Source: “Labor, Women, and Populism, Argentina”
On October 17, 1946, in an incredible display of popular power, masses of protesters entered the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina to demand that the populist leader Juan Perón be released from prison and returned to the presidential office. For many, the memory of the pivotal moment of Argentine history has become a touchstone of Argentine national identity. By analyzing the recollections of one prominent union activist, we find that this memory pinned Argentina as a nation to sense of emancipation from working-class suffering. When historian Daniel James interviewed María Roldán in the 1990s about the rally in 1946, her own affective attachment to Perón and the people of Argentina was strongly based in a sense of deep, shared pathos. In the interchange, she first described the lives of the working poor with details of run-down tenements, filth and material poverty, long hours, dashed hopes, and broken bodies. She identified herself as one of this weathered, sorrow-filled multitude: when a politician asked her who she was, she remembered replying only, “I am a woman who cuts meat with a knife bigger than I am in the Swift meatpacking house.” Here, María Roldán dissolved her identity as an individual into the sea of dispossessed and exploited poor. When she later remembered Juan Perón and his memorable speech to the protesters, she presented him as both empathizer and savior. “Because I have seen you weep…” she remembered him imploring, forging a bond of sympathy and shared suffering with this disenfranchised working class. “First I will raise up the weakest,” he then promised, “[and together we will] rescue the Argentine people from the pain in which it is submerged.” The reader can almost hear María Roldán’s heart stir at the mere memory of these words. What is clear from the interview is that a Catholic reverence for suffering and succor underscored her sense of national identity, which she equated with the poor. It must be remembered, however, that this interview was conducted decades after the event described, and therefore it may not accurately capture what inspired and motivated Roldán or other activists in the 1940s. In that sense, it is a better measure of what national identity meant to (at least some of) the working class in subsequent decades. Argentina, according to Roldán, is a promise of release from suffering.
Source: “World Proletarian Revolution, Peru”
The guerrilla army known as the “Shining Path” terrorized Peru in the 1980s and 1990s as it waged war against the national government. Yet while it had its sights set on national leaders and oligarchs, it was not to national liberation or rebirth that the army aspired. The Shining Path did not envision a better Peru. Instead, when we read the words of its founding leader, Abimael Guzman, we see that the Shining Path aspired to a world without nation-states. In his famous “We are the Initiators” speech, which Guzman delivered to his guerrilla warriors to announce the beginning of the armed struggle in April of 1980, he made no reference at all to the Peru or Peruvians or the Peruvian nation-state. Guzman instead explained that over the centuries “the class struggle [created] the ultimate class: the international proletariat [i.e. working class]” and that the mission of the Shining Path was to now instigate “the strategic offensive of the World Revolution.” Evidently, at least in Guzman’s perspective, the age of the nation-state was coming to an end and achieving a truly just and equal society would require not national liberation, but global solidarity among the working class and poor. The only nation-states he did mention were “the United States, the Soviet Union, and other powers,” whom he characterized as “imperialist powers” and enemies of the World Revolution. Although Peru and other Latin American nation-states were not mentioned in Guzman’s speech, it was implied that these too were obstacles to achieving the new world order. Despite Guzman’s stridency and evident sincerity, there are good reasons to be suspect of this source as evidence of the mission and goals of the Shining Path. Guzman was a university professor who had frequently traveled to communist China, but the guerrilla soldiers who fought under his leadership were mostly drawn from the peasantry and urban lower classes. It is therefore quite possible, even likely, that the warriors of the revolutionary army had quite different objectives and hopes for the outcome of their struggle – perhaps hopes more tied to brighter future for the Peruvian nation. That conclusion, however, would require much more evidence – testimonies, letters, diaries – that could attest to such sentiments. In sum, outwardly the Shining Path waged war on the state to achieve global transformation – a post-national epoch; inwardly, though, they may have told a different story.
