This is just a simplified guide. The questions are not central to the discussion in this class, but rather basic starting points.
Prof. Jorge Majfud
- What was Peronism in Argentina, and what is it today?
- Who were its most iconic and founding leaders?
- What were the most significant achievements and failures of Perón’s government in Argentina after World War II?
- What was «Project Pulqui» in Argentina (interrupted by another right-wing military coup), and what did it have in common with NASA’s development program (see Operation Paperclip)?
Pulqui II, 1955
Notice: The following pages are not mandatory readings. They provide a historical background drawn from “The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America” that may be considered for this topic.
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1945. God sends Ambassador Braden to Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina. May 19, 1945—Convinced that God has landed him in Argentina to correct the dangerous path the country has taken with the Revolution of 1943, the new US ambassador, Spruille Braden, arrives. Engineer Braden is the heir and, along with the Guggenheim family, one of the shareholders of the mining company Braden Copper Company, which dominates copper extraction in El Teniente, Chile.[1] Like other US ambassadors, Braden stands out for his participation in various coups d’état in foreign countries and for defending the superiority of the sacred private corporation, such as Standard Oil in Paraguay or the United Fruit Company in the Tropics, for which he will work when the banana company and the CIA decide to overthrow the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, nine years later.
Spruille Braden is a man of the old guard. His roots belong to the times when Washington, the media, and large transnational corporations fought against “the threat of the inferior races” that inhabited the countries where God had spread the natural resources of the chosen people. But now Braden has learned to repeat the new slogan: it is not race but culture, the inferior mentality of underdeveloped countries. Although Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was the main ally of the United States in the war against the Nazis and a partner of powerful businessmen like Henry Ford, after a brief parenthesis of civilized experiment proposed by Roosevelt, the threat will remain as the only sexy enemy option, even though for most Latin Americans it is not even an option. Communism.
In the early 1940s, Argentina and President Perón were accused of sympathizing (largely for demographic reasons) with the Axis of Italy and Germany. In fact, the Argentine problem stemmed from having a large population of Italian origin, which made it suspect of fascism. With fascism defeated in Italy, the State Department warns that communism is not significant in Latin America, except in countries like Argentina where the population of Italian origin is very substantial. Although communists are and will remain a very small minority in Latin America, they are the only substantial excuse left to continue a tradition of control, interventions, dictatorships, and dispossession that has its roots in the previous century. But just as dangerous as the Italians in the Río de la Plata are the poor throughout the continent. In the June 3, 1946 issue of Life magazine, in a lengthy article, the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, reported the real danger: in Latin America, Moscow’s presence is almost nonexistent, but “the standard of living for many of its industrial and agricultural workers is poor, which offers an opportunity for communist propaganda.” So, instead of addressing poverty, the poor are attacked. In 1948, a year after the creation of the CIA and in the midst of recruiting experts and Nazi criminals, the Office of Planning in Washington will conclude that the influence of communism in Latin America is irrelevant. But, as the Secretary of State himself clarifies, the vocation of communism is to spread throughout the world, which reminds one of the comics where the fashionable superheroes fight for justice and against the villains who want to take over the world that already has an owner.
Beyond the reality of Moscow’s intentions and possible plans, their use and manipulation will become a state policy and the preferred strategy of Washington’s propaganda and intelligence services. The excuse of the communist threat will be repeatedly used by Washington, by its Latin American dictators, and by the Latin American ruling classes, the “good people,” who in this way will not only be able to maintain a status quo based on old social injustices, inequalities, violence, and extreme poverty but will also receive millions in aid from the United States to keep the new ghost alive and stronger than ever.
On December 23 of last year, the dictator Anastasio Somoza, who liked to boast about being able to speak English, sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt requesting more resources for his National Guard, a creation of the Marines in their glory days, the only force capable of stopping the imperial ambitions of Mexico, “a country that does not hide its disgust for the United States“ while “Nicaragua is a bulwark against communism, which aims to infiltrate Central America as Mexico’s policy”. Mexican communism consisted of nationalizing its oil wells and limiting foreign ownership of land to the surface for habitation and work. Although Somoza is ahead of his time, the Roosevelt administration has taken the idea of democracy in other countries quite seriously and, given the possibility that the left might come to power in a hypothetical election in Nicaragua, prefers not to intervene.
