was living what –to that date- seemed to be the harshest experience of a military authoritarian regime in its history. In 1970 the crisis suffered almost simultaneously by the Fundación Di Tella and the Ford Foundation that were supporting this effort derived in the transformation of CIAP into an “associate center” which received practically no further funding from the Instituto Di Tella. Consulting and technical assistance services thus became the main source of CIAP’s modest resources that helped it to survive in the early 70s, until the eight remaining members of the original group decided to break apart from the Instituto Di Tella at the end of 1974. We thus set up a completely independent CIAP which only lasted six months. The brief history I can tell you as one of the players is that the Ford Foundation offered an important subsidy which would enable full-time dedication to research and this brought about two different positions, that of the “French” group (Roulet, Sábato, Caputo and Lavergne) and that of the “North American” group (Cavarozzi, Boneo, O´Donnell and myself): our group was prone to accepting the subsidy so as to work on research; and the “French” group did not accept the idea and preferred to provide technical assistance (although just for a short time). One day in the Autumn of 1975, in a bar on Córdoba and Cerrito streets, which still exists today, Guillermo, Marcelo and myself (with the subsequent adherence of Horacio) decided to create a new center which that same day we baptized as CEDES. The “French” group thus decided to create its own Center which it called CISEA (Center for Social Research on State and Administration). Since we were united by important bonds, the group of eight -now members of independent, separate centers- decided to continue using the same common infrastructure and for over a decade we shared premises in a posh building on Córdoba Avenue. We then moved to a shabby apartment on Hipólito Irigoyen street where one day Saúl Ubaldini took refuge for a while, during police repression to workers’ demonstrations,. Finally, we were the pioneers in installing our centers in an old building with 40 balconies and no flowers on Pueyrredón and Corrientes streets, which then became the headquarters of other research centers created during this period (almost all of them former Di Tella ones) that turned the building into a sort of Social Sciences Palace. It would be a very long story to talk to you about the different people that joined both CEDES and CISEA, after their common foundation. I must say that in less than a decade they considerably increased their scarce initial membership. In our case I would like to mention Elizabeth Jelin (the first to join), Guillermo Flichman, Adolfo Canitrot, Jorge Balán, Oscar Landi, Roberto Frenkel, Enrique Tandeter, Mary Feijoó, Juan José Llovet, Silvina Ramos, Mónica Gogna, Ana and José Fanelli, Laury Golbert, Inés González Bombal and others which I cannot remember at the moment. This is just a brief overview of CEDES’ foundational data. Beyond the anecdotes, it is worthwhile bringing into the picture a few elements of the context of those times to recall part of the environment in which we started on this 30-year intellectual adventure. Just like the Di Tella grew as an intellectual and artistic redoubt during the years of Onganía and the succeeding governments, CEDES and other social science centers expanded and became consolidated under the most brutal military regime of our history. This paradoxical situation deserves a comment. Only 30 years had elapsed since the end of the Second World War, the same period that has gone by since the creation of the Center to date. During the Center’s first few months, transcendent events took place in the world. Chile, Brazil and Uruguay installed their long authoritarian military regimes; Portugal lost its African colonies; King Juan Carlos the First was enthroned in Spain; and the US invasion came to an end in Vietnam. CEDES was born on the first anniversary of Perón’s death when Isabelita (his wife and successor in Government) was completing her first year in office. We were in the midst of a general strike in June/July 1975, headed by Lorenzo Miguel and the UOM (Metallurgical Trade Union). A few days earlier, Economy Minister Celestino Rodrigo, as a reaction to the strike underway, adopted a monetary policy, a devaluation that history would then recall as the “Rodrigazo”. July 1975 marked the end of a cycle of uninterrupted growth which had started in the country back in 1960 and that would be the longest in subsequent economic history. In that same month of July, Minister Rodrigo’s failure -protected by López Rega and his followers- popular pressure and internal discussions in the Peronist party would end up in the abrupt departure from the country of López Rega, a witch, with power in the shadows and creator of the sinister triple A, which day after day spread corpses of social activists on the streets. Soon Isabel would renew the leaders of the armed forces and appointed future dictator Videla as head of the army. This was part of a policy to toughen actions against the guerrilla groups which also included the closing down of opposition publications, the so-called Independence Operation, the