PERONISM: THE ENEMY WITHIN...ALWAYS

Embattled Bariloche Mayor Omar Goye

Late this week, Argentina’s embattled Bariloche Municipal Mayor Omar Goye was still insisting he wasn’t going to resign. Nobody was really asking him anymore, in the aftermath of the December 21 riots and lootings that I reported on here last month, but he continued to state it anyway—and to just about anybody who would listen. Most local, provincial and national observers probably realized that his saying this was a sort of affirmation of faith, rather like whistling in the dark to belie his worst fears, because the question most people were asking was when rather than if he would quit, since he has done something that is hard to recover from in the Kirchner Era: ticked off the Queen Bee (or K) herself. And it’s a less forgivable sin still, because he’s not just another party dissident that President Cristina Kirchner is forced to cope with, work around or kick out of the way, but a player within Kirchnerism’s own internal party line, the FPV (Frente Para la Victoria).

Verticality. Peronism was conceived as a vertical organization. If today it often looks like a monster with multiple talking heads (each of which thinks it’s right), that concept still holds at the most basic of levels. And even if, as a party, Peronist Justicialism appears to be an illustration of the old adage about how if you put 50 Argentines in a room together you’ll get 50 different points of view, as a movement, Peronism is all about the tail always following the head. At the top of the Peronist heap, it would appear that Goye is seen as having cut a path of his own, and on top of that, defied a virtual order from the President for him to tender his resignation.

Rampart in the Civic Center

Yesterday, in the historical Civic Center, Bariloche’s main square, surrounded by the city’s traditional stone and cypress wood public buildings—designed by famed Argentine architect Alejandro Bustillo (1889-1982)—the mood was still so dense that you could cut it with a machete after the pre-Christmas riots that rocked the Andean resort and later spread to ten other provinces. The plaza had been shut off to vehicular traffic with caution tape barriers manned by traffic police and instead of being peopled by the usual throngs of blissful tourists who go there to have their pictures taken by photographers accompanied by Saint Bernard dogs that join travelers in the photo portraits, or with local artisans who deftly man chainsaws to carve statues from six-foot-tall sections of tree trunk, the entire center of the square was dominated by a monstrously large wooden structure not unlike the sentry’s walk from the rampart of a frontier fort. With ladders up both sides, and a catwalk perhaps 25 feet long and tall enough that it cleared the much-abused, graffiti-covered equestrian statue of General Julio Argentino Roca and, in the process, confined the nineteenth-century politician and military hero (depending on who’s telling the story) and his mount to a kind of stall beneath it. On this rampart, under it and all around it, were rotating shifts of protesters and their attendant general litter of tents, survival utensils, jugs, bags and banners.

Roca and his mount placed in a kind of stall.

On the sidewalks and street and under the arcades surrounding the square were perhaps a score or more of cops. Although some of them were wearing their flak jackets, their demeanor was less than threatening. They were clearly there as a symbolic presence of authority—so symbolic, in fact, that, if you looked closely, you could see that the holsters on their right hips were hanging empty, their regulation 9mm pistols having been left behind in the police station at the end of the block, nor were they carrying truncheons with which to defend themselves. If anything happened, it was only their bodies, their uniforms and their badges standing between the protesters and whatever random objective they might choose.

A House Divided. At first glance the scene looked as if it might be, like so many others before it, an installed protest against municipal authorities, but if you read the signs, you began to ask yourself if these were not groups led by the same “punteros políticos” (heads of local pressure groups from the poorest neighborhoods) with whom the mayor has so often been alleged to be conniving, since their messages were clearly directed at the provincial government—which, at this point in time, is unequivocally distancing itself from Goye and his administration.

One sign read: “We ask for work and you send us repression.” Another said, “Governor, you call us scabs, but we’re workers.” A large banner in the middle read: “May Day Cooperative: Union and Liberty, Work and Social Justice.” There was also a cryptic reference to the looting’s having been directed against “multinationals”. But go tell that to all of the mom and pop operations that were also victimized by the well-organized hoards that descended on the city last December 21. Try as these dubious activists might to make their “cause” sound noble, those incidents were a case of political chicanery at the service of mass vandalism and larceny, with no saving grace to justify them.

