Читать книгу Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina - Antonius C. G. M. Robben - Страница 10

Chapter 1

Changing the Course of History: Dignity, Emancipation, and Entrenchment

“That’s the morgue,” she said calmly, having removed the padlock from the gate that gave access to a walled off wasteland surrounding a drab building. The morgue of Avellaneda cemetery near Buenos Aires consisted of three rooms. One room contained the skeletons of the exhumed bodies, another held various tools, while the central room was dominated by a stainless steel table. Autopsies used to be performed on the table years ago, but it served now to reassemble the remains of the disappeared. After taking off our coats, we walked to an area of ten by thirty meters overgrown with grass, some mounds of recently disturbed soil, and a large open pit protected from the autumn rains by a corrugated roof.

The site turned gruesome when I helped lift the boards that rested across the mass grave: not just because of the exposed skulls, but because most skeletons had been covered with blankets and sheets to protect them from the weather. It seemed as if they were asleep, only to be awakened by a gentle touch. Their place of rest was only temporary. They waited to be reunited with their relatives after exhumation, after having been abducted, tortured, disappeared, assassinated, stripped naked, and dumped at night in this mass grave in a concealed corner of Avellaneda cemetery.

Darío arrived soon after Patricia and I had removed the coverings. We tried to separate a tumbled collection of at least four bodies from section E-D 2. After brush strokes by Darío, a skull appeared. Luis arrived, and the three forensic anthropologists moved to section C 8 to a body that had been burned around the legs and head. Both legs appeared to have been broken with a club or stick and then cut with a knife or machete. One part could not be located. The remains were difficult to identify by age and sex, but indicated a man in his mid-twenties.

Piece by piece, Luis and Darío removed the skeleton and handed the bones to Patricia, who placed them in numbered bags which identified the anatomical contents. The brush swept away morsels of gray clay mixed with traces of rust. Burns on the skull and thigh became visible, but it was uncertain whether they were inflicted before or after death. The skull, weakened by the fire, had been crushed under the weight of the soil when the provisory grave was closed about eleven years ago. The anthropologists searched the soil for clues about the cause of death and the identity of the person—bullets, pieces of clothing, glasses, hair, and teeth—tossing the soil into a bucket. Once several were full, they were taken away in a wheelbarrow. After five hours of diligent work, one skeleton from section C 8 had been exhumed. The coded plastic bags were placed in a cardboard box for later study. We covered the mass grave again, and left.

The identification of the skeletal remains of 278 persons, including nineteen fetuses and babies, in the mass grave at Avellaneda would take years of painstaking work. Meanwhile, the multiple traumas of Argentina’s past kept intruding on society as more mass graves were opened, adopted children asked about their biological parents, and perpetrators made chilling confessions about torture, disappearances, childbirths under hooded captivity, and death flights by night.¹

The Avellaneda mass grave and the pain and suffering of the searching relatives are the result of an all-out war in which the Argentine military out-terrorized and outtraumatized the guerrilla insurgency and the country’s radicalized political opposition. Just as the guerrillas attempted a social revolution, so the military were determined to protect Argentina’s cultural heritage. Two large guerrilla organizations made daring attacks on army bases, and political assassinations were happening daily by 1975.² Argentine military rulers became convinced that their antirevolutionary war was a necessary shock therapy to heal a society ridden with violence, corruption, immorality and defiance of authority. General Alcides López Aufranc wrote in late 1975 that the political violence in Argentina, “concerns an infection of the minds, a gangrene that runs the risk of killing the free, democratic and plural Argentine social body if it is not attacked decisively and energetically.”³ The Argentine military felt that Argentina’s whole way of life, its entire cultural, moral, and social universe were at stake in this war. They decided in 1975 to stamp out this threat with ruthless resolve.

The political violence that led the Argentine military to assault their own society and disappear thousands of people did not come about suddenly. To understand how Argentine society became traumatized and why around ten thousand dead came to inhabit hundreds of mass graves, we have to uncover the historical roots of the cultural war that raged in the 1970s. We have to reach back to a time when the V-Day celebrations in Europe and North America at the end of World War II echoed in the euphoria of hundreds of thousands of Argentine workers who took to the streets of Buenos Aires on 17 October 1945 in defense of their leader Juan Domingo Perón.

Fear among the Argentine military and the middle and upper classes of a social revolution on Argentine soil began with this one crowd in 1945. It raised hopes for a better future among the working class and provoked anxieties among the vested interests. All recognized the revolutionary potential of this new political movement, but where some saw the 17 October gathering as a celebration of social emancipation, others feared that a demagogic leader might unleash the crowd’s irrational violence on the established social order. Mobilizations became a fertile political practice on which violence was grafted. A spiral of violence was set in motion that produced multiple social traumas suffered throughout Argentine society. The traumatizing fallout of tens of thousands of dead, disappeared, and tortured citizens affected Argentine society at large, and eventually engulfed the perpetrators themselves.

Crowds became a constant in Argentine political culture during the reign of Juan Domingo Perón from 1945 till his military overthrow in 1955. Perón manipulated the deep-seated fear of the crowd that existed among the middle and upper classes, and continued to mobilize his following in a crowd competition when the opposition to his government became greater. Crowds became the groundswell of Argentine political life, creating and toppling governments and dictatorships, inspiring fear and raising hopes.

An Enormous and Silent Force

The founding myth of the Peronist movement tells us that on the morning of Wednesday 17 October 1945, hundreds of thousands of workers began to walk the many kilometers from the factories, meatpacking plants, and working class neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to the Plaza de Mayo at the heart of the nation’s capital. They carried makeshift signs and shouted slogans in favor of Perón. “I had the impression that something very powerful and even mysterious was happening,” observed Ernesto Sábato years later, “the impression that, almost underground, an enormous and silent force had been set in motion.”⁴ Perón had become Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare in October 1943 and helped pass labor legislation that improved salaries, social benefits, and workers’ rights. Under pressure from hostile conservative forces, Perón was forced to resign on 9 October 1945, and was interned on the island of Martín García on 12 October. This confinement would lead five days later to protests of Argentine workers in the entire country.

