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, union leaders determined to cling on to power by any means morphed into the ‘union bureaucracy’ and ousted the masses as the natural leaders of the workers’ movement. The Peronist Party was proscribed, its leaders exiled or jailed. The ‘new leadership’ – the unions’ secretaries and treasurers – fell in behind the country’s most reactionary right-wing forces. Union headquarters became bunkers from whence bodyguards accompanied their bosses to night clubs or the races. Economists of the cattle and grain oligarchy ran the economy on behalf of the military regime and, at the behest of US imperialism, joined the network of international organizations like the IMF, IDB and GATT with its Latin American adviser ECLAC, and drowned in acronyms any possibility of domestic industrial development. On the contrary, they adopted an economic policy which condemned Argentina to a secondary role as producer and exporter of primary products.
Arturo Frondizi, a lawyer and dissident member of the Radical Party, emerged as a possible candidate in the forthcoming elections. His friend Ricardo Rojo, also a lawyer, journeyed to Caracas with other emissaries to seek the good graces of ‘El Viejo’ Perón, who was there in exile playing with his dogs. A subtle web was being woven with threads from Perón’s own skein; like a puppet-master, he tugged a little here, pulled a little there, and conspired daily with the many different pilgrims visiting the Peronist Mecca. Frondizi’s negotiations prospered and he went on to sign a pact with Perón that would ensure electoral victory for Frondizi’s party through the majority vote of the Peronist masses. In return, he would restore the social, economic and political gains Perón had made, and revoke laws restricting Peronism. In February 1958, Frondizi was elected president.
Frondizi’s economic policy was probably the most sensible the Argentine industrial bourgeoisie had ever come up with. The idea was very clear and seductive. We lived in one of the continent’s richest countries, but were like poor people content just thinking we are rich. Resources do not exist unless we extract them. What use are oil reserves if we don’t exploit them, turn them into foreign currency to develop the country, import technology, industrialize? Frondizi’s thesis passed from hand to hand in the form of a book, Petrol and Politics, which denounced the power of the multinational oil companies, who exercised global control through corruption and blackmail, backed by force. But like Perón, Frondizi did not hold all the cards. At the transactions, agreements and concessions stage that every electoral policy has to undergo, it was undermined by ‘enemy’ strategists – the powers that be, the cattle and grain barons allied to US imperialist multinationals.
When the new administration came to power, a total of twenty-eight oil contracts were signed with foreign companies, twenty of them from the US. Other contracts setting up industrial plants, especially in the car industry, put most of Argentine industry in foreign hands, an insuperable barrier to the implementation of the Radical Party’s policy. In fact, the exact opposite policy was implemented. Not only was oil not used to fuel the national industrialization programme, but after Frondizi was defeated four years later, it transpired that US and British companies had been paid more to drill for oil than if we had bought it directly from them on the world market and kept our crude deposits intact. The systematic surrender of our natural resources was shameless and absolute. Foreign companies earned enormous sums. The race to denationalize was unstoppable: shipping, distilleries, naval shipyards, radio stations, furnaces and farmland passed to the Argentine private sector, and in the case of oil to Standard Oil, Texaco or Shell. The de-capitalization of the country forced us to take ‘loans’ from those same countries that had thoroughly plundered our national patrimony. US and European banks, the IDB, the Eximbank and the World Bank, together with the IMF, made the loans conditional on a series of restrictive measures that saw thousands of workers lose their jobs. ‘Frondizman’, as the cartoonist Landrú’s magazine Tia Vicenta called him, was not made of national steel or oil. He was made of Coca Cola.
My wife Claudia’s parents had a holiday home in Potrerillos, a valley in the foothills of the Andes on the road to Chile. One Sunday in the spring of 1958, Radio El Mundo’s midday international news programme announced it would be broadcasting an interview with Cuban guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra led by Fidel Castro, an already mythical figure even before he was famous for his beard, his outsize cigars (described by US journalist Herbert Matthews) and his audacity. Some years earlier, he had attacked the Moncada military barracks with about a hundred men, most of whom were killed, but he still went on to invade the island by motor launch with another hundred suicidal maniacs, again most of whom were killed, and then marched into the mountains with a handful of survivors. Among them was a doctor from Argentina.
With the whole South American continent between us, my image of the guerrillas was not so much political as romantic and adventurous. But it fired my imagination and awoke expectations. Insanity is generally closer to reality than cold reason. Argentine political journals were full of rigorous analyses of ‘important’ regional events, in which the World Bank or IMF, the State Department or CIA, carried more weight than some fantasy character no matter how bearded. But I was an avid reader of Primera Plana, a magazine that had already published an article on Cuba (its editor Jacobo Timerman had a nose for a story), and its accounts of the Bolivian revolution and the disaster in Guatemala had set my pulse racing.
I was determined to listen to the programme. So, leaving the family barbecue, I sat in the shade glued to the radio. The interview had been recorded by Radio El Mundo’s international news editor, Jorge Ricardo Masetti. If Fidel’s followers on the motor launch were suicidal maniacs, Masetti was cloned from them. From a Catholic Nationalist background, he nonetheless admired men of action, caudillos, leaders: not men who turned the other cheek but those who fought
