by Lewis Shiner
One of Perón’s associates, Ramón Landajo, brought us into his study. I was so nervous. I don’t have to explain to you, you’re Argentine, but it’s hard for the rest of the world to understand the sheer force of gravity that man had. The poor of Argentina, his descamisados [shirtless ones], loved him with such intensity, and that love was the fuel that he burned. When I was a girl in Buenos Aires, every time it was a beautiful spring day, one of my friends would say, “¡Qué día peronista!” As if Juan Perón had made the day especially for her.
Now, let me say that my parents thought him a fascist. They would talk about how he learned his political philosophy from Mussolini, and how he never really cut his ties to the Army. Some of that is true enough, but why did the Army hate and fear him so much that his political party was outlawed, that during most of the time he was in exile it was dangerous to even speak his name in public?
Which is to say, I didn’t come to the meeting as an acolyte of Perón. Still, Che and I both liked the fact that he always refused to deal with the Yanqui imperialists. It was only after he let the Army force him out in 1955 that the North American corporations began to siphon the wealth out of our country. Privatization—that is the English word for “looting.”
He was quite old by this time, 72, and the years had been hard on him. He was still a very large man, but his strength was failing. He stood up when we came in the room, and you could see that even that effort cost him.
He was very cordial, very respectful, very gracious. We had coffee, exchanged a few pleasantries. He asked about the flight, we talked about the weather in Madrid, Che gave him a box of Montecristos. But there was still tension. Like so many, he had a hatred of Communism that went beyond the rational, as if it were some kind of contagious cancer.
It was Perón who made the first move. “You know,” he said, “I am uncomfortable with what you are up to in Argentina. I have many questions.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Che told him. “Our hope is that we can answer all your questions and come away with your blessing and support.”
“If you win your Revolution, what happens then?”
“The first order of business,” Che said, “is to reverse the damage that Onganía did in 1966. Expel the imperialist corporations, starting with the oil companies. Nationalize the industries that the military auctioned off. Create jobs for the descamisados. Make Argentina truly independent of the US. These are all things that you would do yourself, are they not?”
And Che drew him out like that, got Perón to talk about his own dreams for Argentina. It was beautiful to watch. The subject got on to land reform, and Perón asked, “What of the land owners? What of the estancias in the countryside? Do you intend to confiscate all that land for the State?”
“Let me tell you something,” Che said. “In Cuba, we left the small farmers alone. We didn’t advertise the fact, but it’s true. We only broke up the big plantations, starting with the ones owned by foreigners, like United Fruit. Again, our goals are no different than those of the left wing of the peronsitas, who operate under your name.”
We talked then about life with the montoneros, and the news we had of compañeros that Perón knew. It was going really well, until finally—and we knew this had to happen—he said, “What about the firing squads?”
Even Fidel had been concerned about the number of men that Che sentenced to death, starting in the Sierra Maestra and continuing through the trials and mass executions after the Revolution. But Che was inflexible.
“I was in Guatemala in 1954 when the Arbenz government was brought down by United Fruit and the CIA. It would never have happened if Arbenz had been strong enough to eliminate the men who were his sworn enemies, the men who continued to plot against him, the men who betrayed him and tried to assassinate him. How do you think the Cuban Revolution survived when the US has overthrown every other popular government in America? You have to kill them before they kill you.”
Perón was shaking his head. “You would make Argentina run with rivers of blood.”
I could see Che getting worked up and I didn’t know how to stop him. “There are already rivers of blood in Argentina,” he said. “And in Guatemala and Nicaragua and El Salvador. It’s the blood of the poor. It’s the blood of the innocent, who are kidnapped and tortured by government death squads paid in Yanqui dollars. That’s what Arbenz gave Guatemala when he resigned. That is the legacy of cowardice.”
He’d gone too far. I could see Perón’s face go stiff. Because of course that’s what Perón himself had done in 1955, resign rather than let Argentina be plunged into civil war. “You are a very unforgiving young man,” Perón said. “I hope the years bring you more compassion.”
And that was all. Perón said he had much work to do and Landajo took us back to our hotel.
Che was angry with himself for getting carried away, angry with me for not stopping him, and I was angry with him for blaming me for his own mistakes. Altogether it was a long, miserable night. Che, of course, had insisted on our staying in a cheap hotel and the beds had fleas—misery upon misery.
You can only imagine our amazement the next morning when there was Landajo again, arriving in the middle of breakfast, saying that Perón wanted to see us again.
“You do the talking this time,” Che said to me as we were getting in the car. “I will keep my mouth shut.”
In the end there was little for us to say. Perón had clearly had a bad night too. He seemed very frail.
“I don’t have much longer,” was nearly the first thing he said. “I want to go home.”
“Join us,” I said. “We can find you a cabinet position if you want, though that seems demeaning for a man of your stature. We could make you a Hero of the Revolution, with a generous pension, and of course you would be one of our trusted advisors, a full participant in the government.”