The 1969 account of this day by historian Félix Luna has sustained the founding myth of the Peronist movement. According to Luna, the leaders of the national confederation of labor unions (CGT), had planned a general strike for October 18 to demand free elections and the protection of workers’ rights. With great drama, Luna writes that just as the union leaders were going to bed, the ordinary people were getting up to take to the streets and demand the freedom of Perón.⁵ Nothing could stop the masses advancing on Buenos Aires. They crossed the Riachuelo river on rickety rafts when policemen opened the bridges to stop them. Streetcars were rerouted, and trucks and buses were ordered to drive to the Plaza de Mayo. This spontaneous protest arose throughout Argentina. Everywhere, workers converged on towns and cities as if moved by an instinct or collective mind.⁶ The image of workers giving rest to their tired feet in the fountain at the Plaza de Mayo became a lasting symbol of Peronism. This Day of Loyalty (Día de Lealtad) to Perón, as it became known, has provided the Argentine working class with an interpretation of history in which they became its protagonists; an inspiration on which they have drawn in times of repression and times of protest.

The Argentine workers took destiny in their hands by mounting the peaceful protest, so the myth goes, and expressed their loyalty to the hastily released Perón in a spiritual reunion at the Plaza de Mayo. Most Peronists believed in the historical protagonism of the crowd, and this conviction made Peronists believe in themselves as a movement, not an ideology or political party. The protesters were regarded as the authentic voice of the Argentine people who had a right to determine their destiny. This belief was carefully cultivated. On 17 October, according to Félix Luna, “the people had corrected the course of history.”⁷ In this founding myth, Perón and the Peronist movement gave birth to each other on 17 October 1945. The masses were “driven by a dark and undetainable instinct, almost without leaders or a prepared plan.”⁸ In this rendition, nothing stood between the emotions of these humble people and their call for Perón. But was the popular mobilization of 17 October 1945 really so spontaneous?

The intellectual debate about the events on 17 October 1945 has crystallized into three positions. Gino Germani emphasizes the irrationality of the mass protests, and attributes the success of the Peronist movement to the able manipulation of impoverished, ignorant, and leaderless rural migrants by the charismatic Perón.⁹ Murmis and Portantiero argue, on the other hand, that the mass support of Perón was entirely rational and self-interested. The unions asserted their political might and mobilized the workers to defend a leader who had championed their rights and delivered social reforms and better working conditions.¹⁰ Finally, Torre and James have provided in my opinion the most accurate account. They show that the worker mobilization was prepared by the union confederation and instigated by local representatives.¹¹

Torre and James explain that under pressure from locally declared strikes in Rosario, Greater Buenos Aires, and the province of Tucumán, the CGT union central decided on 15 October to call for a national strike on 18 October. Everywhere, workers were prepared for action by union representatives to give expression to their feelings of exploitation and social exclusion. However, on 16 October, it became clear that the protest could no longer be contained. Meatpacking plants were picketed at daybreak, workers in other branches of industry were alerted about the upcoming strike, shopkeepers were warned not to open their establishments, and several street protests erupted in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The 17 October mobilization occurred because the rank and file had already been put on the alert by the CGT decision to strike on 18 October.¹² Even though the precise moment of the mobilization was not orchestrated, the strike directive of the CGT and the grass roots work by local labor representatives had been essential.¹³

The image of 17 October as a popular feast has been debunked by Daniel James. Félix Luna speaks of a “festive atmosphere,” a “great party,” and an “orgiastic, triumphant” event.¹⁴ Myth and reality are again at odds. James reveals the secular iconoclasm of the day. He interprets the mass mobilization as a Bakhtinean ritual reversal of traditional hierarchies in which workers danced in the streets as in “a form of ‘counter-theatre,’ of ridicule and abuse against the symbolic authority and pretensions of the Argentine elite.”¹⁵ There were outbursts of violence against the symbols of hierarchy. Buildings were stoned, stores pillaged, and windows broken in 167 major incidents. Centers of leisure, like the Jockey Club, offices of conservative newspapers, and student bars and lodging houses, were favorite targets in various cities. There was at least one death to mourn. Stones hurled at the offices of the antiPeronist newspaper Crítica were answered by gun fire, killing one seventeen-year-old demonstrator and wounding forty.¹⁶

Daniel James and Juan Carlos Torre have given the most accurate account, with a sharp eye for the feelings of worker resentment that built massive adherence to Peronism, but they pay little attention to actual crowd experiences. However, these profound feelings are indispensable to understand the founding myth. It was the crowd experience that remained most vivid to participants, and that gave the day its mythic quality. I therefore turn again to 17 October, asking four questions related to the formation of the crowd. Why would workers respond to a call for mobilization? How did they experience being in the crowd? What conception did activists have of the crowd as a political phenomenon? Why did the representation of the crowd as a spontaneous protest become the hegemonic version of 17 October?

It was not just the threat of economic and social deprivation or the strike preparation by the labor unions that drove people to the streets, but rather the injury to the feelings of dignity articulated effectively by Perón. The decades before the rise of Perón were marked by exploitative and humiliating labor relations. Perón’s policies tried to remove the origins of these “stings of command,” to use Elias Canetti’s trope, but it was at the 17 October crowd gathering at the nation’s capital that these resentments and humiliations were emotionally shed en masse. “For that period at any rate they were free of stings and so will always look back to it with nostalgia.”¹⁷ Canetti’s thought is suggestive, and can be supported historically because the stings of command were real experiences of oppression. The violence directed at the symbols of oppression can only be understood in conjunction with the joy of throwing off the yoke of exploitation and the fraternal equality felt by the workers. Peronists drew strength from the event for decades on end, and its spirit made them soldier on in times of repression.

Another reason why people responded to the mobilization was the existence of a rival crowd. Street demonstrations in Argentina often become a competitive show of force between opposing crowds. The first major street mobilization by workers, on 12 July 1945, protested a proclamation by landowners and industrialists against Perón. The opposition responded with street demonstrations on 9, 10, and 11 August whereupon the military government declared a state of siege.¹⁸ The fire of opposition was kindled. On 19 September, the middle classes demonstrated for free elections and against the Farrell-Perón military government. The march expressed anger at the junta that had been contained since May of that year. As V-Day crowds in Europe were celebrating, street celebrations were forbidden in Argentina. The police declared that they had discovered a communist plot to create disturbances, unleash a revolutionary strike, and overthrow the government.¹⁹ The end of World War II was openly celebrated on 31 August, and this street mobilization soon developed into a call for a return to a constitutional government in Argentina.

