Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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of Peronism—a Peronism that had been proscribed since 1955—was that its essence rested in the dialogue between Perón and the crowd, and in the convergence of people and leader in the person of Perón.53 Perón voiced and personified the genuine will of the people. Crowd and leader were believed to accomplish this spiritual and political alignment during the Peronist rallies. The magazine of the Peronist Youth described in 1974 this public dialogue as follows: “Between Perón and his people there is always this phenomenon of mutual nourishment: the crowd creates, Perón incorporates, Perón creates, the crowd recreates, and so the movement advances….”54
Still, as is typical of all myths, they are rewritten whenever opportune to their believers. At the beginning of 1974, as the breach between Perón and the second-generation Peronists became clear, they began to circulate the unlikely story that Eva Perón had been the driving force behind 17 October, inciting the workers to take to the streets. Evita was represented as a revolutionary who preferred the worker masses over the Peronist Party and labor union bosses, beckoning them to overthrow the conservative oligarchy by force.55 Yet, it was not through Evita’s incendiary speeches but under Perón’s tutelage that the Peronist crowd began to use violence as a means to achieve political goals.
The Violence of Popular Crowds
The fear that someday the Peronist masses would turn violent was always present among the Argentine middle and upper classes. The working class had become a political force that could no longer be ignored. Perón’s brand of populism was tolerated because the elite believed that he might prevent a radicalization of the Argentine workers. The violent Tragic Week of 1919 was still fresh in their minds, and the Cold War had made a Soviet-backed resurgence of communism in Argentina a real possibility. The brazen-faced working-class crowds entering the heart of Buenos Aires might become easy prey to revolutionary agitators without the presence of Perón. These misgivings were shared by the Argentine Catholic Church because it was after all the Church which had monopolized the mobilization of popular crowds in processions and pilgrimages.
Initially, the relations between Perón and the Church hierarchy had been fine. The Church had supported his presidential candidacy in 1946, and Perón had embraced the Church’s Social Doctrine and approved legislation that guaranteed religious instruction in public schools. What precisely sparked the disaffection between Perón and the Church is hard to determine, but in 1950 Perón began to state publicly that Peronism embodied the essence of the Christian faith, namely defending the poor, the down trodden, and the oppressed. His pronouncement that there was a spiritual unity between the Argentine Catholic Church and the (Peronist) State raised the suspicion that Perón was usurping the Catholic community.56 In fact, Peronist youth and workers’ organizations were depleting similar Catholic organizations of their membership. Furthermore, Evita Perón’s Foundation which provided social assistance to the poor undermined the Catholic charity organizations.57
The Peronist crowds were even more unsettling to the Argentine Catholic authorities: they undermined the natural hierarchy deemed sacred by the Church, and provided a formidable competition to the religious crowds. 17 October had demonstrated what this subversion of hierarchy could do to people. The ritual reversals and the occupation of a public space hitherto reserved for the upper and middle classes undermined authority and their divinely given right to rule.
The threat of usurpation was an additional worry to the Church. The Peronist movement organized large crowds in an atmosphere with spiritual overtones. This became clear after the death of Evita Perón in 1952, and caused a considerable deterioration in the relations between Perón and the Argentine Catholic Church. The refusal of Rome to canonize Eva Perón added chagrin to the conflict, but it was the spiritual mobilization of the Argentine people for a dying Eva Perón without the involvement of the official Church that accelerated the crisis.
On 20 July 1952, the CGT union central organized a mass at the Plaza de la República to pray for Evita’s health. One week later, on Saturday 26 July, she died of cancer. There was an outpouring of public mourning. People erected small altars in the streets in her memory and, for two weeks, more than one million people passed by her body in state at the CGT head-quarters in Buenos Aires.58 The Catholic crowds of the 1934 Eucharistic Congress led by the Argentine ecclesiastical authorities had been replaced by the 1952 Peronist crowds praying for Evita’s recovery, and later mourning her death.59 “The pastoral role of the Church seemed threatened,” Lila Caimari has observed, “and its monopoly on massive religious mobilization became seriously questioned.”60
There was an increased crowd mobilization after Eva Perón’s death. There were torchlight processions in remembrance of Evita, demonstrations supporting Perón, and welcome crowds as he returned from foreign visits. Embattled by anti-Peronist forces and amidst an economic crisis, Perón called for a show of force on 15 April 1953. Overconfident because of a massive working-class backing in the 1951 elections (in great part made possible by Evita’s efforts to obtain female suffrage in 1947), he threw in his lot with the working class and alienated his middle class supporters. In a radio address, he threatened “the internal and external enemies” of Argentina, while the CGT ordered a general strike and organized a crowd mobilization at the Plaza de Mayo. A notorious rhetorical exchange developed when Perón responded to two bombs that suddenly went off nearby: “Comrades, comrades! I think we’re going to have to go back to the days when we went around with garrotes in our pockets.” The crowd chanted, “Perón! Perón! Punish them! Punish them!” And Perón replied, “This thing about punishment you are telling me to do, why don’t you do it?”61
Even though Perón asked the crowd to return home quietly, the message was clear. Irate Peronists attacked the seats of the Radical party (UCR) and the Democratic National party, and burned down the headquarters of the Socialist party and the Jockey Club, the exclusive meeting place of Argentina’s landed elite. Police and firemen were standing by passively as the fire burned priceless libraries and art treasures. The greatest loss was caused by two anonymous bombs that killed seven people and wounded ninety-three at the Plaza de Mayo. The arrest of around four thousand anti-Peronists intensified the polarization in Argentine society.62
Two weeks later, during his speech at the 1 May demonstration, Perón tried to rein in the street violence by asking the crowd to leave matters to him. However, he also threatened the opposition with unleashing the crowd’s destructive force: “I ask you, comrades, not to burn down anything anymore, not to do those things. Because when something needs to be burned down, then I will go ahead of you. But then, if this would be necessary, then history will record the greatest bonfire that humanity will have lit until today.”63 The fears of those weary of 17 October seemed to be coming true. Perón had the people in his grip. He had inculcated a leader-crowd model that allowed him to manipulate the popular masses. Perón’s militant language drove his opponents into one camp, a camp that became reinforced with the powerful Catholic Church when Perón directed his attention to Argentina’s youth.
Perón repeated often that the youth held the future of the Peronist movement, and his words proved prophetic in the 1970s.64 The Union of High School Students or UES (Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios) was the principal organization to captivate the youth. The UES was conceived in 1953 as a sports organization with separate branches for boys and girls. The combination of rumors about Perón’s more than normal interest in the adolescent girls using the sport facilities of the presidential summer home at Olivos in January 1954, and the annoyance of anti-Peronist parents at the growing hold of the State on their children, led to the charge that the Peronist rule was morally corrupt. When priests advised parents from the pulpit to keep their daughters away from the UES clubs, time was ripe for a showdown in the streets of Argentina.65
The crowd became an obvious choice of weapons in a society in which “to win the street” (ganar la calle) had been a successful Peronist tactic since 17 October 1945. The Student Day celebrations on 21 September 1954 in Córdoba became the first major occasion for a public contest. The march of the Peronist UES drew an estimated 10,000 high school students, while the rally organized by the Catholic Action (Acción Católica) gathered 80,000 participants.66 This shocking defeat worried Perón. On 10 November 1954