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The Argentine Silent Majority
Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies
By Sebastián Carassai Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7657-6
CHAPTER 1
Political Culture
I am repelled by the idea that a person allows someone to tell him "Perón, Perón, how great you are!" This person is either crazy or a fool. If someone told me: "Mr. So and so, how great you are!" I would tell him "Ok, look, my friend, let's change the subject...."—Jorge Luis Borges
In June 1943, a military revolution put an end to the conservative cycle that began with the overthrow of Hipólito Yrigoyen thirteen years earlier. The young officers of the armed forces developed an increasingly significant rule in the new government, occupying positions and helping shape its political orientation. One of these officers, Juan Perón, soon became the strategic head of the revolution. When he was the Labor and Welfare Secretary, Perón granted unions long-awaited concessions that quickly earned him the sympathy of a majority of the nation's workers. This fact, coupled with the incentives that Perón gave to working-class protests, turned him into a potential threat for the traditional political parties and, above all, for his military comrades in the government, who decided to arrest him in October 1945. On October 17, thousands of workers marched to the Plaza de Mayo to the presidential palace and demanded his release. A political identity that persists until the present day was born.
Perón deepened and extended state intervention beyond the economic realm, implementing a populist program that transformed Argentina's social landscape in a matter of years. His first two terms (1946–1955) left an indelible mark on both supporters and detractors. His fall, provoked by another military revolution in September 1955, reopened a cycle of institutional instability that would only multiply over the two following decades. Whether Peronism was rising or in crisis, whether it was legitimate or prohibited, whether Perón was in power or in exile, the society reacted dividedly. The question of whether one was with Peronism or against it defined much of Argentina's twentieth century.
In this chapter, I explore the political culture of the middle classes. I analyze experiences, memories, and responses to Peronism and propose continuities and notable fractures, for example around the figure of Evita, in middle-class views of Peronism. In particular, I challenge recent accounts that have portrayed the middle class as turning to the left, and toward Peronism, in the 1970s. At the same time, I examine a largely unexplored hypothesis regarding Perón's strategy toward the middle class in this key period. To grasp what is at stake, however, we must begin with a deeper examination of what the first Peronist administrations had meant to the middle classes.
Anti-Peronism and Enlightenment
The years of the first Peronist government (1946–1955) stained the prism through which the new political juncture created in 1973 by the return of a democratic regime without prohibitions was read. In that period, the middle class developed the sensibility that would later serve to decode important events of the 1970s, Peronism's triumph in March 1973, Perón's definitive return to the country in June of that year, and even the March 24, 1976, coup. Whether the memories of the Peronist decade were their own or inherited from their family, they tell us something fundamental about the political identity of the middle classes, as well as allowing us to understand their future behavior.
From the rise of Peronism, the political identity of most of the middle classes was conditioned by a sensibility that structured itself as a reaction to this movement. What was traditionally called "anti-Peronism" was at the heart of this sensibility. From 1945 on, various political identities (radicals, conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists) came together in their anti-Peronism and were mobilized by this sensibility. This fact did not make a middle-class Peronist vote impossible. As shall later be seen, Peronism was a multiclass movement from its origins, and, both at midcentury and in the 1970s, enjoyed the support of a fraction of the middle classes.
However, when a sector of the armed forces put an end to almost ten years of the Peronist regime in 1955, the multitude that celebrated the rise of the so-called Liberating Revolution (1955–1958) was largely composed of the middle classes. From this coup to 1973, the various political actors in conflict demonstrated, on the one hand, their inability to impose their own political project and, on the other, their ability to impede those of their rivals. This "hegemonic tie" resulted in military and civilian governments with limited legitimacy due to the banning of Peronism, who sooner rather than later were able to corroborate the persistence of the Peronist political identity. In 1973, in the epilogue of another military coup, the Argentine Revolution (1966–1973), the de facto government assumed the failure of its project to "de-Peronize" the country and called for the first election in eighteen years that allowed the Peronist party to present candidates, while proscribing Perón himself. The Peronist ticket of Héctor Cámpora and Vicente Solano Lima were elected with a large majority.
Although the intensity of anti-Peronism weakened after the regime's fall in 1955, a majority of the middle classes remained "not Peronist" in the two following decades; the furious anti-Peronism of the 1950s gave way to a more nuanced "non-Peronism." This should not, however, lead us to lose sight of the fundamental issue: the political identity of much of the middle classes remained conditioned by that sensibility, organized around their distinction from Peronism.
