Argentina After Villa Martelli
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
FALLOUT FROM AN INSURRECTION Argentina After Villa Martelli By Arthur M. Shapiro Buenos Aires The 15,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Palace of Congress here last December...
...During six weeks of traveling 3,000 miles on the ground in Argentina, I had many hundreds of political conversations with all sorts of people, and I heard one word used over and over again to describe the country's politicians: payasos (clowns...
...Thus the purely political aims of the Villa Martelli mutineers—an amnesty and an end to prosecutions of human rights violators—will not be achieved in short order...
...The government was trapped in an extremely uncomfortable space...
...After the September riot, Menem suggested that Alfonsin be impeached...
...With his tour of duty in Panama coming to an end, he had been placed on the "available list...
...Seineldin was apparently able to establish contacts within several disgruntled units and lay the groundwork for the insurrection that erupted as he clandestinely returned to Argentina, reportedly in a Panamanian Lear-jet by way of Paraguay...
...There was never any explanation of why no effort was made to stop and capture the rebel caravan on the highway, but the answer seems plain: No one had the guts to act...
...Alfonsin retaliated by calling Menem "the worst governor in the country," and the level of political discourse right up until the eve of Villa Martelli remained exceptionally low even by Argentine standards...
...Peronist candidate Carlos Menem, who was jailed for five years by the former military government yet is seen by many as relatively sympathetic to the hard-liners, has left the door open for an eventual amnesty...
...Villa Martelli was not a coup attempt...
...Long before Villa Martelli, Argentine politics had turned ugly and vituperative...
...Or one can buy a temporary peace, knowing from simple stimulus-response psychology that in so doing one is virtually assuring a repetition of the behavior...
...Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Villa Martelli convulsion is that it seems to have had scant impact on the course of the presidential campaign...
...My sense is that the public is exhausted by the constant tension...
...They are so deeply embedded in the culture and mythology of the Argentine military that they cannot see any incongruity or contradiction in committing mass murder in pursuit of democracy, nor do they recognize the extent to which they are the product of a long history of failure by the civilian society to impose discipline on its armed forces...
...of historians...
...Civilians, he said, should accept the necessity of having armed forces, and the military should accept subordination to civilian rule...
...If Villa Martelli accomplished nothing else, it should have finished off that paranoid notion...
...Alfonsin has probably bought peace for the remaining 11 months of his term...
...They feel that the military merely did what it had to do to save the nation from terrorism and Communism in the '70s, and that there would be no democracy today had it not made 10,000 people "disappear.' They do certainly seek "vindication," to use Alfonsin's word...
...On December 6 he made vaguely conciliatory gestures to the hard-liners in the Armed Forces, saying he understands their desire for "vindication" but could not countenance their "grave errors.' On December 21, addressing Congress, he spoke in sweeping generalities of the need to heal the wounds of the "dirty war...
...Though both Seineldin (who is of Lebanese Druse extraction) and Colonel Aldo Rico, leader of the two previous rebellions, are what Argentines call mesianicos, they are not deluded enough to believe the nation would accept a military government at this time...
...The mutineers made the situation even more difficult by leaving the Campo de Mayo military complex, where they were more or less encapsulated, and digging in at Villa Martelli, a facility surrounded by working-class neighborhoods where full-scale operations could not help but cause major damage and loss of life...
...Of course, none of the problems that inspired the rhetoric was altered in any substantive way by Villa Martelli...
...His successor had better start worrying about how he will handle military tantrums...
...While the rebels (who included the son of former military President Jorge Rafael Videla, currently serving a life term in prison for murder, kidnapping and torture) were obviously outgunned by loyal forces, the government simply could not count on absolute obedience...
...To keep him at a distance, he was consigned to a four-year "exile" as military adviser to Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega...
...Arthur M. Shapiro, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis, who frequently visits Argentina...
...As the tanks were being washed down, the nation was riveted to TV coverage of the wedding of one of its favorite stars, Susana Giménez...
...One can suppress the outburst forcefully, hoping the lesson will be learned but secretly fearing that it will merely build up more resentment and contribute to a worse explosion later...
...If Alfonsin's handling of the crisis was less than satisfying to the most fervent defenders of Argentina's Constitution, it nevertheless was probably the best that could be expected...
...It was armed blackmail...
...Indeed, despite tremendous tension from a variety of sources, it seems unthinkable that next May's presidential elections could be aborted for any reason...
...Uruguayan journalist Enrique Rodriguez Larreta, himself an ex-desaparecido, or "disappeared" person, claims to have identified one of the provocateurs as a well-known Right-wing goon, Osvaldo Forese, dubbed "The Pachyderm...
...But that does not mean they will forever be denied...
...Alvaro Alsogaray of the Union of the Democratic Center is considered a bootlicker of the military, so his exceptionally tough language denouncing the rebels did not convince anyone that he had changed his spots...
...Radical Party candidate Eduardo Angeloz did nothing wrong in the crisis, although he was not helped by the unhappiness with Alfonsin's performance...
...Alfonsin's options vis-à-vis the military have been likened to those of a parent whose child is inclined to throw tantrums...
...There was no cheering a couple of hours later when word came that the rebel leader, Colonel Muhammad Ali Seineldin, was surrendering in return for the resignation of the Army Chief of Staff, General José Dante Caridi...
...The question of blame, he declared, "should be the task...
...That was widely interpreted as meaning he would be forced into early retirement, especially since he was known to be bitter about having already been passed over for promotion to general...
...Seineldin, a charismatic hero of the Malvinas war with a huge following among junior officers, had been perceived as a potential troublemaker from the day Alfonsin took office...
...Some Peronist elements hinted broadly in the austral spring that the military and the incumbent Radicals were laying the groundwork for an autogolpe—a palace revolution—to prevent a Peronist victory in May...
...But he is infamous for trying to be all things to all men, and his studied ambiguity in this instance is unlikely to hurt him very much...
...FALLOUT FROM AN INSURRECTION Argentina After Villa Martelli By Arthur M. Shapiro Buenos Aires The 15,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Palace of Congress here last December 4 cheered when the loudspeakers on the front steps announced that President Raul Alfonsin had ordered loyal troops into action against the military rebels at the Villa Martelli Army base...
...There is some valuein this, because they are obliged to swear to the public that they will never, ever, support an amnesty law for the criminals of the "dirty war...
...Both Rico and Seineldin are traditionalists who believe deeply in the honor of the military institution...
...On September^ forexample, a Peronist labor rally in Buenos Aires degenerated into a riot, apparently started by provocateurs who sought to heighten the anxiety felt by the middle class over Peronism's seeming recrudescence...
...The political parties closed ranks against military adventurism and issued strong statements against appeasement or amnesty...
...A news magazine that did a split run using two different covers— one on the military crisis, the other on the Giménez wedding—sold far more of the latter...
...Forese was a guard at the clandestine torture center known as "Orletti Motors" under the former military regime...
...Exactly who the provocateurs were remains a subject of continuing debate...
...The tensions that erupted into two military rebellions during the past 20 months, however, continued to simmer just beneath the surface...
...On the contrary, there was bitterness over the fact that any concessions at all had been made to the rebels...
...Everytimethe military acts up it provokes a self-congratulatory orgy of democratic solidarity by the politicians...
...Alf onsin subsequently addressed the issues raised by the Villa Martelli rebellion on several occasions...
Vol. 72 • January 1989 • No. 1