dirty war and, finally, the long military dictatorship. If I was asked to highlight the most significant trait of the first few years, I would say that it was the centripetal force created by the authoritarian regime that led academicians to take refuge in the social centers that existed at the time. In 1966, ‘The Night of the Long Canes’ had started the banning of our intellectuals from university life. The hope of reinserting ourselves into university in 1973 was frustrated a year later after Perón´s death and the government’s violent shift to the right. The Universidad del Salvador allowed us to continue teaching for a time but that too would come to an end with the dictatorship that took office. Firstly, it was the generosity of our sponsors –which our director will refer to- that allowed social science research to survive and become consolidated in Argentina (and in other Latin American countries). Nobody requested our services and neither were we able to disseminate our work in that environment of repression. CEDES was a part of the institutional “organization chart” that Ramón Camps and his followers had built in their paranoid view of their intellectual enemies, which included us together with the Universidad Nacional del Sur, the Fundación Bariloche, the Instituto Di Tella and other similar institutions. Our contacts were mainly external, particularly Latin American, such as the CLACSO study groups, the programme we set up with CEBRAP-Brazil and CIEPLAN-Chile, the almost undercover relations with CIEDUR-Uruguay, the postgraduate teaching at FLACSO, among others. And CEDES’ in-house relations entailed socializing with one another. We had lunch together. We planned to have tea at 5 p.m. every day. We also played cards on a daily basis (more specifically, a game called “Oh Hell”), with the peculiarity that when we first started to play games, we said the losers would have to put up with the humiliation of asking the winners what kind of “alfajor” –type of small cake- they preferred before going to the bakery on Suipacha and Córdoba streets to buy either the chocolate, dulce de leche or santafecino ones. The exception that for obvious reasons did not prosper was half a bottle of good wine that Guillermo Flichman offered so as to pay for his daily defeats. We organized parties. We imposed on ourselves a routine of harsh in-house seminars which few left without any wounds or scratches. We invited distinguished colleagues such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ricardo Lagos or Albert Hirschman to share ideas and projects. And we generated what were called “the CEDES circles”, a series of mechanisms to integrate other colleagues into the life of our Center, such as the Saturday Club, organized by Oscar Landi who we so dearly remember, in which a loyal group met on that day to discuss articles, documents or book drafts. Or the Programme for Training Young Researchers because of the lack of academic courses at University. Or the Cavarozzi initiative to organize lunches with young politicians at which a discussion forum was created with personalities coming from the political parties during the transition to democracy. These were years of intense work and creativity during which an important job was done to contribute to establishing the grounds for critical social sciences targeted to reclaiming Latin America’s contextual and historical specificity. Democracy changed the direction of that centripetal force by centrifuging the life of the centers. The demand to fill government posts and provide technical assistance, our re-entry into university, our insertion into several institutional environments and the retraction of some donor agencies regretfully produced effects which, in some cases, led to the closing of certain centers. Fortunately, during the hard initial years, CEDES had managed to convey to each of its members a basic survival lesson: “it should not be expected for someone to see to the provision of resources for the Center´s operation. Each member should learn how to obtain his/her own, socializing part of such funds”. This was one of the keys to institutional survival. Another was the opening up to younger generations which allowed a permanent renewal to move out of the scheme that the ITDT (Di Tella) had at that time, where the average age of its researchers increased year after year (which is no longer true at the Fundación Di Tella). Maybe another factor was when the initial charisma turned into a routine and we had to learn how to manage the Center professionally, taking it in turns. These comments are targeted mainly to this new generation with which I now have the pleasure to share my academic life at CEDES after my recent reincorporation. It is that generation that must take on the commitment of continuity and excellence. It would be another miracle to be able to celebrate the Center’s fiftieth anniversary with these youths. As the Jewish tradition says, one must go on until the age of 120. [up] > Catalina Smulovitz: When Silvina proposed that I speak at the celebration of CEDES’ 30th anniversary, I happily and unconsciously said I would. It was a unique opportunity to meet up again with friends and teachers and to recall the enthusiasm that led many of us to