Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
(Post 19526835)
Harvey, after reading the Wikipedia entries for The Dirty War and Peronism and the biographies of Juan and Evita Peron I'm pretty confused. Who are the 'good guys' in modern Argentinian history? Peron is thought to have been a Fascist yet it seems him and Evita were beloved by the people. Then the military overthrows Peron and this 'Dirty War' begins - the opposition to the junta are a mixture of different groups, including extreme Marxist guerillas who killed many people themselves, right wing Peronists and left wing Peronists which seems impossible, like saying there's a right wing faction of Barack Obama supporters. I know a military dictatorship isn't something anybody wants to live under but neither is Communism which is what these revolutionaries were fighting for. These students who were kidnapped and killed were probably Marxist?
Obviously I don't understand Argentinian and South American history and culture.
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It's extremely complicated, not even us in Argentina can get to an agreement on the subject. Just to add to the confusion: the biggest armed organization was "peronista" but they fought against Peron.
Also, Evita and Peron were a very different story. Furthermore, Peron in 1945 wasn't the same Peron as in 1970. It's true he had bounds with fascist regimes, but saying he was a fascist or a nazi by Evita's time is quite a reach. However, he developed that fascist personality later, so that explains why Evita and Peron were so beloved by so many people and then the same Peron is called a fascist.
Just a really brief recap: Everything started after Cuba's experience, when US created the "School of Americas" to train South American military to dominate the whole continent, hence the many "coup de etat". This caused a great discontent amongst people all around Latin America, which led to the creation of different organizations. Some of them went into guerrilla paths, some of them went into legal paths. By beginning of 70s, Peron was exiled in Spain and military governments couldn't handle the situation, thus he was allowed to get back in what was called GAN (Gran Acuerdo Nacional, stands for Big National Agreement), under Kissinger's "Plan Condor" strategy.
There were elections in 1973, and a new "peronista" president was elected, but Peron kinda overthrown him, so new elections and this time Peron won them with the "Peron-Peron" formula (he and his wife).
After this he started the "Dirty War" by the creation of a paramilitary organization called AAA (Argentina's Anticommunist Alliance) which killed around 1200 people, mostly culture people and politics rivals, but when he died, socialist organizations proved to be too much, so a new coup happened in 1976, which led to the genocide.
However, after everything ended, we found out that the guerrilla was a mere excuse and most of the killed and disappeared people had nothing to do with guerrilla: religious people, workers, students, people having money or companies which someone form the government wanted and so on. Also, there was a huge influence and participation of pro-military civilians.
But one of the most resilient consequences to these days was the appropriation of children, of which 112 were found, but there are around 400 still missing, some of them dead, but most of them with a different identity they don't even know themselves.
As for the "communism" part.... you gotta understand your perception of communism isn't ours. For example, Chile's Allende was known as a communist (and that was the "justification" to overthrown him), but nobody with a bit of real knowledge would call Allende a communist for real, he was a mild socialist, not very different to what Obama is today. And Allende was the most leftist president in Latin America, so talking about communism in Latin America is, to the very least, funny. In general, Latin America's left limit always was a socialism like Sweden's or Willy Brandt's Germany. Of course there were more radical organizations, but they weren't really important.
And it's very easy to see it: nowadays, some people calls Chavez a "communist", yet nobody can explain which ones were the "communist" acts of Chavez. Some people calls "communist" our president Cristina Kirchner, yet most people here sees her as a right wing quasi fascist president with strong ties with IMF and US.
So, in short, I can see why it's complicated for you to understand something we don't understand even though we live it every single day :Oh crap