ARGENTINA: A STORY BEHIND A WAR
Corradi, Juan E.
This article is reprinted from the FSISI pamphlet "DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP IN LATIN AMERICA," © 1982 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. The pamphlet will be...
...Old and new patterns were thrown together in haste, geared for the dramatic confrontations that would rock the country later on...
...If Peronists are excluded, only a weak government would inherit the present problems...
...PerOn's call for conciliation found more favorable reception among non-Peronists than among his own followers...
...Dangerous Fictions, Sobering Facts THE CENTRAL Argentine problem is not economic, not strategic, but political...
...The paradox was this: the man who had skillfully sabotaged many a government from exile was now called upon to rescue a drifting polity...
...From such disarray some have concluded that only a supreme concentration of power could end the conflict of all against all...
...in others it has come about through violence...
...in exchange, the Peronist party was allowed to campaign and present a stand-in candidate), the military returned to the barracks and general elections were held in March 1973...
...Terrorism was abolished, but terror became part of the art of governing...
...Old and ailing, he became a political system by himself...
...PerOn and his third wife, known as Isabelita, ran for president and vice-president, respectively...
...The simplicity of official ideology—which does not exclude surrealistic overtones—is, however, paradoxical...
...The junta vowed to abolish terrorism, to revitalize the economy, and to transcend the social stalemate...
...This precocious Alexandria has challenged decrepit Albion to the deadliest of all games...
...This may explain why, instead of assuming clear positions, so many Argentines were seized instead by a wish to forget, by a passion to ignore the outrages that were practiced in their midst...
...Fear is not the enemy of enthusiasm...
...But in the latter, the weight of traditions, the respect for weathered institutions, the commonality of beliefs makes decadence supportable...
...Argentina has lived in the shadow of fear...
...How was he to persuade labor, which had been victimized by previous economic policies, that its demands had to take into consideration the general wellbeing of the economy...
...In consequence, right-wing Argentina offers the spectacle of a young country defending mythical old values, a modern melting pot worshipping traditions it never had, conservatives with little to conserve...
...no solid authoritarian state, but praetorian regimes in search of adventure and in fear of retribution...
...It was not wholly committed to a political order that had curtailed its participation in the past...
...New actors entered the scene then: radicalized groups of middle-class youth whose irruption set the tone of the second Peronist era...
...The currency has been devalued several times...
...He had to defuse the forces that had brought him back to power...
...More important than its substance was its style, based on populist mobilizations...
...In this odd context, it is not odd that Argentina has gone to war with Great Britain in 1982 over an injustice done to it in 1833...
...but we can hope...
...The model of repression was simple...
...Detached from existing interests and values, the new generation sought to impose its radical will, seriously misjudging the actual composition of the country's political forces...
...PerOn made use of extremists from the right to consolidate his power, just as he had made use of extremists from the left to acquire it...
...Grain went to the Soviet Union...
...How was Perlin to obtain peace from those whose violence he had previously endorsed...
...The middle class now eagerly embraced a culture that for long years it had been allowed to taste surreptitiously at best...
...Some claim as many as 30,000 victims...
...While Peron presented himself as the only man who could spare the country a social upheaval, the guerrillas in turn intended to provoke, with his return, a revolutionary wave...
...PerOn returned, and already the welcoming ceremonies at the airport were marred by a deadly battle between radicals and the security forces...
...Serious analysts believe the total number is closer to 15,000...
...In every cycle of this spiral, dictatorship has become more savage and the economic medicine more bitter...
...In the end, one is left with the unequivocal impression that what Argentina needs is a solid team of political craftsmen, not an assortment of stuffy officers—mostly murderous—and economic wizards—mostly fake...
...Altogether 82 percent of the voters backed candidates hostile to the armed forces...
...Behind the impressive victory of PerOn stood not only his traditional supporters—the working class —but also large contingents of the middle class that had abandoned their former political loyalties to gather around the figure of PerOn...
...Such apprehension led them to believe that only Peron himself could contain those explosive forces...
...In the awesome stadiums the junta and the masses feigned working for a common cause...
...In April 1982 the military chose a classic and suicidal nonsolution: the flight forward into war...
...Everything came to rest on his shoulders...