start with social research quite a few years ago. I still remember the first time I went to CEDES. It was located in the Córdoba street building and Leandro Gutiérrez opened the door. I was then studying sociology and was looking for literature for a course that Marcelo Cavarozzi and María Grossi were giving at the Universidad del Salvador. It was my first contact with that secret haven. This was a meeting place for personalities who wrote and discussed issues that even nowadays dazzle me. During those days CEDES already appeared as a place in which Social Sciences in Argentina could take refuge. Maybe this is the first thing we should celebrate about the achievements through CEDES’ foundation and consolidation: its capacity to build a place of refuge and shelter to face two of the main challenges of Social Sciences in Argentina in the seventies; the challenge of the confusion there was between social research and political practice. And the challenge of the authoritarian political repression which believed that social research should be eliminated because it was simply a mask for dangerous conducts. During those years in which political passion swallowed up reflection on social issues, turning it into still another instrument of political and ideological conflict and during which state terrorism dismantled social science careers at university and killed or threatened social researchers, CEDES, together with a small group of other Centers was able to build an autonomous space which preserved and reactivated Social Sciences in Argentina. This was not a minor achievement given the challenges of the context. CEDES was able to become a refuge because vis-à-vis a situation of extreme politicization, it defended the need to maintain an autonomous space of reflection, a space where as a foreigner in an unknown country, one could wonder with educated ingenuity: what is this? How did we get this far? I do not think we can really make out how CEDES and other Centers were able to preserve that refuge from the clutches of state terrorism. In one of Andrés Thompson´s publications at CEDES years later, he ventured that such survival was due to the success of the catacombs strategy, that is, work carried out in “closed circuits” for a reduced audience of academicians. Probably as survivors of other tragedies, we will be unable to explain the mysteries of this survival. Nonetheless, even when we are unable to accurately answer this question, I believe it is necessary to underscore that, at a time of democratic opening, that sort of small space that CEDES and other Centers were able to build allowed us to have a body of knowledge of what had happened in the years of darkness as well as professional cadres duly trained to provide technical support to social movements, political parties and the State, which had been interrupted by the dismantling of Social Sciences at university. The refuge and space created allowed us to obtain another fundamental achievement: to convince others that reflecting on social issues requires, as Virginia Woolf said, “your own room” for its realization. The CEDES I knew had another trait I would like to highlight. I believe that the enthusiasm I recall about those days is also due to the fact that social research at CEDES attempted to link history to biography, according to Wright Mills advice. This experiment can be noted when reading the titles of CEDES’ publications. Questions on how the public authority operates, survival strategies for the popular sectors, gender relations, the disciplining effects of economic relations, the ethical and political labyrinths of democratization are all issues which reflect the confusion that social life brought about in its researchers´ biographies. On the other hand, their responses, that is, their articles and research work showed how the confusion of their biographies was related to the historical and social scenario in which they were embedded. Throughout the years, CEDES’ publications have reflected this intersection between biography and history. An intersection which not only guided but still guides the selection of research topics and also reflects the interest and responsibility of its researchers towards the public consequences of the problems affecting us. I have just mentioned several public legacies of CEDES’ activities which we can still enjoy nowadays. The creation of an independent refuge for reflecting on social research, the establishment of that legitimacy for distinguishing between the practice of research and political action; and work characterized by its technical quality and the public importance of its concerns. There are, however, another two issues I would like to mention. Unlike the two legacies described above, these are of a private nature, or in any case, only those that were lucky enough to be part of the guild will enjoy hearing about them. Oscar Oszlak always invoked the “animus societatis”. And truly CEDES had it. And its ‘high table’ was the best place to note this, I believe. A modest tea with biscuits, splashed with gossip and fervent political discussions took place every day at times of abundance and every Tuesday and Thursday in times of crisis and, the latter, despite Juancho Llovet’s calculations that the benefits