“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
Table of Contents
Questions
- 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)?
Argentina before the WWI
Argentina experienced massive European immigration before World War I because Europe had population growth, rural poverty, and unemployment, while Argentina actively encouraged immigration and urgently needed labor for its expanding agricultural economy, railways, cities, and infrastructure. The spread of inexpensive, fast steamship travel made transatlantic migration much easier, while established Italian and Spanish communities created networks that encouraged further chain migration.
1914 marked a profound rupture in people’s lives. As war spread in Europe, transatlantic transportation became dangerous and unreliable, cutting families off from one another and isolating entire communities, while millions of Europeans were torn from their homes, work, and families to serve in the military, facing fear, loss, and a future that suddenly felt frighteningly uncertain.
The mass European immigration that transformed Argentina before World War I also contributed to the country’s growing social and political tensions. Rapid urbanization, a large immigrant working class, poor working conditions, and widening conflicts between workers, employers, and the traditional landowning elite fueled the growth of anarchist, socialist, and labor movements in the early 20th century. These tensions, combined with economic inequality and the political exclusion of much of the working population, created a climate of social dissatisfaction that persisted into the 1930s and 1940s and became part of the historical context in which Juan Domingo Perón emerged and built his political base among organized labor.
What is Peronism?
Nobody in Argentina agrees, and everybody is certain.
Ask an Argentine what Peronism is, and you will get not one answer but a civil war of answers —each delivered with total conviction. A union leader in Avellaneda will tell you it is social justice. A rancher in the Pampa will tell you it is demagoguery dressed as justice. An economist will call it populism; a historian will call it a movement, not an ideology; a taxi driver will simply say, with frustration, «it’s who we are.» This is not a failure of Argentine political culture. It is the whole point of Peronism. It was built, from its first day, to be filled with contradictory content by whoever needed it. It can be considered a left-wing movement with many examples of right-wing policies and presidents. That elasticity is not a flaw in the phenomenon; it is the phenomenon.
The difficulty is not that Argentines lack the vocabulary to define Peronism, but that Peronism itself resists any stable definition, often by design. It has been, at different moments and sometimes all at once: a labor movement that also cuts deals with industrialists; a nationalist project that has simultaneously served as a vehicle for right‑wing economics (neoliberal reforms under Carlos Menem); a self‑styled defender of the poor that also operates as a machine controlled by provincial bosses; anti‑imperialist in its rhetoric while practicing a deeply transactional, pragmatic diplomacy. When a movement can credibly claim all of these positions at once, it becomes fair to ask whether «Peronism» names a coherent project at all, or simply a flexible label that can be stretched to fit almost any momentary convenience —trying to plot it on a left‑right axis exposes this ambiguity more than it clarifies it.
Its unintended founder, Juan Domingo Perón, emerged from the military nationalism of the 1943 coup, but his genius was elsewhere: he saw, from his modest post as Secretary of Labor, that Argentina’s urban working class —swollen by European immigrants, internal migration from the interior, unrepresented by the traditional parties, and looked down on by Buenos Aires’ old elite as «cabecitas negras» —was a sleeping continent waiting for a name. He gave it one.
By 1945, General Peron had used the labor ministry to build direct ties with unions and workers, granting wage increases, paid vacations, and other labor benefits. This made him hugely popular with the working class, but it also made him dangerous to two groups: (1) the traditional oligarchy and business elites who saw him as a threat to their interests, and (2) rival military officers who resented his growing personal power and saw him as maneuvering to seize the presidency for himself.
On October 9, a group of army and navy officers forced him to resign all three posts as Vice President, Minister of War, and Secretary of Labor. Shortly after, he was arrested and detained on Martín García Island, an island in the Río de la Plata that Argentina had long used to isolate political prisoners.
