Malvinas, entre dictadura e Independencia: la historia argentina en los discursos de CFK

This article aims to analyze Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s (CFK) commemorative speeches about Malvinas, delivered during her tenures as Argentinian President (2007-2015). By adopting Discourse Analysis as an interpretative practice (Arnoux, 2006), we will enquire into the discourse strategies with which CFK shows both a rejection and a celebration in respect to national past. In the first place, considering our corpus framed by the boom of memorial practices within Latin America as a part of “memorial duty” [deber de memoria] (Jelin, 2018), we study the polemical dimension towards the recent past including 1982’s war as well as the ‘de-malvinization’ [desmalvinización] period. In the second place, we inquire into the construction of the national Independence past, looking at the relation between polemics and commemoration. By doing so, we show how a problematic homage, composed of different tensions, results in a new history that recalls the official history of the motherland and, at the same time, exalt new national heroes according to the ‘kirchnerism’ political identity.