The long and winding history of the Argentine left through the life and work of Otto Vargas, leader of the PCR – 25/02/2019

With the death of Otto Vargas, founder in 1968 and secretary-general since then, the Communist Revolutionary Party (PCR), one of the last witnesses of the eventful history of divisions, divisions, farewells and eternal resentments of the Argentine communism disappears.

Vargas, who died at the age of 89 on February 14, inspired the Maoist Marxist Marxist current born in the 60s, after the 20th Congress of the PC of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khruschev blamed Joseph Stalin for all the past and present ills of the USSR, and when the communist world began to look with a little hope and for lack of anything better, at the enigmatic China of Mao Tung Tung, who lived the inimitable shocks of his cultural revolution.

Time and distance, but especially a certain contemporary alienation to a past that seems more distant than it is, make today almost incomprehensible these differences that tore lives, broke alliances, cracked ideas and gave the flag and wind always changing often stormy. Vargas embraced Maoism and the theoretical conception of an "anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist, agrarian and popular social revolution on the road to socialism" with a fervor that may be hard to find today among the Chinese and who, on the other hand, the RCP militants underlined in the painful tribute that they paid back to their boss in the Chacarita cemetery.

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He was born in Choele Choel in 1939, in a rural setting, shearing workers. His childhood was marked by the solidarity movement with the Spanish Republic: he was nine years old when the civil war in that country ended. At the age of 17, he arrived in Buenos Aires to join the nautical school, but ended up studying law at the University of La Plata. In April 1949 he joined the Federation of Communist Youth, FEDE., where he quickly became a leading academic leader and participated in the organization of four editions of the World Youth Festival and students in Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw and Moscow.

He was 28 when went to Cuba to collaborate clandestinely with the guerrillas of Sierra Maestra who sought to overthrow Fulgencio Batista and led by brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He returned to the island in January 1959, while the revolution is already triumphing. He meets Guevara and perhaps coincides with him in the rejection of the new Soviet theses proposing a "peaceful transit" towards socialism, consecrated at the congress opening the USSR. to "de-Stalinization".

Vargas was already facing a breakthrough in the Argentine PC when, in 1952, he joined the line of defense of autonomy led by then-ruler Juan Jose Real. In July 1952, on the death of Eva Perón and with the historical secretary general of the PC, Victorio Codovilla, absent from the country, Real published an obituary in the official organ of the PC, "Our word": he was expelled from the party, accused of having "approached Peronism" and "bourgeois nationalism" in the midst of a plot that still seemed to hide a probable conspiracy to strike a blow in the conduct of Argentine communism.

Followed by a large group of subsidiaries, Vargas faced an almost frontal dissent with the PC leadership, which he accused of "opportunistic deviationism". In 1964, when he was propaganda secretary of the Fede, he declared: "We must help the mbades to replace the bourgeois nationalist ideology and clbad conciliation by the ideology of struggle Clbades and proletarian internationalism: Marxist-Leninist ideology. "And in 1967 he raised these dissents in a pamphlet entitled" Why do not you want to argue? ", which brought to light their doctrinal differences and criticized, from the title, the vertical and closed leadership of the party.

The year of the break of Vargas with the PC, a real partisan sangriaIt was the year of the capture and murder of Ernesto Guevara in Bolivia. The Cuban-Bolivian guerrillas, more Cuban than Bolivian, were already surrounded by the army of this country with the support of the "green berets" sent by the United States, when the group Fede led by Vargas, that they called the PC "Leftists" proposed to sabotage an Argentine military train with weapons heading to Bolivia. The PC leadership vehemently opposed the adventure and "worked to prevent concrete solidarity with the guerrillas," Vargas writes in his book "Is Communism Dead?" – Maoism in Argentina.

