Argentina's Summer of Discontent
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
ALFONSIN ON THE ROPES Argentina's Summer of Discontent BY ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO Salta The decorations for carnival were going up in this subtropical town nestled against the base of the Andes, but...
...Thus the very Radical government that had been basking in the glow of electoral victory mere weeks ago now seemed to be thrashing about—scapegoating the Left, cultivating the Right, feeling isolated and increasingly lonely in the center...
...The civilian-military Rightist alliance, reacting with ill-concealed glee to all of this, went so far as to suggest the whole "plot" had been concocted by the government as a pre-election ploy, and that provocateurs could have set the bombs...
...Raul Antonio Guglielminetti, alias Major Guastavino, former bodyguard of the last military President, Rey-naldo Bignone, was one of the few old familiar faces around the Casa Rosada after Alfonsin came to power...
...There were block-long lines of anxious people outside the Salta office of Aerolineas the morning before the walkout...
...Salaries, by and large, do not, especially in the public sector...
...If the economic situation continues todeteriorate, however, waving the bloody shirt will play out as a tactic and Raul Alfonsin will be face-to-face with the reality of trying to govern an intrinsically ungovernable country...
...Next came the anti-Rockefeller riot...
...Speaking in Villa Regina, he launched a furious attack on the antidemocratic and proviolence tendencies of the Communist Party and the Movement Toward Socialism...
...The Christmas cards still dribbling in are symptomatic of the problems getting everyone down...
...Nothing was ever made to stick against them, leaving functionaries in the Interior Ministry, where such matters are handled, red-faced...
...They were still more red-faced when, in early January, the list of military promotions (approved by the President) was released—and two of the alleged plotters were on it...
...Yet many citizens can be heard complaining that there was no summer this year...
...In the post-election euphoria there was talk of Radicalism converting itself into the "third national movement"—that is to say, a consensus government transcending partisanship...
...There are precious few brilliant ideas going around for a quick alleviation of these pressures, and there is little likelihood of achieving anything in the Second Stage approaching the dazzle of the First Stage—which early on dramatically cut the monthly inflation rate from 25-30 per cent to 2-3 per cent...
...the Right by saying "we told you so...
...The government was unwilling to display its evidence'in open court—presumably because it had been obtained by illegal wiretaps, or out of fear of compromising an informer—so the judges began letting the defendants go...
...One can see why the government is attacking the Left, hoping to head off its emerging alliance with the unions by appealing to the terror of memory...
...Film taken by television cameras, combined with eyewitness testimony, revealed thatahardcoreofyoung demonstrators had come to 9th of July Avenue armed with Molotov cocktails, weapons and other trouble-making paraphernalia...
...Not all were apprehended, and upon arraignment the men in custody invoked habeas corpus...
...The roots of the labor unrest can be seen in the Peronist failures in November, which happened to coincide with increasing evidence that the Administration's grand economic design, the Austral Plan, was not working very well...
...Eventually, things got hot for Guglielminetti...
...The government rejected the settlement as inflationary, though, and the stream of belated good cheer dried up like so many others under a blazing late summer sun...
...His presence provoked the most violent night Buenos Aires had seen in seven or eight years...
...The Left reacted by claiming the "Montoneros" were police provocateurs...
...First the telephone operators staged a slowdown that turned into a full-scale strike, cutting off the country from the outside world for days at a time...
...An apparent Right-wing plot had been nipped in the bud...
...In fact, the Al-fonsinist success in the congressional election came largely as a consequence of the dramatic exposure of an apparent conspiracyto "destabilize" the country in late October...
...This prompted the government to take the extraordinary action of declaring a state of siege for 60 days, thereby suspending habeas corpus and allowing the continued detention of the suspects...
...A few representative salaries tell the rest of the story: A skilled mechanic earns around 150 australes per month, a bank officer 200, a secretary in a public office 100, a coal miner 150, a hospital director 330...
...Then there was the Guglielminetti affair...
...Then things started going really wrong...
...Meanwhile, unemployment has gone from 4 per cent when the present Administration took office to an alarmingly high 8 per cent, and underemployment is common...
...The cost of living for an average family in December was 303 australes, and it is estimated that 25 per cent of the work force is paid at the minimum wage of 70 australes per month...
...The state of siege was lifted after 45 days and the detainees were released...
...That a successful strike could nevertheArthur M. Shapiro, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis, who frequently visits Argentina...
...Torrential spring rains in the heartland had inundated farmland and city alike, putting added stress on a desperately fragile economy...
...Alfonsin told his countrymen to expect hard times, yet even he did not foresee the erosion of buying power that has lately developed—18 per cent by the measure of independent economists, 28 per cent according to labor groups...
...Major Guastavino" fled to Spain, where he was apprehended at Argentina's request and extradited to stand trial for the murder of a businessman named Emilio Naum...
...He apparently ingratiated himself with the Interior Ministry by debugging the Presidential offices—presumably an easy task for him, since according to the grapevine he had put the "bugs" in...
...Rumors flew that the moderate Army chief, Hector Rios Erefiu, was on shaky ground and that the government had to prop him up by giving the generals whatever they asked for...
...ALFONSIN ON THE ROPES Argentina's Summer of Discontent BY ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO Salta The decorations for carnival were going up in this subtropical town nestled against the base of the Andes, but spirits were not following suit...
