Redeemers (40 page)

There is no mystery at all about the direct aid given by Evita to the mass murderers of Croatia, one of Hitler's most savage satellites. In 1954,
Izbor
, the magazine of the Argentine Croatian community, would write: “We wandered through Europe from country to country until the day on which our suffering knocked on the doors of the noblest heart then beating in the world, that of Eva Perón, who was then in Rome.” Among the war criminals who, thanks to Evita Perón, obtained visas or passports through the International Red Cross was Ante Pavelic, the Croatian führer himself, who had presided over the murders—by direct, hands-on methods—of many hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies in the concentration camps of fascist Croatia. He reached Buenos Aires under a false name and wearing the robe of a priest, together with his compatriots Vjekoslav Vrancic (decorated by Hitler in honor of his planning skills at the work of mass deportation) and Branko Benzon, who became Juan Perón's personal physician. With them came a band of Ustashe (Croatian fascist) refugees, some of whom, says Dujovne, contributed their more developed skills at torture to the repertoire of the Peronista police.

In 1955, the Revolución Libertadora (which overthrew Perón) put some personal belongings of Juan and Evita on exhibit. Among the objects was a sumptuous storage box adorned with inlay and containing a set of silver plates. On the lid was a Star of David in mother-of-pearl. Obviously a part of the Nazi plunder, its significance could not have passed unnoticed even by the most uninformed of fairy godmothers.

 

V

The critics of Eva Perón used to say that she had done “good very badly and evil very well.” Perhaps they were somewhat off in the first half of the statement. Eva came from the disinherited and she was able to genuinely communicate with a significant number of them and, fleetingly at least, they thought and felt that she helped them. The second part of the assertion, however, is surely no mistake. The political conduct of Peronism is a stunning example of what Latin American nations concerned with the creation of a responsible future are trying to overcome.

Peronism was a veritable manual of antidemocratic practices. The liberal opposition (the
Partido Radical
), the socialists and the communists, opposition labor leaders and factions were all systematically persecuted. The official, nationalist newspapers—among them the Nazi
Deutsche La Plata Zeitung—
could count on generous tax exemptions. The free press almost disappeared, with the government (falsely claiming a scarcity) rationing their supply of newsprint and then forcing sales to government loyalists or directly expropriating newspapers or else shutting them down with strong-arm actions. The grounds of the National University were violated on various occasions and the institution was progressively stripped of its autonomy. “The martial figure of Perón and the angelic figure of his spouse, wrapped in delicately pinkish clouds,” recalls the historian Tulio Halperín Donghi, “began to decorate the readers for primary schools.” Raúl Apold, a disciple of Joseph Goebbels, was given the job of creating the apparatus of Peronista propaganda. His office produced the slogan “Perón accomplishes, Eva dignifies.” Public competitions were organized and mass-participation games invented in which the villains were always the anti-Peronistas.

In the best fascist style, a committee was created to investigate “anti-Argentine activities” (a synonym of course for anti-Peronista actions of any kind). The committee censured books and jailed authors. They imprisoned the writer Victoria Ocampo, editor of the internationally acclaimed magazine
Sur
, which had for decades published the best literature of the Hispanic world. Jorge Luis Borges's mother was put under house arrest, his sister was sent to jail, and Borges himself fired from his job in the National Library and given the position of chicken inspector for the markets of Buenos Aires (which he obviously refused). Radio stations could not broadcast even the slightest criticism of the government. Radio Belgrano, for which Eva had portrayed famous women, became her personal property. Any musician or dancer or singer who failed to demonstrate attachment to the regime suffered for it, while court poets flourished as never before.

Punctiliously observing the old Spanish tradition of patrimonial power, Juan and Evita behaved like a single and only legitimate lord and master of Argentina. The entire Duarte family would prosper under the shade of Evita. Her brother Juan became Perón's corrupt and influential secretary, one of her brothers-in-law was a senator, another director of the customs agency, another one a prominent judge. Congress functioned as a simple adjunct to the Peróns, who eliminated the protections of congressional immunity. Once when Evita visited the Supreme Court, the chief justice asked her politely to sit down in the public area—next to his own wife—rather than on the bench by his side. Evita had him fired from the court. She would later, by fiat, fire many judges throughout the legal system. Toward the end of her career, she proposed herself for the vice presidency of the republic. But this time Juan Perón, under pressure from the military, refused to support her wishes. Had she lived, perhaps she might even have considered trying to overthrow him. She had already played, and well remembered, the role of Catherine the Great.