The public resentment at the Farrell-Perón military government culminated on 19 September 1945 in a peaceful crowd of roughly one-quarter million people who walked from the National Congress to Plaza Francia, singing the Marseillaise and shouting “National unity hurts Perón” and “From corporal to colonel, let them return to the barracks.”²⁰ The march was described as a spontaneous mobilization, surprisingly similar to that of the upcoming 17 October crowd. “The people of Buenos Aires experienced yesterday one of its greatest days. Lacking means of transportation, they mobilized, organized, engaged in and won a great battle for the cause of democracy…. The need to walk five or ten kms. to keep an appointment with their own honor as citizens didn’t scare away men and women determined to much more than that….”²¹ The newspaper La Prensa observed that the streets of Buenos Aires had never witnessed such a large crowd. 17 October was going to rival this crowd as in a contest. Both crowds fought for freedom, but freedom meant different things to the two social groupings. The middle class wanted freedom of speech, an end to the state of siege, and the restoration of civil liberties. The freedom of the working class was emancipatory, observed Luna, “to look upon the foreman as an equal, to feel protected by the union representative, not to hear every moment the bark of misery….”²² 17 October was thus an outpouring of feelings of oppression by the working class in rivalry with the middle class.

How did the participants experience 17 October as a crowd? Canetti has suggested that, “It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it.”²³ 17 October was not by chance both a celebration and a riot. Just like in carnival, it became a ritual reversal of hierarchy and an expression of equality. Working-class people appropriated a public space that had been the privilege of “decent people,” the gente decente who had demonstrated on 19 September. They did so in defiance of established codes of dress and conduct as they danced in the streets in their working clothes, and refreshed themselves in the fountain of the Plaza de Mayo.²⁴ Seen from Canetti’s perspective, the mixture of violence and elation is therefore not as contradictory as it might seem. The 17 October crowd was not one homogeneous mass but was comprised of several crowds with several causes and objectives. Many celebrated the freeing of Perón, others experienced a sense of personal dignity, while still others turned with violence on the symbols of oppression. The violence was an expression of anger directed at the sources of subjugation. The euphoria came from the removal of the stings of command, and the sense of equality that was experienced in the crowd. These feelings became inscribed in people’s crowd memory and touched each following Peronist crowd with its mythic unity and aggrandizement.

Why did the founding myth of Peronism as a spontaneous movement in search of Perón become hegemonic, despite many indications to the contrary? Belief in a spontaneous mobilization is most attractive from a political perspective and most persuasive emotionally. It invokes effervescence and feelings of equality which only derive from the crowd itself, not from external forces. Understandably, the evocation of the spontaneity and equality of 17 October gave way to nostalgia when the political fortunes of the Peronist movement turned, when demands were no longer met, and the overall living conditions of the working class worsened. Peronists of succeeding generations continued to long for another 17 October of fraternization, hope, and dignity that became so indispensable to the Peronist identity.

Politically, the myth was attractive because it could accommodate various interpretations that suited Peronist leaders, supporters, and opponents alike. Each party to the event cherished its own account of the mobilization. Union workers considered the demonstration as the purest expression of the popular will. The rank and file recognized themselves in the throngs of ordinary people accompanying them to the Plaza de Mayo. In turn, Peronist union leaders saw 17 October as legitimizing their pivotal role in the Peronist movement by channeling the feelings of discontent into an organized protest. Perón himself stated that the Day of Loyalty took place because he had prepared the Argentine working class for his leadership. The spontaneous mobilization was his harvest.²⁵ Surprisingly, the Peronist founding myth was also embraced by anti-Peronists. For the opposition, the protest was ominous evidence that a political movement could either turn into tyranny or mob rule. This hostility to Peronism was fed by a fear that popular crowds were driven by deep-seated irrational and violent instincts. Perón’s opponents portrayed the 17 October crowd as irrational, primitive, and moved by bestial outbursts.²⁶ In sum, 17 October 1945 could readily be interpreted in different ways. Competitive versions of crowd conceptions must be examined further because the post-World War II crowds became such formidable players in Argentine politics from then on.

The Fear of Popular Crowds

The perception of the crowd as either a mass of people ruled by a strong leader or a mob threatening the established order has been common among political philosophers since antiquity.²⁷ This fear was given a theoretical foundation during the late nineteenth century, when mass psychologists like Tarde and Le Bon reflected on the political significance of the riots and insurrections of their times. Their ideas about the irrational and violent nature of popular crowds found willing ears in a turn-of-the-century Argentina where labor unrest was growing rapidly, and combative unions were being formed. In 1899 the physician José María Ramos Mejía published his book The Argentine Crowds. Ramos Mejía relied heavily on Le Bon. He drew an analogy between the individual and society, comparing the crowd with the body and the elite with the brain. In addition, he associated the crowd with madness and the elite with reason, concluding that “the day when the rabble is hungry, the organized socialist crowd will be relentless, and the leading agitators will be the perfect example of this virulent mob that will contaminate everything.”²⁸

These ideas pervaded Argentine police and justice departments. The image of a violent and culturally regressive crowd threatened to become reality as Argentine workers were becoming a distinct, class-conscious sector of society. Argentina was modernizing rapidly, attracting many European immigrants between 1865 and 1880. Exiles from the Paris Commune established an Argentine branch of the First International in 1872, and workers began organizing themselves in unions, boosting their demands with strikes and street protests. Anarchists and socialists multiplied during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and raised the class consciousness and combativeness of the workers.

A second immigration wave between 1900 and 1908 brought nearly two million people to the shores of the River Plate. These impoverished Europeans added social ferment to the labor movement. They had fled economic exploitation, and arrived in Buenos Aires with high hopes, only to find a sprawling capital in which workers received no better treatment than in their homeland. Political agitation and street protest were forms of resistance familiar from the old country.²⁹ The working class was coming of age, and popular crowds had become such a force in twentieth-century Argentine politics that Hilda Sabato talks of a “culture of mobilization” among disenfranchised Argentines. The streets and squares of Buenos Aires became “an arena of mediation between certain sectors of civil society and political power, through which relatively large numbers of people were involved in various forms of politically consequential public action.”³⁰

These mobilizations did not arise exclusively from a disaffected working class but were also organized by the middle class demanding universal suffrage for all men. This right was finally gained in 1912. In other words, there existed among the ruling elite a great suspicion of crowds in general, but of working class crowds in particular because of their revolutionary potential. Confrontations with the guardians of order were just a matter of time as the police began to fight strikes and protests with increasing force.

The first major strike was in 1902. The repression of the 1909 May Day celebrations led to the death of a dozen workers, and renewed protests in 1910 made the authorities declare a state of siege in Buenos Aires.³¹ The police repression of striking metal workers in January 1919 cost the lives of four men. The confrontation by army and police of the protesters accompanying the funeral killed around thirty workers during what became called the Tragic Week (Semana Trágica).³² At this time, workers were already carrying banners which demanded “dignity,” a slogan that became Perón’s rallying cry.