...The word "Mon-tonero" itself inspires fear and loathing in most of Argentina...
...Should Rios Erefiu fall, his replacement might be much more truculent...
...And Anibal Gordon had the effrontery to write a letter to the media from his jail cell, claiming that Gugliel-minetti had told him he was working for the Interior Ministry in a plot to destabilize the Peronist movement and assassinate key Peronist leaders...
...Had the Peronists been able to rally behind a strong leader, the economic dissatisfaction was there to carry them over the top in November...
...Genera] strikes are not exactly common in summer here...
...Howthis palpable fascist managed to keep his job is a matter of considerable gossip...
...But it informed the general public that civil rights were being suspended in practice only for those defendants...
...once again, the far Right seemed uncannily untouchable...
...When a second judge issued a detention order on other charges—probably in violation of the extradition terms—Gugliel-minetti skipped to Uruguay...
...Back in Buenos Aires, the "Major" mounted a vigorous defense...
...In Argentina carnival, like our Labor Day weekend, gives people a last summer blowout before reluming to I heir jobs and daily worries, and it has been one of the hottest Janu-aries on record...
...He was linked to the infamous Anibal Gordon, the capo of the '70s goon squads, and ultimately to a mysterious gang said to have carried out kidnappings and extortions (and perhaps murder) even after Alfonsin's consolidation in power—and to be functioning under the umbrella of the "security forces...
...But it was not to be...
...Still, the tremendous success of the January 24 general strike—ranging from 70-97 per cent compliance in the various provinces —clearly shows the depth of discontent with the UCR's economic performance...
...Pilots for the national airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, after a one-day strike in early January, threatened, canceled and rescheduled a two-day strike for the end of the month, throwing thousands of travelers into chaos...
...Pub-licindignationrosebytheminute...
...The Buenos Aires subway workers followed with a series of random one-hour work stoppages, while the press was ranting about a wave of subway crime and vandalism...
...The move was as popular as it was shocking, and the recoil from Right-wing conspiracies was enough to carry the UCR in what had been considered a very uncertain contest...
...A surge of them marked the third week in January, when striking postal workers reached a tentative accord with management and an assault of sorts was mounted on the backlog of 15 million pieces of undelivered mail...
...The year began on a mixed note...
...last June when it supported the Austral Plan, an austerity program named for the new national currency...
...Nor can it be denied that, with the leadership of the party in dispute and with its lack of charismatic figures, the union bosses themselves are the inheritors of Peronist power...
...These incongruities seemed to advertise that, election victory or not, Alfon-sin was nervous about the military and needed to keep it pacified at any cost...
...less be mounted testifies to what an unusual summer this has been...
...Though the protesters got a martyr—a young Communist named Victor Hugo G6mez, shot in the stomach at point-blank range with a rubber bullet (he survived)—their claims of a "police riot" against them were belied by the TV footage...
...Small wonder...
...See "Rumblings on the Right," NL, January 1428, 1985...
...Subsequently, President Alfonsin took up the theme...
...A wave of bombings and bomb threats, allegedly masterminded by a group of 12 men (six civilians and six military, one of whom is the highest-ranking fugitive from prosecution for atrocities committed in the "dirty war" of the '70s), was brought to an abrupt end by the issuance of special detention orders against them...
...But it was not the legal status of goons or the firebombs against Rockefeller that brought the government to this pass: It was economics...
...David Rockefeller was in Argentina January 13 for high-level financial talks...
...At the same time, some top military critics of the old regime, who were popular with the new government, were passed over or rejected on flimsy excuses...
...After decades of inflation, the Argentine public emphatically said " enough...
...Despite price controls (and well-publicized sanctions against violators), the cost of living keeps creeping up in a variety of sneaky ways...
...It was a strange turnabout from a year ago, when the government went to great pains to debunk a transparently fraudulent Right-wing claim that the Montoneros were coming back...
...No one can doubt for a moment that the Peronist CGT is today playing strike-confrontationist politics because the Peronist movement failed so badly at the polls...
...Inflationary pressures, in short, are mounting inexorably as the government prepares its long-awaited Second Stage of the Austral Plan...
...He gave interviews to the media (showing off his collection of Nazi memorabilia, and having himself photographed in front of a portrait of 19th-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, a fascist folk hero), and soon became a free man because the only eyewitness to the killing suddenly recanted her testimony...
...The Montoneros were the Trotskyite wing of the Peronist Youth, who by turning to guerrilla war in the early '70s had set in motion the slide into anarchy and suppression...
...Fuming over cries of "repression" from the Left, Cesar Jaroslavsky, Radical Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, screened this footage for the press anddroppedabombshell: Theviolence, he said, was spawned by Montoneros...
...Finally, on Friday January 24, the whole country was shut down for a day—and that, warned Saul Ubaldini, leader of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), was just the beginning...
...President Raul Alfonsin's Radical Civic Union Party (UCR) had scored modest gains in last November's congressional elections, and the Peronist Opposition was in catastrophic disarray...
...Once again, Interior was red-faced...
...Indeed, cynics might say there is nothing to shut down, since the whole country seems to be at the beach during the month of January...
Vol. 69 • January 1986 • No. 2