...The first problem, therefore, is to create a system of government that can do justice to a complex society, not to evade it with an ersatz of jingoism and war...
...We cannot bet on it...
...Argentina has developed into a complex society, but it has not achieved the political sophistication and self-restraint that could make participation and freedom compatible...
...Military security and economic speculation soon got out of hand...
...It is a problem to be attacked perhaps piecemeal, a process in which every class, political association, and institution must renew and criticize itself...
...His maneuvers stemmed from an opportunistic conception, in which democratic methods contain nothing sacred in themselves and are but one item in a larger and less humane arsenal...
...He also endorsed the claims of several guerrilla groups that acted in his name, as a means of exerting pressure on the regime...
...In this volatile conglomerate, alliances, like fireworks, are as varied as they are ephemeral...
...Together, they are formidable enemies of reason...
...foreign goods flooded the local market...
...to the pragmatic present a purified and redeeming past...
...but instead of approaching a definitive solution, both have only increased the danger of disintegration and explosion...
...Economic, political, and social movements, which elsewhere made their way by gradual stages, here have been in simultaneous ferment...
...In 1982, the regime has offered them external war as the bitter substitute for national consensus, but the war can only postpone the question: will Argentina achieve freedom without chaos, and order without fear...
...Something resembling a dual state has existed in the country since 1976, a state in which two systems operate, one serving as a mask for the other, one under the remnants of the old constitution (to which a new body of repressive legislation has been attached), the other under arbitrary measures 290 in which considerations of military security override all law...
...PerOn had been dead for four years...
...Political repression and economic discipline would put Argentina back on the right track...
...Despite repeated attempts at coercion and co-optation, the different regimes that succeeded Per6n's could not erase that primary loyalty...
...The Social Patchwork ARGENTINA, like other dependent societies, is characterized by social disarticulation, which in turn is the result of the historical accretion of disparate modes of development...
...But each time it falters and then succumbs to the tug-of-war between pressure groups...
...Moreover, 2 million Argentines— including many of the better trained —have sought refuge abroad...
...He could not disentangle himself from the web of interests and passions that he had promoted...
...But how to account for the new youth movement that sprang from the heart of middle-class Argentina and broke all ties with established political practices...
...Given such dissonance, a heavy premium was placed on the distribution of resources, on multiple payoffs...
...The gap between the savage political form and the mild social content, between criminal means and conventional ends, gives a measure of the political anomie that has seized Argentina...
...And everything has been going very badly in Argentina...
...But, as on all those occasions, things had not turned out well for them...
...Guerrillas stepped up their attacks on right-wing Peronists...
...The different sectors of society started to protest again...
...The rapid development of Argentina put side by side groups that failed to speak the same political idiom...
...the workers, the language of participation...
...Five years later, General Videla finished his mandate and conveyed power to another general, president-select Roberto Viola...
...The crisis that ensued forced president Campora to resign and resulted in his temporary replacement by the Speaker of the House...
...Both further sapped the public spirit...
...The 1973 elections functioned like a plebiscite and discharged on the political arena a torrent of accumulated frustrations...
...If the political style was violent, indeed fascistic, the government's social and economic program remained prudent, with some nationalistic overtones...
...But how to distinguish between friend and foe...
...Nationalism went hand in hand with oil concessions, "liberation" was mixed with "dependency," until the perverse dialectic found an echo among those who advocated violence as a means of attaining peace...
...the industrialists, the language of growth...
...In general, they last as long as authoritarian rule is able to keep civil society on a short leash...
...A bizarre discursive bricolage accompanied a no less confusing act of political combinations...
...on the other, business and labor arrived at a concerted incomes policy...
...sophisticated weapons were bought...
...Whereas for the workers the return of Peronism signified the vindication of old political convictions, for the middle-class newcomers it was a gesture of political parricide...
...Old words received new meanings...
...The ideology of the officers is a universe plagued with demons, illdigested values, and a sense of intellectual siege...
...no revolution, but terrorism...
...There is a puzzle of passions that seek but cannot find an adequate political solution...
...Its political system functions like a wild market...
...No stable political formula has emerged...
...The country had moved from terrorism to state terror...
...If open elections are held, the Peronists are likely to return in force...
