On the way to Buenos Aires from the airport at Ezeiza, two weeks before the May 14 elections, I asked the taxi driver to point out the site of the mas- sacre. He smiled and waved vaguely behind us at bridge 12, where the Ricch- eri expressway passes over highway 205. The massacre took place on June 20, 1973, a chilly fall day in Argentina. As many as four million people had massed on the highway and fields around the airport, in the largest demonstration the country had ever seen. The reason, as bumperstickers and graffiti had pro- claimed for months, was "Per6n vuelve"--Per6n returns. Juan Domingo Per6n, president from 1946 until his overthrow by the army in 1955, was coming home. Whole families had come to greet him, some from distant provinces, with their picnic satchels, yerba mate, arm- bands, banners and noisemakers. Col- Geoffrey Fox is the author of Wel- come to My Contri, a collection ofshort stories, and of the forthcoming The Land and People of Argentina (Harper & Row). umns of Montoneros, self-styled "sol- diers of Per6n," snaked through the crowd with immense banners and boom- ing bass drums. At about 2:30 p.m., one large contingent approached the speaker's platform from the south along highway 205. As they were about to pass under bridge 12, automatic rifle, machine gun and shotgun fire exploded from "security" atop the overpass and the speaker's platform. Targets included anyone who looked like a zurdo, a leftist-anyone, that is, with long hair, jeans, or other signs of Argentina's de- fiant youth. Someone ordered the release of the 18,000 doves-1,000 for each year of the General's absence from Argentina -which were meant to be freed as he spoke. The shooting stopped as flutter- ing wings filled the sky, but in a minute they were gone and the firing resumed. As many as three hundred people were shot, stabbed or clubbed to death by the men on the platform. They, it was later established, were under orders from Per6n's personal secretary, a former police officer named Jos6 L6pez Rega. Per6n, meanwhile, landed at another airport. Shortly after Ezeiza, the 78-year- old Per6n was elected president for the third time. He did nothing to replace factional violence with dialogue, but instead encouraged the hunting down of left-wing Peronists. He died the next year, leaving power to his vice presi- dent and widow, a former flamenco dancer known by her stage name, Isa- bel. The real power was L6pez Rega, called el brujo (the warlock), a serious practitioner of black magic and numer- ology, and founder of the terrorist Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. Isabel's government, generally con- ceded to have been a disaster of eco- nomic mismanagement and social chaos, was abruptly terminated by the military coup of 1976. Ezeiza demonstrated both the breadth of Peronism's appeal and the virulence of its internal conflicts. The appeal endures, as proven by the 1989 election, which gave the Justicialista (Peronist) Party control of the presi- dency, both houses of congress and most of the provincial governorships. The question now is what will become of the conflicts. Constituencies in Conflict On July 8, incoming President Car- los Sadl Menem wriggled awkwardly into the presidential sash that outgoing President Radl Alfonsin held up for him. Both men are short, but the long- haired Menem is slender and athletic while the mustachioed Alfonsin is tubby and ponderous, and they couldn't quite manage the choreography of the ges- ture. Besides, Menem was visibly nervous-a rustic lawyer who had risen to the governorship of his remote, rural province, he seemed as out of place at the Casa Rosada as Jimmy Carter did in front of the White House in 1976. Peronism's heterogeneous, but generally working-class and lower middle-class composition, and its mix of conservative nationalist and eco- nomic reformist ideas make it roughly analogous to the Democratic Party of the United States. However, unlike its U.S. counterpart, Peronism until re- cently had no internal democratic mechanisms allowing its different con- stituencies to be heard. (For that matter, neither did the other Argentine parties, each built around the personality of its REPORT ON THE AMERICAS I 4leader.) Thus, rival factions made their appeals directly to Per6n (or Evita, who interceded with Per6n). If they failed to get an audience, or if the leader (as often happened) chose not to intervene, the rivals fought with whatever weap- ons they had at hand, frequently resort- ing to violence. During Per6n's long exile after 1955, gang warfare came to serve the functions of caucuses and primaries. That's what happened at Ezeiza: the caucus of the bullet. The overwhelming electoral defeat of 1983 shook the Peronists from their complacency; their party had never before lost a free election, and they could scarcely believe it was happen- ing as they watched the returns. The main reason for the loss, Menem and others concluded, was that voters were disgusted by the party's undemocratic practices and violent image. A major force for party reform is the faction calling itself "Renewal" (Reno- vaci6n), made up mostly of urban intel- lectuals, many with a strong social- Catholic