The annotation is from July 23. John crisis. In his own words: ‘I am going to desert the ministry’, he told me at 11 in the morning, and he confined himself to his house. From three to seven in the evening I keep him company. Then she interviews Alfonsín”.
who writes is Juan Carlos Torre, sociologist, historian, perhaps the most important Peronologist given by the local intelligentsia, and also the right-hand man of Juan Vital Sourrouille, the Minister of Economy who in that July of 1988 was, like the country, on the verge of exploding. The writing is one of the many dramatic fragments that has “Diary of a season on the fifth floor”, the book that Edhasa has just published. There Torre declassifies, for the first time, the almost periodic notes that he took during the six years he worked as a political adviser on the top floor of the Palacio de Hacienda, at a time when the memory of the dictatorship was very fresh. The result is as revealing as it is shocking.
“The kitchen of power was never told like this,” Torre tells NOTICIAS. It is that the more than 500 pages of the book open the door to a world until now reserved for the dome of the red circle, which is narrated in the first person, in real time and that is published without changing a comma from its original. The text reveals like never before the backstage at the top of politics, the internal brawls of a government, the undisguised pressure from the IMF, the betrayals of the opposition and their own, the doubts of the ruling party towards its president, and also the stark first-person account of how suffocating it is to be in charge of a country like Argentina. “I would like the future to be already written, so that I can read it and thus achieve better cope with the anxiety with which I accompany this steep march of the car pulled by Alfonsín”, says Torre on June 2, 1986. At the end of the following year, with the hyperinflation that was going to end up burdening that government looming just around the corner, he notes: “I returned home depressed at the very likely prospect to see my friends destroyed in the short term by the crisis that is advancing, inexorably”.
The book, which since it came out has become the political work of the moment, is disturbing because what Torre says almost forty years have passed but it could have been written yesterday. A cracked country, on the verge of economic collapse, squeezed by monstrous debts, galloping inflation, and with a society always on the verge of bursting. “The four years of Alfonsín have been four years of strikeouts, full of improvisations, because it has become clear that the majority of the government had not been preparing for it. Only the fresh memory of the recent past explains that, after four years of so many difficulties, this government is still in office”, he writes on January 11, 1988.
News: Does the Argentine crisis have a solution?
Juan Carlos Tower: Having lived since my distant youth in the shadow of “the cycles of illusion and disenchantment” that have marked our contemporary history, my answer is: I don’t know.
News: Throughout the book, Alfonsín’s position of trying to get along with everyone is critically commented on, thus leaving all flanks open and not solving the big problems. The question that arises is: was he a good president?
Tower: We Argentines were fortunate that in 1983 a leader with the moral qualities, social sensitivity and political intelligence of Alfonsín was elected. The objective that was proposed was very demanding: to get the different political and social forces to get on the train that had as its destination the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another and prevent them from getting off it looking for other paths. With that goal, he maintained more than once that he aspired to govern for 80% of the population. This involved a constant effort to prevent the creation of a convulsive situation that would open the door to the rebellion of the Armed Forces. This framework added one more condition to the economic policies that were already bearing the weight of the foreign debt and the reactivation of distributive conflicts. In these circumstances, the tactic of kicking problems forward often earned us a critical comment on the Fifth Floor. Judged from a distance, I tend to see in it a resource of “good governance” in the difficult circumstances of the country.
News: A phrase that caught my attention in your book is when you speak of the probable victory of the post-Alfonsín Peronists and affirm that this movement “is more attractive by giving a place to hope.” Can you develop that idea? Could the crisis of the current government be due to the fact that it can no longer sell “hope”?
Tower: In political studies it is often said that it is the governments that win or lose the elections because it is they and not the opposition that present themselves to the elections with their record of service, to be rewarded or punished by the vote. At the end of its difficult six years in office, the balance of the radical management left much to be desired. It was not surprising that a majority of voters looked at the offer proposed by Peronism to renew the hope that democracy would provide an answer to their demands. In the results of the recent elections, the postulate has been fulfilled again because it was the Government that lost, since for many of those who had voted for them, their service record also left something to be desired. We will see if in the remainder of his mandate he is capable of renewing hope.
News: You narrate what was the tremendous blow that losing the legislative elections of 1987 meant for Alfonsinism, from which it did not recover. Will the same thing happen to the Front of All?
Tower: The Frente de Todos, as Alfonsín did at the time, has just made its own ministerial replacement after the recent electoral setback. Will this decision allow you to overcome the current situation? We do not know; What we do know is that two years after Alfonsín’s cabinet changed, the UCR lost the elections.
News: How was the process that led you to keep the diary?
Tower: For someone dedicated to reconstructing stories from a distance, from the academic field, the possibility of glimpsing how stories were forged was a great blessing. And very soon I got down to work to leave a record of the episodes that I had at my fingertips. In addition to its documentary value, of course filtered by my own personal vision, the book has a pedagogical value: it alerts those who intend to give their opinion on economic matters or want to get involved by showing how complex management is in the midst of political restrictions.
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