While such events may tend to confuse and confound those who are not privy to the inner workings of the country’s political underworld, the truth eventually percolates to the surface as the political players scurry helter skelter following revolts of this sort, seeking to shed responsibility and lay blame elsewhere while keeping their own political assets intact. As usual—over the course of the last 70 years of Peronist history in this country—what masquerades as “social upheaval for the cause of social justice” is actually the result of infighting at the core of Peronism itself, or “organized chaos” staged by one Peronist faction or another against whoever happens to be in power at any given time. Cristina Kirchner appeared to suggest this herself this past week when she referred to the December 21 riots as being “a shabby version” (versión desmejorada) of the organized mass looting and protests staged against the administrations of former opposition Radical Party (UCR) Presidents Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) and Fernando De la Rúa (1999-2001), which ended both of their presidencies ahead of schedule. To her mind, there appears to be a single person accountable for the mess: Omar Goye.

Río Negro Governor Alberto Weretilneck

Early on after these latest riots, Río Negro Province Governor Alberto Weretilneck sought—perhaps thinking he might kill two birds with one stone—to blame elements in the UCR for the violence. But the Radical Party’s response was swift in coming and utterly clear-cut: Bautista Mendioroz, a leading UCR politician in the province, termed the governor’s accusation “an infamous calumny” and challenged Weretilneck to put up or shut up. If the governor had proof of what he was stating, said Mendioroz, then he should press charges and name names, and if he was proven right, the UCR would take its own actions to expel the perpetrators and bring them to justice. Nothing more of this sort was heard from the provincial capital and by this week, Weretilneck and Goye were swapping accusations of their own, making it fairly clear that the Bariloche riots were very probably the result of a feud between Peronists in power in both the municipality and the provincial governorship.

All About Money. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the bad blood between the governor and the mayor is, apparently, all about money. Weretilneck assumed the governorship a year ago, when his predecessor, Carlos Soria, who won office with the backing of Cristina Kirchner, was shot to death by his own wife on New Year’s Day, 2012, just 21 days after being sworn in. During a later tour of the province, Weretilneck publicly announced in Bariloche that the province would be allocating 500 million pesos to the city to provide, among other things, for its ambitious social programs. Goye later discovered that no such allocation was earmarked in the provincial budget, and has since accused the governor of making facile announcements for political gain and then welching on his promises. In the days leading up to the organized looting in Bariloche, which spread like a contagion to the rest of the country, Goye and his surrogates are reported to have repeatedly warned the governor that by not coming up with the funds promised he was risking a social explosion in one of Argentina’s premier tourist destinations.

The impression left by this is that in what started as a bid by the mayor to pressure the governor into putting his money where his mouth was, he may well have unleashed something he couldn’t control (especially since he was conveniently out of town during the riots), and something that grew a lot bigger than anybody would ever have expected.

Whatever the case might be, the person on which the turn of events reflected worst wasn’t the provincial governor, but the country’s president and her government, since the riots and looting spread to ten of the country’s 23 provinces and the chaos triggered in Bariloche fostered the impression of a country out of control, underscoring the growing perception that Cristina Kirchner has lost the majority support that swept her into a second term in office and that if she doesn’t start paying attention to the demands of a no longer silent civil opposition, she might well expect to end up like De la Rúa, whose ouster amounted to a civilian coup.

Sole Accountability. It would seem logical, then, that she might like to see Mayor Goye’s head on a platter, and that was precisely what she was calling for at the end of this week. She reportedly passed this “desire” on to Weretilneck and to powerful Río Negro Senator Miguel Pichetto, who immediately called on Goye to cross the province to the capital city of Viedma for a powwow. Already guessing what the meeting was going to be about (his resignation), Goye flatly refused, saying he was busy, and adding—rather cynically, considering the circumstances—that he “didn’t want to leave the city on its own,” because “you can see what happens when I’m absent for just 24 hours.” Undeterred, however, the governor and senator flew to Bariloche, where they held a meeting yesterday in the airport with Mayor Goye and strongly suggested he hand in his resignation. It was pretty clear that the two provincial authorities purposely made no secret of the meeting because news of it spread like wildfire throughout the national media. The situation was clear: the highest of national and provincial Peronist officials considered the mayor a loose cannon and were dumping him overboard before he could cause any more damage. If he defied them, he would do so in total isolation, which would make his viability as mayor untenable. This is particularly true since the justification that the authorities cited for giving the mayor his walking papers was the barely veiled extortion he allegedly perpetrated by hitting local businesses up for “Christmas gifts” for the poorer sectors of the population if they wanted to avoid retaliation.  

