Why the Left Runs Last in Argentina
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
DISUNITY AND FRUSTRATION Why the Left Runs Last in Argentina By ARTHUR M. Shapiro This is the concluding installment of Arthur M. Shapiro's three-part series on Argentina as it prepares for...
...But if the huge crowds that assembled in record-breaking heat outside the Palace of Congress on December 3-4 to protest the Villa Martelli takeover were decidedly Leftist in character, they were nonetheless made up of a multitude of antagonistic small organizations...
...The most famous was triggered when anarchist Simon Radowitzky assassinated the police chief of Buenos Aires on May Day, 1909...
...Whilemost of the country stagnates, southern Patagonia has had a miniboom —and a major influx of both Northerners and immigrants from nearby Chile, all looking for work...
...Argentina once had a fledgling electronics industry of its own...
...FRAL, one of the major components, is itself a temporary union of smaller groups clustered around the Communist Party, and Echegaray says (with perestroïka clearly in mind) that "the time has passed when the Left was all arranged and there was nothing to discuss...
...Moreover, out of its frustration and self-pity came the bizarre events at La Tablada three weeks later...
...Many are in the Radical Party, but some other traditional embodiments of the CenterLeft have opted not to join the IU...
...But the phenomenon antedates the Peróns: In Argentina as in the United States, the Left came in with the waves of immigrants from Europe, never really reached out beyond them, splintered before long into a multitude of factions as much at war with one another as with capitalism, and tended to die out after the immigrant groups assimilated and ascended the economic ladder...
...That was clear from their banners and their photocopied fliers with similar messages and equally flamboyant rhetoric...
...Now that the Peronists have expelled the Montoneros, one might think the non-Peronist Left would go a-courting...
...The real, or "hard," Left has come together in a political formation calling itself the United Left (Izquierda Unida, or IU, as in Peru) for the purposes of next May's elections...
...Nevertheless, video clubs have mushroomed everywhere...
...Haunted by foreign debt, tortured by the disparity between real wages and the cost of living, stalked by the twin specters of inflation and recession, browbeaten by its own military, Argentina would seem a likely breeding ground for the Left...
...Here in Ushuaia, poetically called the The Uttermost Part of the Earth by Anglo-Argentine writer E. Lucas Bridges, it revolves around consumer electronics, but the term "industry" hardly applies...
...On the other hand, practically every party (excluding, of course, thoseof the self-defined Left) pays homage to the desirability of privatization—presumably because nothing else has done any good...
...After the Montoneros were expelled from Peronist movement (nominally because Montonero leader Pablo Unamuno had embarrassed candidate Carlos Menem by claiming that if he were victorious he would pardon terrorist Mario Eduardo Firmenich...
...the Far Right...
...Yet it is not perceived as being "Left...
...From now on the Right moves forward and democracy goes on its knees before the overbearingness of the military, before military impunity and amnesty...
...The man who defeated Zamora in the IU's presidential primary, Nestor Vicente of the Broad Front of Liberation (FRAL), agrees...
...This was not simply a populist gesture on the part of the IU— which is more vanguardist than populist anyway—but rather a concession to the fact that no one is quite sure who belongs to the conglomerate...
...Now the moorlands where Ona Indians stalked guanaco less than a century ago have sprouted prefabricated factories for prefabricated color TVs and microwave ovens destined for Buenos Aires and Jujuy and Neuquén...
...Again like in the U.S., this country had its "Red scares" early on...
...Estévez Boero of the United Socialist Alliance rushed to denounce the attack as contrary to everything the democratic Left stands for...
...Thus can the Left grow...
...Alende's old slogan "Oscar Alende no se vende"—"Oscar Alende doesn't sell himself to anyone"—inspired catcalls of "Esta vezse vendió"—"This time he did...
...The Buenos Aires theatrical association, hoping to lure patrons back, has lowered prices city-wide (from $1.25 to 90 cents U. S...
...Such reactions were typical—and desperate, almost as desperate in their own way as the action of the students who took up arms in the belief that the apparent sellout to the military at Villa Martelli had foreclosed the democratic option to the Left...
...to midnight or beyond members can watch one video after another, sip beer or coffee or soda, and eat munchies...