To the new ambassador in Argentina the new idea of the four-time president who rescued the United States from social catastrophe has not yet arrived. In fact, his ideology is short-circuited with that of Roosevelt, the “socialist president”. Braden detests any type of union, except his own, the union of millionaires, always present in the government of superpowers and satellite countries. He detests organizations of the poor and detests even more that countries other than his own can industrialize, like Argentina.
In the brief four months he remains in the country, Braden invents anti-Peronism before Perón invents Peronism. The U.S. embassy participates in the electoral campaign as if it were just another political party, but the pivot occurs when Vice President Perón takes advantage of the electoral dichotomy “Braden or Perón” and his wife Evita begins to build left-wing Peronism. If anti-Peronism is born before Peronism, the Peronism that will mature in Argentine clandestinity, far from its exiled leader, will be more Peronist than Perón himself. The Perón of the workers will die when Evita dies in 1952. Or when he goes into exile in 1955.
Perón is a conservative military man surprised by the overwhelming support of the new working class; Evita (the poor “bastard,” the “social climber”) is the left wing of Peronism. During his exile in Franco’s Spain, Perón, like Washington, will support the 1966 coup d’état by General Juan Carlos Onganía against the elected president, Arturo Illia. In his case, only verbally. By the time he returns to Argentina in 1972, he will have openly become anti-Peronist. Or at least the Peronist faction of the far right consolidated by his mysterious shadow, José López Rega, and his wife Isabel Perón. Popular Peronism, the Peronism of the workers, the Peronism of Evita, will survive in some unions and in Héctor José Cámpora, president for two months, but, along with the Montoneros, will be expelled by Perón himself in 1974, and by other Peronists like President Carlos Saúl Menem in 1991.
Despite the fact that, according to Braden, God has sent him to Argentina to correct the course, something will go wrong and Perón will win the election in 1946. Some will not forgive God for such betrayal. Most of the U.S. diplomatic corps and the local dictators in their service do not know that Perón is less communist than Roosevelt. In March of this year, one of the most radical anticommunists in Washington, Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, in line with the president’s new Good Neighbor policy, hosts the Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko in his own home so that he can meet with representatives from Brazil. After all, the Soviets have been the main allies in the war, without whom Hitler would still have a serious chance of winning and writing a different history. The Roosevelt administration believes that a traditional relationship with the Soviets could be more convenient than a confrontation, so it facilitates the establishment of diplomatic relations between Moscow and some Latin American countries. Joseph Stalin also considers the United States as an ally against fascism and thinks he has more to gain by maintaining the alliance formed during the war than by starting a new confrontation with the emerging world power. To improve his social and linguistic skills, Stalin recommends his ambassador Andrei Gromyko attend a Protestant church, but Gromyko prefers to improve his English in other ways.
The same former ambassador Braden, recently appointed Assistant Secretary of State, in response to dictator Somoza’s insistence on the possibility of a leftist party winning the elections in Nicaragua if they were allowed, responds on December 17: “Well, the best way to have a democracy is to have a democracy… That is, if sometimes a leftist or anti-American group emerges, that is part of any democracy.” These statements are actually part of a special moment in Braden’s career, like an Introduction to Democracy course is part of a student’s education when they are informed of the most basic aspects of the discipline and, as they advance in their career, become increasingly cynical.
With the death of Roosevelt a few months earlier, history begins to change dramatically with Harry Truman. Washington’s policy towards Latin America will revert to the old Monroe Doctrine through different methods, and there will be no possible dialogue with the other winner of the war, the Soviet Union. This time, in a more sophisticated and secretive manner, but the interests, brutality, dictatorships, and deaths will remain the same. No longer will there be talk of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and the danger of Black people and mestizos, as in the past century, but instead of the superiority of democratic values, of free enterprise, and the inferiority of a culture with twisted roots, prone to communism (like homosexuals in wealthy countries), corruption, and the mere complaints of an underdeveloped mentality.
