Of Revolutionaries and Victims
I will soon be 50 years old. The optimism of the will tells me that I have just reached the middle of life. But the pessimism of reason whispers that I am approaching, slowly but surely, old age. These are not contradictory statements. And both sit well with me. My mentioning age has nothing to do with biology: It’s because just at this moment, the figure of my old man appears at the center of my musings, finally. He was the top leader of the most important Guevarist guerrilla group in Argentina, the People’s Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, ERP). Some still remember him as Comandante Robi—not only the comrades who survived him, but also young people who admire his example.
Mario Roberto Santucho died on July 19, 1976, in a gun battle with the army, in the midst of the military dictatorship. During the same confrontation, my mother, Liliana Delfino, and three other senior leaders of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores, PRT), the political party ERP was associated with, were kidnapped. All of them are still missing. Some say that this was the final episode of the struggle that had begun in 1969 with the popular insurrection known as “the Cordobazo.” The defeat of the revolutionary dream was becoming evident. Neoliberalism began to impose itself.
I was saved because at the beginning of that year, just a baby then, I was sent to Cuba with other family members, who sensed that a coup d’état was imminent. I returned to the country in 1993, having just reached the age of majority. And I was part of the generation that put the brakes on neoliberal hegemony in December 2001. We were protagonists in the great social rebellion that created the conditions for the emergence of a wave of progressive governments across South America. I participated in the Colectivo Situaciones, a militant research experience that made a specific contribution to the conceptual elaboration of recent struggles.
Among the theoretical operations that we deployed at the beginning of the century, there was one that specifically consisted in settling accounts with our parents’ generation. Although they had been extraordinarily courageous, risking their own lives to defy power, we dared to question several of their conceptions, casually and without solemnity. “To be like them, one has to change,” we said. We wanted to recover the essence of their purpose while innovating as much as necessary on form. This earned me the resentment of those who just wanted to copy them, again and again.
We proposed inverting the order of things: The key to social change lies in the rebellious multitude and in the counterpowers that develop from below, and not so much in enlightened vanguards or charismatic leaders. Virtuous transformation is guaranteed by an organized community determined to emancipate and capable of offering new visions of happiness; the dynamics of warlike confrontation often subordinate, or even undercut, popular energy because they confront power with its own weapons. The new insurgencies demonstrated instead that the alternative to capitalism arose from generating change on the ground and the power of horizontal cooperation, rather than from the capture of the state by a few liberating masters.
Today, history has taken an unexpected turn and the times force us to reevaluate some assumptions that were quite obvious to the revolutionaries who preceded us. First, political conflict implies accepting the enemy’s existence. Then, defeating the enemy requires great commitment, serious discipline, perhaps a certain dose of heroism. Contrary to what triumphant narratives suggest, we never believed that our fathers and mothers became martyrs because they were too narcissistic or an uncontrolled messianism confused them. Even less did we consider them to have been mere victims. This is the most difficult thing to retrace. Going beyond the subjectivation of human rights is not a simple task. And yet that is what it’s all about.
A Moment of Danger
Javier Milei has just completed one year in government. His administration can be considered successful if we evaluate it on its own terms, even though most Argentines are having a very bad time. He became a worldwide phenomenon thanks to the radicalism with which he has challenged the established order. And unlike most progressive politicians, who become more moderate once in power, the extreme right seems determined to capitalize on social unrest and hatred of the elites. Donald Trump’s return to the White House confirms that we are facing a political phenomenon of unsuspected consequences.