...In recent times the Pi's views have become virtually synonymous with those of its leader, Oscar Alende, former Governor of Buenos Aires and advocate of an alliance this year with the Peronists...
...A day-long promotional festival, with continuous screenings, offered the opportunity to see six features free...
...Many of the other dead were college students with no previous record of political violence...
...In the early 1970s Vittorio Codovilla, a Peronist theoretician, advocated Peronism as the vehicle whereby the Left could gain power...
...But hints that something was really brewing began to surface in mid-November...
...Communist Party leader Patricio Echegaray lamented: "Who profits from this...
...Congressman Miguel Monserrat walked out afterward...
...Even less than Americans, Argentines in general do not perceive the Left as offering viable solutions to the nation's woes...
...Sentenced to life imprisonment in the Ushuaia stockade, Radowitzky became the South American equivalent of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...actually because Menem's alleged sympathy for the Montonero Left was proving an effective campaign issue for the opposition), Buenos Aires Governor Antonio Caf iero said on a talk show that "the Montoneros are still pursuing subversive goals.' Then, on December 10, a well-known Montonero terrorist, Osvaldo Horacio Olmedo, was killed in a shootout with police during a bungled bank robbery, raising speculation that this was no ordinary crime...
...The United Socialist Alliance, by contrast, has set its sights on capturing the Center-Left dismissed by the IU...
...Ever since the restoration of democracy, the far Right had been spreading rumors that a resumption of Leftist guerrilla violence was imminent...
...In Rio Gallegos and Rio Grande the prosperity is attributable mostly to the petrochemical industry...
...Some commentators trace Argentine antiSemitism to this incident...
...But no: Nestor Vicente, winner of the primary, wants an " open, well-defined, well-profiled" Left that does not include any "Peronists, Radicals, Intransigents or Christian Democrats...
...it played directly into the hands of the far Right...
...Luis Zamora, head of the Movement to Socialism (whose acronym, mas, spells the Spanish word for "more"), explained the IU's role as follows: "Every day people believe less in the political parties, partly because of the great expectations and great disillusionment awakened first by Alf onsin and then by [Antonio] Cafiero [the Peronist "renovator" who went down to defeat in his party's presidential primary...
...They were patent disinformation, and dismissed as such...
...For example, the Intransigent Party (PI), significant in greater Buenos Aires and in the South, spun off from the Radicals decades ago and has been the inheritor of the moral force of old-time socialism...
...As it turned out, the attackers at La Tablada were not Montoneros...
...His two previous articles in the series were "Argentina After Villa Martelli" (NL, January 9) and "Privatizing Argentina" (NL, January 23...
...All in all, the crisis displayed the heart of the Left's problems in Argentina: While a truly united Left might be capable of impressive achievements, a fragmented Left is condemned to remain at the margin of the country's politics...
...Its presidential nominee, Guillermo Estévez Boero, says that voting for the major parties assures "that nothing is going to change.' He may get 2 per cent of the vote...
...Yet except perhaps down here, it is not...
...Indeed, in this case the Left stiffened the backbones of the major parties and failed to gain politically in the process...
...A number of them had reportedly been in the Coffee Brigades that had gone to Nicaragua to "help with the harvest,' and the Right had charged all along that they received guerrilla training there...
...From 4 p.m...
...Only the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), considered the political voice of the entrepreneurial class, is ideologically committed to privatization and the free market...
...Actually, if that label means state intervention in the economy on a large scale, besides the Radicals it could be applied to the Peronists and even the unlamented former military regime— for they have also been involved in a long, albeit more or less unideological, process of economic statism...
...This may come as news to the very large number of voters who think of themselves as the Center-Left...
...It was in no way competitive in an open market, however, and went under when former economics minister José Martinez de Hoz opened the doors to foreign competition at the end of the '70s...
...Today he might add ERPists and MTP-ists to the growing list of undesirables...
...The VCR boom in Argentina is more pervasive than in the United States, and video rentals are so cheap that moviegoing, a traditional national pastime, is on the verge of extinction...
...He adds that the Center-Left is a " fiction" that "doesn' t exist...
...But democratic socialism remained respectable if anarchism did not, and was a major force in national politics until 1930...
...One can see his photograph in the Territorial Museum at the waterfront...