Braden too will return to his previous convictions about exclusive democracy. Shortly before the CIA, with his direct collaboration, destroys Guatemala’s democracy in 1954 by accusing its president Jacobo Árbenz of having installed a “communist regime” in the country, at a conference at Dartmouth College, he will state that “no one is more against interventions in other countries than I am, but sometimes it is necessary to fight fire with fire.”
In the 1955 coup d’état, known as the “Liberating Revolution,” the model of a jet aircraft extensively tested in Argentina, the Pulqui and its various versions will be used, not for any international war but to support the attack on Argentine cities and against the president who initiated the project.[2] Later, once the new military dictatorship of generals Lonardi and Aramburu is established, the national aeronautics industry will be dismantled with the import of obsolete, second-hand military aircraft from the United States. As if that weren’t enough, within three years the new dictators will reverse Perón’s resistance to turning to the IMF for loans and will increase the national debt from 57 million to over one billion dollars. After a democratic interlude, in the 1960s the dictatorship of General Onganía will multiply this inflated figure by forty.
In 1967, as ambassador to Nicaragua, Spruille Braden and his wife will receive the Gran Cruz de Rubén Darío from the friendly dictator Anastasio Tachito Somoza “for his struggle for freedom in Latin America.”
(…)
1966. Short Minds, Long Sticks
Buenos Aires, July 29, 1966—Eduardo Señorans Cerruti hears his father talking on the phone. “Go to the Faculty of Sciences and beat them to death,” orders General Señorans. Eduardito, as he is known to distinguish him from his father, tries to warn his friends, but it’s too late. The only resistance the students can offer is to close the doors. At night, the federal police enter several faculties of the University of Buenos Aires, evict hundreds of professors and students by force of batons and tear gas bombs, and destroy whatever communist laboratories they find in their path. General Señorans, speculate Eduardito’s friends, hates the university for having changed his son’s way of thinking. The fascist generals, and the fascists in general, as everyone knows, hate universities and books for all the other reasons.
Among the students pushing from the outside to enter and join the weak resistance of those inside was Eduardo Señorans, the rebellious son of one of the coup generals, Eduardo Argentino Señorans. Among the professors evicted by force was the renowned American mathematician Warren Arthur Ambrose, who would denounce the aggression in an article titled “Short Minds, Long Sticks” sent to The New York Times on July 29th and never published. To ensure humiliation, “the forces of order” make them pass between two lines of officers who beat them one by one on the head and back with sticks and bayonets. Four hundred will end up in jail. From now on, all forms of academic freedom are strictly prohibited. Suspects are accused of subversion and communism and condemned for having occupied the faculties in protest against the military coup of the previous month.
Until then, and especially since the university reform of 1918, the university had gradually transformed into one of the most independent institutions in the country, and its example of radical democracy and co-governance, nonexistent in the United States, had spread to several Latin American countries. Nothing had ever bothered Washington more than the independence of others. Not even the most hermetic communism, as long as it was capitalist, like that of prosperous China thirty to fifty years later.
One month earlier, on June 28th, General Juan Carlos Onganía had forcefully removed the democratically elected president Arturo Illia, suspended the Constitution, Congress, the judiciary, freedom of the press, and began ruling by decree. From then on, every dissident is and will be subject to arrest under the military accusation of contempt. The country becomes a large barracks where almost no one is a soldier or wants to be one.
For the Argentine army, intervening in politics is not foreign to its tradition, but its conscious politicization begins with the 1955 coup against Perón. Like the overwhelming majority of Latin American armies, since the last century, its main function had been to protect the special interests of the creole oligarchy. However, unlike most other armies on the continent (with exceptions like Chile and Uruguay), until a few years earlier, the Argentine army had remained independent from the influence of Washington’s dictates. During the period of national industrialization under Perón’s government, the Argentine armed forces had managed to develop, with the help of German engineers (with a past as dirty as the Germans who propelled NASA), their own propeller-driven combat aircraft model, the Pulqui II. After the 1955 coup and during the dictatorships of Eduardo Lonardi and Pedro Aramburu, this industrialist program was replaced by second-hand American aircraft. For some time, the greatest foreign influence continued to be that of the French army, whose torture techniques developed in Algeria were taught in Argentina. Like Argentine diplomacy since the 1930s, the Argentine army’s tradition of resisting the military hegemony of the United States in the hemisphere also continued for a few more years. Even in the 1962 coup against the president who was too neutral on Cold War issues, Arturo Frondizi, some army officers opposed the rupture of the constitutional order, among them General Juan Carlos Onganía. Until then, Onganía belonged to the blue faction of the army, which, without being Peronist, appreciated the third way of Peronist nationalism.
