Populisms are creators of slogans, antinomies expressed with words that mobilize emotions, establish irreducible antagonisms or set hopeful objectives.
"Fight and come back", for example, was the slogan inspired by the Peronist youth in the '70s to achieve the return of Perón.
There was a military dictatorship, there was a leader in exile, and there was a popular passion that set out to resolve that historical dilemma through struggle.
"Fight and come back", was articulated with other slogans that still survive in the memory of the elders or on some old walls;
traces, traces, fragments of passions that today smell of ashes: "Homeland yes, colony no", "Perón, Evita, the socialist homeland" or "Perón or death".
The young people of the then tumultuous Peronist youth took to the streets, hoarsed their throats chanting some of these slogans and thanks to this brave rhetoric they were described as "wonderful youth."
Politics as a youthful passion, transgressive and bearer of the charm of the passions considered just for a society that at that time was, at best, indifferent, that one of the most mobilizing slogans of these boys of the resistance celebrated the kidnapping and murder of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu.
It was no longer just about killing, but about celebrating and rejoicing at the spectacle of death.
It is useless to note that this captivating passion for crime was recreated until it was transformed into a political action program by Mussolini's black shirts.
Nothing more moving, nothing more sensitive than the spectacle of young people mobilized by passions who promise paradise on Earth at the modest price of a few heads that the guillotine or the wall will take care of rolling so that social justice is possible.
Nothing more sublime and, at the same time, as history is responsible for demonstrating over and over again, nothing more cruel and disenchanting than the manipulation of youthful passions by unscrupulous politicians or bosses.
"Wonderful youth" were described those youthful columns capable of oscillating from idealism to fanaticism and from humanitarian preaching to apology for crime.
The youthful libido placed at the service of politics usually causes these results.
This truth was already known in the '70s, but when history unfolds in these whirlpools of passions and resentments, there is no room for warnings.
They were the "wonderful youth", but the eloquence of the designation did not prevent that a short time later, due to those cruel lessons with which history is pleased to offer mortals, the most wonderful of all were not their doubtful virtues but contemplating how the beloved leader, the chief and driver, expelled them from the plaza and immediately afterwards consented to their liquidation through the operations of his other military branch, the Three A's, inaugurating through this sweet procedure the habit of using the State to assassinate outside of the law.
Marvelous.
The same one who encouraged their passion for crime was now throwing them into hell.
At the time, he excited the beardless with the "story" of Mao, of Che, of the socialist homeland.
The astonishing thing is not that a cheating politician has lied to them, but that so many have believed him, although to be fair it must be recognized that among the wonderful youth there were a few rogues enthusiastic about the job of killing, "rogues" who supposed that the old man Skilled in the arts of manipulation, a lucid mind and a frozen soul, capable of ordering the most antagonistic orders without his smile faltering, they were going to pass him to the room.
That's how it was.
Some will have to be investigated of that wonderful youth, who betrayed and murdered them with more viciousness: if the military after 1976 or if their Peronist companions before 1976.;
if the "long live the order of the cemeteries" of the military or the "long live Perón" of the implacable Peronist orthodoxy.
Fifty years later, the descendants of those "stupids", as the General kindly described them, take up the slogan "Fight and come back", although in this case the staging is enriched with the exquisite detail that the one who must return is not an exile or outlawed, but the real head of the current government, someone who includes condemnation in her struggle record not for resisting privilege, but for using the privilege of power to enrich herself.
Combining verbal fraud with alienation, fanaticism and stupidity is a work of art that is difficult to achieve.
Well then: this aesthetic and rhetorical achievement has been achieved by our indigent Creole populism.
Half a century was necessary for the transition from tragedy to farce, from redemptive passion to grotesque, from youthful passion to the passion to benefit from the lust for power to be possible.
Old slogans, rusted by the years and failures, recovered to revive passions incinerated by disappointments.
Populism recreating cheaters' traps or fanatic alienation.
There is no leader in exile, nor is there a return, much less a ban.
There is neither "fight" nor "return", but rather anachronism and disenchanted greed for power.
Rogelio Alaniz is a journalist and historian.