The word “imberbes” It was used before and will have been used later in other contexts, but it is clear that for the dictionary of Argentine history and politics “Perón invented it”, as some of the Justicialist memes that circulate postulate. Her death was two months away when the leader pronounced it on the balcony of the Casa Rosada on May 1, 1974, exactly 50 years ago. He was angry with the groups he himself had called “wonderful youth” but now they had made him lose his patience.
“Beardless”, a word almost from the cultured register, was a little more elegant than the qualification he had applied to them 1 minute and 19 seconds earlier, when he called them “stupid people who scream“.
If the net speech is taken, the distance between one term and the other was only 19 seconds. What happened was that in the middle, Perón paused for exactly one minute, where he shouted “Perón/Evita/ the Peronist homeland“was imposed as the response to the version that the other half of the square was singing at that same moment:”Perón/Evita/the socialist Homeland“.
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The difference word was crack that divided the movement in those days, which coincided with the last of the life of the leader, who died on July 1.
But that May 1, 1974 was an incredible day. The events of the afternoon were fixed in his memory, when Perón went out to the balcony to speak to the crowd in the square for the second to last time in his life. But the morning had also been important. In Congress, during the Legislative Assembly, he had announced his “Argentine model for the national project“, a document that many specialists consider one of his most elaborate pieces and his true political testament.
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That day Perón spoke of the place that localism had to give up in favor of “continentalization.” Of third worldismand also ecology, linked to everything else. “The fight for liberation is, to a large extent, also a fight for resources and ecological preservation, and we are committed to it. The peoples of the Third World are home to the large reserves of raw materials, particularly the exhaustible ones. The time has passed when wealth could be taken by forcewith the argument of the political struggle between countries or between ideologies”.
A lucid Perón ahead of time He also talked about violence. “There was and still is blood between us,” he said and pointed to the “agents of chaos “They are those who try, in vain, to promote violence as an alternative to our irrevocable purpose of peacefully achieving self-development and Latin American integration, the only goals to prevent the year 2000 from finding us subject to any imperialism.”
In the afternoon, Perón was going to have the dramatic expression of reality before your eyes. After the coronation of the “Queen of Labor”, a tradition of the first Peronism that was maintained and that day was in charge of Isabel Peron, the tension in the square grew more and more. It seemed miraculous that the two well-differentiated and conflicting sectors did not cross paths beyond the chants.
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For that day, the CGT had wallpapered the City and the Buenos Aires suburbs with posters with the slogan “¡Compliant, General!“Although the so-called Great National Parity had not been able to compensate for the growing inflation, the unions put loyalty to the leader first. And they supported almost without ifs or buts.
The boiling point was on the side of the left wing of the movement, with a high prominence of Montoneros. Mario Eduardo Firmenich had ended their speech at a recent event in Atlanta by announcing that they would be attending the event “to personally tell the general everything we think”. The organization had also published a request clarifying that it was calling for the Plaza “despite the threats and intimidation.” enumerated kidnappings, torture and murders of militants, and measures linked to censorship, such as the closure of the magazine “El Descamisado”. They called the event “Popular Assembly of May 1” and called for people to attend to “demand the defense of salaries”, “request the repatriation of Evita’s remains”, “reclaim land and housing for the villagers” and “demand the immediate release of the Peronist prisoners”.
“The Montoneros officially maintained that if they managed to break the siege created by the Minister of Social Welfare, Jose Lopez Rega, around Perón, it would be possible for the government to orient itself towards the construction of the socialist homeland. They argued that the president’s measures against the Peronist left were due to the absence of direct contact with the people, which they defined as the essence of Peronism. Therefore, for them this act had a crucial and decisive character and there they had to make their criticisms heard and demonstrate their strength,” he explains. María Sofia Vasallodoctor in Social Sciences and master in Discourse Analysis from the UBA, in her work “The dialogue between Perón and the crowd of May 1, 1974.”
May 1, 1974: the afternoon when Perón elected
On Perón’s part, trust was broken since the deep wound that the assassination of the Cegetista leader had represented. Jose Ignatius Ruccithe leader of the movement for which the leader had the most personal affection.
With “the young people” (as he himself called them generically) he had been denying and challenging them for months. But on that sunny autumn afternoon, Perón was going to finish choosing.
Montoneros and all its fronts “made a great mobilization effort and occupied approximately between a third and half of the plaza. Circumventing the directive issued by the General not to carry signs identifying the groups, they carried them hidden inside large bombs. As the event begins with an artistic festival led by Antonio Carrizothe slogan was imposed: “We don’t want carnival, popular assembly’“, rebuilt Juan Manuel Abal Medinaof the leaders closest to the leader, in his book “Meet Perón.”
