by Ciro Bustos
And then Fidel arrived in Santiago. The visit of the champion of the armed struggle to the reformist parliamentarian caused a huge rumpus in South America because it threatened to extend Cuban influence into virgin territory. The Chilean president, Salvador Allende, could mobilize the support of the masses whenever necessary, sometimes with a bit of persuasion. But the presence of the mythical Cuban leader showed that the Revolution crossed national borders and had common roots lying fallow, struggling to grow, coming together to follow in its footsteps.
Multitudes gathered for Fidel, shouting themselves hoarse wherever he went on his long tour, and probably sealed the fate of the Popular Unity government. Nothing would ever be the same in Chile. The Cuban apparatus moved to Chile wholesale, and many Cubans I knew were working in the wings. Yet not one of them contacted me. It was remarkable. Not because of me as a person but because, in their eagerness to reconstruct events (including purely random and superficial things), the Cubans sought out and interviewed survivors, their own and others, members of groups of all kinds, soldiers, neighbours, improbable accidental witnesses, deserters (the so-called ‘resaca’), and even chickens pecking around the area. All and sundry, except for me; the only survivor of Che’s original project.
That was the active and visible face of the order to ignore me. Yet there was always a hidden hand doling out favours. Among the spin-offs of Fidel’s visit was an exhibition by the Cuban National Publishing House to promote Cuban books. The former soldier in charge of the exhibition made an official visit to Quimantú and we met. I asked if I could buy some of the books on show and he replied: ‘Compañero, you can have any book you want, they’re all yours. All of them! Come and get them when the exhibition is over.’ So I did. I recovered the books I had abandoned in Holguín, although, of course, they would ultimately end up in a blaze of glory. Borges would say exile is the books you lose when you leave them behind. He’s right.
The masses in Chile went through a period of heightened politicization under the Popular Unity government that contrasted with the Cuba I knew. In Cuba the Revolution exercised power with the support of the people, but in Chile the masses kept up a constant pressure on the government, mobilized by the grass roots of the different parties in the Popular Unity coalition and the revolutionary Left, sometimes exceeding their mandate and pushing the government further to the left. Society was becoming visibly polarized and while the Left shouted slogans, the Right plotted its return with the help of their neighbours in the north. In this frenzied atmosphere, it was impossible not to get involved, and I was no exception. Quimantú had, as did every Chilean workplace, a grass-roots organization, the FTR (Revolutionary Workers Front), set up by the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement), and I was invited to join them. I went to its founding meeting and joined, together with Pancho Nelson López de Oliveira, a young Brazilian journalist with whom I had begun choosing photos to be bought from the Zig-Zag archive to create our Documentation Department under the expert guidance of María Teresa Moraes, another Brazilian from Rio. Pancho and I were completely absorbed in the FTR and managed some notable achievements.
The MIR offered to let me join directly ‘as a cadre’, and I happily accepted on condition that my political situation, which was being affected by noises off, was clarified publicly. We were in the middle of discussions when we were overtaken by events.
A significant political shift had taken place in Argentina. The military dictatorship of General Onganía was supplanted in March 1971 by a sector of the army headed by General Lanusse that was more open to negotiation. It aimed to attract public support by calling free elections, after tough concessions to Peronism. These included the return of Perón and allowing the Peronist party – Justicialismo – to participate in the elections, but only if they put up a candidate other than Perón himself. The political crisis had exploded and the waters of the confrontation between armed leaders were to sweep the Argentine people into the most tragic period of its history. Numerous organizations preached the armed struggle as the people’s way of regaining power and recuperating living standards that had been eroded in one of the richest and most developed countries in the Americas.
The thousands of potential combatants that Che had envisaged took up arms on Perón’s behalf, offering their lives and the lives of others, in the largest clandestine mobilization in the Americas. Workers and students were mainly recruited by the ERP (Marxist), Montoneros (Peronist), FAL (ex-Communists), FAR (Peronist), FAP (Peronist). The armed groups became known internationally in August 1972 when some of their members broke out of prison in Rawson, capital of the Patagonian province of Chubút. The leaders managed to hijack a plane and fly to Chile, while soldiers took the rest – eighteen men and women – to the naval base in Trelew and shot them in cold blood.
The ERP (People’s Revolutionary Army), the organization with the largest military capacity, contacted me via Dolores Giménez, one of the members of its political wing the PRT (Workers Revolutionary Party) in exile in Chile. She suggested organizing a meeting with an ERP official in Santiago. They offered me the same as the MIR: to be part of their plans for a guerrilla base in Tucumán, a province in the north of Argentina directly to the south of Salta. My reply to the ERP was the same: everything was conditional on their publicly dispelling all rumours about me. So, things were left up in the air because no one, not even a group as independent as them, wanted to take on positions that were not clear, given Cuba’s silence on the subject, although privately they showed solidarity.
Months later, a new meeting took place in Argentina, in San Rafael, with a couple of militants – including another ERP officer – who explained their plan for Tucumán. My reaction was negative. Establishing a rural guerrilla base in that area, without a frontier for a bolt hole, surrounded by highways (the area around Aconquija), seemed to me a trap, a dead end.