 

POPULISM IN
itself is a neutral term that can be applied to any political program that claims to be overwhelmingly concerned with improving the economic condition of the majority of a country's population and that speaks and appeals directly to them. Peronism was really the first great populist movement in Latin America, and was strongly stamped and branded by three features: the vertical mobilization of the masses, the tendency to privilege demand rather than productive energy (with its serious economic consequences), and its cult of the leader, the
caudillo
, in this case two of them, Perón and Evita. Peronism ushered the lower economic classes into the citadel of the State. This acceptance of them was not in itself so different from some other Latin American countries, including Mexico. Where it radically differed was in the fact that the “organized workers' movement” was the first of its kind not to embrace the doctrines or traditional programs and demands of the political left. Embodied (almost incarnated) in the figure of Evita, Peronism was (in a mode very different from, for instance, the Mexican PRI) a program of distribution from on high, propagandistically fueled by the engine of social resentment.

Caudillismo
, the oldest of the continent's social ills—a distant echo both of Moorish sheiks and Christian warlords during the war of the Reconquista in medieval Spain—means the concentration of power into the hands of a single man, and, in this exceptional case, of power (though shared with Perón himself) into the grasp of a single woman, a
caudilla
richly endowed with charisma. When the
caudillo
takes over, the strictly
personal
passions of a leader (traumas, obsessions, whims) are transferred to the history of the nation, converting history into a kind of “biography of power.” Almost all our countries have experienced this phenomenon, but in Peronist Argentina, it acquired a special emphasis of its own, since the personal power of Juan and Evita Perón had no institutional limits at all except eventually for the veto of the army. Eva could and did convert Argentina into a stage for the movie of her own life.

But why, since the collapse of the dictatorship, has the prestige of Perón still continued to influence national politics so that a party of moderately left Peronistas now holds (and was freely elected) to power. The answer likely lies in the fact that Evita forced the elite to recognize the existence of the poor and because the Peronista programs, however unbalanced and financially spendthrift, are remembered as an age when the needs of the
cabecitas negras
took center stage in Argentina. And we have the curious phenomenon of these social programs (as well as a hand strong enough to carry them through) appealing to the “left Peronists” while a ruthless authoritarianism (often linked to the parochial interests of morally corrupted unions) spoke to the “Peronists of the right.”

Across the rainbow of ideology, Evita moved from being the goddess of right-wing populism to the icon of many (especially the terrorist Montoneros) among the Marxist revolutionaries who were the first target (to be followed by many others) of the exterminationist military regime of 1976–83. “If Eva were alive, she would be a Montonera,” said these Argentine urban guerrillas. Were they right? The question is not answerable but history did provide an ambiguous and horrifying response. During one of the most murderous military dictatorships in the history of Latin America, many of these “left-Peronist” guerrillas (as well as thousands of men, women, and children who had never lifted a finger in violence) would die (often thrown, still barely alive, from airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean) after long weeks and months of unspeakable torture at the hands of—among others—“Peronists of the right.”

Peronism involved a formidable machinery of repression but it was not, strictly speaking, an essentially militarist dictatorship. Perón was not a traditional Argentine soldier. He permitted elections and his social policies were intensely disliked by most of the traditional military elite, who when they seized power also did ever-increasing economic damage to the country. But in the government of Juan and Evita, another gross weakness (as through much of the history of Argentina and other Latin American countries) was a commitment to intense chauvinism. Chauvinism is in essence an overvaluation, careless and ultimately erroneous, of the situation and destiny of one's own country among the nations of the world. Argentina, gifted with an immense and wealthy territory, a relatively literate and homogenous population, might have concentrated its energies into a process of balanced development, without wasting its accumulated wealth. But Argentina lost its way and almost the entire century, victimized by a false dream of total self-sufficiency and an unhealthy obsession with opposing the Anglo-Saxon world.

