The June massacre exemplifies but does not represent the height of this regime’s perversity. Aramburu’s government imprisoned thousands of workers, stifled each and every strike, and did away with union organizing. Torture became the norm and spread throughout the entire country. The decree that prohibited mention of Perón’s name or the secret operation that snatched his wife’s body, mutilated it, and took it out of the country, were expressions of a hatred that even inanimate objects could not escape—sheets and silverware from the Foundation were burned and melted because they bore the imprint of this name that was thought to be demonic.39 An entire health and welfare program was destroyed, public swimming pools that called to mind “the cursed deed” were drained, and liberal humanism reached medieval lows: rarely has such hatred been seen here, rarely have two social classes clashed so strikingly.40
But if this kind of violence reveals the true nature of Argentine society, fatally split, it is actually a different, less sensational and more pernicious violence that insinuates itself into the country with Aramburu. His government gives shape to a second década infame: enter the Alsogarays, the Kriegers, and the Verriers, who neatly rejoin the bonds of dependency that were broken during Perón’s government.41The Argentine Republic, one of the countries with the lowest foreign investment (5 percent of total investments), which had barely been sending remittances abroad of one dollar per inhabitant annually, begins to administer loans that only benefit the lender, to be duped into investing in technology scams, to build foreign capital with the national savings and to accumulate the debt that today saps 25 percent of our registered exports. One decree alone, number 13.125, divests the country of two billion dollars in nationalized bank deposits and places them under the control of the international bank that can now control national credit, throttle small businesses, and prepare for the massive influx of big monopolies.
Fifteen years later, we are able to see the outcome of these policies: a dependent and stagnant country, a sunken working class, rebellion bubbling everywhere. This rebellion finally reaches Aramburu, confronts him with his deeds, and paralyzes the hand that was signing the loans, the decrees, the executions.
Footnotes:
35 DG: Juan Carlos Onganía was the de facto President of Argentina from 1966 to 1970. He enforced social and economic policies that disempowered universities and union s, and his dictatorship was heavily bruised by the Cordobazo of May 1969—a civil protest coordinated by student and labor activist groups in the city of Córdoba that lasted three days and resulted in a number of deaths and hundreds wounded.
36 DG: Right-leaning, conservative groups who traditionally opposed Peronist policies.
37 DG: Manuel Dorrego was the governor of the Province of Buenos Aires from 1827 to 1828, when his office was overtaken by General Juan Lavalle in a military coup. Lavalle executed Dorrego, only to be ousted himself not seven months later. Salvador María del Carril, the first vice president of the nation, advised Lavalle to execute Dorrego. Walsh suggests that Socialist Américo Ghioldi was similarly recruited to advise de facto President Lonardi’s regime on how best to dismantle Peronism.
38 DG: Walsh is referring to Argentine author Ernesto Sábato’s 1961 work Sobre héroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs), which contains a somewhat vindicating description of General Lavalle’s struggles and his death (see Note 37). Walsh considers the possibility of such a work, revisionist in nature, being written about Aramburu.
39 DG: The Eva Perón Foundation was founded by the First Lady herself in 1948, and kept running for three years after her death as a charitable institution, until her husband was ousted in 1955.