The apparent victory of the masses in Argentina, when Perón’s candidate Héctor Cámpora became president in May 1973, made us think it was time to go home. Ana María and the girls would go to Buenos Aires first, since I was still involved in what was happening in Chile. I would wait for even more optimistic news from Argentina. I went to the Popular Unity’s last huge march which was taken over by the radical Left. Standing in front of the Moneda palace under Allende’s balcony, I heard the speech in which he rejected extremist pressure from the grass roots.
Gustavo Roca then wrote urging me to return: ‘Come now or you won’t be able to fix your legal situation.’ The process in Argentina was disintegrating too; the Cámpora people’s government lasted a mere two months. Ana María sent a plane ticket and I flew to Buenos Aires on the last day of August 1973, eleven days before Pinochet’s fascist coup in Chile. I left my friends in Quimantú, with my Chilean family (the last head of the Documention Department, Lidia Baltra, and her husband Claudio Verdugo) promising to visit us in Mendoza.
A year later, I was returning from a visit to Buenos Aires with Ana María and the girls in my brother Avelino’s car. Crossing the San Luís desert at noon, we decided to stop for lunch just off the road under the only chañars high enough to protect us from the sun. We followed some car tracks over to the trees. While we were making sandwiches, a little Renault appeared through the heat haze and, following our tracks through the sand, drove towards us blowing the horn. It was Lidia and Claudio. Never has a promise been kept with such punctuality.
42
Argentina: 1973–1976
The noble magic of human nature was felt every now and again in Argentina, electrified by the factional war taking place all over the country, as the net closed in around us almost as soon as we arrived in Buenos Aires. We lived with Ana María’s parents in the Plaza Once for a while, and in the mornings I used to go down to the baker’s on the opposite side of Yrigoyen Street. The baker, a rough but friendly Spaniard standing behind his counter surrounded by different types of wonderful smelling bread, always made the same joke. ‘Good morning’, I said, ‘a kilo of baguett
e, please.’ ‘There isn’t any!’ he barked, as he weighed the bread. We only ever exchanged those brief words, but one day, looking down as he counted the change, he said: ‘Señor, you have to leave the city. Bad people are asking after you.’
When I returned to Argentina, I had contacted my former compañeros again: those who had been released from jail when Cámpora came to power, and those who had kept safe doing their regular jobs. A meeting was arranged in Córdoba, a sort of general assembly and welcome home for me. In Camiri I had jotted down some thoughts and my doubts about the possibility of rowing against the present current. I had in mind the example of Peru, where a military coup, supported by the people despite the opposition of the traditional political parties, had brought about an apparent process of transformation, pushed to the left by the spontaneous action of the masses, and the unrestricted political and material support of the Cuban Revolution and the Soviet Union. I meant the government of General Jorge Velasco Alvarado.
The question I asked myself was: do we always have to oppose populist processes generated by forces outside the proletariat or should we accompany them so we have the right to be present when they define themselves ideologically? Should we go on ignoring the fact that the majority of the working class in Argentina is Peronist just because it is not in Lenin’s manuals, or should we try to share their experience from within? I thought we should be with the working class, not confronting them.
I arrived at the meeting with a copy of my report freshly typed by Ana María. It was read out aloud, and the consensus was that there was nothing to discuss and the meeting was adjourned. We all thought the same. Any differences were tactical rather than ideological, and the party line was to stand with the people in the struggle for power, not on the outside.
Others had other ideas. When they came out of prison, Bellomo, Carlos Bandoni, Miguel Colina and Henry Lerner joined the ‘Masetti Brigade’, an organization formed to continue the struggle of the EGP, but primarily in the city. Later, Bellomo joined the ERP where, together with Daniel Hopen, he led a splinter group that proposed working with the Peronist grass roots. It was called ERP 22, in memory of the executions in Trelew on 22 August 1972, when both Marxists and Peronists were among the dead.
However by this time the leadership of the Peronist movement had been taken over by its right-wing, using its hegemonic presence around Perón, in the Justicialist Party and the CGT (General Confederation of Labour). The unions acted like corporatist bodies and were Perón’s shock troops, intensified by the direct influence of residual Italian fascists, regrouped in Propaganda 2, the new order of Licio Gelli, whose private secretary and pocket wizard José López Rega was general factotum to Perón. This sinister figure, essence of the darkest of dark forces operating at home and abroad, played a central role in destroying the popular myth of Peronism, separating the wheat from the chaff: the hope of the working class deposited illusorily in the leader; the reactionary and fallacious structure of the party and the leader. Like the Nazis, their solution was the physical elimination of the enemy.
The attack on the grass roots of the labour movement and their most radical leaders was conceived in the bosom of the Peronist Right, allied to the army (the armed wing of economic power) which finished off the task. Symbolically, its first action came in June 1973, during the gigantic reception at Ezeiza airport for the return of Perón. The Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) appeared on the scene under the supervision of López Rega, now minister of social services, with a programme of selective but widespread killings, which included anything that moved on the left of the political spectrum or was seen as cultural, student, union or social activity. As their political calling card, they began sending letters to their victims with a deadline to leave the county before the death squads arrived. Union lawyers were the first targets, sending a clear message that intellectuals and professionals would not be immune. Rodolfo Ortega Peña, a lawyer and journalist, who had given Ana María support and solidarity in Buenos Aires, was the first on the Triple A list to be killed.