An ambivalence emerges in the memories of Peronism's return to power in 1973 that members of the middle class evoke today. For some, this return represented the hope for a peaceful and orderly solution to the political crisis. For others, it represented the fear that the dark days of the first Peronism would return. Ricardo Montecarlo, a young man from Tucumán who in 1973 was finishing his studies of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, speaking about Perón's return, stated:
I, at least, had some hope, despite not being a Peronist. Perón was the element that—Perón the person, Perón the individual—was the element that could have united people with different ideas. His famous pendulum swing, from left to right, from right to left. [...] When he died, the bell tolled. Everything fell apart [...] I knew that Perón had come back to die. But I felt sorry and disappointed to lose hope, because I knew that everything was falling apart. He was the only one that, perhaps, could have united the Argentine people. And everything fell apart, as you see later, because then came the big mess.
Memories like Ricardo's contrast with those who remember having felt hopelessness and even fear at the return of Peronism. Many questions that I posed about 1973 were answered with references to the first Peronist decade, especially by those who were young people or adults in the earlier period. In the first interview with Jorge Van der Weyden, who was born in 1928, the issue of Perón's return led to the following dialogue:
SC: My question is how you saw Peron's return at that moment. Not the reflection that you have today, but in that moment, if you remember, did it make you feel ...?
JORGE: Fear, yes, yes. That man's return, for all of us who lived through his first period, one said: "well, now we're going to return to the same old stuff." Fortunately it wasn't like that. But the fear was present. It was present. Not because of ideology or anything like that, because that's all "verse." It was because of the methods, and because of what could happen [...] People don't know what the first Peronist period was like. Now, people talk about Peronism—I'm sorry that I'm getting to this, but for me it's a fundamental part of the country's skeleton, right?—All the first Peronist period was a dictatorship with all of its letters capitalized. We couldn't have this conversation in a bar, nothing. Not even with your family, or it would depend with whom and behind closed doors. Not in a subway, not in a train. This is how far we had gotten with that fine gentleman. Maybe he changed later, he came back [in 1973], seemed like a nice old man, people are left with that image, or the young people that didn't live through [the first Peronist period], see that and are left with that. But I knew the reality. You would pick up a newspaper, any newspaper, eh? And all of the pages, all of them said, "Perón" and "Perón." The province of Chaco was called Perón, Retiro [the train terminal] was called Perón, everything, everything: "Perón," "Perón," "Perón." It was unbearable. And everything was like that: the kids in school, studying Evita's virtues. [...] There were the block captains, which meant that each block had an informant that could point you out. Look, that was really serious! The famous 1970s that everyone talks about, it was a wild time for those that were in the activist movements. Those of us that weren't involved in that, well, we lived through the World Cup [of soccer, in 1978], and everyone was content and happy. In that period, [during the first Peronist government], no. That was universal, universal.
By 1973, after several years of political party inactivity, the vast majority of the middle classes (which by that point included generations that did not have direct memories of the first Peronist government) were not affiliated with radicalism, developmentalism, socialism, or communism. Many of their members sympathized with some of these political currents, and, in that sense, these sympathies separated them. However, they were united by what they had in common: whether they inherited it from their parents or whether it was their own, they maintained that non-Peronist sensibility that was the child of the anti-Peronism cultivated during the ten years of the regime. Thus, although by the 1970s the party sympathies of the middle classes were dispersed, their political identity was defined less by what they supported than by what they opposed. And what they opposed continued to be Peronism.
The memories of anti-Peronism are filtered through the generational variable. However, the driving force of the different generations only differs in its intensity, not in its nature. Maurice Halbwachs taught us that collective memory is neither global nor homogeneous. Collective memory never reflects the beliefs of "society" as a whole, viewed as a totality; instead, it is a product of the standards, values, and social experiences of particular groups and classes. Social memory has limits, and these limits correspond, with some flexibility, to the symbolic framework and representations of defined social classes. The memories of the Peronist regime that I will now present can be, with some flexibility, assigned to the "nonactivist middle class in the 1970s."