Without delay, Washington found a channel to replace France and impose its military and political interests in Argentina, known and detested for decades as the rebellious or arrogant country that stood up to Washington’s delegations at every inter-American summit. A breach was the discovery that Onganía had moved from nationalism and his tolerance towards the Peronists to the group of red generals, those who were against the political neutrality of the army and saw no harm in U.S. hegemony in the Southern Cone.
During the dictatorship of José María Guido, in May 1963 General Onganía was officially invited by Washington to visit military installations in the United States. Undoubtedly, the Argentine general was as impressed as expected. Before his return to Buenos Aires, Washington awarded him the Legion of Merit medal for his support of democracy, the same medal received by other Latin American dictators. General Onganía accepted it with tears in his eyes. The ceremony had formalized a marriage that would bear several children in the short, medium, and long term.
At the time, in December 1963, the elected president Arturo Illia had decided to terminate contracts with American oil companies and refused to compensate them, which angered Washington and deepened its honeymoon with the Argentine army. To make matters worse, in April 1964 President Illia had refused to participate in Washington’s invasion of the Dominican Republic, later they had lifted the proscription of Peronism, and, shortly before the coup, Congress had voted in favor of limiting the privileges of foreign pharmaceutical companies in the country. On June 9, 1995, the CIA reported economic recovery and growth close to eight percent. The CIA did not abandon its practice of planting articles and opinion pieces in major media outlets, but the Argentine press did not need Washington’s dollars to destroy another democratic government. It was enough with the wealthy national oligarchy. They relentlessly mocked Illia, the elderly president. They portrayed him as a ridiculous, ineffective turtle. Journalists like the ever-present Bernardo Neustadt, a faithful representative of this class that flirted with power throughout the second half of the century, in 1987 would admit that, like everyone else, he expected a coup. Like everyone else, he would regret it, but his clericalism would continue to be the same, more refined, in favor of those above.
In May 1964, with the signing of the Military Assistance Agreement, as an inverse variation of the Good Neighbor Policy, Argentina became the last Latin American country to confirm its submission to Washington’s interests. From the old oligarchy’s anti-Peronist passion and the current Argentine army’s obsession with anti-communism, there was only one step. Because in the United States and, especially in Europe, there are plenty of progressives, social democrats, and socialists, in Latin America no one would disappear under any of these accusations. Progressives, social democrats, and socialists, whether individuals or governments, would disappear under the accusation of being communists.
When, finally in October 1962, the navy and then the rest of the Argentine armed forces declared themselves in favor of collaboration with the United States in its fight against Cuba, President Kennedy did not miss the long-awaited opportunity. The ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert McClintock, called it a historic opportunity. The golden excuse of the fight against communism could not fail, especially when the oil stain had spread, in the words of Simón Bolívar a century and a half earlier, across the rebellious Río de la Plata. The only obstacle was convincing the army that the new Doctrine of National Security and the anti-insurgency fight made any sense, when their own generals reported that insurgency in the country was irrelevant. Not only were the Argentine generals of this opinion. The CIA, in a later report from June 9, 1965, stated that, with less than 65,000 members, “the Argentine Communist Party is the largest in the hemisphere, but it is not an influential political force; neither the Communists nor the Castro supporters are a subversive force with any potential relevance, except if they decide to participate in some mass action with the frustrated Peronists.”