It is well known that this reactionary global movement was the doing of a handful of organic intellectuals who appropriated certain key ideas forged by the left in the 20th century. The notion of counter-hegemony proposed by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci is the most obvious example, and it indicates that the pretensions of “the engineers of chaos,” as Giuliano da Empoli called them in his 2019 book, do not consist simply in winning elections in order to control the state machinery. The “Decalogue of Mileista Action” presented in December 2024 by the Argentine libertarian party (La Libertad Avanza) has a provocative heading: “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
The unprecedented capture of the revolutionary imaginary by the populist internationale is plagued with contradictions and inconsistencies, but it is credible because, among other things, its main referents break with everything that smacks of political correctness. There is in this impudence an effective questioning of liberal hypocrisy, which proclaims universal rights yet produces ever-greater inequality and injustice. The first president of post-dictatorship Argentina, Raúl Alfonsín, in one of his most memorable speeches, proclaimed: “With democracy you can eat, with democracy you can educate, with democracy you can cure…” Forty years and ten governments later, poverty has reached record levels, and the public education and health systems are in a galloping crisis.
The great paradox of the present is that the criticism of democracy comes from an ultra-capitalist program rather than from a revolutionary alternative that denounces democracy’s imperfection for being built on the private ownership of the means of production, with the structural inequality that this implies. This gesture, which is simultaneously contentious and conservative, includes promoting heroic figures and calling on them to save the world: the mega-millionaires. Milei has recited this formula in all the business forums he has attended, especially in Davos. In his harangues, he denounces the stigma surrounding tycoons and invites them to embrace, with self-awareness, their role as subjects of history. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the best exponents of this “storming of the skies” by the rich.
This reactionary ideological operation is so powerful that it has succeeded in paralyzing us. We are literally disarmed. “It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.” Thus concludes the manifesto of the young Luigi Mangione, whose killing of an insurance company executive on Dec. 4 was a flash of lightning in the dark night of voluntary servitude, whether one thinks his crime was just or intolerable. The Argentine philosopher Diego Sztulwark considers that such an act can be deemed heroic in one specific respect: A hero is the person who summons the virtual, unmanifested forces of a community to rebel against an oppressive power. The appeal can work and unleash an uprising. Or it can be forgotten.
Borges, Walsh and After
In 1944 Jorge Luis Borges published Ficciones, his famous book of short stories. The shortest of these literary pieces is entitled “Tema del traidor y del héroe” (“Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”). It deals with an imaginary episode, which is nevertheless historically situated, for the writer’s “narrative convenience.” “The action takes place in an oppressed and tenacious country,” which could be any country. A group of conspirators is preparing a popular revolt, but just before the appointed day they realize that one among them is collaborating with the enemy. And they discover something else, which is terrible: The traitor is the head of the organization. However, Kilpatrick, as the protagonist is called, admits his guilt and asks to die as a patriot. The revolutionaries then decide to hold a meeting during which the leader will be assassinated by a supposed hitman sent by the authorities—and this event will unleash the insurrection. Everything is scripted and the plan works perfectly. One hundred years later, Kilpatrick’s grandson discovers the truth about the plot, but he decides to hide it. The historian, too, is part of the script and writes a eulogy of the martyr.
The plot is chemically pure Borges. The story has a coded meaning that envelops us. Its meaning is more complex than the reasoning of mere mortals admits. Traitor and hero can be the same person, which is maddening. But the collective elaboration builds a myth that neutralizes this contradiction and imposes itself on the protagonists themselves. They are conscious pieces in a game whose rules are immutable. The foundational heroism of a national will is preserved even though incongruity nests in its bosom. Truth has nothing to do with reality itself, only with its logic. Sometimes it resembles a ruse, bordering on deception, that feeds on our secret complicity. I take this literary detour because it allows us to account for the ambivalence of heroic and treacherous drifts, which are always nonlinear and open to unforeseen combinations and revelations but which should not be elided in the name of a victimhood that pays tribute to the end of history.
