Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Perón's widow, however, did not have sufficient training or character
to handle the requirements of the job. Truth be told, perhaps no other
living person did either, as the Montoneros immediately declared war
on the government. The next two years showed a steady deterioration
in public confidence; frightened people of wealth and foreign investors
again sent their money to safe havens abroad. Inflation soared along
with the nation's fatalism. Peronist workers again suffered losses of real
wages that President Isabel Perón's decrees of pay increases could never
make up, and they began to show up less frequently at Peronist loyalty
rallies. Their chants of “Eez-sah-BELL, Eez-sah-BELL” never lasted as
long as the old homages to “Pay-ROHN, Pay-ROHN, Pay-ROHN.” Isabel
turned to a shady, corrupt favorite of her late husband to help her run
the nation. José López Rega, the minister of social welfare, consulted
the stars before advising her and arranged to divert about a quarter
of the federal budget to his ministry. Everyone knew that López Rega
funded the notorious Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, the Triple A.
Thugs within the Triple A undertook a positively Rosas-type reign of
terror in the country, killing suspected guerrillas and leftist politicians,
threatening left-of-center actors and folksingers, and leaving mutilated
bodies indiscriminately along suburban roads and in burning cars near
Ezeiza airport.
Guerrillas countered by taking up again their campaign of terror,
bombings, kidnappings for ransom, and assassinations. In 1975, there
were 723 incidents of guerrilla activity. “We are guided in this enter-
prise by the clean example of that great Argentine and great Latin
American . . . commandant Che Guevara,” stated one guerrilla com-
muniqué. “[The regime's] puppet generals, its torturer policemen, have
staged the comedy of finding our violence scandalous. . . . [T]hey are
simply projecting on revolutionary combatants the image of their own
methods, their own habits” (Moyano 1995, 61-62).
Neither side could easily get to the other, so they knocked off inno-
cents in between. The guerrillas, unlike the Triple A, however, could
never be faulted for lack of imagination. In 1974, they broke into General
Aramburu's tomb and held his corpse hostage until Isabel and the mili-
tary repatriated Evita's body from where it had been laid to rest in Spain.
“If Evita were alive,” they spray-painted on walls throughout the country,
“she would be a Montonero.” Seven hundred ninety people—soldiers,
policemen, businessmen, politicians, and innocent bystanders—died
at the hands of guerrilla assassins. The Triple A murdered hundreds in
retaliation.
