the popular masses into impressive crowds which took center stage in Argentine political life. He provided the Argentine working class with a public forum to express their resentment of social, economic, and political wrongs. He established a link between the dignity of Argentine workers, their rights as full citizens of Argentine society, and their assembly in crowd mobilizations. The Peronist crowds affirmed and renewed these newly won privileges by gathering periodically in the symbolic heart of the nation, at the Plaza de Mayo with its Cathedral, presidential palace (Casa Rosada), and town hall (cabildo) where Argentina’s independence from Spain had been secured.
The importance of the physical assembly of the Peronist following in a crowd cannot be overestimated. The Peronist crowd was essential for the transformation of injustice into dignity. According to Elias Canetti, crowds evoke irresistible feelings of unity and equality.90 “It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.”91 These sensations relieve people temporarily of society’s “stings of command” left by institutional inequality and exploitation, precisely the social injustices and restrictive civil rights which Perón addressed. Such stings of command leave residues of resentment which can be shed temporarily in a crowd.92 In other words, people can give free rein to their innate aversion of unjust authority and social injustice when gathered in a crowd. Even though Canetti’s imagination took flight in essentialism and romantic extravagance, his suggestive ideas about society’s stings of command help us understand the collective experiences of oppression, injustice, and exploitation that existed in Argentina at the end of World War II when V-Day celebrations were forbidden by an authoritarian regime fearful of a popular insurrection.
The 17 October crowd took on the mythic proportions of a popular mobilization which emancipated the Argentine workers, united them with fellow Argentines behind the banner of social justice, and represented for every Peronist the most supreme manifestation of identity, belonging, togetherness, dignity, and equality. These gatherings gave Peronists a sense of comradeship and community that transcended narrow class boundaries. The momentous 17 October 1945 and the tragic 16 June 1955 framed an era in which crowds made their presence felt in Argentine politics. Within one decade, Perón had inserted the working class into national politics and had turned the crowd into a familiar tool to achieve political ends. Winning the streets with a large crowd became an equally favorite weapon of power and legitimization for Peronists as well as nonPeronists.
Perón’s crowd manipulation was condoned as long as he curbed the political radicalization of the Argentine working class. This tolerance ended when Perón became increasingly authoritarian and threatened to turn the Peronist crowds loose on the middle and upper class establishment. The presence of the Peronist crowds had been so great between 1945 and 1952 that political opponents could not help but enter into a crowd competition to dispute their dominance in an attempt to oust Perón. One segment of the Argentine people tried to protect Perón and the recent social gains, while another segment wanted greater civil liberties. This growing political opposition to Perón drove the middle classes into the streets, while the hitherto rigidly organized Peronist masses erupted inside Argentine society in uncontrollable ways, ways which would eventually draw the country asunder in massive violence.
Chapter 2
The Time of the Furnaces: Proscription, Compromise, and Insurrection
“There hung a murmurous atmosphere resembling the sea,” one reporter wrote of the crowd that celebrated the installation of General Lonardi as Argentina’s new president on 23 September 1955, “a constant surf of sounds: shouts and applause.”1 The people were in a festive mood on this warm first day of Spring. Some fainted from the heat and the crowd’s pressure, while others refreshed themselves in the fountain at the Plaza de Mayo. The reporter compared the crowd to the Peronist crowds that used to monopolize the square, and asserted that never “has there gathered such a dense crowd as the one which yesterday tried to find a place at [the Plaza de Mayo] and overflowed into the converging avenues….”2 Perón had consecrated the Plaza de Mayo during ten years of mobilizations as the nation’s foremost political arena where the Argentine people and the authorities determined their destiny. Packing the square with an immense crowd became henceforth a proof of political legitimacy for every future Argentine president and dictator.
The 23 September crowd expressed as much its support for the military government as its aversion of Peronism. The final years of Peronist rule with its increasing suppression of public speech, imprisonment and mis-treatment of political opponents, curtailment of civil liberties, and the confrontation with the Catholic Church had blown deep divisions in Argentine society which had manifested themselves in several crowd competitions. The 23 September crowd marked only the first of several street mobilizations that legitimized the Liberating Revolution. There were crowds on 11 January 1956 to support the new Aramburu government, on 10 June 1956 to listen to President Aramburu after a failed Peronist rebellion, and on 16 September 1956 to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution. Finally, there was a massive farewell on 21 October 1957 for a military junta which was voluntarily abandoning power through general elections in February 1958.
The repression of Peronist crowds after the 1955 coup became particularly harsh when the moderate Lieutenant-General Lonardi was pushed aside in November 1955 by the hardliners General Aramburu and Admiral Rojas. Four months after the palace coup, the Peronist party was declared illegal. Systematically, the Peronist Organization was dismantled and with it the dignity of the working class.3 What became now of the leaderless Peronist masses? How would they be able to recapture their feelings of dignity, unity, and power without the presence of Perón, and what would motivate them to take to the streets and brave the repressive climate?
The prohibition of Peronist mobilizations had a tremendous impact which compelled Peronists to remember the 1945 Day of Loyalty through sabotage and undo the bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo with acts of defiance. Bombs exploded every 17 October and slogans were painted hastily on the walls. Canetti’s stings of command accumulated again, not only in the working class, but also among a younger generation that had been raised with stories about the glorious days of Perón and Evita. Some guerrillas of the 1970s were only children in 1956 when they had their first brush with violence and repression. Ernesto Jauretche recalls how deeply the search for his mother affected him when she was arrested after the failed Peronist rebellion of June 1956. “The first time they took my mother, they also disappeared her. For one month, we searched for her everywhere but they told us: ‘She’s not here, she’s not here.’ We searched for her at military bases, everywhere. Executions were taking place and we didn’t have any news about my mother, we didn’t know where she was. The history of the disappearances is indeed very old.”4 Jauretche believes that this episode and the frequent visits to his incarcerated mother caused a profound class hatred that fed his political activity during the rest of his life.
These experiences were shared by many Peronists, and contrasted with happier and increasingly idealized memories of the Peronist years. Hardship and happiness shaped militant Peronists who romanticized about Eva Perón helping the poor and the sick, the jubilant Labor Day crowds at the Plaza de Mayo, and the holidays at the seaside resorts built for the workers. Added to these memories came the traumatic bombardment of the Peronist crowd on 16 June 1955 and the frustration of not being able to manifest the loyalty to Perón and his ideals, because if the crowd was not the progenitor, then it was certainly the womb of the Peronist movement. As Perón wrote on 3 November 1956 to John William Cooke: “I have given them an organization, a doctrine and a mystique. I have worked eleven years to politicize the masses. I have prepared them to fight against a reactionary response and I have left them with an example of how to achieve important reforms.”5 The leader-crowd relation stood at the origin of the mystique of Peronism, and the obstruction of the public expression of that sentiment, either in
