Similar drives for “connecting with the people” inspired the creation of the second student-based organization of the Tendency: the UES. Peronist groups had been active among secondary school students since at least 1971 when, during a teachers’ strike, there was rapid Peronization in a realm thus far dominated by the Communist Youth.90 Like their university counterparts, the secondary school students within the UES also strove to validate the school as a legitimate arena for activism. In contrast to the university students, who did not have examples to emulate, the ones affiliated with the UES held idyllic images of what the first Peronist governments had implied in terms of cultural changes and student organization. “We want to re-create the student experience of the 1950s,” one boy from La Plata argued, “when they learned a true democratic culture.” The UES often compared that imagined landscape with the one that the students had inhabited since 1955 “when the schools became training camps for obeying the system through military-like discipline and anti-national content.”91 To begin deconstructing that school system and repudiate continuismo, the UES students also took over schools. At the Colegio Nacional in La Plata, for example, the students requested the principal’s resignation, financial aid, and the establishment of a tripartite government of students, teachers, and staff. Neither they nor the almost one thousand students who occupied two technical schools in San Nicolás succeeded in their demands.92 Some of the takeovers, however, did result in profound changes, such as the one in the Belgrano School, where the students gained the right to appoint a new principal. It would be hard to overestimate the feeling of empowerment these adolescents may have experienced: as one student put it, “until yesterday, we were ‘good-for-nothing’ kids, now we have a voice.”93
The new government gave the secondary school students a voice at the same that it tried to transform the curriculum. The minister of education discontinued the Democratic Education class imposed after the 1955 coup d’état, replacing it with Study of Argentine Social Reality, and mandated “nationalization” to cut across all disciplines: language classes should strive to “deter English neologisms,” while history classes might reinforce the “learning of national history.”94 The transformation of content did not exhaust the ways in which the schools, to the authorities, might serve to forge new citizens for the “nation’s liberation.” In this respect, they thought that it was a student’s right to participate in the schools’ decision-making process, crucial to fostering “active, risk taking, caring youths.” To that end, the minister discontinued a decree passed in 1936 prohibiting student politics and encouraged the creation of student centers. The authorities further believed that supporting student involvement was not enough to end the well-entrenched authoritarian practices at schools. Although more difficult to actualize than the student centers (which mushroomed in 1973), the authorities advocated “building horizontal relations,” and they suggested ways to “ensure that dialogue and equality [are] prevailing in the relations between teachers and students, parents and children.”95 The antiauthoritarian ethos permeating this proposal was unusual, since it combined a politically “liberationist” overtone with an emphasis on undoing hierarchical relations. Similar to other promises of the “popular government,” this one went unfulfilled because teachers refused to discuss it and because the mobilized students did not consider it a pressing political issue either.
Like the JUP’s, the UES’s politics were animated by the motto of “connecting with the people.” This included enlarging its constituency by organizing working-class students. In contrast to the university student body, which was presumed to be composed of middle-class youths, the secondary school student body had expanded significantly since the 1950s to include even more working-class adolescents. Thus “going to the people” meant organizing students other than the ones in the traditionally middle-class schools where the UES first grew. The Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires exemplified this: a stronghold for the children of enlightened middle-class professionals, the UES recruited more than one hundred fifty students there in 1973. Former students recall that, in the years that followed, the UES leaders asked them to move to different schools, yet the task of mobilizing students seemed difficult: “we did not have any idea of how to engage with the girls,” recalls one student sent to organize in a teacher-training school, “they were interested in telenovelas and boyfriends.”96 However, the UES’s main targets were the technical schools, sites for engaging with working-class boys. A police report, for example, noted that one hundred delegates from schools in the Greater Buenos Aires area agreed to prioritize the technical students in a meeting held in late 1973. Although recruitment figures are missing, the UES was likely relatively successful in recruiting technical students. As a former activist recalls, they were reluctant to discuss but always ready to act: “they were the first wanting to plant bombs.”97
As happened with the Tendency at large, the UES also embarked upon a series of social work endeavors that amplified the practices many youths had developed since the late 1960s. Among the tasks developed by the UES, those related to vaccination campaigns, literacy campaigns, and children’s recreation prevailed. In the city of Santa Rosa in La Pampa province, for example, the UES students ran seventeen “literacy circles” to improve adult education, and they also ran twelve daycare centers. Moreover, the students with the UES were proud to help paint and to do maintenance work at schools and hospitals in their respective districts.98 These activities coalesced into what was the UES’s largest venture, the “Operativo Güemes.” In January of 1974, five hundred students from all over the country went to Salta province to help build roads, canals, and schools. These activities resembled the eye-opening travel practices of Catholic youths: as one student argued, he was encountering an impoverished Argentina that he “could not believe existed.” Unlike the youth in the 1960s, these were nonetheless confident: they were helping fulfill the “national reconstruction mandated by the popular government.”99
