On 4 June 1943, at a turning point in the Second World War, the armed forces staged a coup against their own civilian government. The ideologue behind the coup, Juan Domingo Perón, was to become a key figure in the political landscape for the remainder of the century. No ordinary soldier, no dull lover of barracks life, no servant of the oligarchy, he had concrete plans and had made good use of his previous post as military attaché at the Argentine Embassy in Rome. As he would later explain to the Army chiefs of staff: ‘Gentlemen, the Russians will win the war. Social reform is on its way. Either we make our own revolution and lead it, or we will be swept away by history.’ But he needed charisma to win over the people. A stroke of luck came his way in the shape of a national catastrophe, an earthquake in the province of San Juan. At a gathering for the 10,000 victims, he had the good fortune, superlative good fortune as it turned out, to meet the person who would become the bond of steel between him and the proletariat, and bind herself to him in marriage: Eva Duarte – Evita.
Peronism brought the biggest change in social structures, and ways of thinking, in Argentine history. The working class ceased to be a faceless mass and took power. Above all, they were no longer a tool to be used, abused and discarded. They became human beings, protagonists central to the life of the nation. For the first time in history, the poor downtrodden masses arrived in Buenos Aires as its masters, not its street cleaners.
A passion for travel rather than sport, made me, in the words of Bernard Shaw, ‘leave school in order to get an education’. I set off for Salta, in the north of Argentina. I did not know then that whenever you leave a place, you are reborn, over and over again. But it really was like that. The journey opened up a whole new world, another country, much more Argentine, less Spanish, less Gringo than the Mendoza I lived in, a world of amazing natural beauty.
Northern Argentina showed me a reality the Left refused to see, and influenced my nascent political consciousness. The country was Peronist. As a lesson in practical politics, it was a defining experience. Since vagrancy was not subsidized, I had to find work from time to time, and this took me to one of Argentina’s largest sugar mills, El Tabacal in Orán, Salta, where the sugar cane harvest was about to begin. I was given the job of overseeing the Indians who fed the sugar cane into the crushers on the platform beside the mill where the trains loaded with cane arrived. El Tabacal was a huge mill, self-sufficient in both cane and food from its vast plantation. It was closed to public traffic, guarded by its own police and run by a staff of technicians, some from overseas, skilled workers and ordinary personnel. The majority of cane cutters were Chahuanco and Toba Indians. The mill would collect them from the forests of Salta each year in cattle trucks, give them space on the river banks to build straw huts, provide them with a minimum amount of food, and after the harvest was over, take them back home, with no further costs.
To a mind like mine filled with utopian socialist ideas, and despite my encounter with a real country in a process of change, Peronism seemed more like a stumbling block than a road to revolution. It did not stand up to scientific Marxist analysis. Its heterogeneous, something-for-everyone character – a mix of bible and boiler-room as the tango goes, of cops and robbers – hindered any effective manifesto.
And then, Eva Perón died. She was the person who might have radicalized the movement. In fact, she had embodied the rage, the class ingredient, the banner of the poor. Her passing left millions orphaned, and uncoupled the train from the engine. On the day of her funeral, it drizzled on Buenos Aires and on the soul of half the country. For the poor, it was as if the light illuminating their hopes had gone out.
The Argentine Communist Party was a typical petty-bourgeois party, divided into an arcane leadership, in the style of the Soviet Communist Party, and a militant rank and file. The few roots it had in the masses were swept away by Peronism, leaving space only for the middle class, professionals and students. There was, however, a larger sector on the Left that had been there almost from the birth of the nation, influenced by Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ and inspired by Argentina’s most brilliant independence heroes. This Left later absorbed the ideas of Marx’s First Socialist International, but did not join the party and became what were known as ‘fellow travellers’. In any case, the drama of continental realities south of the Río Grande stemmed not from the indigenous nature of a population that had been exploited since the Spanish Conquest, but from the exploitation itself, now firmly in the hands of the empire to the north.
The Catholic Church, which had used Peronist power to impose religious education in schools and colleges, now began to oppose him, supported by its historical strongholds: the army and the oligarchy. Perón abolished religious education, passed the divorce law, made illegitimate children equal before the law, withdrew subsidies to Catholic schools – and thereby precipitated the end of his own term in office.
On the morning of 16 June 1955, I was staying with Pepe Varona, a friend who subsequently became the official set designer of the New York Opera. I was preparing a set of proposals for advertising posters for an American travel agency when, around noon, we heard warplanes overhead. Without a second thought, we dashed up to the roof of Pepe’s hostel, on the corner of Montevideo and Rivadavia streets, and from there, with heavy hearts, we watched the criminal attack on government house in the Plaza de Mayo, no more than ten blocks away. The first wave of planes turned right over us, and continued on between Rivadavia and Avenida de Mayo, their guns firing on the Casa Rosada. We could see other planes coming in over the River Plate, nose-diving on the plaza and unloading their bombs and shrapnel. It was a murderous attack over streets crowded with cars and pedestrians, pensioners feeding the pigeons in the square, and children playing on the grass. Men and women fled in terror, dragging their kids, fanning out from the epicentre of the crime. We were just going back into the hostel, to listen to the radio, when a second, smaller squadron appeared and resumed the attack.
Back on the roof, we watched the battle in full swing. By now the army loyal to the president had deployed anti-aircraft guns and was returning fire, filling the sky with black puffs and the air with a pungent odour and a terrible sound of thunder. The aircraft, extending their radius, flew in just behind us, before going towards the Casa Rosada and on to the War Ministry building on Paseo Colón. At the end of the park, they headed towards Uruguay and disappeared into impunity. Ambulance and fire-engine sirens ripped through the silence settling over the city, normally so noisy at that hour, just past 1 p.m. A couple of hours later, a third group of stragglers, three fighter planes coming in from the West, strafed the three targets again, before flying off over the river, bound for Montevideo. Privileged Argentina, tired of wrinkling its nose and containing its hatred of the plebs, had gone to confession, genuflected, crossed itself, and sought the blessing of their chaplains and bishops, before finally attacking the fallen angel, Perón, and his demonic descamisados.
The dead quickly lose their identity and become difficult to count. The actual number of casualties in a massacre is rarely known. Similar world events have suffered from the same lack of mathematical precision. The numbers are minimised ‘to avoid panic’, and forgotten for political expediency. We never knew how many people died in that attack, although they were in the hundreds. ‘Five for each one!’ bellowed Perón in his speech that afternoon. The streets began filling up in the opposite direction to the previous stampede. Angry, threatening groups marched in from the outskirts of the city, home to the manufacturing industries and Peronists (the city itself was never Peronist), and as night fell columns of thick smoke rose from several parts of the city. A Dantesque glow turned some buildings red.
News of Castro’s Revolution Reaches Argentina: 1958
By 1958, homemade pipe-bombs were going off all over Argentina’s industrial cities. Made from bits of iron piping stuffed with dynamite, with a fuse sticking out of a hole in a screw top, they caused a pretty convincing explosion. A new slogan, ‘Perón Vuelve’ (Perón is coming home), began appearing on walls.
Meanwhile,