It was the fear of either mob rule or the manipulation of the masses by a dictator that frightened the middle and upper classes most, only months after the Allied victory over fascism in Europe. Thus, the 17 October 1945 protest did not come unexpected, while the ideas of Le Bon and Ramos Mejía about the irrationality of crowds provided a scientific framework to explain the events. The panicked reaction by some cabinet members on 17 October, upon hearing that column after column of workers was marching on downtown Buenos Aires, expressed their fear of the crowd. Navy Minister Admiral Vernengo Lima ordered an army captain to shoot at the crowd, but War Minister Avalos refused to ratify the order. General Avalos believed that the people would disperse quietly once word was out that Perón had been released.³³

The negotiations between Colonel Perón and General Avalos during the late-afternoon of 17 October are unknown but possibly they agreed that only Perón’s able manipulation of the crowd might avoid street violence and prevent a radicalization of the working class. The military’s fear of a violent crowd taking revenge for Perón’s political death was greater than the price of his reinstallation. Their belief in the likelihood of a social revolution had already been exploited by Perón in 1944 when he explained to Argentine industrialists how his aggressive policy of unionization had rescued the working class from the clutches of communist agitators.³⁴ Still, however opportune the temporary alliance with Perón might have been on 17 October 1945, the fear that some day he might incite these workers against the established conservative forces, or that the masses would disentangle themselves from his control, kept feeding the mistrust of Peronism among the elite and the majority of conservative military officers. Their understanding of crowds convinced them that this fear was justified when Perón tightened his grip on Argentine society, and the violence surrounding his fall from power in 1955 made them feel that their suspicion had been right all along.

Perón and the Masses

Perón’s appearance at the balcony of the presidential palace at the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October 1945 was certainly one of the greatest political comebacks in Argentine history. His political career had begun three years earlier after a sojourn in Italy as a military attaché to the Argentine embassy in 1939 and 1940. Upon his return to Argentina in December 1940, he became a military instructor in Mendoza, and was assigned in March 1942 to the inspectorate of mountain troops in Buenos Aires.³⁵ Once in the capital, Perón founded a secret military society called the United Officers Group (Grupo de Oficiales Unidos). It consisted of twenty officers who were strongly anticommunist, wanted Argentina to remain neutral in the Second World War, and were appalled by the fraudulent politics of President Ramón Castillo. The Castillo government was overthrown in the coup of 4 June 1943, that would be the springboard for Perón’s rise to prominence.³⁶

Perón’s leading role in the military lodge and his support for General Farrell as Minister of War in the new cabinet of General Ramírez resulted in his 7 June 1943 appointment as Undersecretary at the War Ministry. However, it was his appointment on 27 October as head of the National Labor Department that would bring Perón his greatest political windfall. He transformed the regulatory agency into the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, and won the trust of the unions by taking their demands seriously. Farrell replaced Ramírez in February 1944 as Argentina’s president. Perón became the new Minister of War, and was appointed as Farrell’s vice-president in July 1944.³⁷ His sympathy among the working class and the political support from the labor unions were to be decisive when oppositional forces succeeded in ousting him from power on 9 October 1945.

Perón’s rise from army instructor in 1941 to president-to-be in 1945 was meteoric. How much of the military instructor was still in him when he assumed power? How did he perceive his role as a national leader, and what was his relation to the working class? These questions are important to understand the Peronist movement, the suspicion of his control of the working class among his opponents, and the factional struggle that would lead three decades later to an incipient civil war.

Perón’s acquaintance with fascism during his 1939–1940 stay in Europe has often been mentioned as a formative influence on his political style and ideology.³⁸ Perón was proud of his alleged contact with Mussolini, and may have even heard of his admiration for the French mass psychologist Le Bon. The sight of Mussolini’s rallies must have convinced Perón of the transformative power of crowds.³⁹ Even after his fall from power in 1955, Perón’s faith in the historical destiny of the masses remained firm. He wrote on 14 September 1956 from his exile in Caracas: “The Russian Revolution, Mussolini, and Hitler demonstrated to the world that the people and especially the organized masses are the politics of the future with which they buried the political parties that the countries still preserve as a vice from the twentieth century.”⁴⁰ The crowd was for Perón the acme of the masses, and became a crucial weapon at decisive moments in his political career.

Perón saw it as his mission to prevent the radicalization of the Argentine working class. He rejected communism but also capitalism. Perón pursued a Third Position (Tercera Posición) that opposed class conflict and pursued social justice through a pact of capital and labor. His stay in Europe had made him realize that the political emancipation of the working class was an historical inevitability, and that unions were playing a growing role in achieving social demands. The simultaneous rise of fascism and communism taught him the important lesson that organization superseded ideology in mobilizing the masses. After all, both movements had equally drawn on the working class. As Perón wrote: “Le Bon anticipated us quite some time ago: ‘The age we are entering will truly be the “age of the crowds.’” ‘The destiny of nations is not created through the advice of princes but in the soul of crowds.’ ‘The divine right of crowds will replace the divine right of kings’, etc.”⁴¹

Le Bon’s crowd theory had a great influence on Perón, whereas the works by Ramos Mejía and Taine were widely read in the nationalist circles of the 1930s that influenced Perón.⁴² Like Le Bon and Ramos Mejía, Perón believed that the popular masses would turn violent without a leader, especially when they formed a crowd. “When a mass does not have any sense of leadership and one abandons it, it is not capable of going on by itself, and great political cataclysms will follow.”⁴³ This view is consistent with his 1944 warning that an unorganized, inorganic mass is a dangerous mass. Since masses are by nature impulsive and destructive, they need to be educated to become organized masses. This education is the task of a leader, “because the masses do not think; the masses feel and have reactions that are more or less intuitive or organized.”⁴⁴ When he became Secretary of Labor in 1943, Perón set himself the task to curb the potential violence of the masses and use their force to achieve long-term objectives. The spontaneous crowd had to be domesticated and harnessed into the mold of the Peronist hierarchy. Perón perfected his mass control upon his political rebirth on 17 October 1945.

Perón drew on his military experience for political leadership, and perceived a structural similarity between the army and the organized masses.⁴⁵ He emphasized qualities like discipline, obedience, loyalty, camaraderie, and modesty, also found in the military, but set these in an emotional frame that exalted the honor and dignity of the Argentine worker. Part of his appeal came from tapping into and voicing the hidden injuries and injustices, resentment and exploitation of the Argentine working class.⁴⁶

Perón did not want to instill workers with a combative class consciousness but to inculcate a leader-crowd model that stimulated their personal identification with him as their leader. “The first thing one has to do,” Perón said, “is to awaken the sense of leadership in the masses. People can be better led when they are willing and prepared to be led.”⁴⁷ Perón set out to disseminate his political doctrine among the Argentine workers and inculcate his ideas during crowd assemblies.

