Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
what am I doing here below this roof safe from
the cold the heat I want to say
what am I doing
while Commandant Segundo other men
are pursued to death are
given back to the wind to the time that will come
and the sadness and pain have names
and there are shots in the night and I can’t sleep58
There was an intense soul searching among Argentina’s post-World War II generation about what to do, what life to lead, and how to bring about change. Young, politically conscious Argentines perceived an analogy between the American semi-colonization of Cuba with its brothels, casinos, and impoverished peasantry and Argentina with its landed gentry and conservative ruling class. The presence of Che Guevara added a special flavor to their state of mind. They romanticized Fidel’s Cuba, its Revolution, its deliverance from exploitation and injustice, its stimulation of the arts, its Caribbean exuberance, and its promise of a New and morally superior Man. The 1966 coup in Argentina and its crackdown on the freedom of thought, together with the death of Guevara in 1967 and the murky involvement of the U.S.A. in Vietnam, turned self-reflection into action.
The gauntlet had been thrown in Argentina’s political arena. Guevara’s dream of liberating his native Argentina ended in 1967, but his ideas about revolutionary violence would outlive him for at least a decade.59 The Uturuncos and the People’s Guerrilla Army might have failed but an urban guerrilla insurgency, which was much more appropriate for an industrializing nation, was already brewing at the time of Guevara’s death. This guerrilla insurgency emerged within the Peronist movement, and bore the ideological stamp of John William Cooke, an early admirer of the Cuban Revolution. Cooke’s militant past and proximity to Perón allowed him to draw upon the Peronist following for the grass roots support which Masetti and Guevara had lacked. Cooke’s revolutionary Peronism became firmly implanted among young Peronists, and his works would be the second most sold Peronist books in 1973, only those of Perón ahead of him.60 Cooke’s enduring contribution to the revolutionary Peronism of the 1970s was his strategic shift from crowd mobilization to vanguardism, and his ideological development from Peronism to socialism.
Cooke’s Provocation
John William Cooke arrived in Havana in mid-1960 to share in its revolutionary vigor. He learned that a truly national liberation, traditionally desired by Peronism, could not be accomplished without a social revolution. Peronism and Castrism were national expressions of the same anti-imperialism, and he even invited Perón to move from Madrid to Havana.61 Perón never responded, and the two grew apart ideologically.
Cooke’s awareness went hand in hand with his interpretation of Peronism as a movement of social emancipation arisen in response to a crisis of the Argentine bourgeois system. He emphasized that the Peronist movement was a heterogeneous, multiclass movement which contained within itself a struggle between opposed class interests. The orthodox segment, represented by the pragmatic union leaders, held back the revolutionary potential of the Peronist masses. The struggle between reformists and revolutionaries would eventually be resolved in a dialectic fashion, and be won by the revolutionary Peronists.62 The development of a revolutionary Peronism without Perón was only a matter of time. Just as Peronism became wed to socialism, and Perón became replaced by the revolutionary vanguard, so the Cuban Revolution became a model of inspiration for Cooke. Guerrilla insurgency was to replace the Peronist crowd mobilizations as the principal political instrument of change.
In 1964, Cooke founded the Peronist Revolutionary Action or ARP (Acción Revolucionaria Peronista). Cooke justified the use of violence by arguing that the bourgeois state was founded on the structural violence hidden in its institutions and crystallized in its laws. The guiding principle behind the words of vanguardists, such as Cooke, was the belief in a political Verelendung, the conviction that a violent deterioration of the political process would persuade the armed forces to militarize the conflict and respond with excessive violence.63 This escalation would reveal the true repressive nature of the Argentine regime and provoke an insurrection. In more Peronist terms, the structural violence from above would provoke the armed violence from below which, in turn, would result in more repressive violence from above. This dialectical process would raise the political consciousness of the working class, undermine the legitimacy of the State, and end with a revolutionary insurrection.
Despite Cooke’s call for a guerrilla insurgency, his group never came into action, this to the chagrin of several members who decided to split off in late 1966. The dissidents included future Montoneros such as Fernando Abal Medina and Norma Arrostito. They converted Cooke’s ideas into practice.64 John William Cooke was not to witness the revolutionary surge of the 1970s of which he had been one of the intellectual fathers. He died of cancer in September 1968, at the age of forty-seven, in Buenos Aires.
Despite Castro’s threat to turn the Andes into the hemisphere’s Sierra Maestra, Cuba’s assistance to Argentine revolutionaries consisted only of the basic training of a hundred or so Argentines and limited support for Masetti’s People’s Guerrilla Army.65 Nevertheless, this Cuban connection troubled the Argentine military. Analyzing national threats in geopolitical terms, they perceived an international conspiracy of a magnitude that vastly surpassed reality. Nuclear deterrence between East and West had moved the battlefield from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so they argued. World War III would start there as the communists tried to achieve world hegemony.
The fear of an Argentine social revolution was not new. As I explained in Chapter 1, similar fears had been voiced since the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially after the Russian Revolution. The Cuban Revolution resuscitated these worries. Many Latin American officers doubted whether the United States had the political capacity and military capability to protect the world from communism. Cuba, the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, and the unstoppable decolonization of the Third World were all signs that the West was losing ground. Democracy and Christianity were on the retreat, and the Latin American nations had to unite their efforts in combating the communist aggression.66
The Latin American military rejected the professionalism of the American armed forces and harked back to a nineteenth century Hispanic tradition in which the military were the nation’s moral guardians. They emphasized tradition, authority, spirituality, honor, abnegation, and austerity, all values which the Argentine armed forces had upheld in a more glorious past. They deplored the materialism, individualism, sexual permissiveness, and moral corruption of the Western world. Crucial was their belief in the gift of leadership (don de mando), an inbred, near-mystical, charismatic quality, which obliged them to lead the nation through turbulent times. A national security policy emerged which integrated national defense with economic development, political consolidation, and ideological combativeness.67
The military’s belief in their historical protagonism became cause for action when democratic Latin American governments began to suffer from guerrilla insurgency, labor unrest, economic recession, and legitimacy crises. The 1964 military coup in Brazil was the first stance made in Latin America to halt the process of deterioration and implement a national security plan. Brazil’s example would soon inspire similar takeovers in many other Latin American countries.68
The concern with national security in Argentina was voiced by General Osiris Villegas, one of the principal experts on revolutionary war. He wrote already in June 1961 that this new type of warfare was invading all domains of society by making people their battleground, seeking the destruction of their personalities and trying to convert them into a depersonalized mass under the guardianship of a socialist State.69 These same ideas were expressed by General Juan Carlos Onganía on 6 August 1964 at the Fifth Conference of the American Armies at West Point Military Academy. The speech was largely written by General Villegas. Onganía declared that the armed forces had the constitutional mission to secure the country’s internal peace when domestic enemies, under the influence of foreign ideologies, threatened its republican institutions.70