...Hence, though intellectually brilliant and culturally creative, more "modern" than other Latin American societies, Argentina falls prey to political decay...
...All they knew was that their safety and lives were at stake...
...These factors must be placed in the context of Argentine society, which is made up of many diverse ethnic groups and is characterized by the weakness of social loyalties on the one hand, and a protracted institutional crisis on the other...
...Politicians and intellectuals sat back, puzzled and paralyzed, watching in stupor the invasion of the stage by vigilantes whose only answer was retribution...
...Argentines have, for their part, resorted to unscrupulous methods in pursuit of modest goals...
...Too weak to lead, each group is still strong enough to prevent others from doing so...
...Personal and military rivalries aside, this was probably the reason why Viola was forced to resign and was replaced by General Leopoldo Galtieri, the army commander...
...as they would do again in 1976...
...elected government in 1966—as they had done in 1962, in 1955, in 1943, in 1930...
...The hour of political revenge seemed imminent...
...Punishment and Fear THE MILITARY RULERS have reduced the complex mores of Argentina to a simple dichotomy: friend or foe...
...Depending on the whim of the authorities, the scheme remained simple or was complicated...
...They were seeking a way out...
...The magnitude of this shift appears clearly when we recall that the majority of middle-class Argentines had been against Per& in the '50s...
...But a dual state of this sort is a state on the verge of decomposition, where the capacity to coordinate and integrate society in a universally binding fashion, by means of a rational legal structure or at least through a rational bureaucracy, is lost in the rivalry of warlords and their free-wheeling "special services...
...Against a backdrop of sordid battles between armed factions, the established social groups continued their bickering, neither joining the fight nor doing anything to stop it...
...Until democratic order exists, economic progress will continue to be fitful and intermittent...
...Different international organizations have documented some 6,000 cases of "disappearances...
...In the Falklands adventure, they have counted on the nationalist loyalty of the population...
...PerOn's return to power took place in an atmosphere of increasing violence...
...On the eve of the Falklands/Malvinas war, the predicament of the present regime was tough...
...Their elders were able to withdraw to old reflexes and acquired positions...
...Unemployment has mushroomed, and inflation has gone back to three digits...
...How then was PerOn to press the need for compromise on those in whom proscription had bred an acute sense of difference...
...Social and political conflicts exceeded PerOn's capacity to manage them...
...A society once full of promise and still young has entered a fateful spiral of decay that sometimes seizes much older nations...
...This is not a panacea...
...An ordeal of insurgency and counterinsurgency was then added to the list of hardships that were plaguing an exhausted country...
...There is no largeness of aims, no solid rule—only some partial answer to blockages and reciprocal vetoes...
...It may come about that one group will absorb all the others, or that other compromise structures will arise, or that the present system will lapse into further anarchy...
...Whence their mythical reappropriation of Peronist ideology at the very moment when the established political groups sought conciliation...
...It has repeatedly denied itself what it has needed most: a properly functioning "bourgeois-democratic" system...
...but the process bypassed the educational institutions of the middle class and, instead, passed through the state-sponsored unions and the welfare system...
...PerOn did not limit himself to demanding a return to electoral politics...
...The wish to catch up seized the universities and from there spread to the wider world of the middle class...
...Peronists and Radicals— the two traditional parties that the military had sought to suppress—received 70 percent of the vote...
...From within, it behaves fitfully and lacks focus, not because there is a vacuum of power, but because power is dispersed in explosive fragments throughout the social body...
...Peronism extended the rights of citizenship to a recent proletariat...
...The old and the new were juxtaposed in odd coexistence...
...For Argentina, decadence is hell...
...The question is posed once again: can Argentina succeed in achieving internal stability, in making use of its remarkable human and natural resources, in becoming a civil community...
...The lesson of these tragic years seems to be that it is as strenuous to develop the potentialities of Argentina on a dictatorial as on a democratic basis...
...Without the appropriate political, if not natural, resources to muddle through in an unsteady world, and lacking solid political mores on which to stand, the country declines in ugly ways, tormented by the image 289 of a past for whose loss it finds no consolation...
...And so the economic remedies have come to depend on political dictatorship...
...No democracy appears—only disorder...
