Strikes against political asylum: a dark precedent in the turbulent Argentina of the 1950s

The scandalous arrest of Jorge Glas, former Ecuadorian vice president of Rafael Correa, organized by Daniel Noboa, head of state of Ecuador, at the Mexican embassy in Quito, was front page news in the world’s most important newspapers. Glas is accused verifiable cases of corruption, but this does not take away its status as political asylum. The images impress and bring politics back to prosaic times of coexistence between nations. The case had immediate consequences the breakdown of relations between Mexico and Ecuador and a state of maximum alert in the region, with countries careful to avoid alignments due to purely ideological issues based on political reasons and not on the norms of diplomacy and public international law.

In its long history of institutional transgressions, the turbulent Argentina of the 1950s records a case of notorious good neighborliness with Ecuador’s indignation against Mexico. Maybe worse. This happened during the June 1956 military uprising of a group of Peronist generals, colonels and civilians against the dictators of the Liberating Revolution, a coup movement that had overthrown Perón in September 1955. In his work “Army and Politics in Argentina 1945-1962” , historian Robert Potash argues: “In adopting its harsh anti-Peronist policy, the Aramburu government had to consider the possibility of counter-revolutionary violence.” He didn’t do it and therefore repressed with unusual harshness. Potash highlights Generals Juan José Valle and General Raúl Tanco as “leading figures in the conspiracy attempts.” Valle had been a classmate of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu at the National Military College and also one of the generals who negotiated with the coup plotters the conditions for Perón’s removal from power, once the Peronist leader made it known that he would not fight.

In fact, in June 1956, Valle and Tanco revealed themselves to be the visible leaders of the insubordination called the “National Recovery Movement”, which took up arms against the dictators Aramburu and Rojas. Perón had not blessed the risky undertaking and would not have endorsed it after its failure, but he could never have prevented it from entering the mythology of the Peronist martyrology, especially due to the requests for clemency that Aramburu would ignore in order not to apply the Martial Law to the captured (death penalty according to the Code of Military Justice). Among them, General Valle, Colonel Oscar Cogorno and 15 other officers and around 18 civilians massacred in various locations across the country.

In his work “Argentine History/Homage to José María Rosa (Volume Tanco?”), the other general at the head of the nationalist insurrection, of whom there is no news in the days following June 9th or until the 12th, the day of the defeat of Valle execution. Chávez himself will give the answer: “General Tanco and some others They manage to take refuge in the Haitian embassy. From there they were taken by a group led by the head of Side, General Quaranta, who couldn’t bring himself to shoot them in the middle of the street because the public was circulating and disturbing them.”

General Tanco would appear at the Haitian embassy on June 14, with the coup repressed and Valle already shot, and ask for asylum. Some reports indicate that Colonels Ricardo González and Agustín Digier, Captain Néstor Bruno and Petty Officer Andrés López were already there. They would have been hosted in the annex of the residence of the Haitian ambassador, Jean Francoise Brierre, who he would have personally informed the Argentine government in office of the granting of asylum.

That day the embarrassing episode of the coup d’état by a commando unit under the command of the head of SIDE (General Juan Constantino Quaranta) occurred, which surrounded the residence with several cars and its members stormed it, a perfect precedent for the scandal. at the Mexican embassy in Quito, but with the seal of the Argentine coup d’état of the 1950s. They got out of the cars about twenty people with pistols and machine guns in their hands. They disarmed the residence guard and entered the diplomatic headquarters. They broke every diplomatic protocol. Between beatings, shouting and threats to the ambassador’s wife and one of his employees, they kidnapped the asylum seekers. Sources at the time assure that someone in charge of the operation would have hurled unacceptable insults at the wife of the Haitian diplomat: apparently, they would have heard him say “You fucking black woman”.

The lawyer and human rights defender Alicia Oliveira, now deceased, will tell the details of that shameful day, a day of terror in which all kinds of rights were subjugated, in addition to kindergarten. This is what Oliveira would say in his testimony:

*“At the command of this group known as ‘civil revolutionary commandos’ was General Quaranta, who was active and head of the state secret services. While they took them (the Peronist asylum seekers) out of the house, they placed them against the wall, while the civilian commandos prepared their weapons to execute them on the spot.”

*“What prevented them from continuing was that the ambassador’s wife went out into the street and shouted for help to the neighbors, who came out of their homes. Warned that there would be too many witnesses to commit a murder, Quaranta stopped a passing bus, made the passengers get off and the kidnapped ones get on. From there he headed to the First Army Corps. Once on site, the prisoners were identified and their personal effects, placed in bags, were removed. Tanco’s said, “The personal effects of the person who was General Tanco during his lifetime.”

Furthermore, the ambassador’s wife, Therese Brierre, with quick reflexes, I would immediately report the incident to international news agencies and at the same time communicated with the Foreign Ministry of his country. When the ambassador returned to the diplomatic headquarters, he launched an energetic claim to the Argentine Foreign Ministry and requested the return of the abductees to the embassy under his command. They had not been kidnapped in Argentina, but in that little piece of Haitian dream. In his book “Martyrs and Executioners,” about the 1956 shooting, Salvador Ferla, an Italian historian who became a nationalized Argentine, would say: “Not because Haiti is a small nation will he allow such an outrage. On the contrary, small countries must be scrupulously respected because they are small.” General Tanco, weeks later, managed to negotiate his exit from the country and requested asylum in Venezuela. Upon returning to the country in 1964, he managed to have his military rank restored until his death in 1977.

The invisible (or less invisible) threads of history sometimes move alone and acquire a certain autonomous symbolism.

Friday 5 April, Argentina granted political asylum to six leaders close to Corina Machado, the Venezuelan candidate banned by Nicolás Maduro’s autocracy. Sixty-eight years earlier, in June 1956, nationalist general Raúl Tanco had sought refuge in Venezuela after his failed coup to restore Peronism to power, with or without Perón.

On Friday 5 April, Ecuadorian police forces violated the political asylum granted by Mexico at its embassy in Quito to former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas, accused of corruption. Sixty-eight years earlier, in June 1956, an Argentine parastatal command had violated the diplomatic immunity and right of asylum of a group of Peronist officers, protected in the Haitian embassy in Buenos Aires. He kicked them out of the house and was on the verge of shooting them in public.

The much cited Marxist prophecy, of Hegelian origin, which teaches that “history repeats itself twice, once as a tragedy and the other as a farce”, still resonates as if it were the allegory of the “eternal return”.