million. Despite this ongoing social transformation, Córdoba retained a placid, provincial air in the 1940s. Surrounded by the limitless yellow pampa, its horizons broken only by the blue ranges of the sierras, Córdoba was still mostly untouched by the industrialization and construction boom that was rapidly turning Buenos Aires into a modern metropolis.
As the site of the country’s first university, founded by Jesuits, and with many old churches and colonial buildings, Córdoba had earned a reputation as a center of learning, and
cordobeses
were proud of their cultural heritage. The city’s leading role in education had been secured in 1918 when Radical Party students and teachers at the University of Córdoba spear-headed the University Reform movement that guaranteed university autonomy. The movement had spread beyond Córdoba to Argentina’s other universities and throughout much of Latin America. Dolores Moyano recalled the Córdoba of her youth as “a city of bookstores, religious processions, student demonstrations, and military parades; a city gentle, dull, almost torpid on the surface but simmering with tensions.”
Those tensions burst out shortly after the Guevaras arrived. On June 4, 1943, in Buenos Aires, a cabal of military officers banded together and overthrew President Castillo, who had named as his successor a wealthy provincial strongman with ties to British corporate monopolies. Early reaction to the coup was guardedly positive among both liberal Argentines who regarded Castillo’s pro-German administration with suspicion and nationalists fearing further encroachment by foreign economic interests.
Within forty-eight hours a leader had emerged: the war minister General Pedro Ramírez, representing the military’s ultranationalist faction. Very quickly, he took measures to silence all domestic opposition. Declaring a state of siege, his regime postponed elections indefinitely, dissolved the congress, gagged the press, intervened in the country’s universities, and fired protesting faculty members. In a second wave of edicts at the year’s end, all political parties were dissolved, compulsory religious instruction in schools was decreed, and even stricter press controls were established. In Córdoba, teachers and students took to the streets in protest. Arrests followed, and in November 1943 Alberto Granado and several other students were imprisoned in Córdoba’s central jail, behind the colonnades of the old whitewashed
cabildo
on the city’s Plaza San Martín. Granado’s brothers and Ernesto visited him there, bringing him food and news of the outside world.
The weeks dragged by, with no sign that the students were to be charged or released any time soon. An underground “prisoners’ committee” asked Córdoba’s secondary school students to march in the streets and demand that the detainees be freed. Alberto asked the fifteen-year-old Ernesto if he would join, but he refused. He would march, he said, only if given a revolver. He told Alberto that the march was a futile gesture that would accomplish little.
In early 1944, after a couple of months in detention, Alberto Granado was released. Despite Ernesto’s refusal to demonstrate on his behalf, their friendship remained intact. In light of his penchant for daredevil stunts, Ernesto’s unwillingness to help his friend is striking. And, given his extreme youth and apparent unconcern with Argentine politics, his “principled” stance seems dubious. This paradoxical behavior of making radical-sounding declamations while displaying complete apathy about political activism was a pattern during Ernesto’s youth.
III
As yet unknown to most of the public, a key figure behind the political changes taking place in Argentina was an obscure army colonel with a fleshy face and Roman nose whose name—Juan Domingo Perón—would soonbe very familiar. After returning from a posting in Mussolini’s Italy, where he became a fervent admirer of
As the site of the country’s first university, founded by Jesuits, and with many old churches and colonial buildings, Córdoba had earned a reputation as a center of learning, and
cordobeses
were proud of their cultural heritage. The city’s leading role in education had been secured in 1918 when Radical Party students and teachers at the University of Córdoba spear-headed the University Reform movement that guaranteed university autonomy. The movement had spread beyond Córdoba to Argentina’s other universities and throughout much of Latin America. Dolores Moyano recalled the Córdoba of her youth as “a city of bookstores, religious processions, student demonstrations, and military parades; a city gentle, dull, almost torpid on the surface but simmering with tensions.”
Those tensions burst out shortly after the Guevaras arrived. On June 4, 1943, in Buenos Aires, a cabal of military officers banded together and overthrew President Castillo, who had named as his successor a wealthy provincial strongman with ties to British corporate monopolies. Early reaction to the coup was guardedly positive among both liberal Argentines who regarded Castillo’s pro-German administration with suspicion and nationalists fearing further encroachment by foreign economic interests.
Within forty-eight hours a leader had emerged: the war minister General Pedro Ramírez, representing the military’s ultranationalist faction. Very quickly, he took measures to silence all domestic opposition. Declaring a state of siege, his regime postponed elections indefinitely, dissolved the congress, gagged the press, intervened in the country’s universities, and fired protesting faculty members. In a second wave of edicts at the year’s end, all political parties were dissolved, compulsory religious instruction in schools was decreed, and even stricter press controls were established. In Córdoba, teachers and students took to the streets in protest. Arrests followed, and in November 1943 Alberto Granado and several other students were imprisoned in Córdoba’s central jail, behind the colonnades of the old whitewashed
cabildo
on the city’s Plaza San Martín. Granado’s brothers and Ernesto visited him there, bringing him food and news of the outside world.
The weeks dragged by, with no sign that the students were to be charged or released any time soon. An underground “prisoners’ committee” asked Córdoba’s secondary school students to march in the streets and demand that the detainees be freed. Alberto asked the fifteen-year-old Ernesto if he would join, but he refused. He would march, he said, only if given a revolver. He told Alberto that the march was a futile gesture that would accomplish little.
In early 1944, after a couple of months in detention, Alberto Granado was released. Despite Ernesto’s refusal to demonstrate on his behalf, their friendship remained intact. In light of his penchant for daredevil stunts, Ernesto’s unwillingness to help his friend is striking. And, given his extreme youth and apparent unconcern with Argentine politics, his “principled” stance seems dubious. This paradoxical behavior of making radical-sounding declamations while displaying complete apathy about political activism was a pattern during Ernesto’s youth.
III
As yet unknown to most of the public, a key figure behind the political changes taking place in Argentina was an obscure army colonel with a fleshy face and Roman nose whose name—Juan Domingo Perón—would soonbe very familiar. After returning from a posting in Mussolini’s Italy, where he became a fervent admirer of
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