The complexity of Perón’s political philosophy consists of his emphasis on both the equality of all Peronists—and by extension all Argentines—and on their fundamental hierarchical dependence on Perón and the party structure through unquestioned loyalty and discipline. Perón wanted to create an organization in which “there is nothing better for one Peronist than another Peronist.” He tried to tie followers to him as their leader, while at the same time presenting himself as one of them, very much as a commander calls himself above all a soldier. The refrain of the Peronist march sums it up best: “Perón, Perón, How great you are. My General, how valuable you are. Perón, Perón, how great you are. You are the first worker.” As a general, a soldier, and a worker, Perón institutionalized the popular crowds in Argentine politics. In his historic speech on 17 October he asked the crowd gathered at the Plaza de Mayo to create “a common bond that will turn the alliance between the people, the army, and the police indestructible.”⁴⁸

Perón had prepared the Peronist masses during his two years as Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare. He regarded himself as the only Argentine politician who had instilled the people with a sense of leadership, and this cultivation of an obedient mass made 17 October possible. “If the masses wouldn’t have had the ability they had when the 17th of October lost its command and leadership, then they wouldn’t have proceeded the way they did. The masses acted by themselves because they had already been taught.”⁴⁹ In other words, the mythic spontaneity of the 17 October crowd had been sown by Perón during the preceding years. Expressing the dual quality of the crowd as both vertically and horizontally structured, he said “One doesn’t lead a mass, but the mass only goes by reaction to where one wants it to go, thus fusing two factors: the individual will of the leader and the will of the mass which he knows to interpret at the right moment.”⁵⁰

The belief that there was true communication between Perón and the Peronist crowds is another ingredient of the 17 October myth. The people cheered for more than ten minutes when Perón arrived on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace at the Plaza de Mayo. After they had sung the national anthem, Perón greeted them with a single word: “Workers!” According to Luna, “From then on one wasn’t hearing a speech but a dialogue.”⁵¹ Luna referred in particular to the insistent questioning of Perón by the crowd, “Where were you? Where were you?” Perón shunned the question because he did not want to refer to his stay at the island Martín García as an imprisonment. He responded that he had been making a sacrifice for the Argentine people which he would make a thousand times over if necessary.⁵² This exchange became legendary and was followed by others that cannot be properly called dialogues but were rhetorical discourses in which Perón asked a question, used a slogan, or selected a cue from the crowd and incorporated this adroitly in an impromptu speech.

Spontaneity, peaceful demonstration, and dialogue between leader and crowd became the essential qualities sought for in all subsequent Peronist demonstrations. These ingredients had particular value for a new generation of Peronists born after 1945. Their interpretation of Peronism—a Peronism that had been proscribed since 1955—was that its essence rested in the dialogue between Perón and the crowd, and in the convergence of people and leader in the person of Perón.⁵³ Perón voiced and personified the genuine will of the people. Crowd and leader were believed to accomplish this spiritual and political alignment during the Peronist rallies. The magazine of the Peronist Youth described in 1974 this public dialogue as follows: “Between Perón and his people there is always this phenomenon of mutual nourishment: the crowd creates, Perón incorporates, Perón creates, the crowd recreates, and so the movement advances….”⁵⁴

Still, as is typical of all myths, they are rewritten whenever opportune to their believers. At the beginning of 1974, as the breach between Perón and the second-generation Peronists became clear, they began to circulate the unlikely story that Eva Perón had been the driving force behind 17 October, inciting the workers to take to the streets. Evita was represented as a revolutionary who preferred the worker masses over the Peronist Party and labor union bosses, beckoning them to overthrow the conservative oligarchy by force.⁵⁵ Yet, it was not through Evita’s incendiary speeches but under Perón’s tutelage that the Peronist crowd began to use violence as a means to achieve political goals.

The Violence of Popular Crowds

The fear that someday the Peronist masses would turn violent was always present among the Argentine middle and upper classes. The working class had become a political force that could no longer be ignored. Perón’s brand of populism was tolerated because the elite believed that he might prevent a radicalization of the Argentine workers. The violent Tragic Week of 1919 was still fresh in their minds, and the Cold War had made a Soviet-backed resurgence of communism in Argentina a real possibility. The brazen-faced working-class crowds entering the heart of Buenos Aires might become easy prey to revolutionary agitators without the presence of Perón. These misgivings were shared by the Argentine Catholic Church because it was after all the Church which had monopolized the mobilization of popular crowds in processions and pilgrimages.

Initially, the relations between Perón and the Church hierarchy had been fine. The Church had supported his presidential candidacy in 1946, and Perón had embraced the Church’s Social Doctrine and approved legislation that guaranteed religious instruction in public schools. What precisely sparked the disaffection between Perón and the Church is hard to determine, but in 1950 Perón began to state publicly that Peronism embodied the essence of the Christian faith, namely defending the poor, the down trodden, and the oppressed. His pronouncement that there was a spiritual unity between the Argentine Catholic Church and the (Peronist) State raised the suspicion that Perón was usurping the Catholic community.⁵⁶ In fact, Peronist youth and workers’ organizations were depleting similar Catholic organizations of their membership. Furthermore, Evita Perón’s Foundation which provided social assistance to the poor undermined the Catholic charity organizations.⁵⁷

The Peronist crowds were even more unsettling to the Argentine Catholic authorities: they undermined the natural hierarchy deemed sacred by the Church, and provided a formidable competition to the religious crowds. 17 October had demonstrated what this subversion of hierarchy could do to people. The ritual reversals and the occupation of a public space hitherto reserved for the upper and middle classes undermined authority and their divinely given right to rule.

The threat of usurpation was an additional worry to the Church. The Peronist movement organized large crowds in an atmosphere with spiritual overtones. This became clear after the death of Evita Perón in 1952, and caused a considerable deterioration in the relations between Perón and the Argentine Catholic Church. The refusal of Rome to canonize Eva Perón added chagrin to the conflict, but it was the spiritual mobilization of the Argentine people for a dying Eva Perón without the involvement of the official Church that accelerated the crisis.