of suspending tea time did not offset the cost that such interruption entailed for the “animus societatis”. It was an unavoidable gathering. Kathryn Sikkink, who was affiliated to CEDES while she was doing the field work for her thesis, used to plan her interviews in the field, keeping that schedule so as not to miss any of the teas. Today she still says that she learnt more about Argentina during those discussions than elsewhere. When I left CEDES I knew it was one of the things I would miss the most. Looking at them from a distance, I believe those gatherings had an additional virtue that the easy-going spirit of the meetings did not allow us to appreciate. There coexisted the prices of Enrique Tandeter’s colonial city of Potosi with the “desagio” (built-in inflation) of the Austral currency, Dorita Schwarstein’s Spanish migrants with Oscar Landi’s “General González”. Certainly the most interdisciplinary debates of the institution took place around these three people. The relaxed tone of our exchanges allowed us to abandon the protocol and rites of academic discussion to inadvertently impose an interdisciplinary view and dialogue. The “animus societatis” also included civic ceremonies. For instance, I remember one afternoon in December 1985. We were sitting in the meeting room of the fifth floor in the building on Pueyrredón avenue listening over the radio to the ruling issued by the judges in the trial against the former armed forces commanders. That self-consciousness of living an historical moment even inhibited Oscar Landi. That day he was unable to make jokes. What I would like to highlight, however, is that on that occasion we met in a spontaneous but solemn meeting, because we knew it was a historical event which had to be shared. Finally, I would like to mention our teachers. Each of us who has been through CEDES at some time or another can recognize his or her own teachers. In my case, for instance, I know that among my teachers I can mention Marcelo Cavarozzi and Elizabeth Jelin. Even if I have had others elsewhere, I know I owe to them some of the secrets of this profession. Those of us who were fortunate enough to gain access to university education know that, even if we have been exposed to the great ideas of each of our disciplines, the knowledge of the score is not enough to access the secrets of playing the musical piece. The latter is a learning process which requires a mentor to reveal the mysteries of the art. This was possible because CEDES was organized into teams. In each team disciples could look into the back room and learn the craft. This practice of knowledge transfer was set up spontaneously at first and was then institutionalized in the young researchers’ training programme. Beyond the specific form of this practice, I would like to highlight that the daily working relation between trained researchers and youths was one of CEDES’ great legacies. It was the place where I could not only see how ideas arose and were transformed but also the the work of the back office and the effort required. Therefore, it should also be recognized that CEDES also left us another legacy which is more difficult to define: the generation of skills to carry out social research. No doubt in a country where people age early and institutions tend to die young, the thirtieth anniversary of an institution which has produced all these results deserves this celebration and a toast. [up] > María del Carmen Feijoo: I also wish to express how honored I feel to have been asked to address you on this anniversary of the creation of CEDES. I could not refer to this anniversary without including myself directly in the celebration because it is my way of viewing the world and because CEDES has given so much to me; therefore, I felt very comfortable with the instructions I got “talk about you and CEDES” and I believe that provides a daily life nuance which is another of the aspects of the relationship with this Institution. Unlike what Oscar Oszlak and Catalina mentioned before, I got to CEDES in a completely different way, almost just be chance, I would say, it was after having recovered from the 1976-77 events and having learnt to breathe again, overcoming the loss of the academic and teaching environment in which I had worked to that date as well as the social environment in which I was inserted that had been broken to bits. I started working on my own at home as a permanent reanimation therapy, delving into a topic which would then be one of the great issues of the future, that of feminist historiography. My first publication which I wish to recall now –although outside CEDES- was due to the generosity of Félix Luna and a small CLACSO scholarship. I came to CEDES to see who could help and guide me in the research process to be able to stretch out those few funds I had got from CLACSO so that they could benefit both CLACSO and my academic training. Therefore, it was just by chance that I went along to CEDES. I remember that what struck me when I arrived were all the older people I saw there. Mere fantasy, because as you may see we are now all more or less the same age but, at that time, I thought I had got to a place full of ‘elderly’ people. They were not in fact elderly but the intellectual profile they had