orientation. To their left, a "revolutionary tendency," influenced by Marxism and its offshoots, consists mainly of people who were in some way associated with the Montoneros. Directly opposed to them are the anti- communist nationalists, including some groups that are armed and dangerous. Less ideological, but not always ad- verse to a little violence to get their points across, are the conservative chiefs of the larger trade unions (metalwork- ers, plastics, meatpackers) and their allies; since they have been the ones running the party, they have little en- thusiasm for reform. "Renewal" dominates the party apparatus in both the city and the prov- ince of Buenos Aires, where about half the population lives. In the primary they backed Buenos Aires Governor Antonio Cafiero for president, refusing to consider Menem-either because they regarded him as too friendly to the Right, or because they disdained him as a provincial. (Portefios, "people of the port," are notorious for such attitudes.) The campaign was very bitter, insults and threats were traded liberally. But when Menem won Peronism's fairest and broadest internal elections ever, Cafiero and his supporters put on a good face and campaigned, with appar- ent vigor, for the party's choice. One Renewer is Miguel Angel Toma, 40, a newly-elected congress- man from the capital, who sounds like a social democrat. A tall, urbane middle- class man, schooled by Jesuits, Toma says he became a Peronist to help complete the "peaceful revolution" begun in 1946-1955. Per6n's greatest accomplishments at that time, he thinks, were bringing the proletariat into poli- tics and developing the country's infra- structure, but the doctrine needs "up- dating." The day before our meeting, which was shortly before the election, Toma handed out fake dollars printed on toilet paper along Buenos Aires' ritzy Florida street as a protest against the economic crisis. More seriously, he argued that Argentina will have to demand five years grace on interest payments on the foreign debt, so that the country has the means to reinvest in its industries. If creditors refuse, "there will be a social explosion in Argentina! Because this country can't take any more!" Within weeks of the election, the first explo- sions came, with riots and raids on food stores as prices rose out of sight. To the left of the Renewers are for- mer Montoneros and their sympathiz- ers. Despite their conflicts with Per6n in his last government and persecution by his widow, Isabel, they believe Per- onism is a "national liberation" move- ment with revolutionary potential. To abandon Peronism would be to aban- don "the people," which no revolu- tionary can afford to do. In Buenos Aires I spoke with a for- mer member of the Montoneros' "na- A bust of Per6n in Barrio Rivadavia tional leadership," its governing or- gan, who preferred to remain anony- mous. A Communist for many years, he broke with the party in the late 1960s to help form the Marxist "Fuerzas Arma- das Revolucionarias." The FAR later merged with the Montoneros, which had been formed by Catholic national- ists sympathetic to Per6n. The com- bined Montoneros/FAR had 10,000 members in 1973, he estimated, half of them combatants. Although they were heavily influenced by Che Guevara-an Argentine, but no Peronist-they par- ticularly admired Evita, whom they posthumously recruited and put on their posters, portrayed as "Evita Monton- era." Per6n denounced these "soldiers" a few months before he died. Shortly thereafter the Montoneros resumed military actions-which they had sus- pended during his short presidency -and became, briefly, a fearsome force. By the late 1970s, the government had killed or "disappeared" so many of their cadre that they were little more than an annoyance to the regime. Nev- ertheless, their existence continued to be the excuse for the "dirty war''--six years (1976-1982) of military terror that took at least 9,000 lives. Of those 10,000 one-time members, many survive and are still active within Peronism-although not all admit to their Montonero past. At least one pro- vincial governor is said to be a former Montonero. But armed revolution no longer seems an attractive or possible option in Argentina. Most ex-Monton- eros seem to have resigned themselves to operating on the fringes of the Re- newal group or in labor or community organizations. At the other extreme are right-wing groups such as the Comando de Or- ganizaci6n, whose cadre were among those firing from the platform at Ezeiza in 1973. One of its minor strongholds is the proletarian Barrio Rivadavia, a cluster of small cement houses toward the southwestern edge of Buenos Aires where the local party cell is named after Isabel, whom most Peronists these days are embarrassed to mention. The Comando member I spoke to was an attractive and intelligent brown- skinned woman of about 40, originally from the interior. She was guarded in her description of the Comando; she 5 VOLUME XXIIINO M I . k -- I- -u -)needed authorization from its leader, Alberto Brito Lima, she said, to talk about such things. She did reveal, however, that Peronism is "beautiful, so beautiful," and that its truths could be apprehended by a