illia served as president between 1963 and 1966
Not realizing that step by step and laboriously it was moving towards a possible paradise, a large part of the country, impatient, chose to take a shortcut to hell. When the military, trade union and economic coup of June 1966 overthrew the government of Arturo Umberto Illia, and Juan Carlos Onganía usurped power with his paternalistic airs and his Creole-style Francoism, Argentina entered a gloomy well that cost him horrors -literally- appear.
40 years after his death, on January 18, 1983 in his adoptive settlement of Cruz del Eje, Córdoba, the figure of the ex-radical president only grows bigger. The four decades imply a figure of special significance, since they are equivalent to the time that we have been living in a democracy without interruptions; in fact, they are more years than those that Illia himself managed to live within the framework of the system for which he militated and fought.
Put into perspective, the mandate of Illia, who took office on October 12, 1963, was marked by achievements that today seem epic, and whose appreciation is further enhanced in light of the failures and obscenities of contemporary politics: significant increases in GDP, industrial and agricultural activity; reduction of public spending, inflation and red in the Budget; launch of a national literacy plan; sanction of the law of the Minimum Vital and Mobile Wage; reduction of the unemployment rate; record allocation of a quarter of the Budget to education; increase in the participation of workers in GDP; lifting the ban on Peronism, prevented from running for elections since 1955; and approval of United Nations resolution 2065, which urged the United Kingdom government to negotiate “without delay” the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands.
To these, two key issues were added, which cannot be ignored when explaining the harsh reprisals and fight plans in which some sectors embarked: the annulment of the oil contracts signed by the Frondizi government, and the sanction of the law that set maximum prices for medicines produced by foreign laboratories, declaring them “social goods”, managed by the Minister of Health, Arturo Oñativia.
realize
There were not a few “repentant” ones who questioned their destabilizing role in that period. One of the first and most notorious was the journalist Ramiro de Casasbellas, who during the presidency of the “Apostle of the Poor” was director of the magazine Primera Plana, which did not stop publishing fireships vilifying and insulting him. “What the hell was going on in 1966, when the Armed Forces blew up Argentina’s democracy without finding resistance from the people?” Casasbellas asked himself at the end of the Process: “Nothing happened. Nothing more than this: inflation of 1% per month; foreign debt decreased by one third; rise in gross domestic product at a rate of 10% per year; industrial growth of 35% in two years; 41% share of wages in income; reduction of the fiscal deficit of 25% in two years; no acquisition of companies by the State, which devoted 25% of its funds to education; no tortured, no political prisoner, no disappeared, and the greatest empire known since 1930 of freedoms, economic justice and administrative honesty”.
However, as soon as he joined La Rosada, and day after day, Illia faced a harsh and unrepentant campaign of negative psychological action, fueled by various political and economic interests. Intelligent, stubborn and not without mischief, he made his way and did not admit conditioning even from his own party, although he was not the boss, a role incarnated by Ricardo Balbín. Of course, despite not lacking achievements, his proverbial low profile did not allow him to resort to the vociferous self-promotion that is commonplace today.
In the end, neither the cancellation of the debt with the IMF (before a “review” mission, the president of the Central, Félix Elizalde, snapped at the technocrats “we are going to pay them so we do not listen to their advice anymore”), nor the recovery of real wages, nor the possibility of buying houses with 21-year Banco Provincia credits and fixed rates, prevented the CGT led by Augusto Vandor from launching a plan of struggle with hundreds of strikes and mobilizations, and twelve thousand factory takeovers.
The emergence of currents and political groups of the right and left that coincided in proposing messianic “exits”, and the reluctance of the Armed Forces in the face of the “thaw” of the Peronism that Illia espoused, were the breeding ground for a coup to appear inevitable, and will have significant social consensus. Magazines such as Confirmado, Extra, Panorama and Tía Vicenta operated in the same direction, caricaturing the President as a turtle, while the former head of the Onganía Army was portrayed as a “strong man” who had come to “save the nation”.
the citizen
After being deposed, Illia, who was born in Pergamino in 1900 and graduated as a doctor at the UBA -he is attributed puncturing sympathies from his time as a resident of the local San Juan de Dios-, withdrew from active politics, and served as doctor at Cruz del Axis. But he never stopped being linked to the Radical Civic Union.
In 1981, when Balbín died, he came to our city to accompany the funeral procession from Plaza Moreno to the Municipal Cemetery. A strenuous section along the old diagonal 74, even more demanding for a person his age. But he insisted on walking, together with the crowd that turned the funeral into an act of protest against the dictatorship. We had to insist that he sit down to rest in a family home that opened its doors to him. As throughout his life, he did not accept privileges or special treatment. He was, and he wanted to be, one more citizen.
A year and a half later, when his time came, he was veiled in the National Congress, and his last trip also became a demonstration of repudiation of a retreating Military Junta. His remains were deposited in the Panteón de los Héroes de la Revolución de 1890, in Recoleta, where Leandro N. Alem and Hipólito Yrigoyen also rest, whose company that good, austere and honest man who left an indelible legacy of exemplariness.