However, the discourse of the “communist threat” would become central in all subsequent dictatorships. The report adds that, despite its natural resources and human wealth (low illiteracy rates and, moreover, “almost all are of European descent”), its main problem lies in the contradictions and conflicts of its leadership. At the time, the problem for the army and the oligarchy was not the communists but the Peronists. But the Peronists were too many millions, as had become clear when Illia was elected president in 1963 with only a quarter of the electorate due to the ban on Peronism and with subsequent elections in which Peronism was allowed to participate. So, the idea was to create a weaker enemy but one that was narratively insurmountable due to its international nature. Communism.
For this reason, Washington convinces the Argentine generals that the fight against communism was a fight against internal insurgency, to the point that Onganía’s generals collaborated by inventing the idea of defending “ideological borders” against foreign influence, in the same way that an army would defend physical borders. The story was believable even for the constitutionalist sector of the Argentine army and, naturally, served Washington’s interests. A perfect deal.
As would happen in Chile with the elimination and corruption of the constitutionalist generals by the CIA before the 1973 coup, on June 28, 1966, three years after being honored in Washington with the Medal of Merit, General Juan Carlos Onganía removed the constitutional president of Argentina from office. As would happen with General Pinochet, appointed Army Commander by the elected president Salvador Allende, as would happen with General Rafael Videla promoted by President Isabel Perón, nine years later, and as has been and will be a long tradition among dictators, General Onganía had been promoted by President Arturo Illia himself to army commander.[3] Shocked (no one ever knew why), the United States Congress would break diplomatic relations with the new dictatorship. For a moment, General Onganía was surprised. According to the New York Times of July 14, a spokesman for the new Junta stated: “we thought the Pentagon was in favor of an alliance between the armies of Argentina and Brazil against communism.” The article (next to another one denouncing the presence of a communist summer course in New Jersey, investigated by the FBI and denounced by Representative Joelson) reports on a visit to the new president by a delegation of Jews concerned about the anti-Semitic elements of the new far-right regime, such as General Onganía’s brother-in-law, Captain Enrique Green, and General Eduardo Argentino Señorans, Enrique Martínez Paz and Patricio Errecarte Pueyrredon, both with high positions in the government and members of the patriotic and anti-Semitic group Movimiento Nacionalista Tacuara.[4]
On June 30, 1966, the Embassy in Buenos Aires sent a cable recommending that Washington recognize the new government, “although we recommend not being the first or the last to do so”. Seventeen days later, President Lyndon Johnson reestablishes diplomatic relations with the new dictatorship and deepens the military “assistance” to the regime, which was never interrupted. The investment will be worth it. A secret CIA report, dated December 7, 1967, will state that the new regime has “dramatically reduced the power of workers’ organizations… which has attracted private investments from abroad” and assures that, although the new dictator will not allow free elections in the medium term, “he remains an ally of the United States.”
The new dictator appoints an economist from the previous dictatorship of Aramburu, Adalbert Krieger Vasena as his Minister of Economy and implements the neoliberal prescriptions of Milton Friedman in the country before it was done in Pinochet’s Chile. The country opens up to foreign investment while freezing wages for twenty months. Inflation is reduced at the cost of strangling the workers’ economy. Opposed to the nationalist plan of Peronism, it eliminates subsidies to industries like sugar. Just as Domingo Cavallo will do in 1991, it fixes the conversion rate of the dollar to the Argentine peso (in this case, at 350 pesos).
On May 11, 1967, Richard Nixon will repeat his Latin American tour from a decade earlier. This time, he will find neither criticism, nor student protests, nor spit as in 1958. Nor as many democracies. The next day, in a tiny corner, next to almost an entire page dedicated to Macy’s bikinis, the New York Times will reproduce a UPI dispatch with Nixon’s remarks in Buenos Aires: General Onganía “is one of the best leaders I have met in my life.”[5] Like his friend Henry Kissinger, he knows and speaks the truth: nothing important happens in South America, or no one in the North cares.