The arrest, conceived as a neat administrative correction, exploded like one more of those historical boomerangs that Latin American elites are so skilled at throwing and so inept at catching. From the factories and the tenements, from the anonymous outskirts that official maps prefer to blur, labor unions and working-class supporters — stirred in part by Eva Duarte, still without the legal sacrament of marriage but already wedded to a certain popular imagination, and by loyalist union leaders —converged on the Plaza de Mayo on October 17, 1945. They did not arrive as an anecdote but as a date: a multitude demanding Perón’s release and, without fully knowing it, demanding a place in history’s script. Cornered not by foreign armies but by its own people, the government relented, opened the prison door that same night, and watched him speak from the balcony of the Casa Rosada —that recurring theater where Argentine power rehearses its dialogues with the crowd. That day, later sanctified by Peronism as “Loyalty Day” (Día de la Lealtad), became less an origin than a carefully cultivated myth: the moment when a colonel seemed to become a people, and when a people, in turn, began to be administered as a legend. Thus Perón walked the short distance from the square to the presidency in 1946 —a short distance on the city map, an immense one in the long, circular chronicle of Latin American caudillos and their faithful, of promises that emancipate and bind at the same time.
Wages rose, unions were suddenly “legal” and generously lubricated, paid vacations and pensions descended like late justice on people who had never been counted. Then came October 17, 1945: the day the descamisados (shirtless) flooded the Plaza de Mayo to free their jailed colonel, and the official myth was born — the day the shirtless became visible, as if they had not been there, sweating in silence, all along.
Eva Perón, the actrees who met General Perón in a theatre in 1944, was probably the creator of mature Peronism as a phenomenon: she transformed social policy into personal devotion, distributing aid not as bureaucratic entitlement but as a gift from «Evita» herself, forever blurring the line between state and saint. That is the deep grammar of Peronism: it did not simply redistribute income, it redistributed dignity —and dignity, once it acquires a name and a face, is not something people easily vote away, whatever the economists may calculate about its fiscal cost.
By 1946, in barely two years, Eva and Perón had already reshaped Argentina’s social landscape. As Secretary of Labor, Perón had legalized and funded trade unions, mandated paid vacations, established pensions, and delivered sharp wage increases to a working class that had previously gone unrepresented —turning organized labor into a political force for the first time in Argentine history. Eva, meanwhile, used her platform in radio and entertainment to build Perón’s public image among workers and the poor, helping mobilize the mass demonstration of October 17, 1945, that freed him from detention and cemented his hold on popular loyalty. Together, in this short span, they laid the foundation of Peronism as a movement: social benefits tied directly to personal loyalty, a working class newly conscious of its own political weight, and a partnership that would carry Perón to the presidency in 1946.
Perón is overthrown in 1955; for eighteen years Peronism is banned, its name erased like an obscenity. First paradox: exile and prohibition do not kill the movement, they canonize it. Voting for Perón stops being an act of government and becomes an act of refusal; the movement absorbs a generation’s rage without paying the bill of power, a privilege almost no ideology enjoys without blood on its hands. When Perón returns in 1973, Peronism is already a crowded boarding house: (1) Marxist guerrillas (the Montoneros) at one end of the corridor, (2) the far-right death squads of the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) at the other, all under the same leader, the same flag, the same hymn mumbled through clenched teeth.
Perón dies in 1974; his third wife, Isabel, inherits a presidency and a movement already busy devouring themselves. The 1976 dictatorship offers its own crude solution to the riddle: “Peronist” and “subversive” become bureaucratic synonyms in a State Terrorism that kills by paperwork.
The conflicts, into the present: the movement that keeps winning by changing what it means.
Democracy returned in 1983, and Peronism reinvented itself yet again—this time as Carlos Menem’s 1990s neoliberalism, privatizing the very state enterprises Perón had built, a betrayal so total it posed a new question to Argentine life: can you privatize the railroads in the name of the man who nationalized them and still call it the same party? Apparently, yes. After the massive socioeconomic crisis produced by a decade of radical privatizations, Néstor Kirchner won the first left-wing presidency of the three that will follow. He swung the pendulum back toward statism and human-rights memory politics, positioning himself as heir to the «true» Peronism against Menem’s counterfeit. He manage to get out the major economic crisis in a century and almost pay off the National debt.
Today, the movement’s descendants argue more with each other than with their declared enemies —Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s wing versus the more centrist Peronist governors, each accusing the other of treason to a founder who has been dead for fifty years and who, in death, keeps signing contradictory party platforms.
