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 79