IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 80

2009: 16-17; Picotti, 1998: 18).
Black people are associated to the image of
Africa and the Africans. The Western
media present the continent and its people
in a reductionist and distorted manner to
perpetuate the acritical thinking about
Otherness. This negative burden explains
why people of African descent are still
silenced and/or discriminated in America.
In most cases, the word black functions as a
remembrance and identity marker of the
slave past with a negative burden due to
centuries of slave trade. And Africans are
treated as if they were children or
bloodthirsty primitive barbarians. African
blacks appear as disabled persons, simple
beggars who will be always seeking help
from the West and showing just a very
limited rationality (Iniesta: 2009, 11, 18,
20, 32). This very negative burden is
suffered by their descendants on the other
side of the Atlantic.
Toward Peronism and at its very first time
Despite the attempts to reclaim African
blackness —by movements like Negritude
and Pan-Africanism— and the fact that
some communities and individuals used
blackness as identity reference, the largely
negative burden makes it not surprising the
mentioned western representation in
Argentina since the middle of the last
century to the present.
In 1930, the Great Depression opened a
new stage in Argentine history, marked by
far-reaching changes that broke the model
of sustained development from external
growth based on the primary sector and
agricultural exports. In the new critical
juncture, the economic model of import
substitution industrialization (ISI) or "easy
import substitution" (Rapoport: 2010, 173)
came into effect and extended to the 1940s.
Among the many consequences of this
change, the stagnation of the agricultural
activities provoked an internal migration to
urban centers for about 20 years. For
building itself, Peronism will take
advantage of this human contingent of
newcomers to Buenos Aires (Romero,
2012: 86).
The social and political atmosphere was
rarefied by authoritarian and antidemocratic
tendencies. The debut of the military in
politics occurred in September 1930. The
Infamous Decade began as an experiment

of restricted democracy using patriotic
fraud, after the overthrow of the radical
president Hipolito Yrigoyen.
After having enjoyed some improvement
with the prior radicalism during three
presidencies, the middle classes fell down.
This stage was marked by the abstention of
the radicalism and the emergence of Nazi
and fascist groups. Political participation
was restricted and the political action by
supporters of the deposed regime was
outlawed. To replace them, the aristocracy
established a corporatist regime without
relying on the popular masses, but only on
the Army (Rapoport and Seoane, 2007:
468, 491).
The outbreak of World War II centered the
fighting on the external front. The pressure
to end the neutrality drew considerable
attention within the domestic agenda. The
divisions stressed the political landscape
despite the favorable economic situation,
which brought prosperity and transformed
the industry into an important sector.
However, the key was not who would win
the war, but what would happen in the
aftermath. Economic chaos and social
explosion were foreseen (Rouquié, 1981:
327, 330-331; Romero, 2012: 101, 106108; Rapoport, 2010: 127).
In early 1943, the specter of the popular
agitation was traveling across the country.
The proliferation of popular fronts (as in
Europe) caused alarm among the ranks of
the Army. To address the risk, some young
high-ranking officers informally created a
lodge as outpost in the fight against
communism. It would be known later by its
Spanish
acronym
GOU,
which
interchangeably stands for United Officers
Group, Unification Work Group and
Government! Order! Unity! (Rouquié:
1981, 335). Many of these officers had
participated in the overthrow of Yrigoyen,
including the young Colonel Juan Domingo
Perón.
For the first time, the Army independently
and institutionally acted in the coup d'etat
of June 14, 1943. The putsch was presented
as a revolution; henceforth, it occupied the
main political scene. The pro-coup military
moved forward without bloodshed and
promised —in an early manifesto— to
bring an end to fraud and corruption
(Rouquié, 1998: 9; Romero, 2012: 109;
Torre, 2002: 17). They intended to break

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