achieved by that time was really mature. Even in the Argentine context of those days, the names that surrounded CEDES were those of many persons that we already knew from university and had something to say about Argentine reality. So arriving at CEDES was like arriving at… a place of reference. And getting there was a real celebration given the restrictions of the outside context which my colleagues have already talked about. So whoever was lucky enough –as I was- to get to a place like CEDES, with little money or with lots of money, and become part of a network, could not ignore that he/she was being privileged with a sort of gift that consisted not only of having a training forum but also a place to socialize, to exchange ideas; a space for building a common outlook on what was happening in the country. For me it was very special to be able to be a part of that team which allowed me to go out into the streets once again. There was no way of going out and asking people what was happening to them without running an excessive risk compared to the benefits such action provided. With a modest tape recorder in my hand, cassettes, and frightened to death –at least that is how I felt, frightened to death- we started going out into the neighbourhoods to see what was happening in Argentina and which were the daily mechanisms to survive in a dictatorship which, in economic terms, destroyed the country and which, politically and culturally, destroyed a generation. I have very fond memories of a day when we innocently went with “Shevi” Jelin to the Diocese of Quilmes because we wanted to set up some sort of network which, if necessary, would protect us… that was totally naïve on our behalf…. Anyhow we were warmly welcomed and affectionately received at the Diocese and at least somebody in the area knew that we would be visiting these neighbourhoods that could not be visited, that could not be walked. This was a window to the world and such window we quickly turned into a strategy, a culture of refuge …. I think that in 1979 –I was unable to check the exact date before coming here- we were already holding a first very modest seminar to disseminate results or, better say, to discuss results, which was attended by other survivors of the academic circuit who just like myself -who had arrived at CEDES just by chance- sought to rebuild the saga of their own personal history and start to make proposals looking into the future. Anyhow, this was about exploration of hypotheses, search for paths and the building of shared cultural maps. I remember that not long after, once we were living in democracy, we were called upon by social policy effectors so we went out at eight in the morning to give talks to social assistants at schools, social workers in neighborhoods, always within the same framework: my colleagues with their impeccable pieces of paper and myself with these untidy notes while Silvina kept on telling me “can’t you have decent notes, you will get all muddled up and will not be able to read anything.” What CEDES also showed us was that, even within such a context, there was a potential career –as my colleagues have already mentioned- to train in research, to discuss the public scenario, even within that framework of contradictions. Going out into the field also allowed us to reverse that unique view, a single line of thought that the military dictatorship had promoted and to capture how other new political practices coexisted with what the military had sown, thus resignifying and reactivating old lessons learnt. In my personal case, from carrying out research in popular sectors with “Shevi” Jelin, I went directly to working in a neighbourhood on quite a pioneer research/action project, with Dutch external financing, through which we implemented “Gente y Cuentos” (People and Stories), where we had -on a small scale- a type of experience that was common to the development of social sciences in other Latin American countries. Thus with Sara Hirschman and Lucas Rubinich, who is today the director of the Sociology career at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, we shot a film on the heroic deeds of the neighbourhood and I believe that, probably due to our personal traits and preferences, we were the ones to maintain the strongest relation with that place where daily life takes place. Of course, I am not saying that we were the only ones to do field work since all research at CEDES -each in its own way- involved that kind of work, and I believe that is precisely its strength: the fact that empirical evidence collected in the field allowed all researchers, whichever their field of work, to ponder about the things that were happening. I do not want to convey an idyllic view of CEDES; I would like to say, for instance, that I was thrown out of the “Oh Hell” card games. Ever since I was young I had had active strategies of positive discrimination and since only men played the game, I wanted to get involved too. But they kicked me out because I played by no rules so they could not have any strategy and they all lost against me; I thus suffered discrimination. I would like to say that luckily the daily issues described by “Cary” and Oscar were not the framework of idyllic life, because one can walk through