37. Aramburu and the Historical Trial

On May 29, 1970, a Montonero commando kidnapped Lieutenant General Aramburu from his home. Two days later, they condemned him to death and listed the charges that the Peronists had against him. The first two included “the killing of twenty-seven Argentines without trial or just cause” on June 9, 1956.

The commando bore the name of the executed General Valle. Aramburu was executed on June 1 at seven o’clock in the morning and his body turned up forty-five days later in the south of the Province of Buenos Aires.

The incident shook the country in a number of different ways. The people did not cry over the death of Aramburu. The Army, the institutions, and the oligarchy raised an angry outcry. Among the hundreds of protests and statements that were made, there is one worth recalling. It classifies the event as a “monstrous and cowardly crime for which there is no precedent in the history of the Republic.” One of the signatories is General Bonnecarrere, Governor of the Province at the time of Operation Massacre. Another is General Leguizamón Martínez, who had executed Colonel Cogorno in the La Plata barracks. A third is Colonel Fernández Suárez himself. They did not seem like the best people to be talking about precedents.

The execution of Aramburu provoked the fall of General Onganía one week later, whose dictatorship had already been damaged on a different May 29 (of the previous year) by the saga of the popular uprising known as Cordobazo;35 it also momentarily set back the plans of Liberal groups who saw in the executed general a second chance for the failed Argentine Revolution.36

The dramatic nature of this death accelerated a process that usually takes years to accomplish: the creation of a national hero. In a matter of months, Liberal doctors, the press, and Aramburu’s political heirs canonized him in an unending stream of praise and elegy. Champion of democracy, soldier of liberty, beloved son of the fatherland, a military man cast in the classic mold of the San Martín tradition, an honest and unassuming ruler whose temperament did not allow him to overstep his authority, these are some of the incantations that hide the true portrait of Aramburu from history. Two years later he had his mausoleum, decorated with Virtues.

Not all of Aramburu’s supporters were so foolish as to buy the image of him that was crafted in that language. Those who were smart enough to understand why the people hated him maintained that “the Aramburu of 1970 was not the Aramburu of 1956” and that the Aramburu of 1970, put in the same circumstances, would not have ordered executions, persecutions, or proscriptions. You could say the same for Lavalle, Dorrego’s murderer, that he only committed the terrible acts he committed because he was under the influence of devious advisers: all you had to do was switch Salvador del Carril’s name for Américo Ghioldi’s.37 Both of them would have regretted what they had done and, at the very last moment, come together in a puzzling union with their land and their people. From this perspective, one can see how Aramburu would come to warrant, in addition to the anti-Peronist memorial he received, an expiatory cantata written by some future Sábato.38

In a less partial trial, this kind of transformation would not matter, even if it had truly happened. Here was an executor of a class policy whose foundation—exploitation—is in itself inhuman and whose acts of cruelty derive from this foundation like branches from a tree trunk: Aramburu’s perplexing turns, when he was already far removed from power, just barely illuminate the discrepancy between the abstract ideals and the concrete acts of the members of that class. The evil that he perpetrated was in his acts, and whatever goodness he had in his thoughts was a belated tremor of the bourgeois consciousness. Aramburu was obliged to execute and ban in the same way that his successors to this day have been forced to torture and murder: for the simple fact that they represent a usurping minority that can only stay in power through deceit and violence.

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 unions, 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.

40 DG: Argentine Peronist elected official John William Cooke characterized Peronism as the “hecho maldito” (“cursed deed”) of the middle class. The phrase is most commonly interpreted as pertaining to Peronism’s complicated relationship to the middle class—specifically, to the movement’s tendency to submit to its desires

41 DG: Ministers of the Argentine Economy under Presidents Aramburu and Frondizi. For década infame, see Note 13.