Guns, Gorillas, and God in Argentina: 2016-03-15 Daniel Martinez HOTA 2 Lecture Notes

Argentina, Perón, and the military

The US was involved in lots of coups.

Argentina at the same latitudes at the US, but has milder weather which is better for agriculture. Lots of grasslands and cows.

Timeline

• 1945 to mid-46: Independence acquired, Edelmiro Farrel (you can tell he’s military because of the hat) runs Argentina because military
• 1946 to mid-52: Juan Domingo Perón elected. Southern regions were expected by Northern regions expected to produce food and trade for finished goods, but Perón wanted it to industrialize. Perón was both anti-American and anti-Communists. Ni Yanquis ni Marxistas. ¡Perónistas! He was married to Eva Evita Perón, who really cared about the poor.
• Oligarchs anti-Perón. Interestingly, both leftists and rightists liked Perón, because charisma.
• Perón re-elected 1952, killed in 1955 coup d’état. (Coup due to oligarchs being anti-Perón.)
• Note: Perón <3 Mussolini because Mussolini was a nationalist, when he fled after the coup he ended up in Francoist Spain.
• Leftists in Argentina were intellectuals not connected with the poor very much.
• 1955: Military leader Pedro Eugenio Arambu takes power, holds elections with Perónist Party banned 1958, coup 1962, election 1963, coup 1966, coup 1970, coup 1971 puts Alejandro Agustin Lanusse.
• Military leaders: Not actually that great at being a government. (Good at having guns, though.)
• 1973 Lanusse lets Perón come back. Elections with Perónists banned held. Cámpora elected, Lasitri elected later same year.
• Perón becomes elected even later in the same year, dies 1974. Perón’s VP (Isabelita de Perón) takes power, but she’s totally incompetent. Overthrown in 1976 coup.
• Jorge Rafael Videla takes power until 1981. Argentina wins World Cup 1978.
• Roberto Eduardo Viola rules during 1981. Still a military guy.
• Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri takes power 1981. Tries to take Falklands/Maltinas from GB. Fails.
• Military guy Bignone takes power 1982. Holds elections 1983, Alfonsin elected.

Problem with second Perón administration: Perón party views all over the place. When Perón came back, people organized a reception for him while he was in the air. La Masacre de Ezeiza happened when the left and right factions in his party fought about being near him at the reception.

1974-05-01 (May Day/International Workers’ Day/May Day) has huge rallies by Pink House (Argentinian presidential residence). Perón gives speech from Pink House to ralliers. Montoneros (left portion of the rally-holders) chant your populist government is full of gorillas. Perón calls them beerless booger-havers and decides to kick out the Montoneros and lean right.

Alianza Anticomunista Argentina formed 1974. Killed ~3e4 communists (read: people who disagreed with La Triple A). They kill liberation-theology-type priests. Note that the Argentinian Catholic church (Argentina is very Catholic) as a whole leans right.

Note: 1976 coup called the dirty war, had genocide-like properties. Our speaker was in college during this time. There were police searching students and soldiers in classrooms. An engineering student was killed in the classroom, our speaker was investigated by the government for organizing a student club and sent an informant to the club (which had poetry and leftist books), people would hear shots at night, some music banned for being leftist. A song name changed from the cost of freedom to the coast of freedom.

Argentinian dictatorships made people disappear (read: secretly abducted them) before killing them. People were held, tortured, and either dumped in the river or buried in mass graves.

Starting 1977, Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo held marches every Thursday in the plaza near the Pink House with pictures of their disappeared children asking where they were. They still hoped their children weren’t dead. Because lots of the disappeared women were pregnant, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo asked where the babies were. There’s a long list of when babies of disappeared people would have been born and who their parents were. Babies born in captivity were given to random families.

Later, USA geneticists helped link bones to families. They also offered genetic tests to kids who thought they might have been born to disappeared women, and now people are finding their ancestry. 119 people have found previous family so far.

Non-Perónists called gorilas. Speaker’s family anti-Perónist, but he became pro-Perón in college when he read history stuff. Perónist/Gorilla distinction still a thing.

Speaker opinion stuff: Healthcare should be free, college should be free. People with money don’t care about the rest of us. Bernie Sanders expresses these sentiments. I <3 Bernie Sanders. Big corporations need the approval of the US to do terrible things in other countries. For example, DDT is produced by US corporations and sold in other countries despite being banned in the US. Don’t play football, play soccer. Recently, Argentina had 10 years of a Perónist government which did lots of good things such as legalizing gay marriage and making the media less of a monopoly, but now it has a rightist government and it sucks.

Perón helped the poor and developed educational programs. 3 Argentinians have gotten Nobel Prizes in science.

JP in graffiti means young Perónist.

Schools of the Americas

US DoD Institute in Georgia trained Latin American soldiers in anti-communist counterinsurgency. It’s now named the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and trains people in the Middle East as well. Lots of Argentinian dictators graduated from there. Torture was included in the curriculum.