The 20th century’s other great Argentine writer became a hero himself. Rodolfo Walsh founded “non-fiction” literature in 1957 with his great novel Operación Massacre (Operation Massacre). He was kidnapped by the military on March 25, 1977, after a shootout in which he was mortally wounded, like my father. He also remains missing. During those 20 years of his revolutionary mutation, his writing merged with intelligence work for the Montoneros, a left‐wing Peronist guerrilla group. Thus he conceived the idea of a “collective hero,” based on anonymous characters who embodied the resistance to the dictatorship: “This is what makes them so vulnerable and what constitutes our power; for as the people’s struggle develops, hundreds of eyes and ears begin to observe them …. We all handle some information about the enemy …. however small it may be, any piece of information is useful, because we join it with other pieces of information and thus we build up our network of information …. That is why what you know is necessary …. Comrade, you have something to contribute, do not deny it.” In a way Walsh is the opposite of Borges, because he maintains that “there is more richness in reality than in fiction.” The challenge is to liberate the enormous social potential that remains dormant. Literature and politics are united around this objective.
After the blood-and-fire defeat of the emancipation movement, criticizing any heroic inclination was in order. This has meant not only rejecting the attempt of the 1970s, but also (and above all) establishing a new regime of subjectivation around the figure of the victim, who now became the protagonist of the national democratic drama. The other great slogan of the Alfonsín transition, coined by another of great man of our literature, Ernesto Sábato: “never again” to genocidal state repression, but at the same time, goodbye to the project of a revolutionary transformation. And so democracy returned, in 1983, shackled by terror, devoid of any redemptive promise. In these circumstances, the victim not only became defined by the refusal to deploy a new radicalism; now, the victim also had a strategy of demanding recognition and reparation from the State. Their starting point is to cede their own power. They are not a political actor; they are a subject of rights that are no longer to be conquered but requested.
The Unarmed Critique
Three influential books published this century present as exemplary victims people who collaborated with the enemy during the military regime. The first appeared in 2007 and is entitled Traiciones (Betrayals). Its author, Ana Longoni, is a leading researcher on the relationship between art and politics. Her aim is to question the militarism of revolutionary organizations, expressed in moral codes incapable of accepting the betrayal of those who were kidnapped. As she portrays it, the option of dying as a martyr, besides being messianic, doesn’t account for the armed forces’ cruel and sophisticated machinery of repression, which could break anyone. That is to say, everyone. When criticism focuses on the past without questioning the conditions of thought in the present, it obscures what is important. This normalizes a pious humanism very much in tune with the democrat creed. And a remarkable quid pro quo takes shape: Those who challenged the existing order become responsible for the ordeal, for not giving up their fighting spirit. The only reasonable choice becomes defeat. Resistance is no longer thinkable.
La búsqueda was published at the end of 2010 in the city of Córdoba. The author, Miguel Robles, is the son of a local police commissioner who was murdered in November 1975. The official account of the attack attributed it to the left-wing Montoneros organization. But Robles, also a policeman, discovered many years later that his father actually was killed by the right-wing paramilitary apparatus. His book is a key piece in that historical revelation. It contains a long interview with Charlie Moore, a former revolutionary militant who was kidnapped on Nov. 16, 1974, and who for six years collaborated with the genocide, until he escaped to Brazil and gave testimony to international organizations, and then settled in England, isolated and stigmatized. Robles traveled there to restore Moore’s voice in the matter, driven by a powerful argument: However one ethically judges the witness, his word holds singular value for judicial processes because he knew the system from the inside. Robles’s political-editorial exercise means broadening the category of victims to include both his father, a martyr for the police, and Moore, a living symbol of betrayal. At times the book seems to suggest that even torturers can be victims—of a perverse mechanism beyond their own will. To take this merciful step requires a shift in gaze: to emphasize not a political interpretation of the facts but the human dimension of the tragedy. When the book was published, the Argentine president at the time, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, praised it: “A shocking and enlightening account, not only of the past, but perhaps even more of the present.”
