On the way to Buenos Aires from
the airport at Ezeiza, two weeks before
the May 14 elections, I asked the taxi
driver to point out the site of the mas-
sacre. He smiled and waved vaguely
behind us at bridge 12, where the Ricch-
eri expressway passes over highway
205.
The massacre took place on June 20,
1973, a chilly fall day in Argentina. As
many as four million people had massed
on the highway and fields around the
airport, in the largest demonstration the
country had ever seen. The reason, as
bumperstickers and graffiti had pro-
claimed for months, was “Per6n
vuelve”–Per6n returns. Juan Domingo
Per6n, president from 1946 until his
overthrow by the army in 1955, was
coming home.
Whole families had come to greet
him, some from distant provinces, with
their picnic satchels, yerba mate, arm-
bands, banners and noisemakers. Col-
Geoffrey Fox is the author of Wel-
come to My Contri, a collection ofshort
stories, and of the forthcoming The
Land and People of Argentina (Harper
& Row).
umns of Montoneros, self-styled “sol-
diers of Per6n,” snaked through the
crowd with immense banners and boom-
ing bass drums. At about 2:30 p.m., one
large contingent approached the
speaker’s platform from the south along
highway 205. As they were about to
pass under bridge 12, automatic rifle,
machine gun and shotgun fire exploded
from “security” atop the overpass and
the speaker’s platform. Targets included
anyone who looked like a zurdo, a
leftist-anyone, that is, with long hair,
jeans, or other signs of Argentina’s de-
fiant youth.
Someone ordered the release of the
18,000 doves-1,000 for each year of
the General’s absence from Argentina
-which were meant to be freed as he
spoke. The shooting stopped as flutter-
ing wings filled the sky, but in a minute
they were gone and the firing resumed.
As many as three hundred people were
shot, stabbed or clubbed to death by the
men on the platform. They, it was later
established, were under orders from
Per6n’s personal secretary, a former
police officer named Jos6 L6pez Rega.
Per6n, meanwhile, landed at another
airport.
Shortly after Ezeiza, the 78-year-
old Per6n was elected president for the
third time. He did nothing to replace
factional violence with dialogue, but
instead encouraged the hunting down
of left-wing Peronists. He died the next
year, leaving power to his vice presi-
dent and widow, a former flamenco
dancer known by her stage name, Isa-
bel. The real power was L6pez Rega,
called el brujo (the warlock), a serious
practitioner of black magic and numer-
ology, and founder of the terrorist
Argentine Anticommunist Alliance.
Isabel’s government, generally con-
ceded to have been a disaster of eco-
nomic mismanagement and social
chaos, was abruptly terminated by the
military coup of 1976.
Ezeiza demonstrated both the
breadth of Peronism’s appeal and the
virulence of its internal conflicts. The
appeal endures, as proven by the 1989
election, which gave the Justicialista
(Peronist) Party control of the presi-
dency, both houses of congress and
most of the provincial governorships.
The question now is what will become
of the conflicts.
Constituencies in Conflict
On July 8, incoming President Car-
los Sadl Menem wriggled awkwardly
into the presidential sash that outgoing
President Radl Alfonsin held up for
him. Both men are short, but the long-
haired Menem is slender and athletic
while the mustachioed Alfonsin is tubby
and ponderous, and they couldn’t quite
manage the choreography of the ges-
ture. Besides, Menem was visibly
nervous-a rustic lawyer who had risen
to the governorship of his remote, rural
province, he seemed as out of place at
the Casa Rosada as Jimmy Carter did in
front of the White House in 1976.