He said, “I don’t see how I could be a part of a Communist government.”
“We don’t have to use the word Communist,” I told him. I could see Che straining not to cut me off, wishing he had never let me talk. “We will call it a socialist government.”
And that was how it went. Point by point we hammered out a compromise that Perón could live with.
How did Argentina react to the news?
The people were overjoyed. Che and Perón together? The only thing we lacked was bringing Evita back from the dead. Everyone wanted to join us—grandmothers, little kids, middle class shop owners.
For three months we built our strength, moving slowly down from the mountains. There was little resistance from the government—I think they knew they were doomed. On March 19, 1968, just as the first leaves were starting to turn with the fall, we marched into Buenos Aires and took the Casa Rosada without firing a shot. Perón flew in the next day from Madrid.
Shots were fired later, however.
There were executions. The Argentine military had allowed themselves to get in the habit of taking over the government every few years. It was a bad habit, and Che intended to break them of it.
What was Perón’s role in the new government?
To be honest, it was very small. He did convince Che to hold elections, which Che was not keen on doing. And he suggested we run John William Cooke for President, which was quite a brilliant idea. Cooke was Argentine-born, Perón’s handpicked representative during the exile, yet he had been in Cuba since 1960 and was close to both Che and Fidel. He was the perfect blend of socialism and peronismo.
We were surprised how conservative Perón had become in his old age. He worried that business would suffer under Che’s direction, he worried about the US invading us—
Quite rightly, as it turned out.
True, but that was no reason to appease them. It was a full time job, keeping Perón on our side. If he’d lived longer he would probably have started his own faction and started a long and bitter power struggle. I don’t mean to sound callous, but it’s just as well he only lasted a year after he came ho
me.
How did you feel when the US invaded that July?
We had already lived through one US invasion back in Cuba, so we were not intimidated. If anything, the invasion at La Plata was even more pathetic than the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The US was in the middle of the Tet Offensive at the same time, and already sending their young men to Vietnam as fast as they could draft them, so they had no reserves available. They ended up with a few hundred mercenaries from Tachito Samoza in Nicaragua and Stroessner in Paraguay, a collection of poorly trained rejects that hated each other more than they hated us. The US military was in a hurry, you see, because it was an election year and Eugene McCarthy had come out in support of the Revolution. They wanted to knock McCarthy out of contention with a quick victory.
And they underestimated us. The CIA knew that Che had disbanded the army and executed the top generals. They didn’t seem to understand that Che had also created a citizen’s militia, like we had in Cuba, consisting of a hundred thousand armed men and women who were completely loyal to Che and Perón and who passionately hated the US.
Also, as crazy as it sounds, I don’t think the US officers in charge fully understood that it gets very, very cold in Buenos Aires in July.
The invasion was good for us in the end, because when it failed, it got McCarthy elected. That ended the imperialist invasion of Vietnam and kept the US mostly out of Latin America for a few years.
Mostly?
Well, the CIA simply hid what they were doing from McCarthy and continued to raise money for their favorite dictators any way they could—selling drugs and weapons, getting contributions from imperialist corporations like Ford, Bank of America, ITT.
What was your role after the Revolution?
I had developed a taste for combat. By 1969 things were stable at home and we decided on Paraguay for our next focal point. Stroessner was one of the worst dictators on the continent, with a laundry list of human rights violations: kidnapping, torture, murder, corruption, on and on. He was of course one of the favorites of the US. And we wanted to pay him back a little for sending his soldiers against us.
Those were very happy days for me. To see the first light of hope in the face of a peasant who has been held down his entire life. To see his pride and gratitude when you put a gun in his hands and suddenly freedom becomes something real and attainable.
It took two years to bring Stroessner down, and in that time the entire balance of power shifted. Allende won a free election in Chile, and suddenly there were four socialist countries in America.
It’s funny, because the US used to threaten people with their so-called domino theory, the idea that if they let Vietnam fall to Communism, the rest of the countries in Southeast Asia would topple one by one. The left made cruel fun of this idea, and yet it came to pass here. We had barely finished celebrating in Paraguay when the Sandanistas won in Nicaragua.
Honestly, it blurs a little for me after that. Was Duarte in El Salvador next, or was it the Bandera Roja in Peru? Then Bolivia, at last, and Guatemala.
Where were you when McCarthy was assassinated?
That was December of 1972, after he’d just won his second term. I was in Chiapas, in Mexico. As in so many of our campaigns, all the money had been spent on guns and we were left with a miserable radio that never worked properly. We were deep in the jungle, trying to get news of what was happening in the US, and all we could get were bits and pieces, then everything would turn to static. The Mexican soldiers were terrified when they heard that there was martial law in the US and the military had taken over the White House. They thought it was going to be the end of everything.
In fact, it was not so bad for us. The US had to bring all of their troops home just to stop the rioting, and when the news came out that it was the CIA who shot McCarthy, they really had their hands full.