all this in an idyllic manner only if you have very little passion. As Oscar said, the seminars were indeed harsh, and so was criticism. Oscar says I got annoyed with him one day when he made comments about my work. I do not really remember, but it was certainly true that I got annoyed. In any case, what CEDES gave me, which I have also perceived in the number of collaborators which I have sometimes lost was an ad astra per asperum model - things must be done in the best way possible. Of course, everyone has a ceiling and can improve things to a certain extent but, anyhow, whatever you do must be done as best as possible and that I learnt at CEDES. When entering the democratic period and even a little before, came the first batch of young researchers, “Beto” Quevedo, “Lucho” Fara, among those I remember, and we started working too on research work conducted by Jelín, on the topic of social movements. I would also like to say that very often changes in the conceptual paradigm of CEDES brought about strong criticism from other colleagues. It is important to recall this so as to rebuild the map to be able to construct the concepts of circulation and legitimacy. What we were discussing was a model for reading and, according to some, for intervening in our country and it was reasonable for this to produce conflict because some people did not agree and it was important to have discussion forums. I see Hilda Sábato and very fondly remember the great generosity that led CEDES and CISEA to open their doors to a collective “quixotic act” in which we were very much involved personally: the setting up of a movement to favour the abolition of compulsory military service in which CEDES never became institutionally involved because it was not pertinent but it opened all doors possible for this movement to be successful. I also have that recollection of Alfonsín, and equally affectionate memories about those times when certain mornings a lawyer from Buenos Aires Province used to arrive at that small “tenement” on Hipólito Irigoyen street. He looked tired, with signs of fatigue of someone who walks along the roads of this province. That lawyer was Dr. Alfonsín who was then President of Argentina. The Malvinas war, the transition to democracy, the migration of many colleagues to the public sector, all this opened up different spaces which each one of us took over according to our vocation, according to our preference, according to the way in which each one of us thought of each other. Relations between civil society and State and, among them CEDES, as an important player, lived through the hard decade of the 80s. Right now I am recalling that moment of enormous joy when many of us walked into CONICET, thus obtaining a sort of citizenship document, with due recognition within the context of the state institution devoted to public research. I personally started moving away from CEDES seeking other objectives, other goals, and through CLACSO I had the opportunity to coordinate at this institution, the research group on the condition of women… so I walked along other paths. That very productive circle into which we gathered close together and protected ourselves during the dictatorship, opened up and many of us left in the quest for… other careers, other illusions, a different destination in life. Fortunately the current post I fill has brought me close to CEDES again, although I must say that CEDES’ protective shadow never left me because wherever I go in the world or in the region to address the topic I am working on, the maximum expert always knows that CEDES exists, or had some kind of contact with CEDES, knows its researchers and is willing to open the doors to me because of my linkage to CEDES. The only thing I want to say about these thirty years is that I am deeply thankful; CEDES changed my life. And just like all changes, it was not a priceless change but indeed a great part of what I have achieved, I owe to CEDES, and I am very pleased to be able to make this collective acknowledgement. Many thanks. [arriba] > Roberto Bouzas: I would like to thank Silvina and my CEDES’ friends for their invitation to say a few words and would like to confess that I feel an enormous responsibility and, at the same time, a great satisfaction. I feel responsible for three different reasons. Firstly because -from a personal stance- it is very special for me to participate in this ceremony. Also because I am the only “outsider”, that is to say, I am the only one that has not been to CEDES other than on a visit and that, somehow, gives me the responsibility of representing the voices of those that do not belong to CEDES. Thirdly, because I am an economist and the economy does not always get on well with social sciences, despite its features. So the fact that the CEDES colleagues decided to invite an economist to represent the “outsiders” and that such economist is myself, really overwhelms me. Just as she did with the other panelists, Silvina asked me to make a personal reflection and I will start with one. Today we are celebrating CEDES’ thirtieth anniversary and on 10 August it was thirty years since I left Argentina and went to Mexico -just after I graduated- to do a postgraduate course and work in Mexico at CIDE. I thought of going