La llamada: Un retrato (The Phone Call), written by the prestigious chronicler Leila Guerriero and published by Anagrama, became a bestseller as soon as it was released in January 2024. The book’s protagonist contributed to its success, as she brings magnetism and generates controversy. Silvia Labayrú was a Montonero militant when she was kidnapped by a Navy task force on Dec. 29, 1976. She was taken to Argentina’s most famous clandestine detention center, the ESMA, where she was tortured until she was “recovered”: the military’s term to designate people who agreed to collaborate with it to help annihilate comrades in arms in exchange for their own survival. Almost 50 years later Labayrú emerges with renewed splendor, displaying neither guilt nor rancor. Time and a good psychoanalysis cure everything. She has ceased to be a symbol of betrayal and is now a heroine of resilience (that artifice of neoliberal subjectivity that rises above collective defeat to give us back a little bit of pride). And so we reach the maturity stage of the progressive perspective: The revolutionary ideal was just a delirium of youth that fell far short of its objectives and that, in addition, gave the dictatorship an excuse to destroy any democratic inroads. And thank goodness that the paladins of leftism did not triumph, because then everything would very possibly have been worse.
The book’s huge sales cannot hide the banality of this publishing operation. Revolutionary zeal is resurfacing today with devastating force, in the hands of an ultra-right that has no qualms vindicating fascism. To say that enmity is the nucleus of truth in politics is to state the obvious. And violence is once again the ultimate means of conflict resolution. But something even more disconcerting, almost epitaphic, is happening, too. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, better known as Bifo, stated this with particular clarity in a recent interview with the Argentine newspaper Perfil: “The lesson we have to learn from what is happening in Gaza is a terminal lesson. Victims can emancipate themselves from their role as victims only if they transform themselves into executioners.” The genocidal drift of the Zionist state is a clear demonstration that the condition of victim does not possess dignity in itself. Unlike the proletarian subject of Marx or the oppressed subject of Fanon, who carry within themselves the potential for general emancipation and therefore the possibility of a new society, the victim lacks a dialectic of overcoming. To emerge from the position of powerlessness, victims must transmute into perpetrators.
Truth Is Always Revolutionary
In April 2019, the U.S. government declassified 4,903 documents from different state agencies linked to the Argentine dictatorship. One of them, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency—the ineffable CIA—refers to “the incident resulting in the killing of Mario Santucho, ERP commander.” The cable is dated July 29, 1976, and provides very relevant information clarifying how ten days earlier the Argentine military had managed to find my parents’ hiding place. True to its passion for lies, the genocidal power not only made the bodies of the revolutionaries disappear, but also effectively concealed how it had gotten to them. This piece of information may seem trivial, but it had become for me a kind of personal obsession. As if in that secret there was encrypted some key to our collective destiny.
The report sent from Buenos Aires “involves sensitive intelligence sources and methods” and therefore contains several redactions. The most significant fragment reads as follows: “[redacted] medical doctor, Lopez Arguello (FNU), who had knowledge about the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), approached the Argentine army and offered to provide information on the whereabouts of top-level ERP leader Domingo Mena in exchange for the release of Lopez’s mistress who was under detention. The army agreed, and, based on Lopez’s information, in mid-July 1976 security forces located and picked up Mena in a restaurant in Buenos Aires. Mena was questioned about the whereabouts of Mario Roberto Santucho, commander of the ERP, and other ERP leaders, but he refused to reveal any information which would lead to the capture of these individuals. The authorities, however, on searching Mena, discovered a small piece of paper with an address on Venezuela Street in Villa Martelli. [redacted] a unit of the security forces was dispatched to investigate the address which turned out to be the hideout of Santucho.”
This account matches the version of events reconstructed by my father’s comrades at the time. It’s a very powerful piece of evidence, which supports their conjecture. The alleged informer, identified in the intelligence report as López Arguello, is still alive. Reading his testimonies in the justice system reveals contradictions, exaggerations, significant silences. A few months ago I asked him for an appointment and went to interview him. Before showing him the declassified CIA document, I decided to corroborate through some questions certain loose ends in his biography. There are many indications that the enigma surrounding my parent’s betrayal has finally been unraveled. Arguello denies this. But I cannot believe him. There is no apparent reason for the CIA, nor its sources in the Argentine government, to wrongly accuse him. At the same time, it hardly is advisable to take as irrefutable a piece of information provided by the kings of deception and espionage. The opposite of the truth is not a lie but uncertainty: The hypothesis can be neither confirmed nor discarded.
