Peronism: A Legacy of Misrule
Witonski, Peter P.
Peter P. Witonsld Peronism: A Legacy of Misrule A• The late Juan Domingo Peron was a man of many moods. He was El Lider, El Jefe, the quintessential Argentine caudillo, the ultimate master of...
...His murderers were never captured, although Mrs...
...More than one thousand people have been killed in political violence, and The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 9 political kidnapping has become a major industry, earning urban guerrillas close to $100 million in ransoms...
...Before meeting Peron she was already a popular radio performer in Buenos Aires, acting in a number of soap operas...
...From Bad to Worse Argentina was ruled by a series of nilitary and civilian governments in the rears after Peron's ouster, but the situaion only grew worse...
...The old Creole society dominated by the provincial caudillo and his loyal peones began to collapse as the economy expanded...
...It was the ultimate symbolic gesture, and the Argentines with their almost Russian passion for necropolitics spent a great deal of time discussing the artistry of the undertaker who had embalmed Evita to look the way she had in life...
...The old traditions were washed away, beginning in the 1880s, and the typical Argentine became rather cavalier in his dealings with existing institutions...
...The Argentine national character—which had appeared to be so firmly established earlier in the nineteenth century—had begun a period of metamorphosis, and it was impossible to predict what the new Argentina would be like...
...As Argentina moved into the twentieth century Lord Bryce, who had spent some time in Buenos Aires, noted, "The Argentines have ceased to be Spaniards without becoming something new of their own...
...He was gunned down in front of his family as he left church last Christmas Day...
...Two factors, above all, distinguished Peron from his predecessors...
...Had Peron lived longer and been surrounded by more competent associates it is doubtful that he could have done much to alter the situation...
...The poor were her constituency (it is said that she knew thousands of Buenos Aires slum-dwellers by name), and her power lay in her ability to remain in touch with them in a way her husband could never do...
...Peron and her henchmen have been unable to stop the violence...
...left-wing Peronists against right-wing Peronis:s...
...Like most Argentines, Borges was unwilling to discuss Argentine political life in greater detail...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 12...
...Everyone will try to scare you with the specter of an economic collapse...
...Peron will be allowed to return...
...After ordering two bishops out of the country, he was excommunicated by the Vatican, an act which cost him dearly, even among the descamisados, and which, more than anything else, led to his downfall...
...Jorge Luis Borges was forced out of his position as director of the National Library and assigned to a menial job in the Ministry of Agriculture...
...She was attractive, passionate, strong, intelligent, and very ambitious...
...It is odd for a North American to sit over coffee with a group of well-educated Argentines as they discuss their expectations of a military coup, and yet that is what Argentines talk about every few years—and that is the kind of conversation that is going on in Argentina today...
...When Jose Hernandez's fictional gaucho Martin Fierro boasted, "I was born on the mighty pampas as the fish is born in the sea," he was not merely advancing the claims of his country's magically fertile heartland...
...Evita Evita made Peron, and it is impossible to understand Peronism without knowing something of this remarkable woman...
...It is an absurdly frivolous and idiotic philosophy, and yet Argentina—a country that is anything but frivolous and idiotic—has never quite been able to get it out of its system...
...This is clearly what the Argentine political establishment, from the military to the political opposition, desires...
...It provided Peronism with its greatest myth, a myth that may prove impossible to destroy, even though Argentina can no longer afford to cultivate it...
...Juan Peron, and, after the old man's death, • President of the Argentine Republic...
...When she died of cancer in 1952 (at the age of 33) Peronism lost its most popular advocate and its most powerful weapon...
...Peron was the one exception...
...Peter P. Witonsld Peronism: A Legacy of Misrule A• The late Juan Domingo Peron was a man of many moods...
...Peron defined treason liberally, and thousands of ordinary Argentines were imprisoned and, in some cases, tortured and killed—simply because they were not ardent enough in their love for Peron...
...When Peron became President the Argentine treasury held about $1.3 billion in reserves...
...and he initiated drastic reforms in working conditions, ordered pay raises, enforced collective bargaining, and greatly expanded social services...
...Peron became angry when the Church, which had approved of his early reforms and had originally given him strong support, began to object to the growing ruthlessness and repressiveness of his regime...
...Peron, as Argentines are beginning to discover, was a kind of genius, but his genius was for public relations, not governing...
...We Argentines," he explained, "have succeeded at everything—except politics...