for a short period but eventually stayed there for eight years. In 1978, given the attention that was focused on Argentina because of the Football World Cup and after three years of not having come to my country, I made a trip to visit my family, my friends. And one of my main activities on that first trip back, after having left behind that stage of a recently graduated student, was to go to CEDES. CEDES had been created, I knew of its existence, CEDES had been operational for three years and I was very nervous when I managed to get an interview with Adolfo Canitrot and met with him for quite a while to speak about the situation in Argentina and all that was happening. While I was in the meeting with Canitrot, Guillermo O´Donnell and Oscar Oszlak walked by; it was like a film, me coming from Mars, recently graduated and all this was happening around me, and I was here. So I did not have the feeling of being a fellow, or of undergoing training; I had that very intimate feeling of being welcomed, of being received, of feeling satisfied and of being able to interact with those who were at that time the main social scientists in Argentina. What I wanted to underscore –and also convey- about this historical remembrance is the enormous emotion I felt of coming back to Argentina in 1978 and having access to a conversation at an institution, at ‘the’ institution, at one of the few academic institutions in Argentina. The modesty and accessibility that this experience revealed was something eventful for a young professional who was just breaking out of the egg and that nowadays I still remember with great emotion and thankfulness. Oscar Oszlak said that thirty years is enough time to make it an event worthwhile commemorating. l believe this is absolutely true for two essential reasons. Firstly, because of the nature of where those thirty years are celebrated. Our country –as already mentioned by him- is a place where it is easier to do than to sustain something, where it is a lot easier to produce initiatives than to keep them up throughout time; there have always been many initiatives. When one looks at the eighties and takes note of the proliferation of research centers that were created and then disappeared, such a feeling of permanence arises with particular intensity. I also wanted to point out that it is not only a matter of recognizing, appraising, celebrating and holding a party as Silvina said for celebrating these thirty years of CEDES, but I also believe that all these things have to be done because of how CEDES has experienced these thirty years; that is to say, not because of the context, of what went on meanwhile but because of what CEDES as an institution has done in these 30 years. I would say that there are three or four characteristics, features attached to CEDES which I would like to highlight here. The first is an independent research tradition and practice and that, I believe, is of utmost importance in a world where independence is increasingly a more abstract or limited possibility and value. Secondly, CEDES has been an institution with a firm research tradition and this I think, given the conditions in which we act, is also a special trait of the type of 30-year anniversary we are celebrating. An institution which has had an interdisciplinary outlook, where dialogue among disciplines is an essential component to understand reality and few institutions have the capability of transforming that into a working practice. In that regard, I think CEDES has been a successful experience, at least looked at from the outside. I suppose you people will know what went on in-house. Silvina said that an institution is more than just its people, to the extent that institutions, throughout their existence, become more than just persons. Nonetheless, institutions are also the people that make them up and the people that keep them alive. I wanted to pay special tribute to all those who contributed to CEDES’ existence, to have CEDES be still a vital institution and to all those who will have to put the burden on their shoulders in the future not to lose or distort a tradition which I believe is CEDES’ great asset, the tradition of being an academic, independent, rigorous institution, with an applied outlook and a Latin American perspective. I believe this is the great challenge; it is somehow what CEDES has done and I therefore believe that this tribute is paid not only to the institution but to the people. [up] > Closing of the round table > Silvina Ramos, CEDES Director In order to close this round table, I would like to share with you a few reflections and the gratitude of those who currently make up CEDES. Our institution was created with the spirit of setting up a space to contribute with its research work to knowledge advancement, social debate and the design of public policies. During these 30 years those who made up CEDES have placed all their efforts on this, understanding it is the best way of doing things, that is, respecting and having our autonomy as researchers respected and doing our work under the best academic quality standards we are capable of achieving. We were encouraged by the conviction that the social function and the political responsibility of researchers are based on two pillars. And