In point of fact, to what extent the national and provincial government were distancing themselves from Goye was clear immediately after the riots, when the governor showed up and outshined the mayor, virtually shoving him into the background and taking over. In a country where such crimes have often gone unpunished, Weretilneck praised the bravery of police in standing up to the rioters and revealed that the provincial special forces had been kept busy at the local jail where a prisoner revolt appears to also have been part of the planned disturbances. Ill-equipped regular police were forced, then, to cope with the early part of the riots and a score of them ended up getting injured. As a result, the governor said he would be making sure that police received a stock of riot gear usually only issued to the special corps. He also ordered 30 police raids, 23 of which turned up stolen merchandise. Another one brought the discovery of a crop of cannabis plants and residents there were placed at the disposal of a Federal judge. Police also confiscated over a score of vehicles identified in news pictures and security tapes as having taken part in the looting.

Clearly, investigators knew just where to go: neighborhoods known as 34 Hectáreas, Frutillar and Km 20 (Don Bosco), where punteros, who rather grandly refer to themselves as “luchadores sociales” (social fighters)—some of whom have been widely alleged to have loyalties to Goye—complained of police harassment.

In the end, Goye’s fate would appear clear. It seems the only question is whether he decides to make it easy or hard on himself and his city.

THE DECEMBER 21 SYNDROME, ARGENTINE STYLE




The good news is that the world, as you might have noticed, didn’t end yesterday. So maybe the Mayans just grew bored with making calendars and decided to get into a new racket. 

The Mayan Calendar ended yesterday...we didn't.

I have a friend who’s an optimist (now and then you run into one and I keep him close—like you might, say, an African wild ass, Asiatic cheetah or other endangered species—just because he’s so delightfully rare), and he's



The African wild ass, like

optimists, an endangered

species.

(Photo päts CC BY 2.0)

a student of ancient cultures to boot. He chided people all through the past year for repeating that thing about the Mayans saying the world was going to end (yesterday, as it turns out), telling them that the emergence of that idea was based on the ignorant theory of the Apocalypse. According to his studies, what’s going to take place—is, in fact, taking place, as we speak—has to do with the other root meaning of apocalypse: namely, a revelation. According to him, December 21 marked the start of a new, enlightened era in the evolution of Man. As of yesterday, the secrets and meaning of life will start to become clear to us all. Man will become more compassionate, more visionary, more in harmony with the world and his fellow human beings. The world, in short, since yesterday, will start living an aggiornamento that will, precisely, pull us back from the brink of self- and mutual destruction and lead us toward a state of grace in which everyone will work together for the common good. He further subscribes to a theory upheld by a number of obscure if clearly erudite anthropological researchers who, casting aside the findings of Richard Leakey and other noted scientists, claim that the origin and development of Man was just opposite to conventional belief. Man, these scholars say, didn’t first appear on the plains of Africa and then (for some inexplicable reason) make his way to the frigid north, only to then cross the Bering Strait and head back south, creating and leaving behind a string of Native American cultures in his wake. Instead, they say, Man originated in South America (Argentina, they believe), the precursor of the Inca, the Maya and the Aztec, and spread his culture northward, also becoming a great navigator and crossing vast oceans to sow the seeds of the civilizations that were to emerge in Minoan Crete, Phoenicia, Egypt and the Indus Valley.So, anyway, according to that theory, the Mayan Calendar is all about revelation, not destruction, and, if it is to be believed, Argentina might very well be the center of world culture and, thus, the very nucleus of the revelation that we should all be starting to experience as of yesterday at about twenty-four hundred hours, hora argentina.

I would really like to believe that theory. Really! Because, that would mean that I was living in the very epicenter of a marvelous new world of love, harmony and mutual respect and that I had something more edifying to look forward to in my old age than a plummeting decent into the inferno of human apocalypse in which all bets are off and we are back to a scenario of stick-wielding, rock-throwing survival of the fittest.

Unfortunately, the scene that Argentina woke up to on the morning of Friday, December 21, 2012, did little to support either of those theories and certainly did much to create a climate of apocalyptic chaos and anything but harmony. And the molten core from which that sensation emanated was right here, in the Andean mountain resort town of San Carlos de Bariloche, just 12 miles from where I live hidden away in the forest.  

I use the term “sensation” advisedly here, since this is the same word employed on numerous occasions by Argentina’s (in)Security Minister Nilda Garré to try and ward off criticism leveled at her as a result of ever more frequent and violent crime around the country. According to the minister, the insecurity nightmare that residents of Argentina’s cities and towns alike are experiencing is simply the sensation of unbridled criminal activity and juvenile delinquency (a feeling she blames, of course, on the anti-government media that, according to her, have blown the situation—or illusion of same—out of all proportion) not any real increase in crime. (Tell that to the daily victims and their loved ones, Nilda).

Looters turn Christmas into trick or treat by stocking up on stolen

pricey electronics.

Added to this sensation, we now have the December 21 Syndrome, which manifests itself as organized looting, but which has some much larger purpose behind it.