...He gave women the vote, he gave the workers a 48-hour week and 13 months' pay for 12 months' work, he established a minimum wage, he set up elaborate public works projects, and he greatly expanded social services...
...These were all qualities which Peron lacked...
...When the aged Peron was returned to power in 1973, after 18 years of exile, even he seemed to recognize that the problems he had created in the fifties with-his Thermidorian rhetoric and free-spending could not easily be solved...
...He spent far more money than Argentina had to spend...
...Certainly the brilliant Italo Luder, who is one of Argentina's most respected legal scholars, is better qualified to rule the country than the undereducated ex-stripper he replaced...
...but, at the same time, he knew that he could not survive politically if he turned from the path of "authentic" Peronism...
...Meanwhile, Argentina had plunged deeper into economic and political ruin, and Mrs...
...Give to the people, especially the workers, all that is possible," he wrote...
...It was almost as if the desperate people of Argentina believed that the return of Evita's body could somehow return Argentina to the illusionary kind of prosperity that existed in the days of her power...
...It is a happier, more realistic subject, and there is more logic in Beowulf than there is in Argentina today...
...The Montoneros, who had suspended their violent activities when Peron came back to Argentina, were returning to their killing and kidnapping...
...Rescued by Death Peron died on July 1, 1974, and as one Argentine commentator noted, the old caudillo was lucky even in death...
...Although Peron was in many ways a typical Argentine military caudillo, he aroused more passion in his people than any caudillo before him...
...Peron is the keeper of her husband's flame, and will probably return to power as she has promised...
...And his greatest hero was Mussolini...
...Under the influence of Evita, Peron began an era of reform that revolutionized Argentine society...
...She gave the poor a sense of dignity even as her husband's half-baked economic policies lowered their already low standard of living...
...Return of the Prodigal Father Such was and is the essence of Peron-ism...
...She also understood the common people, and possessed political instincts and vision that were very advanced by Latin American standards...
...The killing will continue until we are rid of Peronism," the nationalist historian Julio Irazusta told me recently...
...Lanusse tried desperately to gain Peron's support without actually bringing him back to Argentina, but events ultimately forced him to agree to Peron's return and to let the Peronist movement run a candidate for the Presidency—Hector Campora, a left-wing dentist...
...Peron was the champion of the trade unions and his most ardent supporters were the urban poor—whom he dubbed the descamisados, or shirtless ones—but at times he also numbered conservative business leaders, orthodox Communists, and moderate churchmen among his followers...
...he old dictator's popularity seemed to -icrease with each passing year, and by 971 Argentines of all classes could look ack to his government with almost sentimental longing...
...The economy was about to collapse...
...Peron was already dying, and Lopez Rega knew that Isabelita would be the next Argentine President...
...By the early 1900s, 30 percent of all the people in Argentina were foreign-born, and 80 percent of the adult male population of Buenos Aires was foreign-born...
...He was a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, a devout Catholic, an excommunicated Catholic, a radical, a conservative, a revolutionary, a counterrevolutionary, a populist, a reactionary, a reformer—among other things...
...During the fabled ochenta—the Argentine Gilded Age that began in the 1880s—the eyes of the world turned to Argentina...
...His death shifted responsibility to the shoulders of his fragile widow and the nefarious man who served as her private secretary...
...Even the emotional Isabelita, as she relaxes at her Cordoba retreat, must know that the time for symbolic gestures had passed...
...The first was his championing of the Argentine working class, which had long been ignored by Argentine politicians...
...But his most important asset, the thing that made him most different from all the caudillos that had come before, was his partnership with the woman who was eventually to become his second wife, Eva Duarte...
...As the Argentine situation became more complicated and bloody the aficionados could say, "If only Peron were still alive things would be much better for us...
...Ultimately this philosophy led to his downfall in 1955 and to the downfall of Argentina...
...The Nobel Prize winner, Bernardo Houssay, was fired from his position at the University of Buenos Aires, along with 385 colleagues —for refusing to take part in a Peronist demonstration...
...In these chactic circumstances Mrs...
...But his greatest mistake was to attack Argentina's powerful Catholic Church...
...The term "as rich as an Argentine"—inspired by the ostentatious habits of the cattle-breeding oligarquia—gained a wide currency, particularly in Europe, and was applied to any conspicuously wealthy person, regardless of his country of origin...
...The economy coninued to stagnate, the standard of living emained low, and the restoration of Tder was not achieved...