Peronism’s heterogeneous, but
generally working-class and lower
middle-class composition, and its mix
of conservative nationalist and eco-
nomic reformist ideas make it roughly
analogous to the Democratic Party of
the United States. However, unlike its
U.S. counterpart, Peronism until re-
cently had no internal democratic
mechanisms allowing its different con-
stituencies to be heard. (For that matter,
neither did the other Argentine parties,
each built around the personality of its
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
I
4leader.) Thus, rival factions made their
appeals directly to Per6n (or Evita, who
interceded with Per6n). If they failed to
get an audience, or if the leader (as
often happened) chose not to intervene,
the rivals fought with whatever weap-
ons they had at hand, frequently resort-
ing to violence. During Per6n’s long
exile after 1955, gang warfare came to
serve the functions of caucuses and
primaries. That’s what happened at
Ezeiza: the caucus of the bullet.
The overwhelming electoral defeat
of 1983 shook the Peronists from their
complacency; their party had never
before lost a free election, and they
could scarcely believe it was happen-
ing as they watched the returns. The
main reason for the loss, Menem and
others concluded, was that voters were
disgusted by the party’s undemocratic
practices and violent image.
A major force for party reform is the
faction calling itself “Renewal” (Reno-
vaci6n), made up mostly of urban intel-
lectuals, many with a strong social-
Catholic orientation. To their left, a
“revolutionary tendency,” influenced
by Marxism and its offshoots, consists
mainly of people who were in some
way associated with the Montoneros.
Directly opposed to them are the anti-
communist nationalists, including some
groups that are armed and dangerous.
Less ideological, but not always ad-
verse to a little violence to get their
points across, are the conservative chiefs
of the larger trade unions (metalwork-
ers, plastics, meatpackers) and their
allies; since they have been the ones
running the party, they have little en-
thusiasm for reform.
“Renewal” dominates the party
apparatus in both the city and the prov-
ince of Buenos Aires, where about half
the population lives. In the primary
they backed Buenos Aires Governor
Antonio Cafiero for president, refusing
to consider Menem-either because
they regarded him as too friendly to the
Right, or because they disdained him as
a provincial. (Portefios, “people of the
port,” are notorious for such attitudes.)
The campaign was very bitter, insults
and threats were traded liberally. But
when Menem won Peronism’s fairest
and broadest internal elections ever,
Cafiero and his supporters put on a
good face and campaigned, with appar-
ent vigor, for the party’s choice.
One Renewer is Miguel Angel
Toma, 40, a newly-elected congress-
man from the capital, who sounds like
a social democrat. A tall, urbane middle-
class man, schooled by Jesuits, Toma
says he became a Peronist to help
complete the “peaceful revolution”
begun in 1946-1955. Per6n’s greatest
accomplishments at that time, he thinks,
were bringing the proletariat into poli-
tics and developing the country’s infra-
structure, but the doctrine needs “up-
dating.”
The day before our meeting, which
was shortly before the election, Toma
handed out fake dollars printed on toilet
paper along Buenos Aires’ ritzy Florida
street as a protest against the economic
crisis. More seriously, he argued that
Argentina will have to demand five
years grace on interest payments on the
foreign debt, so that the country has the
means to reinvest in its industries. If
creditors refuse, “there will be a social
explosion in Argentina! Because this
country can’t take any more!” Within
weeks of the election, the first explo-
sions came, with riots and raids on food
stores as prices rose out of sight.
To the left of the Renewers are for-
mer Montoneros and their sympathiz-
ers. Despite their conflicts with Per6n
in his last government and persecution
by his widow, Isabel, they believe Per-
onism is a “national liberation” move-
ment with revolutionary potential. To
abandon Peronism would be to aban-
don “the people,” which no revolu-
tionary can afford to do.
In Buenos Aires I spoke with a for-
mer member of the Montoneros’ “na-
A bust of Per6n in Barrio Rivadavia
tional leadership,” its governing or-
gan, who preferred to remain anony-
mous. A Communist for many years, he
broke with the party in the late 1960s to
help form the Marxist “Fuerzas Arma-
das Revolucionarias.” The FAR later
merged with the Montoneros, which
had been formed by Catholic national-
ists sympathetic to Per6n. The com-
bined Montoneros/FAR had 10,000
members in 1973, he estimated, half of
them combatants. Although they were
heavily influenced by Che Guevara-an
Argentine, but no Peronist-they par-
ticularly admired Evita, whom they
posthumously recruited and put on their
posters, portrayed as “Evita Monton-
era.”