The detonator was located, as I say, here in Bariloche. First thing in the morning of an unseasonably cold, wet business day (December 21 is also the summer solstice in South America, but it was only a few degrees above freezing out), well organized looters marched mob-style out of their nearby neighborhoods on the rough Patagonian highlands surrounding the city and made their first incursion into the parking lot of the Changomás (Walmart) supermarket, which quickly became a sorry symbol and victim of this recurrent brand of terrorism. This was ironic, since before the arrival of Walmart, many of the working class and poor people who live in that windblown area far above the touristy Andean city whose downtown image graces postcards, posters and calendars, had to take a bus  down to town to do their shopping. Local supermarket chains had long ignored that area because they saw it as a market with too low a level of purchasing power to bother with. But they raised the roof when they heard Walmart had plans to come into town and set up out there, and tried to foster a municipal ban to keep the international chain out. A referendum was finally held and the City Fathers lost, as lower-class segments of the population (who far outnumber the well-to-do) overwhelmingly supported having a major store in their neighborhood. The compromise was Changomás (different name, different colors, reduced stock of merchandise: no Superstore for Bariloche). But then, as I say, the Friday attack wasn’t about social unrest. It was all about political skullduggery.

Looting...Patagonian style. 

Though driven back by vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped police (who used the store’s fire hoses, hockey sticks from its sports department and wooden curtain rods from the dry goods section to repel the attacking hoards), the rioters simply regrouped and returned, stronger than before, eventually overpowering all resistance, destroying the shopping center’s entrance, showering defenders with a hail of stones and other projectiles, flipping over cars in the parking lot or demolishing them where they stood, and even using one as a battering ram to knock out the store’s front doors. Once inside, although some did help themselves to food items, the real objects of their affection turned out to be clothing, electrical appliances and electronics (especially plasma TVs that went like proverbial hotcakes). So much for the argument about “the desperate hungry people” who had requested “Christmas food baskets”(see below).   

From there, the vandals moved on to other major supermarkets and a meat packing company, advancing like army ants, wrecking everything in their path and drawing ever closer to the city’s downtown tourist area. An unrelated incident added an even greater quota of confusion since, all morning downtown, local residents and visitors alike had been treated to the deafening petards, thumping drums and rasping chants of electrical workers protesting in front of the local light and power cooperative. But as word spread of the advancing looters in the hills above the mountain town, business people began circling their wagons. Residents scratched their heads as some businesses started surreptitiously locking up for their noon break an hour early. And baffled foreign tourists sat sipping their cocoa, munching pastry and worriedly asking each other what was going on as the town’s renowned chocolaterías started quickly rolling down their metal shop curtains over the display windows or covering the windowpanes with plywood, as if in preparation for a hurricane. By the afternoon, Bariloche gave the impression of being a ghost town, as it awaited the arrival of a detachment of Border Guards to reinforce beleaguered police units.

They demolished cars in the parking lot and used one as a battering ram to

take out the front doors of the store.  

Two years ago Bariloche was also the scene of rioting, which ended up with police shooting dead three of the violent demonstrators. Subsequent action taken against the police for being too quick on the trigger has brought ever more strict controls to bear on officers, which would tend to explain why in yesterday’s incidents cops were seen defending themselves by merely hurling back the same rocks that rioters threw at them. Some policemen were even seen using slingshots to return fire on looters who were armed with similar archaic weaponry.  

The flimsy excuse for the attacks was that the “social sector” had called on the city’s government to convince supermarket owners to donate “gift packages” of food (in the holiday spirit, you understand) to the poorest segments of the population so that they might have a merry Christmas, and that no answer to this “request” had materialized. So Christmas quickly became a sort of terrorist-style trick or treat. But it quickly also became clear that the attempted extortion and its aftermath were neither random nor isolated. Before people in Bariloche had a chance to even ask themselves if the problem was simply homegrown and the result of rich and poor living in such close proximity, the same scenes of violence, vandalism and larceny were being replicated in ten other provinces around the country and in suburbs of Buenos Aires, where looters attacked not only major supermarkets but also service stations and other stores. Scores of police and civilians have been hurt in the riots and two men died in the city of Rosario (one of a gunshot wound, the other after being knifed).

The question most people are asking themselves is, if these actions are politically organized—and they clearly are—whom could they possibly benefit?

Could it be the dissident trade unions that once again held a protest this past week and demanded that the government of President Cristina Kirchner stop overtaxing workers’ pay and start doing something about the rampant inflation that is making it harder and harder for laborers to cover their basic needs?  If it were, it would surely provide President Kirchner with a clear message about what a mess the unions could swiftly turn the country into if the government were to continue to ignore its demands for higher pay, decent retirement benefits and other worker entitlements.