profound reading of Per6n. For her, Isabel was without question still the "chief" of all true Peronists-after all, she bears the magic surname. Though numerically small, the ex- treme Right is an important tendency in Peronism, with friends in the police, the army and the trade unions. Beyond its own capacity for violence, it extends its influence by exploiting nationalist themes dear to most Peronists, even to most Argentines, such as the recovery of the Malvinas Islands, whose con- tinuing control by Britain is deeply humiliating. The Comando de Organizaci6n used to harass Menem during his first term as governor of La Rioja, 1973-1976, ac- cusing him of something like crypto- communism. Menem, though, is im- possible to place in any classical ideol- ogy. He remained loyal to the Right's darling, Isabel, long after her downfall and during her long silence in Spain. The military saw his popular appeal as potentially dangerous, and arrested him shortly after the 1976 coup. They kept him in prison for five years, so he can- not be accused of complicity with the dictatorship (as can many old Peron- ists). Nor did he have any apparent connection to the Montoneros. He likes to claim that he was the original "re- newer," demanding internal reforms in the party. I first saw Menem at a rally in the working-class suburb of La Matanza, where Peronists have never lost an elec- tion. The Peronists had seized the col- ors of the national flag as their own, and everywhere there were headbands, plastic vests, flags, stickers and banners in sky-blue and white. "Vamos, vamos argentinos," Menem's campaign song, blared out of huge speakers, alternating occasionally with the Peronist anthem with its famous phrase, "Per6n, Perdn, iquy grande sos!"-Per6n, Per6n, how great thou art. As my journalist col- leagues and I tried to push forward through the crowd, later estimated at half a million, the crowd would push back; making human waves, "bal- anceo," is a Peronist tradition. Menem drinks mate: a regular guy Menem took the stage, wearing his blue campera, the short jacket favored by workers and many Peronists, grin- ning and waving. His peculiar accent -in La Rioja, they don't trill their R's, so the name of his province sounds almost like La Yioha--came out hugely amplified, feeding the enthusiasm of the crowd. Groups of young men would push to start a wave, and we would see all those black heads moving one way, then the other. Toward the end, obeying some mysterious signal, thousands and thousands of arms shot up, each mak- ing the V sign and swaying in unison. The Normal Thing A few days after the election-in which Menem took over 47% of the popular vote in a nine-way race-I was at an asado, the famous Argentine bar- becue, for the president-elect along with the country's most powerful labor lead- ers and hundreds of journalists. One union boss observed to me about the Renewal faction that some Peronists were too cerebral, too disciplined, with their programs and their rules of proce- dure. "They want to take the Per6n out of Peronism," he complained wryly. "The Per6n," now that the old man is gone, presumably lies in a leader's quirky spontaneity and rapport with "the people." For Oscar Fueyo, a lawyer in charge of the storefront party office in a middle- REPORT ON THE AMERICAS "0 E 0 w '2 class neighborhood of La Plata, Peron- ism is first of all an emotional attach- ment to justice and a sense of commu- nity. For Alberto Delgado, a tall man in a nylon campera who strolled over to say hello and share some mate, "Radi- cals were all from the better-off class, people who intellectualized politics, and who spoke about workers but never understood them. Peronism was the normal thing, of ordinary people .... Peronism is what is normal. The person in the street, who understands his fellows, who drinks mate." That's it. In Argentina, Peronism is the normal thing. In Osvaldo Soriano's tragicomic novel, No habrd penas ni olvidos, one of the small-town charac- ters cries out, "But I've never been involved in politics! I've always been a Peronist!" Nora del Valle, a history professor, bristled when I mentioned populism. That, she said, was "a term of the liberals." "Liberal" here is not the opposite of "conservative," but of "nationalist." "Liberals" uphold in- dividual over community rights and advocate free-market policies instead of protecting local producers. Not all nationalists are Peronists, but all Per- onists are, or claim to be, nationalists. "We are not liberals," Del Valle continued. "Our actions are always group actions. The Marxists call us populists, because they don't consider us really 'popular.' What they say is that the people are with Peronism, but that Peronism needs a revolutionary doctrine-Marxism-to achieve what Peronism can't achieve alone. They call us 'populist' rather than 'popular.' It's a pejorative term for them-and for the liberal Right as well. "To really understand Peronism, you would have to live here several years," she continued, then laughed and added, "And, be a Peronist. Be- cause even though we are the majority, even people living here don't under- stand us. We are a national and popular movement. I don't think you can