Per6n denounced these “soldiers”
a few months before he died. Shortly
thereafter the Montoneros resumed
military actions-which they had sus-
pended during his short presidency
-and became, briefly, a fearsome force.
By the late 1970s, the government had
killed or “disappeared” so many of
their cadre that they were little more
than an annoyance to the regime. Nev-
ertheless, their existence continued to
be the excuse for the “dirty war”–six
years (1976-1982) of military terror
that took at least 9,000 lives.
Of those 10,000 one-time members,
many survive and are still active within
Peronism-although not all admit to
their Montonero past. At least one pro-
vincial governor is said to be a former
Montonero. But armed revolution no
longer seems an attractive or possible
option in Argentina. Most ex-Monton-
eros seem to have resigned themselves
to operating on the fringes of the Re-
newal group or in labor or community
organizations.
At the other extreme are right-wing
groups such as the Comando de Or-
ganizaci6n, whose cadre were among
those firing from the platform at Ezeiza
in 1973. One of its minor strongholds is
the proletarian Barrio Rivadavia, a
cluster of small cement houses toward
the southwestern edge of Buenos Aires
where the local party cell is named after
Isabel, whom most Peronists these days
are embarrassed to mention.
The Comando member I spoke to
was an attractive and intelligent brown-
skinned woman of about 40, originally
from the interior. She was guarded in
her description of the Comando; she
5 VOLUME XXIIINO
M
I . k — I- -u -)needed authorization from its leader,
Alberto Brito Lima, she said, to talk
about such things. She did reveal,
however, that Peronism is “beautiful,
so beautiful,” and that its truths could
be apprehended by a profound reading
of Per6n. For her, Isabel was without
question still the “chief” of all true
Peronists-after all, she bears the magic
surname.
Though numerically small, the ex-
treme Right is an important tendency in
Peronism, with friends in the police, the
army and the trade unions. Beyond its
own capacity for violence, it extends its
influence by exploiting nationalist
themes dear to most Peronists, even to
most Argentines, such as the recovery
of the Malvinas Islands, whose con-
tinuing control by Britain is deeply
humiliating.
The Comando de Organizaci6n used
to harass Menem during his first term as
governor of La Rioja, 1973-1976, ac-
cusing him of something like crypto-
communism. Menem, though, is im-
possible to place in any classical ideol-
ogy. He remained loyal to the Right’s
darling, Isabel, long after her downfall
and during her long silence in Spain.
The military saw his popular appeal as
potentially dangerous, and arrested him
shortly after the 1976 coup. They kept
him in prison for five years, so he can-
not be accused of complicity with the
dictatorship (as can many old Peron-
ists). Nor did he have any apparent
connection to the Montoneros. He likes
to claim that he was the original “re-
newer,” demanding internal reforms in
the party.
I first saw Menem at a rally in the
working-class suburb of La Matanza,
where Peronists have never lost an elec-
tion. The Peronists had seized the col-
ors of the national flag as their own, and
everywhere there were headbands,
plastic vests, flags, stickers and banners
in sky-blue and white. “Vamos, vamos
argentinos,” Menem’s campaign song,
blared out of huge speakers, alternating
occasionally with the Peronist anthem
with its famous phrase, “Per6n, Perdn,
iquy grande sos!”-Per6n, Per6n, how
great thou art. As my journalist col-
leagues and I tried to push forward
through the crowd, later estimated at
half a million, the crowd would push
back; making human waves, “bal-
anceo,” is a Peronist tradition.