The grounds for anti-Peronism (or of the more tolerant non-Peronism) can be organized around four types of elements attributed to the regime: that it was fascist, that it was dictatorial or authoritarian, that it was immoral, and that it was hostile to culture or "anticulture." In the fascist category are mentioned the ubiquity of Perón and Evita and of government propaganda in the mass media and the school books that were required reading; the replacement or introduction of curricular content oriented to glorifying the regime; the compulsory membership in the party to have access to or maintain a job in the public sector (including health and education); the obligation to attend and participate in the emblematic days associated with Peronism (such as wearing mourning clothes after Evita's death); the great demonstrations of people to cheer the leader on; and the persecution, torture, and jailing of opponents. To present it as dictatorial or authoritarian, they mention the police-style surveillance over the population, primarily over those nicknamed "contreras" (those contrary to Peronism), put into place through a network of informers and groups like the Nationalist Liberation Alliance (Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista), the verticalism and the total submission to the leader (and its counterpart, the obsequiousness of his followers); its antidemocratic character (a democracy defined less in terms of votes than in the freedoms and spaces for citizen autonomy permitted). The immoral elements tended to emphasize the corruption that, while not new, had achieved scandalous levels for the first time in the political history of the twentieth century (the enrichment of both Perón and many regime officials); the state manipulation of those who did not have cultural or material resource to refuse state favors; and Perón's own sexual degeneracy in his relationship with adolescents of the Secondary Students Union (Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios). Finally, the elements relating to Peronism's "anticultural" imprint tend to cite the old slogan at the regime's beginning, "yes to sandals [alpargatas], no to books"; the incorporation of illiterate people or those lacking in formal instruction to the legislature; anti-intellectualism, evidenced by the unanimous opposition of universities to the regime; the stoking of emotional and passionate tendencies of the masses to the detriment of their rationality; and the incitement to mediocrity or even vagrancy through the improvement of the population's standard of living through demagogic actions that discredited personal effort, merit, and education.
These memories tend to emerge together with anecdotes in which they, or people close to them, had to elude the impositions of the regime or attempted to do so. Perhaps it is not unreasonable to postulate that the middle classes, between 1946 and 1955, exercised a spontaneous and disorganized resistance to what they perceived to be excesses or abuses to their dignity, a resistance which, while also political and social, was above all cultural. It is thus relevant to ask, What nerve of the middle class's subjectivity was irritated by the serious restructuring of social life that Peronism implied, so that these memories persist so vividly? Is it as simple as affirming that they felt attacked by those that they had always considered to be inferior? In the argument that follows I attempt to respond to both questions, starting with the latter.
There are racist elements present in the discourse of some of the members of the middle class, visible in the allusion to working-class and "popular" sectors using terms such as "blacks," "bums" (gronchos), and "browns." This contrasts with the romanticism with which middle-class activist youth in the 1970s viewed the poor in general and the working class in particular, a conception that led to "proletarianization" as a tactic to obtain a greater closeness with the "objectively" revolutionary subject. However, the young middle-class activists in the 1970s, whether they were Peronists or Marxists, assigned themselves the role of the political vanguard of the working and popular classes, and in so doing denied to these sectors sufficient knowledge to construct for themselves a politics commensurate with their interests. Therefore, even if it is true that a majority of the nonactivist middle classes tended to express themselves as if they had belonged and continue to belong to a social and cultural world that was hierarchically situated above that inhabited by the working and lower classes, this self-declared superiority cannot be attributed exclusively to the sector that kept its distance from activism or middle-class anti-Peronists. On the contrary, everything indicates that this feeling of superiority corresponded more to a class perception than one associated with political identity. In other words, if the middle classes that are the object of my study (their nonactivist sectors in the 1970s) or those analyzed in this section (their anti-Peronist members) had and conserve a dual and hierarchical vision of society—where they situate the lower-class and working-class sectors at the bottom and place themselves above them—this is not related to either of the two groups mentioned but rather with a more general class habitus. Both in the past and today, they feel and think themselves to be superior not because they are anti-Peronists or because they were not activists but because they are "middle class," for having accumulated enough cultural and economic capital to distinguish themselves qualitatively from the poor and the working class. This trait seems to evoke a resemblance with, as opposed to differentiating them from, the various sectors of the middle classes, regardless of their political identity or degree of politicization.
The answer to the first question should thus be looked for elsewhere. I propose to analyze carefully a component of their sensibility that I call "enlightened." This is the middle classes' self-perception (neither activists nor Peronists in the 1970s) as being autonomous and freethinking subjects; in other words, not determined by anything other than their free will to think and to act in the way that they think and act. The anti-Peronist memories, no matter which of the four types they belonged to, often emphasize this "enlightened" element. Peronism, experienced as a fascist, dictatorial, immoral, or anticultural regime, challenged this self-perception by either taking away or threatening to take away this autonomy.
The following excerpts belong to two Correa residents from different generations. The first is from Luis Martino, born in 1953, and the second is from Linda Tognetti, born eleven years before. In the first case, his anti-Peronism was inherited from relatives and acquaintances. In the second case, it was a combination of inheritance and her own personal experience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Argentine Silent Majority by Sebastián Carassai. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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