PRESS: Revolution That Wasn't
Powers, Thomas
Something extraordinary happened in Argentina last August 29, a Sunday. Thirty "leftists," none of them yet identified by name, were taken to a deserted area near Buenos Aires, presumably by...
...The federal police are the prime suspects only because the "leftists" were presumably rounded up from various Argentine jails where thousands are being held...
...In the late '60s and early '70s the Tupumaros were active in Uruguay, leading to a similar right-wing military takeover there, and at roughly the same time Allende came to power in Chile and was eventually overthrown and killed by the military in September, 1973...
...These have grown increasingly frequent in the last year but 30 all at once would have made an impression even in Argentina's current political agony...
...A third reason is the tendency of reporters to focus their attention on officials---repressive rightwing officials, in this case---and neglect the much broader, more complex and less accessible ferment of the people...
...By now everyone knows (or should know: there are always 7 January 1977:20...
...That is about the most detailed description of the guerrilla side in this war which I've seen in six months...
...There has been no lack of coverage of the Argentine violence by Juan de Orris of the Times and Joanne Omang of the Washington Post, among others...
...This was not a solitary adventure by some half-organized group of idealistic students, but a continent-wide effort which has spanned a fifteen-year period, sparked dozens of risings, and left thousands dead...
...7, 1976...
...I'm sure we're going to hear a great deal more about separatism in Quebec in the next year than we have about Latin American politics in the last ten...
...The assumption that the 30 "leftists" came from jails is based on the fact the event of August 29 was not preceded by a mass outbreak of kidnappings...
...But it is clear there is more going on in the Southern cone than what reporters in Vietnam used to call "bang bang...
...But the guerrillas---whoever they are---aren't beaten yet...
...In the early '60s revolutionary ferment in Brazil, and especially in the Northeast, led to a coup by a repressive right-wing military regime which has been in power ever since...
...In the absence of an official investigation it is hard to say for sure...
...Thirty "leftists," none of them yet identified by name, were taken to a deserted area near Buenos Aires, presumably by members of the 35,000man federal police...
...But the most important reason, I suspect, is that the "story"--that is, the matrix of unstated assumptions which determine what a reporter puts in the first p~agraph--is "right-wing repression" rather than "revolutionary struggle...
...On one side in this struggle arc the Argentine military, the federal police, SIDE and various rightwing groups with quasi-official status...
...Groups like the Montoneros and ERP have sprung up, 'fought and been crushed in almost every Latin American country, sometimes (as in Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia) more than once...
...The war in Argentina is only the most recent episode in a broader movement which began with Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959, found persuasive theoreticians in Ch6 Guevara and Rtgis Debray, rejected the mass movement organizing efforts of the old Communist party, and attempted to spark the revolution with highly disciplined elite groups ready to resort to military means...
...I am not indifferent to civil liberties, but I also think the nature of what is happening in Argentina is distorted beyond recognition by the tendency to see it strictly as a matter of due process...
...You can describe the dynamiting of 30 bodies in a few paragraphs, where an attempt to identify the dead might take hundreds...
...The leadership and structure of the Montoneros has not been decisively smashed, and several thousands armed extremists are believed to be operating, mainly in urban areas and industrial centers...
...And for a critic...
...What is not at all clear is how this awful violence got started in the first place, and how it fits into similar left-right violence in the rest of what is called the "southern cone" of Latin America---Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia...
...I would no more ask an author what he meant than I would ]ly.'" There was a certain amount of amiable puton in the Times piece, as Richardson and John Gielgud ramblingly recalled their adventures among the avantgatde dramatists, but the lines I have quoted seem to make good sense for an actor...
...Whether the brutality of these regimes will lead in turn to a renewed, broader and ultimately more successful revolutionary movement remains to be seen...
...This is a delicate matter and I expect to be misunderstood, but all the same I think reporters have approached political violence in the southern cone as if the important question, the one overriding and decisive question, was whether or not the military is violating the civil rights of its victims...
...It is clear that the fight has adopted a virtual policy of extermination against the left, despite frequent claims by Argentina's President of five months, General Jorge R. Videla, that he is trying to bring the killers under control...
...Another possible explanation of American indifference is that revolution has been impending in South America for so long now that readers and editors alike have grown tired of waiting, and reporters are instructed to keep it short...
...It is also far from being something new...
...It is also possible that the Army of the Secretaria de Information del Estado (SIDE), the Argentine secret police, were involved...