As for Eva Perón, she was certainly the greatest female demagogue of the twentieth century. Perhaps she represents a little of the best in the Spanish Christian heritage of Latin America, an echo of the old sense of distributive justice, a footnote to the universal history of charity. But it should not be forgotten that she and her husband also represented some of the worst of this tradition (and of the troubled twentieth century) and that their history places them within the range of human action well described by the title of one of Jorge Luis Borges's books:
The Universal History of Infamy
.

 

 

7

Che Guevara

THE SAINT ENR AGED

“Do not forget this minor condottiere of the twentieth century,” wrote Che Guevara to his parents in March of 1965, as he was about to embark on the final stage of his adventurous voyage through life. The revolution to which he made a decisive contribution; the communist utopia he wanted to build (and could not construct) through the power of his will; the two, three, many Vietnams that he dreamed about and could not ignite; the thousands of young men and women who took to the mountains in emulation of him, to create the “new man” or meet death as martyrs; the sequel of desolation and slaughter left by the guerrilla wars and their suppression from Mexico to Argentina—all of it was vaguely predicted within the course of history long before November 25, 1956, the day that Che and Fidel Castro and a handful of comrades set off from the coast of Mexico in a barely seaworthy boat headed for Cuba. The history of Latin America foreshadowed—almost in the religious sense of the term—a figure like Che Guevara. And he duly arrived, at the right time and place. From then on, not only Latin America but the entire world would have ample reason to remember this “condottiere of the twentieth century.”

Those years of revolution cannot be understood without considering the growth of anti-Americanism in Latin American history. It was not the same throughout the continent. In the Southern Cone, it was an ideology presented as a conflict of cultures: Hispanic America against the Anglo-Saxons, Ariel against Caliban. In Central America and the Caribbean, the confrontation was far more direct and practical. The military, political, and commercial presence of the United States had been growing, especially since 1898, and was sometimes overwhelming. For these countries, the problem was never abstract or vaguely ideological. How to struggle with this great power, how to channel it, how to limit it, and eventually, how to fight it. And perhaps no other country would experience this drama with the same intensity as Cuba.

From the beginning of the century and into the 1950s, the collective memory of many Cubans would develop a backlog of searing historical facts (like the continued presence of American troops after the Spanish-American War, only remedied by Cuban agreement to the Platt Amendment, which established American interference in Cuban domestic and foreign affairs and ceded Guantanamo to the American navy). But the greatest insult was the total identification of American national and private commercial interests. Theodore Roosevelt's cabinet included three secretaries with direct financial interests in Cuba. In 1922, a Cuban journalist would predict, “Hatred of the Yankees will become the religion of Cubans.” In 1947, the liberal Mexican historian Daniel Cosío Villegas would write prophetically:

 

. . . in Latin America, there lies sleeping, quiet as stagnant water, a thick layer of distrust, of rancor against the United States. On the day when, under the protection of governmental tolerance, four or five agitators in each one of the principal Latin American countries launch themselves into a campaign of defamation, of hatred toward the United States, on that day all of Latin America will seethe with restlessness and will be ready for anything

 

By the end of World War II, Latin American liberals like Cosío Villegas were a species on their way to extinction. They were being replaced by the extremes of right and left, which were equally contemptuous of what they termed “Anglo-Saxon democracy.” The brief episode of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy and the heyday of Pan-Americanism was quickly followed by the proxy politics of the Cold War. In various countries of Latin America, the right, formerly pro-German but with its model defeated in war, would find some common ground with the growing left in anti-American nationalism. The United States—as José Martí had warned, incessantly—did not have the vision to understand (let alone respect) its neighbors and so they did not notice (or noticed too late, after 1959) that they had valuable allies in the democratic leaders of the region.