And now president Javier Milei governs by defining himself entirely in opposition to this word —his chainsaw is aimed less at inflation than at the idea that the state owes anyone dignity. Which means Peronism, even in retreat, still functions as the gravitational center of Argentine politics: the thing everyone else must define themselves against.
Perhaps the honest answer to «What is Peronism?» is that it is not an ideology but a wound and a memory of being seen — nd wounds, unlike ideologies, don’t require consistency to keep hurting, or healing, depending on who is asking.
Anti-Peronism was born before Peronism
The Braden-Perón Affair names a peculiar duel: Spruille Braden, U.S. ambassador and self-appointed guardian of democracy, campaigning against Juan Perón in Argentina’s 1945–46 elections —and, in the process, helping to forge the very Peronism Washington feared.
As noted in the book The Wild Frontier, Spruille Braden landed in Argentina as U.S. ambassador convinced he carried a divine mandate to correct the country’s course after the 1943 Revolution —an engineer and heir to the Braden Copper Company (a major shareholder alongside the Guggenheims in Chilean copper mining at El Teniente), a familiar specimen of U.S. envoy who backed coups abroad and defended corporate temples like Standard Oil in Paraguay and United Fruit in Central America, the latter of which he would later serve when it joined the CIA to topple Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, nine years later. A man of the old imperial guard, Braden embodied an age when Washington, the press, and transnational corporations justified their command over resource-rich nations as a crusade against «inferior races» —an argument that, by the 1940s, merely changed clothes: race reappeared as culture, and the same countries were now declared mentally underdeveloped; communism, even after Stalin’s USSR had been Washington’s indispensable wartime ally, simply recovered its role as the elegant, all-purpose excuse, in a continent where it hardly existed beyond the imagination of its enemies.
Braden did not just report; he plotted in broad daylight, posed for photos with the opposition, stitched together anti‑Peronist fronts and wielded the embassy seal like a campaign newsletter. Soon he was summoned to Washington and promoted to Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs. But before the February 1946 elections, the State Department released the “Blue Book,” largely drafted by him, accusing Perón’s government of Nazi sympathies and of trading in the financial rubble of the defeated Axis. Thus, in trying to fight him, Washington finished manufacturing the very enemy it claimed to fear.
Perón turned that phrase into the spine of his campaign. He reduced the election to a crude but irresistible dilemma —foreign tutelage or national dignity— and minted the formula «Braden o Perón», where a U.S. ambassador became the unexpected patron of Argentine nationalism. The trick worked: wounded pride proved more powerful than any dossier on corruption, and in February 1946 Perón walked into the presidency with about 52 per cent of the vote.
The episode became an origin story of Peronist mythology: proof, in its own rearview mirror, that foreign powers had always tried and failed to script Argentina’s future, and that only Perón —curiously indispensable— stood between the nation and the very dependence it needed to believe had been defeated long ago.
A communist or a fascist? Who?
The Pulqui II jet fighter exposed the contradiction without even trying. Perón summoned Kurt Tank —former chief designer at Focke-Wulf, architect of the Luftwaffe’s FW-190— with a team of German engineers to the Instituto Aerotécnico in Córdoba, determined to assemble South America’s jet-age air force from almost nothing. Some arrived with real wartime shadows, and their presence, combined with Argentina’s postwar hospitality toward Nazis and collaborators (Eichmann included, years later), nourished the convenient Cold War story —broadcast by enemies like Braden— that Perón was a fascist at heart, his alleged sympathies confirmed by wartime neutrality and by the dubious guests he allowed to stay.
The picture becomes less clear beside his actual record with Argentina’s Jewish community, unusually favorable for its time: Jewish officials in government and media, cultivated ties with communal leaders, and early recognition of the State of Israel in 1949 with stable diplomatic relations. The joke, of course, is geopolitical: while Washington condemned Perón for sheltering German talent, Operation Paperclip was quietly unloading more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers —some with Party cards and SS ranks— into American laboratories, where a change of address and purpose was enough to convert fascism into “national security.”