On 20 July 1952, the CGT union central organized a mass at the Plaza de la República to pray for Evita’s health. One week later, on Saturday 26 July, she died of cancer. There was an outpouring of public mourning. People erected small altars in the streets in her memory and, for two weeks, more than one million people passed by her body in state at the CGT head-quarters in Buenos Aires.⁵⁸ The Catholic crowds of the 1934 Eucharistic Congress led by the Argentine ecclesiastical authorities had been replaced by the 1952 Peronist crowds praying for Evita’s recovery, and later mourning her death.⁵⁹ “The pastoral role of the Church seemed threatened,” Lila Caimari has observed, “and its monopoly on massive religious mobilization became seriously questioned.”⁶⁰

There was an increased crowd mobilization after Eva Perón’s death. There were torchlight processions in remembrance of Evita, demonstrations supporting Perón, and welcome crowds as he returned from foreign visits. Embattled by anti-Peronist forces and amidst an economic crisis, Perón called for a show of force on 15 April 1953. Overconfident because of a massive working-class backing in the 1951 elections (in great part made possible by Evita’s efforts to obtain female suffrage in 1947), he threw in his lot with the working class and alienated his middle class supporters. In a radio address, he threatened “the internal and external enemies” of Argentina, while the CGT ordered a general strike and organized a crowd mobilization at the Plaza de Mayo. A notorious rhetorical exchange developed when Perón responded to two bombs that suddenly went off nearby: “Comrades, comrades! I think we’re going to have to go back to the days when we went around with garrotes in our pockets.” The crowd chanted, “Perón! Perón! Punish them! Punish them!” And Perón replied, “This thing about punishment you are telling me to do, why don’t you do it?”⁶¹

Even though Perón asked the crowd to return home quietly, the message was clear. Irate Peronists attacked the seats of the Radical party (UCR) and the Democratic National party, and burned down the headquarters of the Socialist party and the Jockey Club, the exclusive meeting place of Argentina’s landed elite. Police and firemen were standing by passively as the fire burned priceless libraries and art treasures. The greatest loss was caused by two anonymous bombs that killed seven people and wounded ninety-three at the Plaza de Mayo. The arrest of around four thousand anti-Peronists intensified the polarization in Argentine society.⁶²

Two weeks later, during his speech at the 1 May demonstration, Perón tried to rein in the street violence by asking the crowd to leave matters to him. However, he also threatened the opposition with unleashing the crowd’s destructive force: “I ask you, comrades, not to burn down anything anymore, not to do those things. Because when something needs to be burned down, then I will go ahead of you. But then, if this would be necessary, then history will record the greatest bonfire that humanity will have lit until today.”⁶³ The fears of those weary of 17 October seemed to be coming true. Perón had the people in his grip. He had inculcated a leader-crowd model that allowed him to manipulate the popular masses. Perón’s militant language drove his opponents into one camp, a camp that became reinforced with the powerful Catholic Church when Perón directed his attention to Argentina’s youth.

Perón repeated often that the youth held the future of the Peronist movement, and his words proved prophetic in the 1970s.⁶⁴ The Union of High School Students or UES (Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios) was the principal organization to captivate the youth. The UES was conceived in 1953 as a sports organization with separate branches for boys and girls. The combination of rumors about Perón’s more than normal interest in the adolescent girls using the sport facilities of the presidential summer home at Olivos in January 1954, and the annoyance of anti-Peronist parents at the growing hold of the State on their children, led to the charge that the Peronist rule was morally corrupt. When priests advised parents from the pulpit to keep their daughters away from the UES clubs, time was ripe for a showdown in the streets of Argentina.⁶⁵

The crowd became an obvious choice of weapons in a society in which “to win the street” (ganar la calle) had been a successful Peronist tactic since 17 October 1945. The Student Day celebrations on 21 September 1954 in Córdoba became the first major occasion for a public contest. The march of the Peronist UES drew an estimated 10,000 high school students, while the rally organized by the Catholic Action (Acción Católica) gathered 80,000 participants.⁶⁶ This shocking defeat worried Perón. On 10 November 1954 he pointed an accusing finger at Córdoba’s Bishop Lafitte as an enemy of the government and threatened to release the Peronist masses into the streets.⁶⁷

The surprising defeat of the Peronist mobilization in Córdoba was followed by an even stronger blow in Buenos Aires. On 8 December 1954 the Church was to celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the end of the Marian Year. That same day, the Argentine people were invited to accompany Perón to the Aeroparque airport for a homecoming welcome of Pascual Pérez, the new world champion boxer. The arrival of the flyweight boxer had been deliberately planned to coincide with the religious ceremony at the Plaza de Mayo. A crowd of 100,000 to 200,000 faithful greatly surpassed the reception crowd of 4,000 at the airport. The people overflowed the cathedral and inundated the Plaza de Mayo.⁶⁸ The crowd had symbolically ousted Perón from the square he had dominated for nine years. In revenge, Perón annulled the 1946 legislation that had made religious education compulsory in public schools.

No longer able to win the street, Perón harassed the Church by legalizing divorce and prostitution. These reprisals drove larger crowds of disaffected Argentines into the streets, and coalesced an array of anti-Peronist forces around the Church. In the ten months following the Immaculate Conception victory, twelve large Catholic demonstrations took place in Buenos Aires. These crowds formed generally after mass in the cathedral at the Plaza de Mayo, often resulted in violent confrontations with Peronist supporters, and ended in the arrest of Catholic demonstrators. Meanwhile, the retaliatory exchanges between the Peronist government and the Argentine Catholic Church continued unabated. Perón declared on 20 May 1955 the official separation of Church and State. The Church responded with a pastoral letter postulating the divinity of the Church and prepared for a massive show of force that developed into a tragic crowd contest.⁶⁹ Many factors contributed to Perón’s downfall in 1955, such as a lackluster economy, military discontent, the restriction of civil liberties, and Perón’s growing authoritarianism, but most scholars agree that the ongoing power struggle with the Argentine Catholic Church was the most important cause.⁷⁰ This conflict was fought out prominently in the street as crowd competitions between Peronists rallied around Perón and anti-Peronists galvanized around the Church.

June 9, 1955, was the day for the traditional Corpus Cristi procession around Plaza de Mayo. Pretending concern about the disruption of traffic in the business center, the archdiocese asked for permission to postpone the procession to Saturday June 11. The real objective was to maximize attendance. The request was denied but the Church went ahead as planned. A combative Perón responded to this challenge: “For every person our enemy can bring out, we shall bring out ten.”⁷¹ The boxer Pascual Pérez was enlisted to draw the competing crowd. Pasqualito had successfully defended his title in Tokyo, and a celebration was organized on June 11.

