Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben

      Chapter 2

       The Time of the Furnaces: Proscription, Compromise, and Insurrection

      “There hung a murmurous atmosphere resembling the sea,” one reporter wrote of the crowd that celebrated the installation of General Lonardi as Argentina’s new president on 23 September 1955, “a constant surf of sounds: shouts and applause.”¹ The people were in a festive mood on this warm first day of Spring. Some fainted from the heat and the crowd’s pressure, while others refreshed themselves in the fountain at the Plaza de Mayo. The reporter compared the crowd to the Peronist crowds that used to monopolize the square, and asserted that never “has there gathered such a dense crowd as the one which yesterday tried to find a place at [the Plaza de Mayo] and overflowed into the converging avenues….”² Perón had consecrated the Plaza de Mayo during ten years of mobilizations as the nation’s foremost political arena where the Argentine people and the authorities determined their destiny. Packing the square with an immense crowd became henceforth a proof of political legitimacy for every future Argentine president and dictator.

      The 23 September crowd expressed as much its support for the military government as its aversion of Peronism. The final years of Peronist rule with its increasing suppression of public speech, imprisonment and mis-treatment of political opponents, curtailment of civil liberties, and the confrontation with the Catholic Church had blown deep divisions in Argentine society which had manifested themselves in several crowd competitions. The 23 September crowd marked only the first of several street mobilizations that legitimized the Liberating Revolution. There were crowds on 11 January 1956 to support the new Aramburu government, on 10 June 1956 to listen to President Aramburu after a failed Peronist rebellion, and on 16 September 1956 to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution. Finally, there was a massive farewell on 21 October 1957 for a military junta which was voluntarily abandoning power through general elections in February 1958.

      The repression of Peronist crowds after the 1955 coup became particularly harsh when the moderate Lieutenant-General Lonardi was pushed aside in November 1955 by the hardliners General Aramburu and Admiral Rojas. Four months after the palace coup, the Peronist party was declared illegal. Systematically, the Peronist Organization was dismantled and with it the dignity of the working class.³ What became now of the leaderless Peronist masses? How would they be able to recapture their feelings of dignity, unity, and power without the presence of Perón, and what would motivate them to take to the streets and brave the repressive climate?

      The prohibition of Peronist mobilizations had a tremendous impact which compelled Peronists to remember the 1945 Day of Loyalty through sabotage and undo the bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo with acts of defiance. Bombs exploded every 17 October and slogans were painted hastily on the walls. Canetti’s stings of command accumulated again, not only in the working class, but also among a younger generation that had been raised with stories about the glorious days of Perón and Evita. Some guerrillas of the 1970s were only children in 1956 when they had their first brush with violence and repression. Ernesto Jauretche recalls how deeply the search for his mother affected him when she was arrested after the failed Peronist rebellion of June 1956. “The first time they took my mother, they also disappeared her. For one month, we searched for her everywhere but they told us: ‘She’s not here, she’s not here.’ We searched for her at military bases, everywhere. Executions were taking place and we didn’t have any news about my mother, we didn’t know where she was. The history of the disappearances is indeed very old.”⁴ Jauretche believes that this episode and the frequent visits to his incarcerated mother caused a profound class hatred that fed his political activity during the rest of his life.

      These experiences were shared by many Peronists, and contrasted with happier and increasingly idealized memories of the Peronist years. Hardship and happiness shaped militant Peronists who romanticized about Eva Perón helping the poor and the sick, the jubilant Labor Day crowds at the Plaza de Mayo, and the holidays at the seaside resorts built for the workers. Added to these memories came the traumatic bombardment of the Peronist crowd on 16 June 1955 and the frustration of not being able to manifest the loyalty to Perón and his ideals, because if the crowd was not the progenitor, then it was certainly the womb of the Peronist movement. As Perón wrote on 3 November 1956 to John William Cooke: “I have given them an organization, a doctrine and a mystique. I have worked eleven years to politicize the masses. I have prepared them to fight against a reactionary response and I have left them with an example of how to achieve important reforms.”⁵ The leader-crowd relation stood at the origin of the mystique of Peronism, and the obstruction of the public expression of that sentiment, either in crowds or in votes, added fuel to its manifestation in surrogate forms such as strike mobilizations, protest marches, illegal gatherings on commemorative days, public disturbances, and street violence.

      In this chapter, I concentrate on the attempts to express Peronist sentiments in public by establishing a diverse presence in the streets of Argentina’s large cities. These public manifestations had an emotional and a political component. The protests arose in reaction to the repression of Peronist sympathies and from a grass roots belief in popular insurrection as the best strategy to restore Perón to power. Strike crowds and small public outcries of Peronist sentiment were at their most intense between 1956 and 1959, only to come to a standstill after increased police and military repression. The labor movement fractured into several segments which each pursued its objectives with different political instruments, only to reappear again with revolutionary fervor in 1969.

       Retreat and Reconquest

      The leaders of the Liberating Revolution saw Peronism as a belated out-crop of fascism. Its elimination would grant Argentina the same post-war prosperity as Europe and the United States. Decree 4161 of March 1956 prohibited all references to Perón, Evita or Peronism. President Aramburu only spoke of Perón as “the monster,” and newspapers identified him as “the fugitive tyrant.” The display of his pictures and books, the singing of Peronist themes, and the commemoration of days important to the Peronist movement were forbidden. The expression of Peronist sentiments and identity markers was banned from public space. Any violation was punishable by a prison sentence, and would bar the violators from assuming a political or union office.⁶ These anti-Peronist measures were experienced by Peronists as anti-working-class measures. The Argentine workers were expelled politically from the city centers to their poor neighborhoods in the periphery.

      Decree 4161 turned the shouting of Perón’s name in public into a small act of resistance in which, at least for a few seconds, the street was retaken. There were many such instances, and they turned into a civil disobedience that became more violent with the day. Jorge Rulli became involved in the political struggle after the failed Peronist rebellion of June 1956. He attended the silent protest marches in Buenos Aires that attracted two to three thousand people, and felt the brunt of the revolutionary civil commandos that had emerged in the resistance against the Peronist government in 1954 and 1955. These commandos were workers affiliated with the Socialist and Radical parties. They took over Peronist union branches and suppressed public expressions of Peronism. In 1956 and 1957, young Peronists began to dispute the center of Buenos Aires with these civil commandos. Their motto was to win the streets for Peronism.

      Public space was conquered through physical confrontations with bludgeons or bare hands. For example, Rulli’s group would hang a photo of Perón at the corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda Streets in Buenos Aires, and lie in wait for their victims. Every person who tore down the image was severely beaten. Thus, they intimidated passersby into not reacting at all on any public expression of Peronist sentiment. They sang the Peronist march and shouted “Viva Perón.”⁷ The shouting of Perón’s name united the orphaned