...Not only did the strategy fail in all its military and political objecrives and produce the worst carnage in a decade...
...Polls taken shortly before the Villa Martelli military insurrection last December showed the IU getting just under 5 per cent of the vote in greater Buenos Aires, with its strength concentrated in the 18-25 age bracket (9.5 per cent) and distributed fairly evenly along the socioeconomic spectrum...
...For once it was in a position to set the tone of political discourse, and the establishment parties fell all over themselves getting into line with it...
...Juan Manuel Burgos, son of the MTP's leader, survived and was arrested...
...They were members of a new organization, the Popular Resistance Front, apparently made up of elements from the old Popular Revolutionary Army (ERP) and a small fringe group called Everyone for the Country (MTP...
...The Left closed ranks to prevent a deal with the rebels, and in particular to force all the parties to go on record unambiguously as opposed to any kind of amnesty for human-rights offenses committed by the military during the "dirty war...
...The traditional explanation for this —that the Left's appeal to the workers was thoroughly coopted by Juan and Evita Perón—has considerable validity...
...USHUAIA WHEN YOU COME into Ushuaia from the north on Highway 3, the first thing you see is a red hammer and sickle spraypainted on the "City Limits" sign of this southernmost city on earth...
...No one had quite accepted the notion that the Montoneros—the revolutionary wing of Peronism—had laid down their arms for good...
...It is a pleasant, inexpensive way to escape for a while from the political and economic uncertainty that have become the dominant elements of the country's daily life...
...Radical presidential candidate Eduardo Angeloz does so on the stump, despite the fact that his own party is pushing in Congress for state intervention in cotton marketing—among the few agricultural sectors still untouched by government meddling, and one that appears to be functioning quite well without it...
...The assault on La Tablada was a disaster from start to finish...
...For disunity and frustration remain the dominant characteristics of the Argentine Left...
...The assailants who perished in the fighting included José Luis Caldu of the ERP and Jorge Manuel Banos of MTP...
...The party convention voted 181-49 to follow Alende in endorsing Menem, but at the cost of a schism of its own...
...President Raul Alfonsin's Radical Civic Union, basically very similar to the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe, is in many ways its heir...
...To Zamora, a Trotskyite by instinct, all the parties outside the IU are of course "the Right...
...The military insurrection of December 1-4 should have been a Godsend to the Left...
...The Left is more visible in the far South than anywhere else in Argentina, an apparent reflection of the region's astonishingly rapid industrialization...
...Shapiro, a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis, and longtime contributor to the NL, has traveled extensively in Latin America over the last decade...
...Ushuaia's Cine San Martin has closed its doors...
...What was intended to be a swift seizure of arms and ammunition ended up a siege, with the guerrillas rooted out one by one...
...But it is all futile...
...When the Izquierda Unida held its own presidential primary last December 18, the balloting was completely open...
...DISUNITY AND FRUSTRATION Why the Left Runs Last in Argentina By ARTHUR M. Shapiro This is the concluding installment of Arthur M. Shapiro's three-part series on Argentina as it prepares for presidential elections next May...
...For the first time in Argentina, anyone could vote, regardless of party registration, and even resident aliens were welcome...
...Speaking for the dissidents, he promised an independent Intransigent ticket on the ballot...
...Surprisingly, in the capital itself the IU appeals most (8.3 per cent) to the middle, not the working, class...
...If the quest for ideological purity and the supposed quest for openness seem at odds, if the quixotic return of guerrilla violence contradicts the oft-asserted claim that the Left seeks victory only at the ballot box, perhaps the real purpose of the wide-open primary was to create the illusion that there are any voters at all within the "United" Left...
...The components all arrive prepackaged from Japan— this is a free-trade zone—and although the products may be high-tech, the local contribution to their manufacture is accomplished with screwdrivers...
...Consequently, he insists that "Carlos Menem [the Peronist nominee], Eduardo Angeloz, and Alvaro Alsogaray [the UCD standard bearer] are all candidates of the Right...
...although it did trigger a spate of anti-Semitic violence, the explanation is too facile...
...The bloody assault on the La Tablada military base the morning of January 23 sent the nation—and especially the Left—into shock...
Vol. 72 • February 1989 • No. 3