...He had taken both a hard and a soft line, played both the right and the left...
...Argentina, however, belies that notion...
...The complaints of labor, business, farmers, and parties have become loud...
...Each group clamors in a separate discourse...
...And if the present rulers succeed in riding out the effects of this war, or if they are replaced by more of their kind, the last act of the Argentine drama is likely to be even more unpleasant...
...The answer cannot be found in the Zeitgeist, even less in "foreign subversion," as the present masters of Argentina pretend, but rather in some basic social and cultural patterns of the 1950s and '60s...
...If Argentina is to count anywhere, it must begin by counting at home, as an entity both livable and lovable that is more—and not, as hitherto, less—than the sum of its parts...
...Soccer came to mean fellowship on the cheap...
...Nothing would shelter the national economy from international market forces...
...Political life became a game of dissimulation, a masquerade in which the masks, though hiding contrary designs, oddly resembled one another, for they were all patterned after the effigy of PerOn...
...The junta had promised to restore faith in work and progress through an iron-fist approach to political disorder...
...Whereas in many societies class conflicts have been deflected into a competition for middle-class status, in Argentina the visible recrudescence of social struggles stems from heightened tensions within the middle class, pitting faction against faction, generation against generation...
...In some countries social change has been brought about by relatively peaceful means...
...Political arrangements are not the product of iron logic but the result of creative answers to challenges, or the lack of such answers...
...Where common values cannot cement the social order, only the delivery of goods keeps the whole fabric together...
...The event was studiously exploited by the regime to make citizens forget their ordeals...
...A responsible collective process of democratic reconstruction will be then—as before—both the best and most fragile prospect...
...Now political disorder and economic crisis played havoc with the demands of a young generation...
...Institutional crises, crises of legitimacy, crises of participation, crises of distribution, de facto governments, states of siege and martial law, attempts at totalitarian or joint rule, experiments in corporatism, terrorism of the left and of the right, terror condoned or practiced by the government—all have been detrimental not only to democratic values and to the rule of law, but to the very existence of the state as well...
...From 1943 to 1955, during the first Peronist era, Argentina had been culturally cloistered...
...Seen from the outside, Argentina does not seem to find a sure place in the changing international order, only illusions and disillusions...
...The farce of 1978 seems, with hindsight, to have been a prelude to the tragedy of 1982...
...While organized labor was being accepted again as part of the political system, the young preached revolution in the name of outcasts...
...After years of abusing power, they pos292 sessed all the cards in the deck but one: they had nobody left to blame if everything went bad...
...The industrialization that took place during World War II gave birth to a strong labor movement, the backbone of Peronism...
...Political conflict became a fight over the appropriation of the same figure and the same language...
...If Argentina had changed, it was only in the sense of wholesale diminution: today it has a smaller industrial base, a smaller working class, and a smaller middle class than it had ten years ago...
...It is hard to see how this mentality can produce anything but internal and external catastrophes...
...A month later he was dead, and the countdown toward disaster began...
...They traded organized repression for past sins and diffuse violence...
...If the officers remain in power, serious divisions within their ranks will explode...
...So the question was posed that would ominously hang over Argentine politics in the years to follow: who would use whom...
...In the '50s—the decade when this youth was born—Argentina underwent a wave of modernization that affected, among other institutions, education and the family...
...In the circles close to power, however, the sense of an ideological war was strong...
...Like so many currents of reform in Argentine history, this modernization failed to encompass the whole society...
...Coming home from the stadiums, citizens had to face an everyday reality ridden by anxiety...
...On this score Per& was a quintessential modern Argentine, a symbol and symptom of the profound disarray that has afflicted the nation...
...but its meaning was quite different in the '70s...
...Would this general impoverishment and permanent dictatorship be the price of escaping the old political vicious circle...
...capital was channeled into speculative ventures...
...The solution has been there all along— known to all, undramatic, but it has eluded Argentines as if it were a supreme task for which they are singularly inept: the acknowledgment of their social complexity, the commitment to democratic processes, and the acceptance of perhaps a modest but steady level of economic performance...
...Because of this lack, economic policies have been inconsistent and economic crises, in turn, have been rapidly translated into wild social tensions and political disruptions...