For the first time the widow of José Ignacio Rucci spoke: “There were soldiers and Montonero terrorists here. They were all murderers”
The columns of Montoneros and the JP occupied the sector of the plaza on the side of the Cathedral. From the center towards Hipólito Yrigoyen were the unions, which at the same time surrounded the box. The President, already on the balcony, was attacked with what perhaps remained as the hit pm: “What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening, General, the popular government is full of gorillas?”.
Another chorus seemed like a low blow directed at Isabel, who was next to her husband: “Don’t break the balls anymore, Evita there is only one!”
With some gestures, the President asked for silence, and started:
“Comrades: 20 years ago today, on this same balcony and on a bright day like this, I spoke for the last time to the Argentine workers. It was then that I recommended that they adjust their organizations because difficult days were coming. I was not wrong either in my assessment of the days to come or in the quality of the union organization, which was maintained for 20 years, despite these stupid people who scream”.
There came the exact minute of the pause in the speech, where the slogans of the sides overlapped. Perón returned: “I said that throughout these 20 years, the union organizations have remained unshakable, and today it turns out that some beardless people claim to have more merits than those who fought for 20 years”.
He had definitely taken sides. While in the square they heard “It’s going to end/it’s going to end/the union bureaucracy!” and “Mon-to-neros, damn!”, the general continued: “For this reason, comrades, I want this first meeting of Worker’s Day to be to pay tribute to those organizations that have maintained their organic strength and have seen the fall of its leaders murdered, without the warning having yet thundered”.
He did not name Rucci, but the Montoneros understood perfectly and went to the limit: “Rucci, traitor, greetings to Vandor! Rucci, traitor, greetings to Vandor“, they intoned. Augusto “The Wolf” Vandora metallurgical leader, who during the time of the general’s exile dreamed of a “Peronism without Perón”, had been shot dead in his office 5 years earlier.
Perón continued to praise the unions and workers, describing them as “the backbone of our Movement.” And he promised to free Argentina “not only from the colonialism that has been plaguing the Republic for so many years, but also from these infiltrators who work inside and who are treacherously more dangerous than those who work from the outside“, not to mention that most of them are mercenaries at the service of foreign money.”
Did the Montoneros leave or did Perón throw them out?
The speech was brief: it lasted just over 17 minutes. The Montoneros and related groups heard only part of it, because, disappointed by the leader, they began to leave the square. “Sawdust, sawdust, it is the people that are leaving“, they marked in the retreat. Before being silenced by their own, other stronger stanzas were heard, or already in the field of dislocation: “Attention, attention/ In the government there is a traitor named Juan Perón“, and “See, see, see / what a bunch of idiots / we voted for a dead woman, a whore and a cuckold”, in reference to Evita, Isabel and Perón himself.
Meanwhile, half of the square blessed by the leader’s speech sang: “Neither Yankees nor Marxists, Peronists!”.
The withdrawal of Montoneros was tumultuous: there were clashes with union activists, with pineapples, shovels, and with stones and chains. There were no deaths but several injuries..
Did the Montoneros leave the plaza or did Perón throw them out? It depends how you look at it. Although it was not verbalized from the box, the organization itself accepted that the general’s words enabled an instance of physical confrontation in the square. And that was an indirect way of telling them to leave.
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Fernando Vaca Narvajaone of the founders of Montoneros, reported a few years ago that the organization had gone to the Plaza “aware that the relationship was broken” and that they had to “avoid a civil confrontation.”
He said that the leader Oscar Alende He confided to them that when Perón finished his speech, already inside the Casa Rosada, he said: “Well, from time to time you have to give young people a slap on the wristbut it’s nothing”, minimizing the rudeness. And that at that same moment he instructed López Rega, to stop a massacre: “I don’t want absolutely anything to happen and you are responsible.” Perón I didn’t want another Ezeiza in the heart of Buenos Aires.
The Montonero bosses had the information that they were going to be ambushed upon arriving at the Faculty of Law, where the buses from the interior delegations had been left. But it didn’t happen.
Vaca Narvaja said that when the column deconcentrated through Callao, he made it stop to generate a political event. Let everyone see how many there were and generate the effect that Perón’s plaza had been emptied. He remembered that at one point she looked towards the balconies, in the area pituca of Callao and Alvear, and saw the people smiling: “If these guys are happy, it’s because everything is wrong“.
Juan Manuel Abal Medina tells in his book that that same night of May 1, Perón spoke with Jorge Antonio, a faithful close friend, who was in Spain. In 1983, the businessman told Gente magazine details of that conversation. He concluded that “that day was probably the bitterest of Perón’s entire life. She made him very sad, he fell down and I think, after that, I just wanted to die“.
LT / ED