...Isabelita was devoted to his teachings and spiritual prognostications, andthrough her Peron, who was always superstitious, came to believe that Lopez Rega possessed magical powers that would, among other things, restore his youthful vitality...
...And he ruled his factious country by playing class against class: the oligarquia against the descamisados...
...by 1952 this had dropped to $450 million...
...Many Argentines would be happy if Isabelita remained forever in her lush hideaway...
...They do not expect much from their caudillos—just as North Americans do not expect much of their big city mayors—and historically they have never received much from them...
...He found Argentina to be even more deeply divided than it had been in the fifties...
...You will see the results...
...But since the fall of Lopez Rega, the wisest Argentine political leaders—including many Peronists —have come to recognize that symbolic gestures are luxuries which Argentina can no longer afford...
...Argentina had been going downhill since 1946, when Peron first came to power, and the aging dictator was no longer the man he had once been...
...She combined the qualities of a beautiful fashion model with those of a secularized madonna and a Tammany Hall wardheeler...
...he was emphasizing the extent to which he and his kind had been shaped by their unique environment...
...only the memory of relative prosperity remained...
...Whenever Peron faltered she was there to support him...
...Quite often she would wander through the squalid villas miserias of Buenos Aires simply tossing small bundles of money at the poor who flocked to her side...
...Last November, General Alberto Villar, the chief of Argentina's Federal Police, and, therefore, one of the most heavily guarded men in the world, was blown up as he climbed into his yacht...
...Al pueblo, los tangos los cantos yo," was his way of saying, "I'll call the people's tune, because I am the General Will...
...Our failure to produce a viable political system has negated all our other achievements, and reduced us to the status of an inferior nation...
...Lopez Rega had served briefly as one of Peron's bodyguards in the 1950s...
...He followed him like a shadow, he told him what to say, he wrote his speeches, and on the day of his death he tried, according to several witnesses, to raise the dictator from the dead...
...But Peron died in the nick of time...
...But riches did not bring political stability to Argentina...
...With his yellow skin and black-stained hair he looked more like a badly embalmed corpse than his country's saviour, and when he died in his bed last year his countrymen were not the least bit surprised...
...The Ultimate Symbolic Gesture Whether the Argentines will ever be able to cast off the shackles of the Peronist mythology remains to be seen...
...Since Peron's death things have gone from bad to worse...
...But Mrs...
...Italo Luder, the Speaker of the Argentine Senate, and headed off for a month's rest at a heavily guarded air force resort in the Cordoba hills...
...As a people, the Argentines are lovers of symbolic gestures...
...The legendary gaucho moved to Buenos Aires and joined the ranks of the growing proletariat...
...When Peron became President she was only 25...
...Peron had faded to a mere 88 pounds, on the verge of a physical and nervous breakdown...
...Indeed, the failure of the various post-Peron governments to lift Argentina out of its political nd economic sty made many Argentines Drget the nastier aspects of Peron's rule...
...Lopez Rega had no choice but to resign, and he went into exile in August...
...Lopez Rega believed himself to be a great necromancer, and while still a poor policeman he had written and privately published several books on mysticism and fortune-telling...
...As Argentina's debts mounted and as the economy slowed down, Peron became more and more isolated...
...and the poor, for their part, made Evita into a kind of secular goddess...
...The eclectic ideology he called justicialismo was equally multifarious...
...those who loved him burned religious candles beneath hiseffigy, and even prayed to him...
...These tactics were in part a return to "authentic Peronism" but they also represented the influence of a new power in the Peronist movement: a sinister, previously unknown man named Jose...
...Guerrillas roam the north of Argentina, outwitting the military at every turn, and gunmen and mad bombers patrol the streets of Buenos Aires, killing with reckless abandon...
...They are a nation in the making, not yet made...
...whenever his popularity declined she would win the people back...
...Victoria Ocampo, the editor of the famous literary journal Sur, was arrested and forced to spend many months in prison with prostitutes—because she sang the national anthem in public...
...This is, perhaps, the main reason why Mrs...
...Between 1869 and 1914, largely as a result of immigration, the population rose from 1.8 million to 7.8 million...
...In 1951 he made a mistake that was to turn world opinion against him: he closed down the distinguished newspaper La Prensa...
...After the deluge of immigrants Argentina began a period of decline that has continued to the present day...
...Let us discuss Anglo-Saxon poetry instead," he said...