Among them, the most outstanding was the Venezuelan Rómulo Betancourt, who had been fighting since 1929 for democracy in his country. Venezuela, since the days of the Liberator Bolívar, had never had a single free election before 1947. As an appointed interim president of Venezuela from 1945 to 1948, Betancourt supported the 1947 campaign of the writer Rómulo Gallegos, who won the election. Shortly afterward, a military coup removed him and democracy from Venezuela. Predictably, the United States supported the new dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. President Eisenhower, in 1958, invited him to Washington and honored him for his service to democracy, while the democrat Betancourt was stigmatized as a “communist.” And this sort of abuse was not limited to politicians. Cosío Villegas, an impeccable liberal, reaffirmed the imminent danger in Latin America of a “belated nationalist revolution.” He was invited to give a paper at Johns Hopkins University, but it had to be read by an American surrogate, because Cosío was denied a visa. The American academic read Cosío's observation that, in Latin America, communist militancy could proceed “in ideal conditions.”

The Americans would not become aware quickly enough of this swelling tide of hatred. Or when they did take note of it, they would act to feed it, as in Guatemala in 1954. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, openly supported by the CIA, violently overthrew the duly elected nationalist and reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz. The spark that would later flame into the Cuban Revolution was truly struck in the streets of Guatemala, among its labor unions and its students. And it was there that a twenty-six-year-old Argentine doctor, Ernesto Guevara, closely observing the sequence of events, mourned the fact that Arbenz had not armed the people and that his government had fallen “betrayed within and beyond its borders . . . like the Spanish Republic” and then added: “it is time that the bludgeon be answered with the bludgeon. If one has to die, better that it be like Sandino” (the leader of the guerrilla resistance to the American invasion of Nicaragua in 1927–33, who was assassinated by Anastasio Somoza, founder of a pro-American family tyranny that lasted forty years) “than like [Manuel] Azaña” (the last president of the Spanish Republic, who died an exile, in Nazi-occupied France, after resigning his presidency).

The Argentine doctor was in Guatemala on one of his wanderings through Latin America. He had become convinced that “someday the dark forces that oppress the subjugated, colonial world will be defeated”; and he was filled with “growing indignation” in response to “the way in which the
gringos
have been treating Latin America.” In the cultural microcosm of the city of Córdoba, where he had grown up, the young doctor had encountered an ambience that stimulated his initial and fundamental anti-Americanism, involving an intense cultural contempt for the “Yankees” (though Guevara would always prefer the much more negatively charged word
gringos
). Ernesto would have also imbibed feelings of anger at injustice within the atmosphere of his own family when, as a boy of ten, he met refugees from the Spanish Republic who were welcomed into his home. And the husband of his maternal aunt was a newspaper correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. He would have heard a firsthand version of the Spanish agony.

 

II

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was said to be born on June 14, 1928 (actually one month earlier, the later date meant to mask his mother's premarital pregnancy). Both his mother and father came from families of high status in Argentine society. His mother, Celia de la Serna, whom Che would adore all his life long, could trace her ancestry back to a royal viceroy of colonial Peru and she received a substantial inheritance at the age of twenty-one. Ernesto Guevara Lynch, his father, was a great-grandson of one of Argentina's richest men, and his genealogy was studded with noble Irish and Spanish names, though his family was no longer all that wealthy. But the couple tended toward a lifestyle that was more extravagant than their means really afforded them and they displayed the characteristic insouciance toward money of aristocrats by birth but no longer by income. They were left-wing and egalitarian in their values. The presiding political eminence for Ernesto's mother was Alfredo Palacios, the first socialist ever elected to the Argentine parliament and the author of a law requiring employers to allow their workers one day off a week, to enjoy their Sunday rest, as well as prescribing other required free time especially for women and children. It was Argentina's first venture into labor legislation.

The family traveled from place to place as Ernesto's father pursued business prospects that never quite jelled for him, and at one point he became the owner of a five-hundred-acre yerba maté farm in the jungle, where he would be remembered many years later by the local Guarani Indian laborers as a “good man.” But both the farm and Celia's income from a family estate in Córdoba province were seriously reduced in the 1930s by the effects of the Great Depression and a severe drought. Times became difficult for them, and even more seriously complicated by expenses and anxiety due to the illness of their eldest son, Ernesto. Their moves were often driven by the effort to find a place where young Ernesto could gain some relief from the condition that was his lifelong curse and stimulus—the asthma that he developed as a child. The attacks would almost strip the boy of his breath, force him to rest motionless, to lie against his mother's breast or sleep pressed close against the chest of his father. In the city of Córdoba, the family found a climate less harmful to Ernesto, and there he went to school. His attendance was irregular, punctuated by asthmatic attacks, by injections and inhalations. During his enforced days of rest, he would try to free himself from his confinement with novels by Robert Louis Stevenson or Jack London, or all twenty-three books by Jules Verne.