Oscar del Barco and I had gone to eat in a taverna near his house in Cerro de Las Rosas, Córdoba, where Aníbal Troilo records provided the background music. It was a simple place, welcoming and cheap, but that night it suddenly filled up with the deputy governor of the province and his court. Atilio López, a former union leader who had run for office on the same ticket as Obregón Cano, was the most progressive governor in the country. The owner of the bar told him we were there and he invited us over to his table for a chat which continued behind closed doors until the early hours. López was assassinated by the Triple A few months later. Curutchet, another labour lawyer friend of Oscar’s whom I knew slightly, met the same fate. We went to his funeral at the headquarters of Agustín Tosco’s Energy Workers Union, and the oppressive atmosphere of threats was palpable inside the building and adjacent streets. The baker’s warning could not be ignored and we decided to leave Buenos Aires, a city now in the hands of reactionary swine, for my mother’s house in San Rafael, a peaceful wine-growing area to the south of Mendoza, far from the fury of the reactionaries. Or so we thought.
One night at three in the morning, Avelino’s wife Alicia knocked on our door and said: ‘The police want to search the house.’ Our dog Top’s furious barking and dashing about implied we were surrounded. I quickly got dressed, took some money from Ana María’s bag, undid the butterfly screws holding the mosquito mesh to the window, said goodbye without waking the girls and climbed out into the side garden. As my feet touched the ground, I thought Top might be a problem since I felt his nervous body against my legs. But wisely he had stopped barking. I went towards the hen house intending to jump the side wall into the next-door house, which once belonged to my grandparents and where my cousin Gilberto now lived. I walked through the darkness with Top at my side, silent as a shadow. However, there were police cars shining their headlights into the corners of the garden and I realized I could not escape that way without causing a shoot out. The same applied to my Aunt María’s house at the other end of the vineyard. So I went back to my window, replaced the mosquito mesh, put the money back in the bag and, sure I would be detained, went out onto the verandah, pretending to be surprised by the upheaval. The police threatened to shoot the furious Top, so Avelino chained him up and began arguing about letting the police into the bedrooms because of my mother’s frail state of health. Avelino’s prestige as a doctor, whose patients included army officers and relatives of the local police, saved the situation: we were being searched by the San Rafael police, subordinate to the departmental police who were answerable to the provincial governor who was on the Peronist Left.
Then, without any explanation, they made us sign a declaration, got into their jeeps and pick-ups, and headed down the majestic Ballofet Avenue, before the astonished eyes of our neighbours. The objective of the operation was obviously to look for weapons, but we knew they would be back, so we quickly moved to a rented apartment in the centre of the city. They knew where we were and my mother could sleep in peace.
Contacts with doctors and trades people meant I could keep earning money by painting. The representative of an electronic equipment multinational, who I will call Omar the Turk, provided solid financial support through his endless chain of contacts with winegrowers and wine merchants, who passed clients backwards and forwards and kept me in work. He was not involved in anything political. His story is tragic.
While I was busy framing my paintings for an exhibition, with the catalogues printed and the support of the municipality’s secretary for culture, the police again raided our house. (A gang had previously come through the building shouting fascist slogans, daubing the walls and frightening my daughters so much that we had to collect them personally from school.) A friend Moisés, who was helping me with the frames, answered the imperious knock on the door, and returned shouting ‘A raid!’ The small apartment was filled with corpulent policemen in riot gear turning everything upside down, whi
le Paula and Andrea looked through the windows, like in the films, and shot imaginary rounds of machine-gun fire ‘ra-ta-ta-ta!’ at them. Perhaps the ludicrousness of raiding a home-workshop full of paintings, and facing the comical resistance of nine and ten-year-old girls, made them again beat a retreat without finding anything.
But the next day they detained me in the street, took me to the police station, and typed up a new file on me at the request of the federal police. They were not convinced of my identity. Either I was an idiot or I was hiding something. They cancelled the exhibition, advertised for the following Saturday in the municipal library. The culture secretary, a young man with Montonero inclinations, insisted on hanging the paintings in the town hall itself, changed the date, and organized radio publicity. I was visited by the military intelligence services (SIE) that night and when the culture secretary came to tell me that the exhibition was off, he was visibly panicking: ‘They have tons of proof in your file that you are training the ERP in Valle Grande. None of it is true, of course, but it’s your exhibition or my life, Ciro. I have to choose.’
The exhibition did not happen, but there was no time to lament. A letter came in the post. The address was typewritten as was the sheet of paper inside. It was from the Triple A, badly written, recommending I make use of the intelligence I obviously had, and realize it was best to leave the country, for the sake of my wife and daughters. They suggested I make lives for them elsewhere and ended by saying there was no room for people like me in Argentina, or something of the sort. I don’t have a copy and I sent the original to Dolores, the friend from the ERP who had come home from Chile only to take her children into exile again. In Córdoba they gave me her new address in Sweden.