Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
anticommunist, wanted Argentina to remain neutral in the Second World War, and were appalled by the fraudulent politics of President Ramón Castillo. The Castillo government was overthrown in the coup of 4 June 1943, that would be the springboard for Perón’s rise to prominence.36
Perón’s leading role in the military lodge and his support for General Farrell as Minister of War in the new cabinet of General Ramírez resulted in his 7 June 1943 appointment as Undersecretary at the War Ministry. However, it was his appointment on 27 October as head of the National Labor Department that would bring Perón his greatest political windfall. He transformed the regulatory agency into the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, and won the trust of the unions by taking their demands seriously. Farrell replaced Ramírez in February 1944 as Argentina’s president. Perón became the new Minister of War, and was appointed as Farrell’s vice-president in July 1944.37 His sympathy among the working class and the political support from the labor unions were to be decisive when oppositional forces succeeded in ousting him from power on 9 October 1945.
Perón’s rise from army instructor in 1941 to president-to-be in 1945 was meteoric. How much of the military instructor was still in him when he assumed power? How did he perceive his role as a national leader, and what was his relation to the working class? These questions are important to understand the Peronist movement, the suspicion of his control of the working class among his opponents, and the factional struggle that would lead three decades later to an incipient civil war.
Perón’s acquaintance with fascism during his 1939–1940 stay in Europe has often been mentioned as a formative influence on his political style and ideology.38 Perón was proud of his alleged contact with Mussolini, and may have even heard of his admiration for the French mass psychologist Le Bon. The sight of Mussolini’s rallies must have convinced Perón of the transformative power of crowds.39 Even after his fall from power in 1955, Perón’s faith in the historical destiny of the masses remained firm. He wrote on 14 September 1956 from his exile in Caracas: “The Russian Revolution, Mussolini, and Hitler demonstrated to the world that the people and especially the organized masses are the politics of the future with which they buried the political parties that the countries still preserve as a vice from the twentieth century.”40 The crowd was for Perón the acme of the masses, and became a crucial weapon at decisive moments in his political career.
Perón saw it as his mission to prevent the radicalization of the Argentine working class. He rejected communism but also capitalism. Perón pursued a Third Position (Tercera Posición) that opposed class conflict and pursued social justice through a pact of capital and labor. His stay in Europe had made him realize that the political emancipation of the working class was an historical inevitability, and that unions were playing a growing role in achieving social demands. The simultaneous rise of fascism and communism taught him the important lesson that organization superseded ideology in mobilizing the masses. After all, both movements had equally drawn on the working class. As Perón wrote: “Le Bon anticipated us quite some time ago: ‘The age we are entering will truly be the “age of the crowds.’” ‘The destiny of nations is not created through the advice of princes but in the soul of crowds.’ ‘The divine right of crowds will replace the divine right of kings’, etc.”41
Le Bon’s crowd theory had a great influence on Perón, whereas the works by Ramos Mejía and Taine were widely read in the nationalist circles of the 1930s that influenced Perón.42 Like Le Bon and Ramos Mejía, Perón believed that the popular masses would turn violent without a leader, especially when they formed a crowd. “When a mass does not have any sense of leadership and one abandons it, it is not capable of going on by itself, and great political cataclysms will follow.”43 This view is consistent with his 1944 warning that an unorganized, inorganic mass is a dangerous mass. Since masses are by nature impulsive and destructive, they need to be educated to become organized masses. This education is the task of a leader, “because the masses do not think; the masses feel and have reactions that are more or less intuitive or organized.”44 When he became Secretary of Labor in 1943, Perón set himself the task to curb the potential violence of the masses and use their force to achieve long-term objectives. The spontaneous crowd had to be domesticated and harnessed into the mold of the Peronist hierarchy. Perón perfected his mass control upon his political rebirth on 17 October 1945.
Perón drew on his military experience for political leadership, and perceived a structural similarity between the army and the organized masses.45 He emphasized qualities like discipline, obedience, loyalty, camaraderie, and modesty, also found in the military, but set these in an emotional frame that exalted the honor and dignity of the Argentine worker. Part of his appeal came from tapping into and voicing the hidden injuries and injustices, resentment and exploitation of the Argentine working class.46
Perón did not want to instill workers with a combative class consciousness but to inculcate a leader-crowd model that stimulated their personal identification with him as their leader. “The first thing one has to do,” Perón said, “is to awaken the sense of leadership in the masses. People can be better led when they are willing and prepared to be led.”47 Perón set out to disseminate his political doctrine among the Argentine workers and inculcate his ideas during crowd assemblies.
The complexity of Perón’s political philosophy consists of his emphasis on both the equality of all Peronists—and by extension all Argentines—and on their fundamental hierarchical dependence on Perón and the party structure through unquestioned loyalty and discipline. Perón wanted to create an organization in which “there is nothing better for one Peronist than another Peronist.” He tried to tie followers to him as their leader, while at the same time presenting himself as one of them, very much as a commander calls himself above all a soldier. The refrain of the Peronist march sums it up best: “Perón, Perón, How great you are. My General, how valuable you are. Perón, Perón, how great you are. You are the first worker.” As a general, a soldier, and a worker, Perón institutionalized the popular crowds in Argentine politics. In his historic speech on 17 October he asked the crowd gathered at the Plaza de Mayo to create “a common bond that will turn the alliance between the people, the army, and the police indestructible.”48
Perón had prepared the Peronist masses during his two years as Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare. He regarded himself as the only Argentine politician who had instilled the people with a sense of leadership, and this cultivation of an obedient mass made 17 October possible. “If the masses wouldn’t have had the ability they had when the 17th of October lost its command and leadership, then they wouldn’t have proceeded the way they did. The masses acted by themselves because they had already been taught.”49 In other words, the mythic spontaneity of the 17 October crowd had been sown by Perón during the preceding years. Expressing the dual quality of the crowd as both vertically and horizontally structured, he said “One doesn’t lead a mass, but the mass only goes by reaction to where one wants it to go, thus fusing two factors: the individual will of the leader and the will of the mass which he knows to interpret at the right moment.”50
The belief that there was true communication between Perón and the Peronist crowds is another ingredient of the 17 October myth. The people cheered for more than ten minutes when Perón arrived on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace at the Plaza de Mayo. After they had sung the national anthem, Perón greeted them with a single word: “Workers!” According to Luna, “From then on one wasn’t hearing a speech but a dialogue.”51 Luna referred in particular to the insistent questioning of Perón by the crowd, “Where were you? Where were you?” Perón shunned the question because he did not want to refer to his stay at the island Martín García as an imprisonment. He responded that he had been making a sacrifice for the Argentine people which he would make a thousand times over if necessary.52 This exchange became legendary and was followed by others that cannot be properly called dialogues but were rhetorical discourses in which Perón asked a question, used a slogan, or selected a cue from the crowd and incorporated this adroitly in an impromptu speech.
Spontaneity, peaceful demonstration, and dialogue between leader and crowd became the essential qualities sought for in all subsequent Peronist demonstrations.