Menem drinks mate: a regular guy
Menem took the stage, wearing his
blue campera, the short jacket favored
by workers and many Peronists, grin-
ning and waving. His peculiar accent
-in La Rioja, they don’t trill their R’s,
so the name of his province sounds
almost like La Yioha–came out hugely
amplified, feeding the enthusiasm of
the crowd. Groups of young men would
push to start a wave, and we would see
all those black heads moving one way,
then the other. Toward the end, obeying
some mysterious signal, thousands and
thousands of arms shot up, each mak-
ing the V sign and swaying in unison.
The Normal Thing
A few days after the election-in
which Menem took over 47% of the
popular vote in a nine-way race-I was
at an asado, the famous Argentine bar-
becue, for the president-elect along with
the country’s most powerful labor lead-
ers and hundreds of journalists. One
union boss observed to me about the
Renewal faction that some Peronists
were too cerebral, too disciplined, with
their programs and their rules of proce-
dure. “They want to take the Per6n out
of Peronism,” he complained wryly.
“The Per6n,” now that the old man is
gone, presumably lies in a leader’s
quirky spontaneity and rapport with
“the people.”
For Oscar Fueyo, a lawyer in charge
of the storefront party office in a middle-
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
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class neighborhood of La Plata, Peron-
ism is first of all an emotional attach-
ment to justice and a sense of commu-
nity. For Alberto Delgado, a tall man in
a nylon campera who strolled over to
say hello and share some mate, “Radi-
cals were all from the better-off class,
people who intellectualized politics,
and who spoke about workers but never
understood them. Peronism was the
normal thing, of ordinary people
…. Peronism is what is normal. The
person in the street, who understands
his fellows, who drinks mate.”
That’s it. In Argentina, Peronism is
the normal thing. In Osvaldo Soriano’s
tragicomic novel, No habrd penas ni
olvidos, one of the small-town charac-
ters cries out, “But I’ve never been
involved in politics! I’ve always been a
Peronist!”
Nora del Valle, a history professor,
bristled when I mentioned populism.
That, she said, was “a term of the
liberals.” “Liberal” here is not the
opposite of “conservative,” but of
“nationalist.” “Liberals” uphold in-
dividual over community rights and
advocate free-market policies instead
of protecting local producers. Not all
nationalists are Peronists, but all Per-
onists are, or claim to be, nationalists.
“We are not liberals,” Del Valle
continued. “Our actions are always
group actions. The Marxists call us
populists, because they don’t consider
us really ‘popular.’ What they say is
that the people are with Peronism, but
that Peronism needs a revolutionary
doctrine-Marxism-to achieve what
Peronism can’t achieve alone. They
call us ‘populist’ rather than ‘popular.’
It’s a pejorative term for them-and for
the liberal Right as well.
“To really understand Peronism,
you would have to live here several
years,” she continued, then laughed
and added, “And, be a Peronist. Be-
cause even though we are the majority,
even people living here don’t under-
stand us. We are a national and popular
movement. I don’t think you can give
any more precise definition than that.”
Pardons and Austerity
Menem has already taken bold ac-
tions which at first glance hardly seem
popular or nationalist. A drastic de-
valuation, wage freezes and an ineffec-
6tive price rollback have reduced
people’s purchasing power nearly to
zero. Real wages have dropped so pre-
cipitously in recent months that the
middle class is suddenly impoverished
and many workers are starving -liter-
ally, in a country which is one of the
great food producers of the world. But
everybody acknowledges that the econ-
omy was in extremis, and extreme
measures were needed. More surpris-
ing is Menem’s turn toward the most
notorious of the “liberals.”
He named as minister of economics
Miguel Roig, former vice-president of
Argentina’s biggest firm and probably
its only transnational corporation, the
food conglomerate Bunge and Born.
(Ironically, the Montoneros financed
their military and political campaign
with the ransom from kidnapping Jorge
Born in 1974.) When Roig died after
only five days in office, Menem asked
Roig’s successor at the company, N6stor
Rapanelli, to take over the ministry.