In the summer of 1974, when Perón and the Peronist right-wing sectors intensified their backlash against the Tendency, “national reconstruction” initiatives and other deployments of Third World status flourished. The Ministry of Education launched a program of student trips to “historical and political sites” in the Argentine Northwest, Bolivia, and Peru. Three contingents of about two hundred students and professors then traveled from Tucumán to Cuzco in January and February of 1974.100 State-sponsored, these experiences emulated those gained by thousands of backpackers who had traveled to the “hidden Argentina” since the late 1960s. The most common travel options that summer were the operations of “reconstruction” for most youth who traveled with the Tendency. The UES carried out its projects in Salta and also conducted fourteen more, most of which involved the deployment of large youth contingents to impoverished areas in the northern provinces like Santiago del Estero, Santa Fe, Chaco, and Formosa. As one leader of the JP argued, the operations had two goals: “to share the lives of our poorest compatriots” and “to help materialize reconstruction promises” by solving their most urgent needs, such as “first-aid clinics or classrooms.”101 Gradually more critical of the Tendency for its willingness to stay in a movement turning to the right, the weekly Militancia—representing the revolutionary group Peronismo de Base—sarcastically criticized the operations when it asked, “What do these Operativos offer to elevate popular consciousness? They take ‘reconstruction’ as brickwork.”102
In many ways, Militancia rightly perceived a common thread unifying the practices of the JUP and UES: the literalness with which they enacted slogans. Interpreting that the 1973 election results had initiated “national liberation,” young Peronist groups alternated between fighting against the “old regime” (i.e., continuismo) and mobilizing “the people.” This combination of promises and threats was the backdrop against which rising numbers of young people affiliated with the Tendency, which appropriated powerful slogans, such as “connecting with the people” and “n
ational reconstruction.” In the dynamics of 1973, the JUP and the UES acted on these slogans in myriad ways. In doing so, many youths shaped and channeled attitudes of social solidarity and extreme will—voluntarismo—and sometimes they may have experienced a previously unknown sense of entitlement. Yet acting out slogans did not ensure their fulfillment: “national reconstruction” did not mean brickwork, nor did “connecting with the people” result in what many youths would have imagined when, for example, they did social work in working-class neighborhoods. Acting out slogans, however, did result in the numeric growing of the UES and the JUP, which became protagonists of at least six mobilizations in which the Tendency drew between fifty thousand and one hundred fifty thousand people, and far more to the Ezeiza airport to welcome Perón back to the country. Their tragedy, as historian Richard Gillespie has noted, was that Perón was not impressed by their numbers.103
Parricide, Filicide, and the Peronist Family Romance
In engaging with Peronism, many youths confronted their familial and cultural backgrounds. Some former students recall, for example, how their middle-class parents opposed their militancy based upon entrenched anti-Peronist claims, often by remembering the first Peronist governments and Perón’s “tyranny.”104 While it is likely that these confrontations were more widespread among middle-class families, some militants from working-class origins also faced them. That was the case of Mabel, who joined the JUP while she was a student at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UBA. Her parents were “nominal Peronists,” that is, “they identified themselves with Peronism and voted Peronist when possible,” however they opposed the radical overtone of her militancy.105 In many respects, thus, the youth with the Tendency modified their inherited ways of conceiving of and interacting with politics. As Juan Carlos Torre has suggested, in their “movement toward the people,” youth carried out a symbolic “parricide.”106 The metaphor is all the more important, since the political and ideological disputes within Peronism were coded in that language: framed and enacted as a family romance, they set discussions about authority and patriarchy as well, chiefly between Perón’s return to the country and his death in July of 1974.
On June 20, 1973, the Ezeiza airport became the stage of an ongoing drama in Argentina’s politics. The right-wing Peronist sectors, relegated to the sidelines in Cámpora’s administration, were the leading forces organizing the event to welcome Perón back to the country, including the mobilization of about three thousand heavily armed civilians recruited from a pool of ex-policemen and body guards of the most prominent unions. Led by an infamous torturer from the first Peronist governments, Colonel Jorge Osinde, and funded by the Ministry of Social Welfare, these forces controlled the stage and its adjacent areas, attempting to prevent the Tendency’s columns from being visible to Perón. The Tendency had made of that would-be celebration an occasion to literally show Perón its capability of mobilization: although there are no exact figures, observers agreed that half of the almost one million people rallied under the Tendency’s banners. Yet the plane bringing Perón back never landed in Ezeiza, and the Tendency’s columns never got close to the stage. As they approached, the right-wing forces fired shots at them, killing thirteen (three members of the JUP and UES) and wounding three hundred. The Ezeiza events set the stage for the rise of the Peronist right within Argentina’s politics. Perón himself, in this first message to the country, threatened: “to the disguised enemies, I just recommend ending their attempts because when the people exhaust their patience, they van a hacer sonar el escarmiento [are going to teach them a lesson].”107
Waiting for Perón’s return, Ezeiza airport, June 20, 1973. Archivo Fotográfico, Archivo General de la Nación, Box 3166, File 38.