Perón’s bluff ended in total failure. Only a small Peronist crowd appeared at the Luna Park celebration against 100,000 to 250,000 people who gathered at the Plaza de Mayo. The crowd walked in silence through Avenida de Mayo to the National Congress, carrying the yellow papal flag and waving white handkerchiefs.⁷² The crowd was religious in name but political in nature. Even noted anti-Catholics participated in this demonstration congregating anti-Peronists from all political persuasions and walks of life.⁷³

The Peronists had to respond to this public humiliation. An analogy with the 19 September 1945 Constitution and Liberty March was forced upon them. Perón warned that “those who sow winds can reap storms,” and added fuel to the situation by expelling two bishops from Argentina for inciting the troubles of 11 June. The CGT union central announced a 24-hour strike on Tuesday 14 June as a show of support to the government, and began to prepare its members for mobilization.

On Thursday morning 16 June 1955 Perón was warned of a possible navy insurrection. In fact, the coup d’état had been in the making since February but the organizers had not succeeded in gaining enough support from the army, even though there were widespread anti-Peronist sentiments in the force ever since the failed rebellions of September 1951 and February 1952. The discovery of the plot demanded swift action. An air strike on the presidential palace had been planned for 16 June at 10:00 A.M. to assassinate Perón. Armed civilian groups would move in to secure the seat of government. The attack planes would take advantage of a fly-over planned in tribute to the Argentine flag which had allegedly been burnt during the Corpus Cristi demonstration.⁷⁴ Dense fog prevented the planes from taking off on time, but when they finally did and released their fragmentation bombs at 12:40 P.M., the devastation among the people assembled to watch the fly-over was horrendous. One bomber made a direct hit on the Casa Rosada. The first civilians were killed by the shattered glass of the Treasury Ministry. Many more casualties fell when a bomb hit a trolley. Perón was unhurt. He had taken refuge in the War Ministry that morning after hearing of rebellions at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) and Ezeiza international airport.⁷⁵

A second bombardment was carried out at 1:10 P.M. which again caused many deaths. Meanwhile, groups of Peronists began arriving at the Plaza de Mayo. Shouting “Perón, Perón,” they gathered in front of the Casa Rosada. Was this crowd spontaneous or organized? A parallel appears with 17 October 1945. The rank and file had been put on the alert and acted when the crucial moment arrived. A small crowd had already congregated at the Plaza de Mayo before the call for a general mobilization went out. At 1:12 P.M., the CGT issued an urgent broadcast: “Comrades, the CGT gave a slogan on Tuesday: On the alert! The moment has arrived to carry it out. All workers of the Federal Capital and Greater Buenos Aires must gather immediately near the CGT building [Independencia and Azopardo streets]. All means of transport must be taken, willing or unwilling. Comrades! Instructions will be given at the CGT building. The CGT calls upon you to defend our leader. Gather immediately but without violence!”⁷⁶ Within half an hour, a large number of people had congregated at the CGT building. The same Avenida de Mayo, where five days earlier the silent Corpus Christi procession had taken place, was now filled with vehicles carrying workers coming to the rescue of Perón, as they had done one decade earlier. A number of workers were killed by machine-gun fire as they arrived at the Casa Rosada.⁷⁷

The final aerial assault took place around 3:30 P.M., when a squadron dropped their bombs and killed many soldiers and civilians in the zone of action before the pilots fled to Uruguay. Army troops loyal to Perón succeeded in reconquering the Plaza de Mayo. The toll of the four-hour insurrection was 355 dead and more than 600 wounded.⁷⁸ For the first time in Argentine history, a popular crowd had been attacked with weapons of war. Peronists were dumbstruck. The boundless Peronist crowd had revealed its weakness, and this awareness had a traumatizing effect that changed forever the self-perception of Peronist street mobilizations. The excessive violence, the hundreds of dead and the impunity of the attacking forces would be recalled in future decades whenever a Peronist crowd was under the threat of repression.

Perón was equally shocked. He had been dismayed earlier that day by the call of mobilization. “Go back to the CGT,” he told a messenger, “and tell the CGT that not one worker should go to the plaza.”⁷⁹ However, it was only after the fighting had ceased that Perón’s message was received. Clearly, Perón had temporarily lost control over the Peronist crowd. Even his plea to the workers, in his 6:00 P.M. radio address, to control their anger, and reseal the indestructible bond of people and army, fell on deaf ears. The acute social trauma incurred by the brutal killings made the Peronists seek revenge.

The metropolitan curia at the Plaza de Mayo was the first target of the angry crowd. The interior was destroyed and its valuable archive torched. Reminiscent of the assault on churches by rioters upon the assassination of the popular Colombian leader Jorge Gaitán in April 1948 or the iconoclastic attacks by the Republican Left on the Church during the Spanish civil war, the demonstrators mutilated statues and dressed themselves in sacred vestments. Seventeen churches were ransacked and partly destroyed by fire as police and firemen looked on.⁸⁰ The gutting of the curia of Buenos Aires on 16 June 1955 became the symbolic reversal of 17 October 1945. Here was finally the true face of the popular crowd, according to the political opposition. Typical LeBonian terminology pervaded their language. The editor of the Catholic magazine Criterio described the protesters as subhuman, “totally immoral, without sensitivity, without education, with a smell of alcohol, living off women, gambling and theft….”⁸¹ The crowd had finally raised its ugly head and revealed its true nature.

Street protests continued to be a means of political pressure and legitimization in the months ahead. John William Cooke, the head of the Peronist party, favored street mobilizations and the formation of an armed militia with the slogan “Another 1945” (volver al 45).⁸² Perón began to have grave doubts about his power base. He admitted to having curtailed civil liberties, declared the end of the Peronist revolution, and promised to be president of all Argentines.

Perón’s offer of a truce was too late. The Church hierarchy continued with its critique, dissident officers were planning another coup, and anti-Peronists held frequent street demonstrations. Perón had a daring answer. He announced his resignation on 31 August 1955. The CGT union central had been privy to Perón’s decision, and had already planned a large demonstration at the Plaza de Mayo to express the support of the Peronist workers. Once more, 17 October 1945 cast its shadow over the crowd.