...The economy has had a sluggish rate of growth, but the population has also grown at a very modest rate...
...In the end, there was nothing left for 288 the majority of Argentines but wait for the return of the military...
...Per-capita product and income have traditionally been the highest in Latin America...
...They had seized power by overthrowing an...
...The society then does not make sense to itself and cannot interpret its position in the concert of nations...
...the selection of victims could be random or according to specific categories...
...But social disarticulation, political fragmentation, and galloping expectations have outpaced the capacity of the economy to please everybody...
...The new junta and its president, General Videla, proclaimed that their objective was not merely to terminate the disorder of the Peronist years, but to reorganize the very basis of Argentine society...
...By 1982 one thing was clear: the military had won their dirty war but not the peace...
...at best they agree informally on certain policies...
...The negative pluralism that results poses a Hobbesian problem...
...The ideas of these moral crusaders are reactive and antimodern—yet Argentine culture is nothing but the product of modern enlightenment...
...The only option for many of them was a leap forward into the abyss...
...Mass silence reigned—except on one occasion...
...Economic policy was aimed at dismantling the arrangements that, in the past, had produced the collusion of inefficient industrialists with oversized labor unions—both under state protection...
...The program was moderate...
...This premature vocation for nostalgia can trigger irredentist claims...
...Conflict will not cease, but it will be carried out in less destructive fashion, within the boundaries of law and around rational principles...
...Anxiety seized all alike—those who did poorly and those who did well, those touched by the terror and those graced by a paper boom...
...Other societies have managed worse strains without the political cannibalism, the futile bloodshed of Argentina...
...The ticket won by a landslide and on October 12, 1973, for the third time in his life, Per6n became president of Argentina...
...to accommodation, struggle without concessions...
...Sometimes the state rises above the turmoil and seeks to assume command of political development...
...As president, PerOn had, on the one hand, to channel the expectations of his followers and, on the other, to rebuild the political system...
...There was a gap between the spirit of conviviality that animated PerOn and the main parties, and the mood of popular mobilization that had carried him back into the government...
...The pamphlet will be published later in July...
...terms belonging to disparate universes of discourse were transposed and combined...
...These elements put Per6n—who, after a brief visit, had gone back to Madrid—under pressure to deliver on his promise to pacify society...
...They placed their hopes again in old PerOn...
...The economic results will not be spectacular, but they will be steadier and in the end more just...
...In 1976 Argentines were tired of a nominally democratic system that delivered them to internal war...
...The junta has been faced with several unpleasant alternatives...
...Social compacts and political understandings were blown to smithereens, and people started to kill each other with depressing regularity...
...In the winter of 1978, Argentines were allowed to pour out on the streets again, to celebrate the world soccer championship, which the Argentine team had won...
...The Political Conundrum WITH THE RETURN of Peronism Argentines hoped to find a viable political formula...
...The new government followed a program based on a social pact between, on the one side, small and medium-sized industry, and, on the other, the powerful central labor organization...
...And now every group defined its position in terms of access to the presumed will of the leader...
...The results were very serious: while wages were rolled back and in291 dustry contracted, primary exporters cashed in on record sales, and financial operators paid interest on deposits that outran the phenomenal inflation rate...
...The right of the regime to stay in power has been challenged by the established groups...
...Thus agrarian wealth at the turn of the century produced large fortunes, urban centers, and a big, though parasitic, middle class...
...Argentina exasperates those who expect a country seemingly modern and urbane to house a free, self-governing people...
...On the right and on the left priorities were twisted...
...Moreover, Argentina continues to produce attractive surpluses of foodstuffs and is self-sufficient in energy...
...Among the few that rule, few common loyalties exist...
...It will not, perhaps, be undeserved...
...And it will frustrate those who believe in a revolutionary outcome...
...In 1973 the Argentines opted for the wholesale rejection of the political pattern that had developed since the ouster of PerOn in 1955: a cycle of proscription, chicanery, and dictatorship...
...The political institutions had been convened to contain the social struggles...
...It will also disappoint those who think that an efficient despotism will bring remedy to license...
...The economy was not revitalized: it went bankrupt...
...Military security of the present kind will only breed insecurity...