Although other political forces soon understood that the Ezeiza events and Perón’s ensuing message were meant to begin the dismantling of the Peronist revolutionary sectors, the Tendency developed a defensive reading focused on “hedge theory.” The PRT-ERP (which, unlike the Montoneros, decided not to abandon armed struggle once the elections had passed) was perhaps the one that most emphatically indicated that Perón had come back to “reconstruct the bourgeois bloc,” a task that implied barring the revolutionary sectors in his political force. For that reason, the PRT-ERP suggested that their “brother Peronist groups” leave a movement that would not be willing to include them.108 Far from that, the Tendency crafted an interpretation geared to both justify their place in “the movement” and safeguard Perón. As for Ezeiza, the Tendency claimed the presence of CIA agents acting alongside the “bureaucratic” unionists paid by the minister of social welfare had caused the massacre. Minister López Rega epitomized the “hedge” circling Perón, which prevented his real encounter with “the people.” For the Tendency, breaking that hedge was imperative and it asked its constituency, “the people,” to mobilize so that Perón could listen to them without intermediaries, as when eighty thousand youths visited Perón’s house in July.109 The “hedge theory” allowed the Tendency to create an imaginary occurrence: Perón would not be in Argentina until the desired encounter with “the people” took place.
Yet Perón was indeed in Argentina, unleashing a war in the “Peronist family.” After Ezeiza, two disparate but leading intellectuals drew on family metaphors to grasp the political scenario. An intellectual hero for young Peronists, the “national thinker” Arturo Jauretche wrote an opinion piece echoing Freud’s Totem and Taboo. As the “primitive horde of brothers” in the Freudian text, he argued that “the young” embodied a revolution that “would devour the elderly fathers” who were unable to adapt themselves to new times. A member of the “older” group himself, Jauretche asked his generational peers, including Perón, not to “become sad widows.”110 While Jauretche endorsed a political parricide, the psychoanalyst Arnaldo Rascovsky spoke of “filicide.” Since the 1960s he had researched the meanings of what he believed were extended practices of assassination and symbolic mutilations of children and youths at the hands of their elders. These filicidal practices at the same time reversed and reinforced the parricide that psychoanalytical theory recognized as essential to the individual’s psychic configuration and to the building of civilization: filicide, for Rascovsky, was equally constitutive.111 Perhaps acquainted with these ideas, La Opinión asked him to write a piece about Ezeiza. Perón’s call for a trasvasamiento generacional, Rascovsky asserted, had caused “expectations among the youth who anxiously waited for the leader, who would support the unfolding of their developmental possibilities.” Yet Ezeiza incited a “reaction of the elder: it was a sacrificial ritual through which filicide was accomplished.” And he further dramatized: “all filicide practices incite parricide sentiments.”112
Both Rascovsky’s theory of filicide and Jauretche’s invocation of parricide, as applied to the disputes within Peronism, erased the ideological meanings of “elders” and “children,” but these categories do stress the family and, most notably, the generational language in which the disputes were framed. Between September of 1973 and May of 1974, Perón deployed generational-based language to “purge” his movement from its revolutionary sectors in three decisive conjunctures. Soon thereafter Cámpora was forced to resign and Perón decided to run with his third wife, Isabel Martínez, in the elections to be held in September of 1973, Perón met the “elder” and asserted that “the youth branch is questioned.” Moreover, he reminded “the young” that the “elder”—namely, the unionists—should not be attacked. The attacks nevertheless continued.113 In fact, some days after Perón won the favor of 62 percent of the voting population, the CGT secretary, José Rucci, was killed. Although the Montoneros had officially abandoned armed action, they were soon (and correctly) blamed, and Perón talked of “purging” the youths who “beneath a Peronist T-shirt” were “Marxists.” The purge had several ramifications. First, rightist groups such as the Triple A escalated their violence against the Tendency, beginning by killing JP militant Enrique Grinberg in early Septemb
er of 1973. In two months, five other left-wing Peronists had been killed and dozens of JP locals shot.114 Second, the purge entailed barring the sites in which the Tendency had mostly grown up, like the university. Perón requested the resignation of the UBA’s rector, and the violent attacks against the university buildings and the JUP militants continued.115
The second moment when Perón made use of generational-based language and settings took place in early 1974, which ended with his expelling the “youth” revolutionary sectors. The starting point for these events was marked by the PRT-ERP’s attempt to take over a military battalion. In that context, Perón asked the population to stand against Marxism and to promote a reform of the penal code so as to tighten repression: not only the PRT-ERP but also revolutionary Peronist groups—and their “ally”—were the targets. In January, the governor of Buenos Aires was asked to resign, over a period of only four days right-wing groups shot up nineteen locales of the JP, and police forces raided the headquarters of the JP’s weekly.116 In that context, Perón called for a meeting with “youth delegates.” The leaders of the JP tried unsuccessfully to exclude the right-wing groups. In a press conference, the Montoneros’ leader Mario Firmenich claimed that the Tendency’s delegates would not “be seated with the ones who shot our locales.” At the meeting, Perón replied, “I prefer an honest leader with ten people behind him to a traitor with ten thousand,” and asked the “traitors” to leave.117
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