Rapanelli, it turns out, is wanted in
Venezuela for his part in a massive
currency exchange fraud. But no mat-
ter: Menem continues to back his choice.
Free-marketeer Alvaro Alsogaray,
recent presidential candidate of the
right-wing Union of the Democratic
Center (UCD), was named “special
economic adviser,” and his daughter,
Maria Julia was made president of the
soon-to-be-privatized state phone com-
pany.
Regarding the Malvinas, Menem
unilaterally lifted trade sanctions against
Britain and expressed his readiness to
negotiate. Despite appearances, these
were probably sensible steps, since the
sanctions were hurting Argentina more
than Britain. And nobody, not even the
military, wants another war.
The move that cost Menem the most
support was his pardoning-indulto,
by presidential decree–of most of the
military officers convicted or pending
trial for illegal acts from the dirty war to
last.year’s rebellions. Gen. Leopoldo
Galtieri, who ordered forces into the
Malvinas, Gen. Ram6n Camps, who
commanded the Buenos Aires police,
Gen. Albano Hargindeguy, who had
Menem illegally detained in 1976, and
rebel Cols. Rico and Seineldin are
among the most notorious set free.
This was too much even for Peron-
ist loyalists. Against orders, many
i ne conmeceracion uenerai oei i ranajo: Will Peronist labor back Menem s
privatization of state companies?
members of the Peronist Youth joined
demonstrations against the indultos in
October. The indultos also included
most of the Montoneros-Femando
Vaca Narvaja, once the second-in-
command, returned from exile on Co-
lumbus Day to ajubilant crowd singing
“Per6n, Per6n, iquo grande sos!” Ex-
junta leaders Gen. Jorge Videla and
Adm. Emilio Massera, on the one side,
and ex-Monotonero chief Mario
Firmenich, on the other, remain in
prison, Firmenich for directing the Born
kidnapping.
Although Peronists at first looked at
Menem’s policies in disbelief, loyalty
has so far triumphed over logic, as often
happens in this movement. Menem,
many adherents now are saying, is not
abandoning Peronist policies, but just
working to achieve them in convoluted
and amazingly astute ways.
Most of the released officers are
has-beens who no longer pose a threat;
the possible exceptions are Cols. Rico
and Seineldin, but the indultos deprived
them of their best issue for rousing
rebellious troops. The turn toward
Bunge and Born is no more surprising
than the abrupt policy shifts of Per6n’s
“third way” (anticommunist and anti-
capitalist). And it could hardly be con-
sidered a reward to put Maria Julia
Alsogaray at the head of acompany that
is about to be privatized, and where the
workers are organized in a strong Per-
onist union.
My ex-Montonero friend, who still
considers himself a Marxist and a Per-
onist, is worried. To govern, Menem
must make choices that are bound to
alienate some of Peronism’s diverse
constituencies. In the past, when there
has been a political impasse, Argentine
politicians have allowed–or even
invited-the armed forces to take con-
trol. The discovery of democracy within
Peronism will undoubtedly help avoid
such an outcome, but the wild card is
still held by the colonels who led three
mutinies against Alfonsin. Should they
play it, the old Montonero believes, it
could lead to a union of Menem’s mass
base with “nationalist” elements in the
army, to impose what he calls a classi-
cally fascist regime: de facto military
rule with popular support.
After hearing Menem at the Argen-
tine consulate in New York in Septem-
ber, another ex-Montonero friend
summed it up: “We are used to an
Argentina that is prosperous but sad;
now we shall have an Argentina that is
poor but happy.” Poor, definitely, for
the foreseeable future. Happy, maybe.
Menem’s objective seems to be to get
all sectors working together. That’s one
version of happiness, and it’s not really
a departure from Per6n’s own posture.
In fact, by his quirkiness, his spontane-
ous gestures and his ready rapport with
almost everybody, in his own way
Menem is putting the Per6n back into
Peronism.
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