...But since the days of the first [Peronisti dictatorship, we have been a people without a future...
...But as of this writing Argentina continues to run on nothing more than such gestures, and there is no reason to believe that Argentina's political leaders are tough enough to get down to the business of dealing with the real facts of Argentine political life...
...Peron used his death as an excuse to place Argentina under a state of siege, and thus deprive her fellow citizens of even more of their liberties...
...She had risen to the top from humble origins and had come to hate the old oligarquia, a fact that would influence the future course of Peronism...
...For Peron was never easy to pin down...
...Without Evita's rhetoric he was unable to win back the support of the people, and in 1955 he surrendered his office to a mili:ary junta without a struggle...
...Peron is dead—Viva Peron...
...If Argentina can make it to the next generalelection in 1978 without a coup or a social revolution, the politicians optimistically believe that a new democratic order can be brought to Argentine political and economic life...
...Peron returned to power with the support of most sectors of Argentine society, but his broad coalition began to fall apart as he began to denounce the oligarquia, threaten La Prensa, and crack down on the Left...
...He viciously persecuted his political enemies, both real and imagined...
...It is hoped that her incompetent rule will finally succeed in convincing the Argentines that Peronism is a gigantic swindle and a political mythology...
...It is eventually to be placed in a massive Peronist shrine (still under construction) between the bodies of her late husband and the brutal nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel Rosas (a barbaric gaucho whose remains were also returned to Argentina last year from their resting-place in England...
...But all of this is a lie...
...But before dying Peron played one last cruel joke on the people of Argentina: he arranged for his third wife, Isabel Martinez de Peron, a woman of tawdry origins, with no education and no political experience, to become Argentina's Vice President, and, under the constitution, his successor as President...
...He was El Lider, El Jefe, the quintessential Argentine caudillo, the ultimate master of Latin American rodomontade...
...In a revealing letter to his friend Carlos Ibanez, who became President of Chile in 1952, he came as close as he would ever come to explaining what justicialismo was all about...
...Incidentally, much of the new money has had to be printed in Chile because the Argentine presses and coin-stamping machines have been breaking down as a result of overwork...
...The Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, Lopez Rega's goon squad—it had nothing to do with anti-Communism—killed opponents of the regime with sudden and brutal frequency...
...Peron and Lopez Rega only in the most polite terms, for to do otherwise, to become too harsh in one's criticism, meant certain injury...
...It has made it possible for us to be ruled by a person like Isabelita...
...When it seems to you that you are giving them too much, give them more...
...He was part Nasser, part Ataturk, part Franco, part Castro, part Hitler, part Stalin, even part Clement Attlee...
...Musing upon the terrifying implications of Peronism, the blind Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges told me, "We were once a great people with a great future...
...Like the United States, Argentina is a frontier society, with an incredibly diverse geography that descends from the bloody Chaco and Andean highlands to the dry plains of Patagonia, the Straits of Magellan, and Tierra del Fuego...
...During the early years of Peron's exile, the two met again, in a Panama City clip-joint where Lopez Rega was managing a young stripper and bar-girl named Isabelita Martinez, the girl who was to become the third Mrs...
...The military coup and the national caudillo became the new established phenomena...
...Those who hated him hated him to the point of never uttering his name...
...There is nothing more elastic than the economy which everyone fears because no one understands it...
...Foreign investment and massive immigration, primarily from Italy and Spain, transformed the texture of Argentine society...
...Lopez Rega...
...Just as the 1955 coup enabled him to escape the responsibility for his own misrule, so his death saved him from that same responsibility in 1974...
...He also began a reign of terror that has poisoned political debate in Argentina to the present day...
...Already upset over how Lopez Rega had usurped control of the Peronist movement from them, the union leaders called a general strike which brought the country to a standstill...
...As foreign debt continued to rise and as living costs be Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 11 continued to soar, however, Lopez Rega consented to Rodrigo's stern policies, which did nothing to help the Argentine economy, but did succeed in outraging the powerful trade union leaders...
...Lopez Rega's own downfall came about when his economics minister, Celestino Rodrigo, imposed rigid price and income controls on the economy...
...On the contrary, as new industries flourished and agriculture boomed, the fabric of Argentine society began to disintegrate...
...She temporarily handed over her presidential powers to Mr...
...The necromancer's first response to the economic crisis was to do what most economic illiterates do when inflation is running close to two hundred percent—he printed money...