After the war, U.S. Army intelligence and later the CIA quietly recruited a number of Nazi war criminals as Cold War assets, then slipped them into Latin America along the same «ratlines» used by fleeing SS officers, often with the pastoral blessing of sympathetic clergy. The emblematic case is Klaus Barbie, the «Butcher of Lyon,» responsible for massacres in Holland, for mobile killing operations on the eastern front, for the deportation of Jewish orphans to Auschwitz, for the torture of Resistance leaders in French basements. In 1948, the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps picked him up as if he were salvageable material and the CIA later used him as a «contract agent» for nearly three decades, while he advised Latin American military dictatorships on death squads and political terror after settling in Bolivia in 1951. He was not an exception but a precedent: as a CIA-declassified document concedes, figures like Josef Mengele, Walter Rauff, and Klaus Barbie did not disappear after 1945; they circulated for years through U.S. intelligence payrolls before being set up in businesses and safe houses in Latin America or the United States when convenient. Rauff, the SS officer who helped devise the mobile gas vans for extermination, was likewise shielded and resettled in Chile, and the network run by former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen —whose eastern front intelligence apparatus was folded almost intact into American intelligence —extended the pattern further. In Bolivia, Barbie went on to advise the cocaine-trafficking networks of Roberto Suárez and to help install the 1980 military dictatorship of General Luis García Meza, as if a curriculum in industrial-scale cruelty naturally qualified a man for the management of a «pro-Western» order.
The same pattern extended into corporate America. Henry Ford was an open admirer of Hitler: his antisemitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, was reportedly read by Hitler himself, who kept Ford’s portrait in his office. In 1938 Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for a foreigner. That same year, Thomas Watson, CEO of IBM, received the same medal after IBM’s German subsidiary supplied the Hollerith punch-card tabulating machines the Nazis used to catalog populations and manage the logistics of the Holocaust. Prescott Bush (father and grandfather of two future U.S. presidents) sat on the board of Union Banking Corporation, which managed U.S. assets for German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an early financial backer of Hitler. Standard Oil (Rockefeller-controlled) maintained cartel agreements with the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, the same company that manufactured Zyklon B. By the time yesterday’s client became an official enemy, the relationship between American capital and fascism already looked less like an accident than like a business plan.
Texaco, under CEO Torkild Rieber, shipped oil to Franco’s fascists in Spain and kept a cordial line open to Nazi Germany, even feeding German agents intelligence on Allied shipping. ALCOA (Aluminum Company of America) locked itself into cartel deals with IG Farben that throttled aluminum output just where it mattered most —aircraft production— arrangements later dissected by U.S. antitrust lawyers who noticed they had helped choke America’s own war capacity. ITT (International Telephone & Telegraph), run by Sosthenes Behn, owned pieces of German firms supplying parts for the Luftwaffe, then after the war calmly invoiced Washington for Allied bombing damage to those same Nazi plants. DuPont and Chase National Bank, for their part, sustained financial and technical ties to German industry throughout the 1930s, while Coca-Cola’s German branch, cut off from Coke syrup by embargoes, dutifully invented Fanta so the brand could keep refreshing the Reich. Taken together, these episodes echo the Ford and IBM stories and sketch the same unflattering truth: American capital’s relationship with fascism (nazism) in the 1930s was not a freak exception but a business strategy, one many of these firms labored to bury once yesterday’s customer became the official enemy.
The pattern reaches its clearest, almost comical peak in NATO’s own top brass. Adolf Heusinger, former general and Chief of the General Staff of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, co‑architect of the Eastern Front and Barbarossa, reappears in uniform as the first Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961 to 1964. A decade later comes Johannes Steinhoff, Luftwaffe fighter ace and decorated pilot of the Third Reich, now chairing the same NATO Military Committee from 1971 to 1974. Around them, other former Wehrmacht officers quietly migrate into senior NATO commands in Central Europe, following the same Cold War logic that recycled Reinhard Gehlen’s Nazi intelligence network into West German intelligence and sent men like Klaus Barbie and Walter Rauff to serve the CIA in Latin America: expertise forged under fascism, seamlessly recycled for the anticommunist alliance that inherited it.
Further readings
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.
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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