Plus, it was a moral victory for us, in a way. It was the US being forced to admit what we had always known, that pure, free-market capitalism is not compatible with democracy. Chicago School Economics really needs a dictator, and now the US had its own in General Westmoreland.
People in Latin America had seen enough dictators. It brought many of them over to our side.
What was your reaction to the Southern Wall?
Well, the irony, of course, is that same year, 1975, the Berlin Wall finally came down. I flew home to be a part of it, and I got to be with my parents in the crowd that welcomed West Berlin and West Germany to the Eastern Bloc. Everyone was holding candles and singing the “Internationale,” chorus after chorus, in one language after another—Russian, German, French, Spanish. Grown men wept. Mothers told children who couldn’t even read yet to always remember that day.
Meanwhile, Westmoreland was using enslaved dissidents to build his own Wall, that ten-foot high monstrosity along the Mexican border. The US never admitted it, but more than ten thousand of those young people escaped into Mexico in the process, many of whom joined the rebel army. I don’t know how many died, or how many more died later, trying to get over the Wall and into Mexico.
You asked me earlier why I became a revolutionary. Really, the answer is single word: justice. And I have to say I felt a powerful sense of justice when the US was reduced to one more third world country, crushed by their own military coup.
When did you first meet the woman who called herself Agochar Kaur?
Ah, so we come to Veronique, already.
I met her at the same time that Che did. September of 1979, early spring in Buenos Aires.
Let me try to explain to you what it was like. Our dreams had come true. Every country in Latin America had either a socialist or a left-leaning government. Even Canada had the Labour Party in power, and the only reason they closed their border was that they simply could not handle the flood of immigrants from the US with no skills and no money. Though in private it’s said that there were jokes about building their own Wall to, quote, finish the job Westmoreland started, unquote.
We were completely independent of the Yanqui imperialists. The poor people of America—except the ones in the US—were better off than they ever had been. There was still much work to do, but we were building schools and factories and hospitals and dams, we were educating children and training adults. There were people who had never had anything at all who now had at least a little land under their control and a future to look forward to.
At the same time it took constant, constant vigilance. For every hundred descamisados who worshipped Che, there was one bitter former bank manager or estancia owner who hated him with a desperate, suicidal fury. There were lots of guns around because of the militias. So it was not safe for Che, or even for me, to walk the streets.
Che was a gregarious, social person, and living in that kind of isolation was poisonous to him. Back in Cuba, he would go out every Sunday morning to participate in the voluntary labor crews and work beside the people—cutting sugar cane, loading trucks.
It was hard for me, too. I love music and dancing, especially the Argentine folk dances, the zamba and the chacarera. These are dances you do in the square at the Feria de Mataderos, with dozens of other couples and hundreds of people watching and clapping along. It’s not the same when you’re locked away in the Casa Rosada.
So, from time to time, we would disguise ourselves and go out in the streets with one or two bodyguards. Yes, it was dangerous, but without being able to do that, our lives would not have been worth much.
It was a Sunday, and we were in Plaza Dorrego, in the old San Telmo neighborhood. You know the flea market there, with vendors in the streets, tango orquestas and tango dancers, marionettes, painters, mimes, thousands of people all enjoying themselves, locals and tourists alike.
And there, down Calle Defensa, sitting against a corrugated steel shopfront, was this one waiflike girl, wearing a turban and playing a steel bowl. She was unearthly, pale, all in white, with a beautiful elfin face and an immensely long scarf. The bowl had indentations in it, like steel drum, and
she ran her fingers over it to make it vibrate in these different pitches while she sang in a language I couldn’t understand. A dozen people sat cross-legged on the cobblestones, watching her. The music was very quiet, and it seemed to make a zone of silence around her. You could hear every sound she made over the crowd and the bandoneons and the touts.
She paid no attention to any of us. After singing and playing for another five minutes, she put the bowl aside, set the cushion she’d been sitting on next to the wall, and stood on her head, facing out to the street.
Che was captivated. He crouched next to her and tried to talk to her. Very quickly he saw that she didn’t have much Spanish, so he changed to French.
“What language were you singing in?” Che asked her.
“Gurmukhi.”
“Gurmukhi? What kind of language is that? Did you make it up?”
“It’s from India.”
“And your instrument? Is that from India too?”
“Switzerland.”
She seemed to know how absurd it was for Che to be squatting there and talking to an upside-down woman, but didn’t seem to care—as if she had nothing better to do at the moment. As for me, I was terribly uncomfortable, as you can imagine. It’s difficult to stand by and watch a man you admire make a fool of himself over a woman. It’s something better done in private.
“Where did you learn to stand on your head like that?”
“From Yogi Bhajan.”
“And who is that?”
“My teacher.”
Che was not one to give up easily. “What is your name?” he asked her.
“Agochar.”
“Is that really the name you were born with?”
“It’s the name I use.”
“And are you not going to ask me my name?”
“I know who you are.”
This snapped me to attention.