The people were in a joyous mood on 31 August, eating the soup, bread, and oranges distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation.⁸³ The tone of Perón’s speech contrasted sharply with the crowd’s peacefulness. Perón said that he had offered his hand to the opposition during the two-month truce, but that they had responded with violence. Now, there were only two roads open: the government must repress the subversion, or the people must retaliate. Unleashing his following and giving free reign to violence, Perón authorized every Argentine to kill whoever undermined or conspired against the public order. “And from now on we establish as permanent rule for our movement: Whoever in any place tries to disturb order against the constituted authorities, or against the law and the Constitution, may be killed by any Argentine…. The watchword for every peronista, whether alone or within an organization, is to answer a violent act with another violent act. And whenever one of us falls five of them will fall.”⁸⁴ Perón’s terrible threat and the CGT’s insistence on the formation of an armed militia convinced his opposition within the armed forces that the time was ripe for a final assault.

The Liberating Revolution (Revolución Libertadora) was launched on 16 September 1955 when General Lonardi rose in rebellion in Córdoba together with all major naval bases. Perón declared a state of siege but did not advance on the rebels with loyalist troops. On 18 September, Rear-Admiral Rojas broke the stand-off by threatening to bomb the oil deposits in Buenos Aires harbor and the oil refinery in La Plata. The next morning, naval salvos destroyed the oil deposits in Mar del Plata. Perón feared a further escalation, delegated his army command, and took refuge in the Paraguayan Embassy on 20 September. Later, he moved to a Paraguayan gun boat anchored in the harbor of Buenos Aires, and finally left Argentina on 3 October by a twin-engine flying boat with Asunción as its destination.⁸⁵

Why did Perón give up his presidency so easily? By late August 1955, only a handful of the around ninety generals were committed to Perón’s overthrow. Once the rebellion got under way, Lonardi’s rebel troops were surrounded and outnumbered ten to four by General Iñíguez’s loyalist troops.⁸⁶ Close associates advised Perón to open the weapons deposits and arm the workers but Perón dreaded the idea of civil war and the scenes of destruction he had seen in Spain in 1939.⁸⁷ Instead, he placed his hopes on a peaceful solution by mobilizing his Peronist following as he had done a fortnight earlier, on 31 August. Yet, the people remained at home. Perón realized that he had lost the crowd contest with the opposition.

The crowd mobilizations of 17 October 1945 and 16 June 1955 had shown that something more was needed than a union directive to make people take to the streets. Somehow, the feelings were no longer there among the people to motivate another massive show of force at the Plaza de Mayo. We can only guess at the passiveness of the Peronist workers, but it is reasonable to assume that the bombardment on 16 June 1955 had traumatized the Peronist crowd. The crowd had responded with retaliatory violence, but could not redress the real and symbolic losses incurred. The bombardment had revealed the vulnerability of the street crowd, demolished the edifice of invincibility and historical destiny erected by Perón, and raised fears of future attacks. After the initial rage against the metropolitan curia at the Plaza de Mayo, the Peronist masses demobilized as if a defeated army. The memories of the hundreds of dead were still too fresh to carry through a massive resistance. Personal feelings of self-preservation, a lack of faith in Perón, and a sense that the tables had turned made most Peronists stay at home. There were small violent demonstrations in Buenos Aires on 23 September and in Rosario between 24 and 28 September but the repressive response of army and police ended the protests swiftly.⁸⁸

The Coming of Age of Argentine Crowds

The figure of Perón looms large in the history of Argentine crowds. The streets and squares of Argentina became the scene of a variety of crowd demonstrations after the end of World War II. There were protest marches, religious processions, strike crowds, election rallies, commemorations, celebrations, belligerent crowds, and festive crowds.⁸⁹ Mass mobilizations had also occurred before World War II, but they only became a constant in Argentine politics when the populist leader Juan Domingo Perón came to power in 1945. The year 1945 marked a watershed in the history of Argentine crowds because it saw the birth of the working class as a principal player in the public arena.

The crowd on 17 October 1945 that rose to the defense of Perón was a cathartic crowd that shed an “infamous decade” (década infame) of frustration and disenfranchisement in a liberating identification with Juan Domingo Perón. Perón transformed the popular masses into impressive crowds which took center stage in Argentine political life. He provided the Argentine working class with a public forum to express their resentment of social, economic, and political wrongs. He established a link between the dignity of Argentine workers, their rights as full citizens of Argentine society, and their assembly in crowd mobilizations. The Peronist crowds affirmed and renewed these newly won privileges by gathering periodically in the symbolic heart of the nation, at the Plaza de Mayo with its Cathedral, presidential palace (Casa Rosada), and town hall (cabildo) where Argentina’s independence from Spain had been secured.

The importance of the physical assembly of the Peronist following in a crowd cannot be overestimated. The Peronist crowd was essential for the transformation of injustice into dignity. According to Elias Canetti, crowds evoke irresistible feelings of unity and equality.⁹⁰ “It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.”⁹¹ These sensations relieve people temporarily of society’s “stings of command” left by institutional inequality and exploitation, precisely the social injustices and restrictive civil rights which Perón addressed. Such stings of command leave residues of resentment which can be shed temporarily in a crowd.⁹² In other words, people can give free rein to their innate aversion of unjust authority and social injustice when gathered in a crowd. Even though Canetti’s imagination took flight in essentialism and romantic extravagance, his suggestive ideas about society’s stings of command help us understand the collective experiences of oppression, injustice, and exploitation that existed in Argentina at the end of World War II when V-Day celebrations were forbidden by an authoritarian regime fearful of a popular insurrection.

The 17 October crowd took on the mythic proportions of a popular mobilization which emancipated the Argentine workers, united them with fellow Argentines behind the banner of social justice, and represented for every Peronist the most supreme manifestation of identity, belonging, togetherness, dignity, and equality. These gatherings gave Peronists a sense of comradeship and community that transcended narrow class boundaries. The momentous 17 October 1945 and the tragic 16 June 1955 framed an era in which crowds made their presence felt in Argentine politics. Within one decade, Perón had inserted the working class into national politics and had turned the crowd into a familiar tool to achieve political ends. Winning the streets with a large crowd became an equally favorite weapon of power and legitimization for Peronists as well as nonPeronists.

Perón’s crowd manipulation was condoned as long as he curbed the political radicalization of the Argentine working class. This tolerance ended when Perón became increasingly authoritarian and threatened to turn the Peronist crowds loose on the middle and upper class establishment. The presence of the Peronist crowds had been so great between 1945 and 1952 that political opponents could not help but enter into a crowd competition to dispute their dominance in an attempt to oust Perón. One segment of the Argentine people tried to protect Perón and the recent social gains, while another segment wanted greater civil liberties. This growing political opposition to Perón drove the middle classes into the streets, while the hitherto rigidly organized Peronist masses erupted inside Argentine society in uncontrollable ways, ways which would eventually draw the country asunder in massive violence.