But the adolescent Ernesto was not about to accept the limitations imposed by his asthma, no more than he would tolerate other limitations in the future. He chose to escape from his precarious physical condition through sheer will. He took up rugby, a favorite sport of the Anglophile upper classes of Argentina. He would edit the first Argentine magazine, called
Tackle
, dedicated completely to rugby. And he would sign his articles
Chang-cho
, a would-be orientalized version of one of his nicknames, Chancho (Pig), which he adopted proudly, based on his careless way of dressing and his asthma-inspired aversion to cold water. When he grew older, into a handsome and voluble young man, this “Bohemian” look, amid upper-class adolescents totally committed to neatness and the latest styles, helped rather than hindered his attractiveness to women.

His fellow rugby players called him “Furibundo Serna,” or “Raging Serna,” for the intensity of his game. Rugby is surely one of the most grueling physical ordeals an asthmatic could face. It combines the continuous running necessary in soccer with harsh physical contact.

The ideal physique for a rugby player is the kind of solid, even massive but relatively supple musculature that Ernesto lacked. It requires great endurance, since the action never stops, nor do the physical encounters. And it is a team game, where the player has to hold his position, no matter what, partly to protect other players. A hole in the formation can leave a teammate more liable to injury. And though the hitting is not as fierce as in American football, it is constant and wearying. A rugby player has to tolerate pain and exhaustion—and transcend them both, ideally, to keep on playing even with broken fingers or cracked ribs. Though it was a favorite game of English public school boys, its origins are more plebeian. (And its international championship teams are ultra-macho.) The sport requires toughness, discipline, obedience, and comradeship.

For a slightly built asthmatic like the young Ernesto, its challenges were enormous. Sometimes, very much against his will, he would have to go to the sidelines because he was unable to breathe, and he would spend minutes drawing on his inhaler, painfully gasping for breath, and then insist on returning, to hurl his body against larger and stronger men, rolling in the dirt and mud of the playing field. In a sense, rugby was a training school for his physical and political future. And he did succeed in greatly strengthening his body, though to his dying day, the threat of crippling attacks of asthma would always be with him.

Mastering problems through the force of his will would be one of the leitmotifs of Guevara's life. The constant shadow of his own illness and the beginning of his beloved mother's twenty-year struggle with cancer probably contributed to his eventual choice of medicine as a career. He did well enough in school, though he never seemed to study, but Ernesto could not be just an ordinary student. He borrowed books from his friend Gustavo Roca, the son of Deodoro Roca, who had been the intellectual leader of the 1918 reforms at the University of Córdoba, a major impulse in moving the conservative, Catholic ambience of that city toward the much more progressive atmosphere in which Ernesto's mother was raised. The elder Roca (Ernesto's friendship with the son would last a lifetime) centered his ideas around a theory of “the integral man.” Ernesto's girlfriend Tita Infante gave him a copy of
Bourgeois Humanism and Proletarian Humanism: From Erasmus to Romain Rolland,
by Aníbal Ponce, one of the major influences on Guevara's later thought. Ponce insisted that it was the responsibility of socialism “to construct a new sensibility” and he preached the need to envision socialism and communism as the permanent and continual creation of “a new culture and a complete man, unified, not torn or mutilated, a man absolutely new.”

For the young Ernesto, these seemed to be fresh and exhilarating ideas and they would combine with a more physically appealing impulse, the will to learn more and to expand his horizons by a direct experience of “our America.” The young man who would pass into history as
El Che
would soon begin to move from his Argentine identity toward a larger fatherland, a broader loyalty, becoming a “citizen” of what he would call (broadening out the phrase of José Martí) “our America with a capital A.”