...Argentina has been governed by both a visible and an invisible government, by dignified military chiefs and by secret terroristic associations...
...Yet the skills PerOn had applied to defeat his adversaries proved insufficient to build a viable political alternative...
...After protracted negotiations (PerOn was allowed to return to Argentina but not to run in the elections...
...The values of the military are an amalgam of small-town morality, religion, and national security...
...On the one hand, state terror confined citizens to looking after themselves...
...Peronism was no longer a coalition of immature classes around the early benefits of industrialization...
...It was this style that alarmed military officers, landowners, business executives, and many moderates in the middle class...
...But what rational strategy could the middle-class youth fall back on...
...But the same balance and flexibility could not be expected from his own movement...
...But, in the present circumstances of Argentina, such maxims as "economics before politics" or "security before politics"—which in practice have meant a combination of a recklessly "open" economy and an intolerably closed polity— are less true than the converse...
...The Soldier's State THE RECENT HISTORY of Argentina yields a picture of fragmented, discontinuous modernization...
...In 1973 the children of those who had resisted Per6n turned their backs on their parents and embraced the very cause that the latter once opposed...
...285 Meanwhile, Per& was reinstated as a lieutenant general in the army, key government positions were filled with conservative Peronists, and new elections were called...
...The latter do not settle their differences in a rational manner...
...While older Peronists saw the possibility of negotiating some historic reparation, the Peronist youth treated them as traitors who lacked nerve...
...The Administration of General Viola vacillated before that question, making gestures of d6tente toward the opposition...
...To grow up in such a climate meant, for the middle-class children of the '50s and '60s, to face a wider set of choices, but also a more uncertain future, than any of their forebears...
...The victim "disappeared," but the target reacted with some manner of submission...
...Guerrillas were being decimated in a bloody campaign that claimed many innocent victims...
...Left-wing Peronists were swept from official posts...
...The country is in the middle of a frightful economic crash...
...It included three actors: a source of punishment, a victim, and a target...
...Each group—the landed elite, the middle classes, the workers' unions, national and international business circles—busily promoted its projects, but no vision has arisen that is large enough to encompass the society...
...During his long exile in Spain, he had presented himself as the ultimate arbiter of Argentine politics...
...The Cultural Malaise NEARLY 40 PERCENT Of the Argentine population belong to the middle class—a class reputed, since Aristotle, to be a source of political stability...
...Who will ever know...
...These form the core of an alleged "Argentine style of life" that is the antithesis of "communism...
...The sportive-jingoistic fervor of 1978 was short-lived...
...Ten years ago, nearly 20 years after his ouster, Juan PerOn became again leader of Argentina...
...So far, the opposite has occurred...
...The landed elites speak the language of order...
...286 The survival of Peronism among the workers was understandable: in the '40s Peronism had presided over the incorporation of labor in the political system...
...It is in this realm that we must seek an explanation for a central problem in modern Argentina, namely, the persistence of unprincipled public action...
...The balance of the "dirty war" against "subversion" is known throughout the world...
...Another process took place in the late 1950s and '60s: political discourse among the elites became inarticulate...
...They had achieved neither social consensus nor economic solvency...
...Political fragility is the other side of an activist but fragmented society...
...victims could be dispatched with variable rates of destruction...
...The conditions of success are partly political, partly economic, partly moral and social...
...On the other hand, the people's strategies to cope with inflation turned them into speculators and moonlighters...
...The end of Per6n's regime [in 1955] led to regression for organized labor but to progress for other areas of social and cultural life...
...PerOn's every act was interpreted in a million different ways...
...In comparison with most developing countries, Argentina's basic predicament has never been too grave...
...The experience left its imprint on the collective memory...
...Ten years ago, the military ruled Argentina...
...But that difficulty did not make internecine war inevitable...
...It was considerably more difficult to balance the interests of labor with those of national and foreign capital at this later date, to house them all in harmony in the same political movement...
...Their reasoning was oriented to the past and negative—a logic of remembrance and avoidance...
...This further confused the terms of political understanding...
...June 20, 1982...
...The citizens had to guess the rules that could separate a good from a bad Argentine...
...If, in that event, the harshest hawks prevail, another bloodbath might ensue...
...Almost any combination of ideological notes was admitted...