each of the 200 researchers that have been a part of this institution believed it so. We have also worked to train new generations of researchers. Therefore, just a few years after its foundation, CEDES started up a Programme for Training Young Researchers of which most of us here benefited; a Programme that was and is still guided by the idea that the best way to learn to research is doing research, side-by-side with those who are already trained. Around 150 young researchers have thus been trained, many of whom are in this auditorium and whom we wish to thank for their company. In the last few years this training task became diversified to develop postgraduate programmes in collaboration with other academic institutions. In 1997 two initiatives were launched: the Masters in Social Sciences and Health in collaboration with FLACSO, Argentina, and the Postgraduate Course specialized in Non-Profit Organizations, in collaboration with the Universidad San Andrés and the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. CEDES history was the history of this country. A history marked by different kinds of hurdles which each one of you knows well. Some of our researchers had to leave the country, others were able to stay and continue working in a more or less concealed manner (to put it elegantly). During those difficult years I remember we used to discuss whether it was prudent or not to put a plate that read ‘CEDES’ on the door of the Hipólito Irigoyen building; difficult memories of those somber years of our country. The reinstatement of democracy gave the country and, obviously us too, a new breath of air, new challenges and new opportunities. I also recall that besides enthusiastically going to give class at university and facing new, unexplored channels of collaboration with the state, those who conducted the institution at that time decided to preserve it under the conviction that, regardless of the new responsibilities we had before us, it was useful to maintain CEDES as an autonomous academic center. Anyhow, it was not easy to convince our donors that this was a good option…. We also faced difficulties during our life in democracy, some of an economic nature, others political and still others merely institutional. We were able to overcome them and now we are celebrating our 30th year. CEDES is currently a cooperative made up of 60 researchers and 20 fellows who carry out research activities, train human resources, and do consulting, outreach and advocacy work. It also has a team of key people for the Center’s daily life. All of them deserve special recognition because of their devotion to their tasks, through which they contribute to sustaining the institution. In these closing words I would also like to bring back pleasant memories of the great help we received throughout these 30 years, an aid which made it possible to support and strengthen CEDES as an institution. We wish to very especially thank the Ford Foundation that helped us in various ways throughout our history: with fellowships for our researchers to be trained abroad, with institutional subsidies, including the one that allowed us to buy the building, and with support to our research and researchers’ training Programme. We thank Augusto Varas very much for sharing this celebration with us We would also like to thank those foundations/non-profits that supported CEDES as from its creation and contributed to its consolidation: thanks to SAREC, the Swedish cooperation agency; to Enrique Ganuza for being here today; to IDRC, the Canadian cooperation agency. To the Kellogg Foundation and to Andrés Thompson, as well as many other agencies; to the United Nations agencies and multilateral organizations who trusted us. Our thanks to CONICET that supports much of our research work; many thanks also to Dr. Charreau for supporting us; and to SECyT which has lately contributed to our institutional strengthening. Furthermore, we wish to express our gratitude to this country’s and other countries’ academic community for having discussed our ideas and nurtured us with such exchange. Finally, we would also like to thank the following people for their presence: > National Health and the Environment Minister, Dr. Ginés González García > Mayor of the city of San Pablo, Dr. José Serra, who has carried out research with us and has been a friend of CEDES for many years. > Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, Dr. Jorge Taiana > National Deputy Minister of Health and the Environment, Dra. Graciela Rosso > Ambassador Juliana Di Tullio > Secretary of Industry, Dr. Miguel Peyrano > Undersecretary of Technical Programming and Labour Studies, Ministry of Labour, Employment and Security, Lic. Marta Novick > Undersecretary for Small and Medium Enterprises, Dr. Federico Poli > Economic Programming Undersecretary, Dr. Sebastián Katz > President of the National Council for Women, María Luisa Colombo > National representatives and senators. > UN agency representatives. > Rector of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Dr. Guillermo Jaim Echeverry > Rector of the Universidad de General Sarmiento, Dr. Silvio Feldman > Deans of the Schools of Economic Sciences and Social Sciences. To conclude, we would like to share with you two joys: |