give any more precise definition than that." Pardons and Austerity Menem has already taken bold ac- tions which at first glance hardly seem popular or nationalist. A drastic de- valuation, wage freezes and an ineffec- 6tive price rollback have reduced people's purchasing power nearly to zero. Real wages have dropped so pre- cipitously in recent months that the middle class is suddenly impoverished and many workers are starving -liter- ally, in a country which is one of the great food producers of the world. But everybody acknowledges that the econ- omy was in extremis, and extreme measures were needed. More surpris- ing is Menem's turn toward the most notorious of the "liberals." He named as minister of economics Miguel Roig, former vice-president of Argentina's biggest firm and probably its only transnational corporation, the food conglomerate Bunge and Born. (Ironically, the Montoneros financed their military and political campaign with the ransom from kidnapping Jorge Born in 1974.) When Roig died after only five days in office, Menem asked Roig's successor at the company, N6stor Rapanelli, to take over the ministry. Rapanelli, it turns out, is wanted in Venezuela for his part in a massive currency exchange fraud. But no mat- ter: Menem continues to back his choice. Free-marketeer Alvaro Alsogaray, recent presidential candidate of the right-wing Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), was named "special economic adviser," and his daughter, Maria Julia was made president of the soon-to-be-privatized state phone com- pany. Regarding the Malvinas, Menem unilaterally lifted trade sanctions against Britain and expressed his readiness to negotiate. Despite appearances, these were probably sensible steps, since the sanctions were hurting Argentina more than Britain. And nobody, not even the military, wants another war. The move that cost Menem the most support was his pardoning-indulto, by presidential decree--of most of the military officers convicted or pending trial for illegal acts from the dirty war to last.year's rebellions. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, who ordered forces into the Malvinas, Gen. Ram6n Camps, who commanded the Buenos Aires police, Gen. Albano Hargindeguy, who had Menem illegally detained in 1976, and rebel Cols. Rico and Seineldin are among the most notorious set free. This was too much even for Peron- ist loyalists. Against orders, many i ne conmeceracion uenerai oei i ranajo: Will Peronist labor back Menem s privatization of state companies? members of the Peronist Youth joined demonstrations against the indultos in October. The indultos also included most of the Montoneros-Femando Vaca Narvaja, once the second-in- command, returned from exile on Co- lumbus Day to ajubilant crowd singing "Per6n, Per6n, iquo grande sos!" Ex- junta leaders Gen. Jorge Videla and Adm. Emilio Massera, on the one side, and ex-Monotonero chief Mario Firmenich, on the other, remain in prison, Firmenich for directing the Born kidnapping. Although Peronists at first looked at Menem's policies in disbelief, loyalty has so far triumphed over logic, as often happens in this movement. Menem, many adherents now are saying, is not abandoning Peronist policies, but just working to achieve them in convoluted and amazingly astute ways. Most of the released officers are has-beens who no longer pose a threat; the possible exceptions are Cols. Rico and Seineldin, but the indultos deprived them of their best issue for rousing rebellious troops. The turn toward Bunge and Born is no more surprising than the abrupt policy shifts of Per6n's "third way" (anticommunist and anti- capitalist). And it could hardly be con- sidered a reward to put Maria Julia Alsogaray at the head of acompany that is about to be privatized, and where the workers are organized in a strong Per- onist union. My ex-Montonero friend, who still considers himself a Marxist and a Per- onist, is worried. To govern, Menem must make choices that are bound to alienate some of Peronism's diverse constituencies. In the past, when there has been a political impasse, Argentine politicians have allowed--or even invited-the armed forces to take con- trol. The discovery of democracy within Peronism will undoubtedly help avoid such an outcome, but the wild card is still held by the colonels who led three mutinies against Alfonsin. Should they play it, the old Montonero believes, it could lead to a union of Menem's mass base with "nationalist" elements in the army, to impose what he calls a classi- cally fascist regime: de facto military rule with popular support. After hearing Menem at the Argen- tine consulate in New York in Septem- ber, another ex-Montonero friend summed it up: "We are used to an Argentina that is prosperous but sad; now we shall have an Argentina that is poor but happy." Poor, definitely, for the foreseeable future. Happy, maybe. Menem's objective seems to be to get all sectors working together. That's one version of happiness, and it's not really a departure from Per6n's own posture. In fact, by his quirkiness, his spontane- ous gestures and his ready rapport with almost everybody, in his own way Menem is putting the Per6n back into Peronism.