...More likely, their names are simply lifted from SIDE files, which no doubt are as whimsical and capacious as J. Edgar Hoover's...
...For one thing, a general explanation would emphasize that there are two sides to this war, just as there are to any other, and that it is not simply a wave of right-wing military nationalism, or even fascism, sweeping the southern cone...
...Too many of the commentators on Pinter, faced with the playwright's refusal to explain himself, impose meaning on him, usually a kind of quivering metaphysics far too spongey for the dramatic solidity he puts on stage...
...Guevara, who was captured and killed by the government in 1967...
...On the other are two major guerrilla organizations, the Trotskyite People's Revolutionary Army and the Montoneros, described as leftist-Peronists...
...In Bolivia in the middle '60s there was a brief outbreak by a guerrilla ]oco under Ch6...
...The natural tendency has been to report on the events within each country separately as if they were discrete and unrelated...
...In each instance local groups mounted a local challenge which brought a local response, generally of a violent military nature...
...I put "leftists" in quotes because there have been so many killings and arrests of such an arbitrary nature it seems to me impossible the killers can really know in most cases who their victims are...
...Argentina is in the middle of a violent revolutionary struggle, and yet the revolutionaries remain a complete cipher, with the result that they appear to the world as victims only...
...From one point of view this can be interpreted as another example of the traditional indifference of North Americans to everything which goes on in South America...
...Their bodies were then dragged into a single great pile and were dynamited...
...These report that the violence began in earnest after the military overthrow of Juan Peron's widow last March 24...
...The nature of the military regime is not in doubt but their opponents rarely emerge as anything more than the initials of some revolutionary group, giving a weirdly skewed impression of the struggle which is taking place...
...The southern cone has been only one field of battle, although arguably the last...
...Their successive failures may represent a misreading of the people, or an underestimation of the CIA's counter-insurgency schools, or just the wrong way of going about a revolution...
...The important question is not who is meanest and cruelest--the military wins hands down-but what the struggle is about, and who is going to win it...
...This simplifies matters and is therefore convenient, but it is also misleading, since the broader violence strikes me as being all of a piece...
...In a recent dispatch in the Times [November 17], Juan de Onis wrote: "Despite their heavy losses, the guerrillas retain the ability to carry out nightly operations...
...THOMAS POWERS 'ABSOLUTELY AS IT IS' OOOOOOOOOOOOOO TIlE STAGE "But now, you see, I've grown up," Ralph Richardson told a New York Times interviewer [Nov...
...The military seem to be winning the war--most estimates say that 90 per cent or more of the 1,200 Argentines killed so far ~ year are guerrillas or "leftists...
...For whatever reasons, the principal effect of the guerrilla ]ocos in one country after another has been political crisis leading to right-wing military dictatorship...
...A second mass execution the same day brought the total to more than 40...
...Names and circumstances may change but the pattern has been the same, and it deserves a more general explanation than it has yet received...
...More recently the struggle has shifted to Argentina...
...But I have no idea who he was, or why he founded the ERP, or what he believed, or why he decided to launch military operations, or who joined his army, or what their reasons were for doing so...
...In addition to stories about individual killings there are more general round-up or survey pieces every month or so...
...In one such attack on an arsenal near Buenos Aires last year the guerrillas lost 100 dead, proof not only that it had been a fierce battle indeed but that the guerrillas constitute a large and well-organized underground army...
...What is not in dispute is that the 30 "leftists," once gathered together, were all murdered...
...I read about them in the New York Times and I have been wondering what has been going on down there ever since...
...I do not think reporters have been guilty of making such a bald claim, but that strikes me as the accumulative effect of so many stories about the violent repressive measures of military governments...
...Along with the numerous stories of right-wing kidnappings and murders in Argentina have been occasional reports of Commonweal: 19 major guerrilla attacks...
...Robert Santucho's name has come up once or twice, just often enough to let me know he was the founder of the ERP, and that SIDE recently managed to hunt him down and kill him...
...Every couple of days there is a story about new killingsm a handful here, ten there, the bombing of police stations, "dashes" in or near La Plata, and so on...
...I put "clashes" in quotes because it is widely believed that a lot of them are not really battles at all, but mass executions of kidnapped or arrested "leftists" reported as battles to avoid the onus of murder...
...The bodies at the two sites were discovered the following day, Adgust 30, and were duly reported in the Argentine and foreign press...
...Videla's failure is generally blamed on divisions within the military junta which put Videla into power and which ultimately rules the country...
Vol. 104 • January 1977 • No. 1
