Peronism is divided, once again.
Luckily for Argentina, the disputes are no longer shots, as in the seventies, but with street demonstrations of strength.
Who mobilizes more people, better represents the legacy of Juan Domingo Perón.
La Cámpora knows this well, the group led by Máximo Kirchner, the son of the vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
This Thursday, March 24, Argentina commemorated the 46th anniversary of the start of the bloodiest dictatorship in the American Southern Cone.
And La Cámpora overflowed the Plaza de Mayo, the place where all the symbols of political power are concentrated.
President Alberto Fernández was not invited to the most Peronist square in Argentina.
He then preferred to commemorate the scientists killed by the military with a small protocol act.
La Cámpora, and with her Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is part of the Fernández Government.
Divorce, however, seems imminent.
The senators and deputies who follow Kirchner voted against the agreement that Argentina has just signed with the IMF to refinance the 45.5 billion dollar debt inherited from the government of Mauricio Macri.
Fernández obtained approval with the opposition votes, while Kirchner was absent from the Senate at the time of the vote.
It was a declaration of internal war.
In the corridors of the Casa Rosada, the rumor then spread that the vice president was preparing an incendiary letter against the president, the man she herself anointed two years ago as a candidate for her political space.
The defeat in the Legislative elections in November of last year deteriorated the relationship.
From Kirchnerism they accused Fernández for the defeat: they said that he had distanced himself from the people, that the economic crisis was unsustainable.
The agreement with the IMF was the last straw.
Kirchnerism associates the Fund with all Argentine ills and signing it in Washington was an affront to its electoral base.
La Cámpora made it very clear this Thursday.
The Kirchnerist group summoned its supporters in front of the site of the former Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), where the largest clandestine center of the dictatorship operated, today converted into a space for memory.
The response was massive: at ten in the morning, the demonstrators already occupied more than ten streets of Libertador Avenue, one of the widest in Buenos Aires.
From there, the columns traveled 13 kilometers through the north of the city to Avenida de Mayo.
"Despite the bombs, the executions, the dead comrades, the disappeared, they have not defeated us," the protesters sang.
“She is not leaving, she is not leaving, the boss is not leaving,” some columns chanted, referring to the vice president and the threats of rupture that weigh on the coalition.
Peronist chants and slogans prevailed during the tour over those linked to Remembrance Day.
Only a few white handkerchiefs, a symbol of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, interrupted the tide of flags from La Cámpora and photographs of Perón, Evita and the Kirchners.
Members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo participate with thousands of people in a march for the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice, which commemorates the 1976 military coup, this Thursday in Buenos Aires.Juan Ignacio Roncoroni (EFE)
La Cámpora was absent from the street when Congress approved the agreement between the IMF.
They got her back to show her rejection.
“Economic independence”, could be read in one of the banners of the mobilization.
“We are not going to pay that debt that they left.”
"With the hunger of the people you can't be screwed anymore," they sang.
Throughout the entire city there are graffiti in which the campers demand that the Fund not be paid.
“First let the Argentines eat”, is also read on the walls.
According to official statistics, four out of ten Argentines are poor.
At the head of the mobilization, an open bus circulated, from which the political group broadcast in
streaming
the entire demonstration.
From there they also interviewed the main referents of Kirchnerism, often reluctant to speak with the media.
From there they shot at President Fernández, without naming him.
“When we told Argentine society that we had to bank it with the vulture funds so that they did not enter Argentina, it was because we did not want what we are going through today to happen,” said Máximo Kirchner from the bus converted into a television studio.
“When the people are present in a government, the bad is less bad and the good is good.
It is with the people inside.
Always, partner”, highlighted the national deputy, who has become the great star of the mobilization between greetings and selfies.
Less diplomatic was Andrés Larroque, Minister of Development in the province of Buenos Aires and strong man of La Cámpora.
Larroque did not forget the president, the internal one that divides the coalition and the position that they consider they occupy in it.
"We can't walk away from something we created," he said.
"The president was in a political space and he was campaign manager of a space that got 4% in the election of the province of Buenos Aires," he recalled, referring to the times in which Fernández was facing Kirchner.
Kirchnerism remembers every time it can that it owes its presidency to the vice president.
The differences are not limited to the bosom of the Government.
They are also visible on the street.
The left occupied the Plaza de Mayo starting at noon and withdrew after three o'clock to make room for La Cámpora.
“If the 30,000 [disappeared] were in this square today, many things would not happen.
Those 30,000 would not accept the IMF,” Nora Cortiñas, head of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo - Founding Line, said from the stage.
"All those who support the Fund are traitors to the people," she added.
Alberto Fernández held his own act in the morning, away from the crowds.
Accompanied by some of his ministers, he recalled in a formal tone at the headquarters of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet) the scientists killed during the dictatorship.
From there he called, once again, for the unity of Peronism and to end the internal debate.
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