Desecrating Democracy
Pingel, Roy
LAST JULY, ON THE 13TH ANNIVER- sary of Gen. Juan Domingo Peron's death, it was discovered that his grave had been opened, his hands severed and stolen. Although an $8 million ransom was...
...Junta chief Gen...
...The Peronists' growing Renewal wing wanted to stage a political event denouncing both the desecration and other recent incidents...
...And the attack indeed seemed to help Peronist politicians forget deep internal splits and raised spirits about the up-coming elections...
...A month later, the Peronist heroine was repatriated to join her husband who had died that July...
...In October 1974, in an adventuristic operation that showed them as true Evita cultists, the Montoneros spirited the general's body out of the Recoleta cemetery...
...a human rights supporter of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo investigating these murders was kidnapped, tortured and threatened with death if she continued her efforts...
...It also earned Aramburu lasting Peronist enmity...
...Instead of the anti-government rally that many seemed to want, they were treated to a religious event honoring Per6n, led by clergy of one of the region's most conservative Catholic Churches...
...This highly charged symbolic act came in the midst of the campaign leading up to September's local and congressional elections...
...During May and June of 1987, immediately preceding the discovery of the mutilation, death threats mounted against political, labor and student leaders...
...Years later, a small group of revolutionary Peronists calling themselves Montoneros kidnapped and executed Aramburu on Armed Forces Day, May 29, 1970...
...The macabre act pressured President Isabel Per6n and her adviser, Jos6 L6pez Rega, to finally return Evita to Argentina...
...An extreme provocation to Peronists, it was also the latest, most audacious in a series of destabilizing incidents to hit the country in recent months...
...Although an $8 million ransom was demanded, no one- doubts the political nature of a very sophisticated grave robbery...
...The military death squads] cut off the hands of my daughter...
...The apparatus of repression is intact and operating again...
...The armed forces seized control of the General Labor Confederation (CGT), and carried out massive arrests and assassinations culminating in the confiscation of the revered Evita Per6n's body from CGT headquarters, where it had been since her death in 1952...
...Jorge Videla, apparently too turf conscious to share his home with the dead leaders of the popular resistance, secretly arranged their removal to two separate cemeteries...
...In response, an opportunity for unity and popular condemnation of continuing violence and psychological warfare was reduced by the political-union hierarchy to a trivialized denunciation of an attack on a corpse and a symbol...
...These acts of violence as well as the thousand unsolved ones since Alfonsin took office were enough to force then Interior Minister Antonio Trocoli to make a rare appearance before Congress to explain what the government was doing to protect the country...
...The Per6ns lay together only briefly at the presidential residence, disturbed this time by the military coup of 1976...
...Forsaking the traditional Catholic response, "Praise the Lord," some participants chanted "Per6n, Per6n," while rightist Peronists called the "Iron Guard" shouted anti-semitic epithets at the Radical Party candidate for governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel Casella, a Catholic of Italian descent...
...Her remains were secreted off to Italy to be buried under the name Maria Maggi de Magistris...
...In poor barrios on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, provincial police murdered six unarmed young men...
...Adolfo P6rez Esquivel, human rights activist and Nobel laureate, places blame for the grave robbery on military commandoes...
...The Per6n grave robbery is a graphic sign of the role played by Argentina's radical Right, which historically has created a theater of tension aimed at undermining national consensus for a popular-based government...
...Within hours, Aramburu's remains were relinquished by the Montoneros...
...The break-in intensified already unstable times for Argentina's constrained democracy...
...As a gesture toward rapprochement with the Peronists, the government of Gen...
...Pedro Eugenio Aramburu launched an all-out attack against workers...
...The CGT and the Justicialista Party (Peronist)-who were unable to organize opposition to the Obediencia Debida law-sought to take advantage of the robbery's public impact...
...and finally, there were bombings such as the large explosion in Congress' underground parking lot and the simultaneous detonation of bombs in 15 local offices of the ruling Radical Party...
...it was a common practice during the military dictatorship...
...The same groups that functioned during the military dictatorship...
...One political commentator noted, "Where else in the world do you find a [labor federation] bringing out people to pray...
...The violation of Per6n's highly protected tomb was not improvised but performed by a commando operation...
...These internal rifts forced them to settle for an afternoon strike and mass which attracted only 50,000...
...This was a departure for the Administration, whose theory of "two demons" blames both the Right and the Left...
...Alejandro Lanusse returned Evita's remains to Per6n at his Madrid home where he spent 18 years in exile...
...Per6n raises his arms above his head in symbolic embrace of his people...
...When the military overthrew Per6n in 1955, Gen...
...LAST JULY, ON THE 13TH ANNIVERsary of Gen...
...Psychologist Laura Bonaparte told Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky, "It is not the first mutilation of a cadaver in Argentina...
...While insisting the nation was not in jeopardy, he admitted the violence came from the Right...
...Hoping to remove a symbol of popular combativeness, the theft only increased Evita's martyr status among the working class...
...a Communist labor activist was shot dead...
...It is the Peronist salute of the faithful...
...An important image for Peronists is that of Juan and Evita Per6n on the balcony above a rally of hundreds of thousands of cheering workers in the Plaza de Mayo...
...The same that attacked 15 local offices of the Radicals...
...Orthodox labor leaders, the so-called Group of 15, argued against holding any event...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26Peronists: strong on national Icons Per6n's saber and surgical removal of his hands was heavy profanity...
...But the Montoneros were not finished with Aramburu...
...OR PERONISTS, WHO ARE STRONG ON national icons, the disruption of the tomb, the theft of Roy Pingel returned in July from Argentina, where he spent seven months researching human rights...
...T HERE ARE HISTORICAL ANTECEdents for July's grave robbery...
...The dramatic act earned the Montoneros some support, but they failed in attempts to exchange their victim's body for Evita's when Aramburu was found by the authorities...
...CGT general secretary, Saul Ubaldini, wanted to call a huge rally, a general strike and a religious service in repudiation of the desecration...
...By this time Evita had rested in at least five different places, not including a stay behind some file cabinets in the offices of military intelligence before traveling abroad...
...If you want to find who sectioned off Per6n's hands, the investigation must be pointed in that direction...
Vol. 21 • July 1987 • No. 4
