Hardline Generals Coup

Scan page 3

The balance of power within the Argentine military has shifted decisively in favour of the ruling faction of Generals Videla and Viola after last week's abortive coup attempt by the 'hardliner" General Luciano Menendez.

Hard though it may be to distinguish between the different variants of repression proferred by the Argentine 'gorilas', there is no doubt that appreciable political differences exist not only between the army, navy and airforce but also between factions within these Their intelligence corps vie with each other for information, each controls different newspapers and has a distinct constituency inside the bourgeois political elite.

In short, after four years in power the Argentine military is reproducing the contradictions of bourgeois political competition within its 'unified' and 'organic institutionalist' infrastructure.

While there is certain scope for the manoeuvre and bargaining of 'civic' political forms, this is very limited and the normal form of resolution is typically military: the coup.

Menendez is known as the leading figure of the Pinochet school of thought in Argentina blaming Videla for being 'soft' on 'communists' despite the President's record of liquidating tens of thousands of militants.

Menendez wanted to wage a 'holy Christian crusade" in which all opponents of the Videla regime would be openly executed in a devastating pogrom.

Videla and army chief Viola, on the other hand, 'prefer the more sophisticated method of night time raids, the victims of which "disappear"

This is less emotionally satisfying for the homicidal ideologues but appreciably more efficient for the purposes of foreign policy.

One clear indication of this is the fact that the crimes of the Argentine regime have never made the impact on the international working class or even liberal opinion that was produced by those of Pinochet and his butchers in Chile.

There is a sound material cause to Menendez' particular version of the ideology of internal subversion.

Until his downfall and subsequent arrest he was commander of the powerful garrison in Cordoba, in central Argentina, the scene of the mass upsurge in 1969, in which car workers fall of the Ongania dictatorship.

Cordoba has been the centre of deepening class conflict for over a decade and outside of Buenos Aires it is the single most important industrial and political location in Argentina.

Cordobaza

The 1969 'Cordobazo' had a resounding effect within national politics as a whole and Menendez viewed the current policies of the Videla-Viola axis as inevitably leading to the reappearance of the mass movement.

It transpires that the opening chord to the symphony of 'reconstructed subversion' was the freeing of the bourgeois newspaper owner Jacobo Timmerman after nearly three years of arrest.

Timmerman is a liberal to be sure, but his guilt really lay not in the few lines of criticism he voiced but in his Jewishness, thoroughly repugnant to the Argentine military which has for decades nursed anti-semitism as an integral part of its unwritten code of conduct.

The release of Timmerman was an easy option for Videla in his attempt to resist the campaign for human rights in Argentina but it does not, either in itself or allied with the removal of Menendez, constitute a significant event for the masses.

Relief from terror and crippling economic conditions for the Argentine workers will only be found in the total defeat of the dictatorship, when its internal disintegration is forced through and driven to the point of overthrow by the mass movement itself organised behind a socialist programme.

Scan page 4

¡OCIA UST. WE day Oct ›ber age 1