Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
decisive episode came in the 1966 police attack on a student protest at
the University of Buenos Aires after Onganía ended university autonomy
and purged administrators and professors. The military government
repressed the student takeover with typically brutal violence. More than
200 students were jailed and 30 hospitalized. The incident was dubbed
the Night of the Long Pencils (a euphemism for police batons).
In the wake of the Cuban Revolution—and fellow Argentine Che
Guevara's role in it—the intelligentsia embraced a new critique of
national weakness that appealed powerfully to these youths. The
doctrine was called the dependency theory. Argentina was trapped
in the periphery of world capitalism dominated by the industrialized
countries of western Europe and especially by the United States. In
Argentina's “dependent” society, the military and the elite collaborated
with the foreign capitalists. Those powerful
vendepatrias
—“sellers of
the fatherland,” or “traitors”—extracted capital from the workers in the
periphery and exported it to the industrialized nations. Dependent eco-
nomic relations, therefore, resulted in underdevelopment in Argentina
for the sake of development in the industrial metropolises.
According to the theory, only revolution would break these bonds of
dependency and free the nation from the enslavement of foreign capi-
tal. Understandably, student radicals lionized Guevara and the Cuban
Revolution, and Guevara's death while attempting to spread revolu-
tion to Bolivia vaulted him into martyrdom in 1967. But the guerrillas
adopted Peronism as the expression of the Argentine revolution. If the
elite and the military hated Perón so passionately, they reasoned, then
he must truly represent it. Famous for her diatribes against the oligar-
chy, Evita became their patron saint. On walls throughout the city, they
painted Evita's slogans such as “Peronism is revolution, or it is noth-
ing!” without quibbling about her concept of revolution. Their admira-
tion of Evita motivated them to strike out at the man who had made
her body disappear. Thus, General Aramburu became the first victim of
guerrilla justice in 1969.
But the guerrilla groups were as divided among themselves as any
other class or political group, including the military.
Revolution
could
mean anything from the Trotskyist sort favored by the Revolutionary
Army of the People (ERP) to a vaguely nationalistic sort endorsed by
the
montoneros
. The latter group became the biggest of a score of guer-
rilla organizations, partly because they had pulled off the attack on
Aramburu and also because their ideology was fuzzy enough to satisfy
many followers. “The old man” in exile had blessed them all as the
Soldiers of Perón. The Montoneros took their name from the pejorative