...Moral crusades were launched against the specter of subversion...
...Their alarums over territorial sovereignty today camouflage the weakening of national sovereignty through disastrous policies...
...Hector Campora, the Peronist candidate, became president...
...PerOn's successors—his widow Isabel and her entourage—isolated themselves from a political society in which every man was for himself...
...The new program was similar to what Peronism had offered in the 1940s...
...This dramatic shift of allegiances helped envelop Argentina in a wave of violence for which it was not prepared...
...The cost would be austerity and recession...
...Many significant groups have been disenfranchised...
...In return, radical militants were persecuted...
...The loudness of the parts only increases the cacophony of the whole...
...The striking feature of Argentine terror is the duplicity with which it has been administered and suffered, ranging from the government's disavowal of responsibility to a split structure of consciousness and discourse among the population...
...Backed by a solid electoral majority, PerOn stood, as president, at the center of this scheme—providing balance and flexibility...
...In fact, they confirmed it...
...Life on the Tight Rope TWO YEARS AFTER the junta seized power, democracy had become a bad word...
...The experience showed that the Argentine military found it much easier to seize power than to hold it with competence or leave it with grace...
...From this confusion emerged, a few years later, that new style of the radicalized middle-class youth with its aptness for the macabre, as in the political terrorism with which it chose to express itself in the '70s...
...On the one hand, the two major political parties fraternized in Congress...
...On this level, Argentina is not merely a "dependent culture," since it has, after all, autonomously developed its own madness...
...The glue that binds them together is profit, power, and the fear of those below...
...The decision to open up the political game had been taken in order to block the menace that the conflicts of civil society might swamp the state...
...It was precisely this capacity of the country's institutions to satisfy a varied set of interests that faltered after 1955...
...The officers who toppled the regime of Isabel Perlin in 1976 expected to accomplish that task...
...Traditional social conventions gave way to a pervasive cynicism...
...He also faced another obstacle...
...Those circumstances have been periods of lowest ebb in politics, coming generally as the result of previous failures...
...Pet& would use up all his reserves of charisma in order to bridge that gap...
...287 Argentine society failed to find an adequate answer to their challenge...
...Thus punishment could be ordered by the highest authorities or left to the judgment of autonomous paramilitary groups...
...Argentine notables were led to fear a convergence of popular discontent with guerrilla action and Peronist organizations...
...To proposals of conciliation they opposed rupture...
...The accumulated mistakes of successive authoritarian regimes had managed to unite disparate groups in a front against military rule...
...The technological reorganization of the 1950s and '60s favored local branches of transnational corporations and disfavored older sectors...
...The last-minute efforts to find a sensible way out failed because of the sectarianism of the Peronists and the civic retreat of the other political parties...
...In June 1974 PerOn threatened to resign...
...Argentina will begin to emerge from the present morass only when compromise between different social groups can be put on a binding universal basis...
...Frustration bred contempt and contempt utopia...
...But, sooner or later, the people may come to see the war as both unnecessary and disastrous, and the hour of reckoning will come...
...It may therefore be fitting to dwell on the socialpsychological dynamics of the last few years...
...Many Argentines have become critical of Western culture in the name of a myth of that same culture—a myth that harried authoritarians have construed in solitude and resentment, feeling besieged by countless and abstract enemies, and betrayed by friends...
...Could the old parties retrieve the formidable amount of social energy that had accumulated outside their spheres during the years of dictatorship...
...This frustration has led to attempts to "salvage" the economy, whenever political circumstances have allowed it...
...Peronists and anti-Peronists came together in a tactical alliance against the armed forces: they demanded free elections...
...An illusory bond was established between a people whose enthusiasm could not find worthy political expression and a regime whose policies were anything but popular...
...Unlike in other dependent societies, however, in Argentina each of these modes has given rise to a dense network of interests that persist over time...
...In 1981 they longed again for peace and freedom, and for deliverance from the executioner's method...
...The political episodes of the 1970s bring to mind Turgenev more than Marx...
...But the summons had found them in a state of disarray: they had not withstood intact the punishment meted out to them by the military regime that had ruled the country from 1966 through 1972...
Vol. 29 • July 1982 • No. 3