Could it be the far left, which, having thrown in its lot with the dissident Peronist unions still has been unable to convince the middle class opposition to join forces with it? The middle class that mustered a million well-behaved and respectful protesters of its own last November isn’t ceding control of its own destiny to either the government or the dissident left and is standing its ground alone in the middle. Certainly this kind of lightning mass terrorism might be seen as a possible way of scaring both the government and the middle class into resigned acquiescence.

Could it be dissident Peronist politicians and strategists? There are clearly segments within the ever eclectic, cloak-and-dagger Peronist movement that feel the Kirchners have not only let them down but have also betrayed their interests. No one has been more relegated by the Kirchners than former president and powerful Peronist kingpin Eduardo Duhalde, who plucked the late President Néstor Kirchner from the obscurity of a southern Patagonian governorship to launch him overnight into the presidency following a major political crisis that rocked the country’s institutions, only to be paid back with ingratitude and disdain by both Kirchner and his widow, the current president.

Or could it be the Kirchner government itself? Its popularity has plummeted in recent months. The highly successful middle-class 8N demonstrations and successive open protests by Peronist labor unions and leftist workers movements have constituted the proverbial writing on the wall in this regard. Nor has the government been able to make good on its raison d’être: the destruction of the Clarín media group.  In the meantime, it has embarked on such obviously inflammatory moves as its plan to take over the traditional Palermo Fairgrounds in Buenos Aires from its clear-cut political rival, the Sociedad Rural Argentina, which groups the most powerful and conservative ranchers and landholders in this agriculturally rich nation. Drawing battle lines between the country’s poor and its well-to-do would be the worst possible thing that could happen to Argentina, but this government has never shown any sense of moderation and less still any spirit of cooperation and social harmony. It is a government that fosters head-on conflict constantly and which is adept in the use of lies and subterfuge for short-term political gain. If it thought that plunging the country into chaos might cover up a multitude of sins, while providing it with an excuse to invest itself with special powers, who—based on its performance up to now—could doubt that it might well do so?

In his highly controversial 1985 novel entitled El día que mataron a Alfonsín, Argentine author Dalmiro Saenz (in collaboration with Sergio Joselovsky) crafts a meticulous (and terrifying) blueprint of how mob violence is used in Argentina to hold democracy prisoner and bring about change by other means for the benefit of political power groups. What he describes is the kind of “social terrorism” witnessed in similar mass looting and rioting organized against the extraordinarily democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín in 1989, prompting the president to resign his post several months before the end of his six year term. And this was also the same sort of organized violence that cut short the elected government of President Fernando De la Rúa in 2001 and cast the country into institutional chaos for two years thereafter, until the democratic election of Néstor Kirchner in 2003. Saenz and Joselovsky make it clear in their book that in organizing such movements, the whole idea is to create suspicion and confusion by destroying every landmark with which a society can orient itself. And therefore, nothing is as it seems and anything is possible.

 Of that novel attorney Alberto Lampugnani, in his opinion “as an Argentine, as a democrat and as a jurist,” was quoted as saying that it was a story that “never should have been written,” adding that it was “sheer madness” and “with a pornographic ingredient.” In his complaint against the writers, he indicated that the book was a manual on “how to act as a mob and (provides) guidelines on how to lead one.” The lawyer went on to say that the book “teaches how important the element of surprise is in attacks on people and institutions, and it teaches that the people attacked remain paralyzed through fear and cowardice.”

I think it’s safe to say that Dalmiro Saenz would probably agree with the last part of that assessment. Perhaps he would even applaud it, since the whole idea of the book was to create a veritable X-ray of the inner workings of a “popular” coup and of who might benefit from it.

And just who might benefit is a question that depends entirely on the current situation and on who decides to use the method first, since a segment of the population long accustomed to receiving free handouts in exchange for fleeting loyalty is predisposed muscle just waiting for something to do, and if a few expensive items that can be fenced later for cash is part of the loot, all the better. But the main idea is to create a state in which the rules no longer apply, so as to be able to install new ones that benefit whatever power is behind the ploy. One of the nefarious characters in Saenz/Joselovsky’s story explains it best:  “Our intention is to carry out a power project…The motive and goal is to strip everything of solemnity, to disparage and undermine every social institution: family, society, churches, marriage, armed forces, justice, religion, honors, dignity, public offices, traditions, patriotic sentiment, the concept of shame and decency, [to render] innocence, holiness and heroism, etc., a joke.”