The capture and immediate badbadination of Guevara in October 1967 in his speech celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the RCP, he sealed the break: "Our party was officially founded on January 6, 1906, but was born in reality at the time when he was badbadinated Che Guevara In Bolivia, on October 9, 1967, our party cut the street with blankets, which was not customary in the 7 and 54 of La Plata, as a tribute to Che. public act of our party. "However, Vargas and his group still belonged to the PC.

In the 70s, with the union leader Cordovan René SalamancaVargas and the PCR have led the Union of Mechanics and Related Motor Transport (SMATA), which they have defined and promoted as a clbad union, in an innovative initiative of the Argentine left. Salamanca was kidnapped in Cordoba on the day of the military coup of March 24, 1976 and is still missing.

In 1972 and after a tour in China, Vargas and the PCR badumed more firmly Maoism as a strategy and deepens its break with the PC of the Soviet Union. According to Isidoro Gilbert in his book "La Fede" (an apologetic evocation of the Argentine PC), Vargas suggested to Chinese leaders to create a new International, "non-reformist as Third" and received, said Gilbert, an answer. very Chinese: "Neither our revolution, nor that of Vietnam, nor that of Cuba needed an International" ".

Under the leadership of Vargas, the PCR approached the Government of Juan Perón in 1973 and his widow, María Estela Martínez between 1974 and 1976, even during the years when the terrorist group Triple A, with its obvious relations with the government and with the then-super-minister, José López Rega, unleashed terror in the sectors of the left in counter-figure of the Peronist Guerilla of Montoneros and Trotskyist of the ERP.

Peronism in the government, and still part of the dissident Peronism with this government, has hoisted a slogan that affirmed with immaculate clarity its theoretical and strategic conception: "Neither the Yankees nor the Marxists", Which did not affect the decision of Vargas and the PCR to maintain their support for Isabel Perón, with the declared intention of avoiding an inevitable coup d'état at this time.

During the military dictatorship of March 24, 1976, Vargas and his party imagined that the government of General Jorge Videla was pro-Russian, perhaps because of the good commercial relations that the dictatorship had with the USSR, forced by the International isolation he condemned their violations of human rights.

Vargas defined Argentina as a battleground between the two imperialisms: that of the United States and what he defined as "Soviet social imperialism", which he had had as agents on both sides, according to his vision of contemporary history, to Alejandro Lanusse, Montoneros, ERP and Videla. The PCR then called for forming a bloc with "the patriotic and democratic sectors of the urban and rural bourgeoisie".

According to an article published during the military dictatorship in the newspaper "Nueva Hora", for the Vargas PCR, Moscow was the true supporter of the Argentine dictatorship in his battle with US imperialism for the control and dominance of Argentina; and as they viewed US imperialism as "less aggressive," the RCP called revolutionary militancy to direct its fury and darts against the USSR.

In the 90s, the PCR and Vargas joined the government of Carlos Menem, critical support which, in 1996, resulted in a call to fight for an "Argentinazo" who imposed "another government and another policy" in an act of the union of Luz y Fuerza Cordobes.

The feast of Vargas too supported the creation of Clasista and Combativa Current Juan Carlos Alderete and Carlos "Perro" Santillán, then went to participate in "the struggle of the unemployed and the excluded". The CCC was a founding member of the piquetero movement in the province of Buenos Aires.

The PCR also approached Mohamed Ali Seineldin and the carapintadas, claiming that they did not have the links of unity with the USSR that they had seen in Menem's military leaders as they had already seen them at Lanusse and Videla. Such a historical and political conception has opened a new and intense debate in the Argentine left.

During Kirchnerism, the RAP was next to the Liaison Office during the conflict with the field for retentions to agriculture. The PCR praised the rebellion of agrarian entities: "Vargas has risen – the main ally of the revolutionary proletariat".

Among the phrases with which his followers referred him to the Chacarita cemetery, one of them served as an epitaph: "Otto Vargas defended the Marxist doctrine against those who l & # 39; Have betrayed and never separated from the most exploited and oppressed ".