The coup of 43, a many-headed monster
The fascist, clerical, anti-modern, and Hispanicist coup d'état of June 4, 1943, put an end to the reformist, progressive, republican, and liberal project that had begun after the fall of Rosas and that began to see its decline with the coup of September 1930. The 1943 coup d'état was driven by Generals Rawson, Ramírez, Farrell, and Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, who, within the dictatorship, put together the political project that would bring him to power in 1946, adopting the political and ideological guidelines of the 1943 coup, characterized by alignment with fascism, anti-liberalism, and Catholic nationalism of Hispanic roots. From what has been said, we can affirm that Peronism was born within an illegal government.
The dictatorship that emerged from the 1943 coup was a multi-headed monster, and Colonel Juan Domingo Perón's was the most significant. By late 1943, his power within the de facto government was so strong that Ramírez became a figurehead; power rested in Perón's hands, and he would soon realize his dream of becoming a Creole ducetto .
The coup was greeted with jubilation and acquiescence by the Catholic Church, which saw in it not only the opportunity to advance the project of the "Catholic nation," but also the opportunity to put an end to liberal secularism in education and the liberal project as a whole. This required an alliance between the Church and the Army.
This alliance between the sword and the cross meant that the Church took power after the 1943 coup, a power it had always had in other respects but never managed to translate into a political project aimed at restoring Catholicism.
The first thing that had to be done was to replace critical thinking and the project of individual and collective autonomy (characteristic of liberalism) with dogma. It was necessary to repeal Law 1420 on common, secular, free, and compulsory education (if not all of it, at least what had to do with secularism), passed in 1884 during Roca's first presidency at the urging of Sarmiento, that dirty word for Catholic nationalism, Peronism, and the left.
This law had lifted a large portion of the population out of illiteracy. The preliminary debates leading up to its passage focused on the religious issue, and it was the Minister of Justice and Public Education, Eduardo Wilde, who effectively defended Roca's views: "We therefore agree that the Argentine State has no religion, although all its inhabitants may have whatever they wish (...) In that case, no religion should be taught in its schools." This scenario of liberal secularism began to change with the coup of September 1930. Anti-secularist preaching began within the state, while Octavio Pico made statements against "schools without God." Thus, the dictatorship issued a decree repealing Article 8 of Law 1420, the first of which stipulated: "In all public primary, post-primary, secondary, and special schools, the teaching of the Catholic religion will be taught as a regular subject in the respective curricula." They were to be taught by teachers “appointed by the government, with appointments made to persons authorized by the ecclesiastical authority.”
But the tutelary measure over primary and secondary schools, intended to prevent students from developing critical thinking, was not the dictatorship's only objective; its power also needed to expand to the universities. With Gustavo Martínez Zuviría as Minister of Justice and Public Education, Tomás Casares was appointed intervener of the University of Buenos Aires, and Jordán Bruno Genta was appointed intervener of the National University of Litoral. Furthermore, the National College of Buenos Aires was renamed the San Carlos University College (as it had been in colonial times), and Juan R. Sepich was appointed rector. This only confirmed the state and religious tutelage over all levels of education; both the left, whose political project is based on indoctrination, and the unions; Peronism, the left, and the unions have been faithful heirs to the educational precepts of the 1943 coup. As we see, fascism is not only right-wing but also Peronist and left-wing. Universities were intervened, and intellectuals and teachers who questioned Martínez Zuviría's mandates were dismissed.
The 1943 coup was, finally, the long-awaited moment to put an end to liberal hegemony. But it is the fascists of the left and right who, if a dictatorship violates their rights, proclaim the validity of the Constitution, the restoration of liberties, and respect for human rights, deliberately ignoring the fact that constitutionalism, the validity of full liberties, and human rights are historical creations inherent to liberal thought. Thus, the cultural model implemented by the 1943 dictatorship and by the Peronism that emerged with it was that of anti-liberal and anti-republican Catholic nationalism, which, among other things, imposed the stereotype of the "national being," whatever that concept may be.
Some of the doctrinal positions of Argentine Catholicism (anti-liberal and anti-modern) were expressed by the magazine Criterio , and it was Monsignor Franceschi who warned in the 1940s about the disintegration of societies as a result of the global secularization process that began with the Renaissance. The rationalism and liberalism that emerged in the Modern Age are the themes Catholicism combated. Why? Because they competed with the Church's perspective, always tempted to align itself with left-wing and right-wing fascisms due to its anti-liberal nature. Not surprisingly, many Christians would embark on a path that would lead them to the Third World and communist positions of the 1960s.
Fascism and communism produced a crisis of legitimacy for liberal Western democracies in the interwar period. This was evident in the liberal world and also in Argentina, where first fascism and then the left worked to establish a dictatorship. These fascisms have now metamorphosed and are manifested in the form of equally anti-liberal and anti-democratic populisms.
I close with the words of Tulio Halperín Donghi in The Impossible Republic. 1930-1945 : “And very soon, a supposedly secret proclamation also began to circulate clandestinely that seemed to confirm the worst of those suspicions, in that it presented a revolutionary leadership determined to treasure the lessons offered by the dazzling triumphs achieved by Germany in the ongoing war, which it attributed to the strict political and social discipline imposed by the regime in power there, and to follow them both in the choice of the instruments it would use to govern and in the objectives it was prepared to use them to serve, mobilizing all national resources as only a totalitarian regime could do to dedicate them to the conquest of Argentine hegemony over the South American continent.”
Bachelor of History (UNLP)
By Juan Carlos Álvarez Gelves
lanacion