Thousands of students abandoned their studies, 1,500 professors resigned, and 700 left the country. Among them were Gregorio Klimovsky, Mariana Weissmann, Juan G. Roederer, Sergio Bagú, Manuel Sadosky, and Tulio Halperín Donghi. In 1994, the Nobel Prize winner in Biology, César Milstein, would recall that “a minister from the military government said that things in Argentina wouldn’t get better until two thousand intellectuals were expelled.” When, indeed, in this decade of the 60s, Milstein and a few hundred intellectuals were expelled, Argentina was on par intellectually and academically with Australia and Canada. Now that the brightest minds are expelled from the country, they will go on to contribute to the best universities in Europe and the United States. In the Río de la Plata, things will be fixed as those in power desire, but they suffer from a well-known inferiority complex. The Onganía regime makes the decreed dream possible, and Argentina goes from being one of the world powers in scientific research to what everyone will see in just a few more years. Without even addressing more important issues, like the systematic violation of Human Rights by the regimes to come.
In the 1940s, while the world powers were distracted by the Second World War, Latin America had experienced a wave of democratic changes that ended a dozen banana republic dictatorships. Now, thanks to Washington’s dedicated effort to promote democracy on the Southern Frontier, dozens of new coups and military dictatorships cover their countries with hundreds of thousands of deaths, with the fear of those below rising and the hatred of those above descending. The following decades won’t be any better, for the same reasons.
From the military’s assertion in 1962 about the irrelevant existence of guerrilla groups in the country, they first adopted Washington’s “National Security” doctrine, then exaggerated the subversive potential (downplayed even in secret reports from Washington), and finally, to the facts with the actual existence of strong guerrilla groups. In a dictatorship, violence is a form of politics. The subversive groups that later serve as an excuse for other military coups, such as the one in 76, are born in the shadows of previous dictatorships. By the end of this decade, the repression, aside from far-right paramilitary terrorism, will lead to an increase in violent attacks by leftist armed groups, which will primarily finance themselves through robberies and kidnappings. If in Uruguay this phenomenon serves as an excuse for a coup in 1973, in Argentina the increase in violence and economic failure will lead to the fall of General Onganía in an internal coup in 1970 and a temporary handover of political power by the Armed Forces in 1973.[6] Until in 1976, with full force, the doctrine instilled by Washington more than ten years earlier is applied once again.
Eduardito, the estranged son of General Eduardo Argentino Señorans Lasso de la Vega, like his friends, will have to leave university and will die twenty years later. His father, General Señorans, will outlive him by another ten years. He will also serve as a minister in another dictatorship, that of General Roberto Levingston, and will die in 1993 while defending in court one of the last genocidal dictators of that country, General Fortunato Galtieri.
[1] The nationalization of this mineral reserve will be completed during the government of Salvador Allende in 1971.
[2] Like the development of NASA and the Soviet space agency, but on a much smaller scale, the Pulqui prototypes had received guidance from refugee German technicians and engineers, some former members of the Nazi party.
[3] The list of generals promoted by presidents who would suffer coups d’état at the hands of their own generals is long, but some cases can be recalled, among others: Francisco Franco in Spain (1936), René Barrientos in Bolivia (1964), Onganía in Argentina (1966), Pinochet in Chile (1973), Manuel Noriega in Panama (1981), and Williams Kaliman in Bolivia (2019). In a less tragic and entirely constitutional manner, Manini Ríos in Uruguay (2019).
[4] Other sources (HAOL, 17, 2008) claim that Enrique Green was a colonel and a militant Catholic, obsessed with the “immorality” of society due to modernity and communism. Laws 17.741 and 18.019 of 1968 will legalize the censorship of any publication or radio and television program.
[5] Above the small note about Nixon in Argentina, a column titled: “American girl gives a lesson to the government of Athens on miniskirts”. Fourteen-year-old Susan Osgood Farrell will protest the ban on wearing miniskirts. Her letter sent to dictator Stylianos Pattakos, in power since the coup d’état weeks prior, will occupy the Greek press for days. Pattakos will partially relent in his campaign to save morality and allow foreigners with long hair to enter the country. Washington, and the rest of NATO under pressure, will also grant support to this new “anti-communist dictatorship” of Pattakos despite multiple reports of serious human rights violations in the country.
[6] One of the social uprisings that would ultimately end the dictatorship was the Cordobazo. Popular organizations, such as labor unions and student associations, took their protests to the extreme by taking to the streets en masse and armed, which led to the total defeat of the police and their shock forces in Córdoba in 1969.
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