Paralysis in Argentina

...In Buenos Aires, rich and solid like a fortune in beef, one feels that power is worth fighting for...

...As though it were the most normal thing in the world, welldressed ladies walked their carefully clipped poodles carefully around dirty Sherman tanks...

...The military coup took place on the eve of announced Government intervention in the CGT...

...It would have been easy for any well-organized civilian group to bring off its own "coup...

...The United States often insists that only "legitimate" power is worthwhile power...

...They would like to man the bulwarks, but their hearts are so heavy they cannot get up the ladders...

...There is a grain of truth in this: namely, that any Communist party in Latin America would prefer to work, if it could, through a massbased popular movement...

...What is so spectacularly unsatisfactory to the Argentine armed forces about presidents and "legitimate" governments, for example, is that the divisions they represent, in their manifestations as parties or "tendencies," are futile...

...Yet a government in South America that is not powerful, is not government...

...Facing him, as it faced his predecessor, is the prospect of a merger between the armed forces and the laboring mass...

...Conceivably, this is why the Argentine Army-for whom the country is important and events have historical dimension beyond the morning newspaper-divided and fought the Glorious Spring Revolution...

...Only one thing is certain, and that is that the very last institution likely to command the sympathy, much less the enthusiasm, of the public, is the parliament, or a parliamentarized executive...

...Nevertheless, the recent events in Argentina were not merely another parlor-game, a military version of the French Fourth Republic...

...There was widespread disgust, too, reflected in a newspaper cartoon that went up in many shops, showing a general facing two soldiers, one of whom was asking, "Yes, General, but would you please explain which of us is the enemy...

...Surely, in this context, the question we should ask is, "how do the military (or the trade unions) arrive at their decisions...

...Constitutional authority" is not the only power affected by such pressure...

...after all, the officers are patriotic men...

...As for political opposition to the new vulgarity, in Argentina, as elsewhere in Latin America, the various parties are devoted to undermining each other, not to making a common front against a common enemy...

...But this is not so...

...Scratch the average Peronist "thinker" in Argentina or Goulartist radical in Brazil, and you will find a third-rate writer, a worker who doesn't care to work, an army officer in search of quick promotion, or an intellectual manqu...

...Here it is necessary to reflect briefly on the other Argentine pressure group, the Peronist labor movement...

...And if the trade-union movement had been unified, the outcome might have been very different...

...They aim at the total politicization of education, welfare, art, economic development, etc...

...Revolutions that succeed each other too rapidly have a way of breeding cynicism, especially when it is exceedingly difficult to know who is rebelling against whom, or why...

...But one also feels that the public knows it has not, does not, and probably will not in the near future dispose of this power...

...It would be sad if this merger were to take place under our complaisant eyes, merely because like the lady with the poodle, horrified, we averted our eyes from the tanks...

...But the issues that divide both groups-particularly the military, by virtue of its education and sense of ?©lite-are important ones...

...We can see no check on their exercise of power and, if they turn corrupt or tyrannical, we are neither surprised nor sorry: It only proves the superiority of our own way of doing things...

...The public wants to know who is running the country...

...Above all, they are opportunistic movements, without real guts and without a politik...

...In Argentina, as in Peru or Brazil, the only fully organized civilian group able to mount a "coup" is the trade-union movement-specifically, the Confederaci??n General de Trabajo' (CGT), or Peronist-dominated central labor union...

...Powerful governments make themselves, and Americans, with moral righteousness, find this distasteful...

...There are no "issues" available to the public: the issue is power, and power is not necessarily linked to achievement...

...No doubt, neither the armed forces nor the trade unions would have the power it possesses if Argentina's institutions were active and logical sources of power-that is to say, if it suited individual ambition better to be secretary of state, education or culture, rather than secretary of war, interior or labor...

...It would be dilficult in Argentina or Brazil to elect a powerful government to office...

...Frustration comes from seeing governments that cannot govern...

...The military's superiority (and hence, arrogance) comes from the certain knowledge that, granting unity, it can accomplish what it sets out to do...

...The spectacle grew quite ugly the next day, with the center of the city deserted and tense young conscripts brandishing sub-machine guns, but an atmosphere of unreality hung over the proceedings throughout...

...Unfortunately for those whom the 18th century called the "projectors"-the people who are forever building giant self-starting, self-correcting systems-in Latin America neither labor nor the military is a single entity...

...But Peronism and Goulartism are really pre-Communist-or, to be more precise, pre-totalitarian - movements, and whether they finally drift into one ideology or the other is as yet undecided...

...Like Arturo Frondizi before him, President Guido survives in an uneasy truce...

...Latin Americans, on the other hand, know that only power itself is legitimate...

...The closeness of the contest in Argentina three weeks ago suggests that what was involved was a serious difference, and not simply a game of power between rival sets of epaulettes...

...These movements are the product of acute demoralization, not of thought...

...Like Cavafy's barbarians, for whom the Roman Senate waited with garlands and fine speeches, they are traitors by essence, not by occasion...

...They have to do with the exercise of power...

...In the midst of this sun-lit revolution, one can be sure that in some odorous room behind heavy brocade curtains, seated on heavy imitations of French Empire furniture, earnest democrats are discussing whether the means of production should be nationalized, and if so, which, and if that one, how...

...They sap all the structures of a rational society...

...Keith Botsford, the New Leader's regular correspondent in Latin America, has just returned from a month's stay in Buenos Aires...

...This situation put enormous pressure on the "legitimate" Government, which ever since the fall of Juan Per??n has only been a buffer between the two powers...

...They are dangerous not because they will inevitably lead to Communism or fascism, but because they create conditions of such absolute vulgarity (as under Peron) that nothing of value, democracy included, can survive...

...One day labor and the military, supposedly mutually antagonistic, may agree to unite: The impotence of the constitutional force in these circumstances would be absolute...

...Rather than condemn them as anti-democratic forces, we ought to consider what movements and tendencies are operative within their leadership, what support each possesses, and what kind of "democracy" each is defending...

...The result is not yet clear...

...Thus, no one decks the tanks with flowers or blows kisses to the conquering armies...

...apparently, the civilian pressure group was not bereft of connections with the military "rebels...

...At the time of the crisis, an absolute vacuum of power existed in the country-vacante sede...

...it has no interest in how or why...

...If the Argentine Army had acted as one unit, there would not have been a Glorious Spring Revolution...

...They destroy institutions at the base, corrupting individuals all the way down the line by providing them with a semblance of power, and none of the responsibility...

...And for what they are worth-at a time when the returns are not yet in, and no one, including President Jos?© Mar?­a Guido, his Cabinet or the armed forces, knows what direction the Argentine State is taking -a few interim observations are in order: It is clear that civil authority in Argentina is absolutely impotent when faced with organized military pressure...

...The current cliche is that Peronism is now the stalking horse of Communism, or Castroism...