Plaza San Martín is far from full. There must have been a little more than a hundred people. Like every October 6, many gather there to honor those “fallen by subversion” during the last military dictatorship. Among the public is Alejandro Biondini, the most famous philonazi in the country, the leader Cecilia Pandothe former carapintada Jorge Breide Obeid and also a then unknown Victoria Villarruel. It is October 6, 2006 and images of “terrorists” are projected from a stage, while a political trial is demanded for each one: Jorge Taiana, Eduardo Luis Duhalde, Miguel Bonasso, Horacio Verbitsky and Mirian Lewin, among others.
As usually happens every year, there is a counter-march in repudiation of the event. They range from left-wing organizations to human rights organizations. Fights and shootings are the order of the day, and if it were not for a strong police presence the situation would escalate even more.
One of those who stands on the front line of combat is Cristian Rodrigo Iturralde. In a street interview he gives to TVR he can be seen with his left arm raised, straight, pointing towards the sky. “Why the Nazi salute while singing the anthem?” the chronicler asks him. “Well, look, Nazi… that’s what the Romans did. I mean, he doesn’t have to be a Nazi, he did it too ‘the Duce’ (by Musssolini). Everyone puts it up for a reason to make Argentine nationalism look bad with the raised arm. It is true that there are groups of skinheads here and well, it is a public event, although we have many things in common with many of them, right?” says a young Iturralde.
Fascism for export. Almost twenty years have passed since then. Iturralde already has some gray hair, while he says he is more “moderate” since he deepened his streak as a practicing Christian. “Before we went to the streets a lot, we came across leftist groups that vandalized Iglesias, he was more of a shock militant. Then I turned to writing and realized that the battle was on the other side, and I started finding good people elsewhere. And I have friends who are left-wing, I have Jewish friends, I began to realize that you have to see more about the person than what they publicly manifest,” he says now, in dialogue with NOTICIAS.
Another new element is that Iturralde went from being one of the public that gathered in Plaza San Martín to having a back-and-forth dialogue with some of the great priests of the new right in the region. Last year he had a meeting with the Chilean José Antonio Kastand in September Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of the former Brazilian president whom many see as his successor, invited him to CPAC. That is the “Conservative Action Political Conference”, the most famous regional meeting of ultra-conservatives on the continent that usually has Trump and Lula’s predecessor among its members. “Satisfaction to personally know the author of ‘The Frankfurt School and the Beginning of the New Left,’” he uploaded Eduardo to his Twitter account, the day they met, in July.
Satisfaction, being in São Paulo, knowing personally about the Argentine writer Cristian Iturralde @CRIturralde1 author of, among other works, A Escola de Frankfurt eo início da Nova Esquerda. pic.twitter.com/m3B0LjF6LY
— Eduardo Bolsonaro🇧🇷 (@BolsonaroSP) July 11, 2023
The Brazilian had read that book at the beginning of the year and since then he has been looking to get to know it. In the region some say that Iturralde – who also wrote “The Inquisition, court of mercy”, “1492, the end of barbarism” and “The Perón Israel pact” – is one of the advisors of Bolsonaro’s son. He denies it, although they have now just published a book together. It is “Cultural War”, a work that his host commanded in the neighboring country and in which he writes one of the chapters.
TO Milei He met him too. It was by chance, in 2021, and the libertarian asked him to give him his book on Perón. Iturralde says that he is going to vote for him, although he does not share all of his ideas. “But I think almost the same in everything as Villarruel,” he clarifies. Jose Benegasjournalist and liberal intellectual who wrote “The unthinkable, the curious case of liberals who mutate to fascism”, has an interpretation of this closeness: “ITurralde is the third layer of the onion that is Milei. In the first he is with his liberal rhetoric of ready-made and recently learned phrases. Then there are Laje and his alter ego Nicolás Marquez as the link with the religious nationalist. Behind it is the truth that is Iturralde, the center of the onion, a pure and simple fascist who represents the true project. All of this together represents the spirit of the old military party in which some self-perceived liberals were looking for someone to put order from above while they could have a market. “That ends very badly.”
Yodentity. “I lI raise my arm for Franscisco Franco, I claim it, I am a Francoist. I have a lot of empathy for him. But this does not imply that he is in favor of killing people. My intention is the common good, and in my opinion at that historical moment Franco gave it to Spain,” says Iturralde.
News: But fascism comes attached to violence as a way of doing politics.
Iturralde: I refer to that historical process where there were more violent moments. Today you can’t go look for a guy in the house and kill him, I don’t agree with those things. But I am interested in determination in values that are non-negotiable for me, such as the defense of the homeland.
News: But fascism is not indivisible from killing people, from political violence.
Iturralde: I talk about not killing people unless there is a war. There, unfortunately, there is no other way; one already has the responsibility to defend one’s own life and that of those who are being unjustly violated. But it is a difficult topic because any attitude would seem to be taken as fascist.
News: It is in line with what Milei said in the last debate about the dictatorship.
Iturralde: I agree with what he said. There was a war, which began in a constitutional government. A threat had to be repelled. Human rights are difficult to guarantee in a war, I agree with the army’s action except of course on the issue of disappearances that should have been handled. But I do agree with the government’s reaction to the terrorists. I do not mourn a single one of these eight thousand disappeared.
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