...Last year the leninized mummy of thelate Evita Peron was finally returned to Argentina...
...Argentine geography, as the historian Roberto Etchepareborda has noted, has shaped the Argentine national character, in much the same way that America's geography and frontier experience have shaped our national character...
...Peron ran himself in the new elections, with Isabelita as his running-mate...
...It appealed, or seems to have appealed, to virtually every hue of the ideological spectrum—from the fanatical Montoneros on the far left to the fascist gunmen of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance on the far right...
...Campora was to be no more than a front-man for Peron, and when, after a few weeks in office, he emptied Argentina's jails of both political and common criminals, his days were numbered...
...Lopez Rega was instrumental in Peron's decision to remove Campora from the presidency, and in his decision to run for the office himself, with his ex-stripper wife as his running-mate for the vice-presidency...
...He abandoned some of his old tactics—although he clung to his rhetoric —and tried to enlist old opponents in the military and the traditional political parties to aid him in unifying the country and bringing back some semblance of order to the shattered economy...
...rural Argentines against urban Argentines...
...El Lider had become El Viejo, and in his last speeches the man who had mesmerized the descamisados in the fifties could barely be heard...
...On the contrary, there is ample reason to believe, as the Buenos Aires daily La Opinion suggested recently, that her government was behind the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, which has brutally murdered critics of the regime regardless of their politics...
...But Peron could not undo the damage he had done in the fifties, and Argentina became even more divided after his return...
...In the end, he seemed to transcend all his sins and to become his country's symbol of national unity...
...and the undeclared civil war that had plagued Argentina for years became more intense...
...One of its victims was Professor Carlos Sacheri, one of Argentina's most brilliant conservative intellectuals, who was a firm anti-Communist but an even firmer anti-Peronist...
...Whatever the case, Lopez Rega rarely left Peron's side...
...Argentine historians and political scientists have long sought to explain why their country—despite its riches—has failed to develop a successful political tradition like the United States, the country which the founders of Argentina most admired...
...Indeed, on the very day of his triumphal arrival in Buenos Aires, fighting broke out between the extreme factions of his own political movement, leaving many people dead or wounded...
...The Peronist repression and excesses were quickly forgotten...
...If I define I exclude," he once declared...
...Nobody, including the military, wants a military takeover, and Juan Peron's widow is probably the only person in Argentina who can prevent one...
...No Argentine citizen, it seems, is beyond the reach of the assassins...
...But Evita's body could have remained in its Roman hiding place if that is all Argentines expected of it, for even after Evita's death, her restless spirit and the cult it engendered remained alive in Argentina...
...Peron decided in mid-September to take a leave of absence from the presidency...
...When he became minister of labor after the 1943 coup, he transformed the moribund General Confederation of Workers into one of the most powerful central labor unions in the world, making it his main power base...
...We may surmise that Lopez Rega controlled Peron by an uneven combination of flattery, intense loyalty, and pseudomagical power...
...Under Lopez Rega and Isabelita, Peronism ceased to be a political movement and became a kind of political gang...
...Peron understood this better than any other modern Argentine politician, and for almost thirty years—both as an active figure in Argentine political life and as an exile—he remained the hero of his countrymen by freely dispensing such gestures...
...Yet the Argentine frontier experience did not unify the Argentine character as the frontier experience had done in America...
...At the same time, however, he totally ig10 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 nored the agricultural sector of the Argentine economy (which was the backbone of the economy), and, at great cost, he nationalized industries simply because they belonged to his enemies...
...And Jews, regardless of their politics, were singled out for harsh treatment simply because they were Jews...
...These gringos—as the old Creoles dubbed them—brought with them alien ideologies, languages, and manners that were to influence Argentina far more profoundly than immigration was to influence the United States...
...One criticized Mrs...
...Left-wing and right-wing guerrillas agitated violently for his return, and by the spring of 1973, President Alejandro Lanusse, who had spent several years in one of Peron's political prisons, grudgingly initiated contacts with the old caudillo...
...Even the leaders of the oligarquia had come to believe that the Argentine crisis could only be solved by bringing Peron back to power...
...whenever Peron's profligate acts of private dissipation caused a scandal she managed to assuage the public's response to it...
...It is not completely clear what Lopez Rega's hold was over the aging Peron, but it was a clearly powerful one that was to dominate the last years of the cau&do's life...
...But before that happens, the last vestiges of the Peronist myth must be destroyed...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
