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economic chaos add up to a mood of collective suicide. A country
young, as countries go, but o ld in its weariness and disenchantment. A
will only to suffer, to go down "in a bloodbath" (in the hope of being
reborn?). A sense of total warfare-"the world is against us" -in which
terror, of the right and left, only blows up the bombs already there.
The terrorist, in a sense, is the child of indulgence. In Argentina,
at a certain social level, you can still live well, provided you don't want
to do anything worthwhi le. The poor (sudden ly including organized
labor, which had been living off the fat of the land, as everyone else)
will strike and may occasionally, if pushed to the wall, take up arms,
but without the old Messianic fervor. The guerilla, we know, is a
middle-class plague, a disease of mindless wealth with no outlet but
guilt and the rage of lost hope. A new form of internationalism for
decaying utopias. In some sense, a last hopeless link to the world, as we
sink into " flag and family." Though of course its appeal is the
opposite, part of the same common urge to turn back the clock to
simpler times. The agrarian myth of more gracious ways, before
rootless city life, at some point joins the Marxist mill ennium.
The first Peronist period (my childhood) was loud. Speeches,
mobs, swaggering parades, burning churches. A lurid political doc–
trine, grand public works (airports, swimming pools, children's fairy
tale cities, before Disneyland), self-congratulatory holidays with card–
carrying demonstrators and their banners trucked in from the prov–
inces. A bloated image of World Power: rumors of an atomic plant in
the mountains, an Argentine Car (with imported motor), even a
prototype jet plane (that never flew). All to the tune of ranting
loudspeakers; eventuall y, in the shadow of closed borders, dimming
lights. In the end, gloom, hate, isolation; clouded store windows; the
blank noise of empty streets . Buenos Aires, "capital of fear," a poet
called it. A country with its back to the world, the garbage of dead
slogans blowing in the wind. Then, almost twenty years (of graft,
turmoil, military coups) after the Fall (1955), the Return (1973). An old
corpse with a new wife (dressed up to look like the old one); a night of
death (hundreds killed in a shootout between different armed factions
on the road to the airport). A sad truth: all by "popular mandate, " a
clean electoral sweep (over 50% of the vote) for the man who once fled
through the mist in a Paraguayan gunboat. The slogan is "national
reconciliation." The jails have been thrown open to let out crooks and
partisans (no one knows the difference any more). The stage is set for a
takeover (by whom?). Everyone is "using" everyone else. It was said
Peron had bankrolled at least one guerilla group from exile in Spain,
before "breaking" with it. By the time he died and his widow took
over, a whole northern province had practically been " liberated" and