Now, unlike Borges’s historian, I cannot conceive of the possibility of covering up such a discovery. Because the important thing is what we do with what was done to us. How can we assess the act of trading in a comrade to save the life of a loved one? The examples that inspired the literature I mentioned above involved the experience of torture and captivity in clandestine centers of detention, torture and extermination. A person can be subjected to such dehumanization that there comes a point at which we can no longer answer for our actions. We become unaccountable, these analyses conclude. And anyone who hasn’t been through that ordeal had better refrain from even hinting at having an opinion, says the canon. “She is unsettled by people who say ‘I am not the one to judge’ because the phrase itself implies a judgment,” we read in La Llamada. In the case at hand, the victim’s confidante was in full possession of his capacity to choose. But once victimhood sets in, its elasticity tends to be infinite.
Pious humanism is the politically correct way out of the old dilemma of distinguishing the hero from the traitor. On the one hand, it illuminates the suffering that underlies every act of disloyalty and it awakens compassion for how fragile a life is when it is oppressed and violated. On the other hand, it reveals just how much the ideal of a full and omnipotent subject resembles an unattainable and ultimately totalitarian illusion. In this way, it invites us to detach ourselves from condemnatory zeal, through a movement that is critical of ideological precepts and their pretensions of transcendence. But victimhood doesn’t renounce sentencing and it imposes acquittal. In this sense, it is a moral solution to an ethical dilemma.
The consequences of this displacement of memory are surprising: Not only do collaboration and denunciation come to seem reasonable, even justified, but acts of resistance demonstrating that power never is omnipotent are erased. Let us return to the CIA cable: “Mena was questioned about the whereabouts of Mario Roberto Santucho, commander of the ERP, and other ERP leaders, but he refused to reveal any information which would lead to the capture of these individuals.” The inversion of values is such that it’s embarrassing to mention that gesture of courage. If it ever happened: Because suspicion corrodes everything that smacks of heroism, it is usually branded as useless martyrdom. Just the opposite, the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner argued. For him, taking on the challenge that torture imposes on thought implies maintaining, even under the cruelest of inclemencies, that the individual body is the “lived index” (the authentic last instance) of any reference to truth and politics. In his 1985 book Perón: Entre la sangre y el tiempo. Lo inconsciente y la política (Perón: Between Blood and Time), he wrote: “Each body, being irreducible in its being-other, necessarily lives and elaborates in some way its continued presence in the repressive system, its acceptance or its resistance: its destiny.”
The unresolved questions of the past are emerging today as burning dilemmas. There were very worthy ways to heal the wounds caused by genocide, even the most painful ones. None of them consisted of accepting the comfortable role of victim that the cynical democracies that actually exist today are now offering us. We must look the truth in the face, especially when it is bitter, knowing that there is no possible reparation. Because our only revenge is to be happy. And collective happiness can only be achieved through an incessant struggle, which at some point becomes a fight. As in the here and now.
It is difficult to imagine a collective feat whose protagonists aren’t affected by the experience of heroism. At least until now it has always been so. This type of deep commitment is recreated according to each historical moment and acquires singular figures or modalities, which include sacrifice and putting individuality on hold for the sake of a common cause or force. Some models are more religious and others more secular; there are the super-powerful and those overflowing with love; some use force and others adopt non-violence as a principle; some crystallize in one or several people, but there are also true heroes who remain in perfect anonymity (the Chilean social outburst of 2019 had among its icons of rebellion the black dog Negro Matapacos). We do not know what the heroes and heroines to come will be like. But if we want them to grow, it is necessary to come out of the closet of victimization, to which we have been consigned to keep us in impotence.
Mario Santucho edits Revista Crisis, and wrote Bombo, El Reaparecido. He studied sociology at the University of Buenos Aires and formed part of Colectivo Situaciones.
