LETTER FROM THE AMERICAS: Peronism's Demise? Don't Bet Your Shirt on It

<a href=www.nytimes.com>Associated Press By LARRY ROHTER

BUENOS AIRES, April 22 — Every time this country is plunged into a period of great trauma and misfortune, it instinctively looks to Juan Perón and his heirs for solace and salvation. To this day, something about Peronism stirs the souls of Argentines and fascinates even other Latin Americans.

Almost 50 years after he was first overthrown and nearly 30 years after he died in office, it still seems fair to ask whether Argentina will, someday, move past Perón. With a presidential election scheduled for Sunday, that question remains all too relevant — unfortunately so, for Argentina's 37 million people.

The Peronist party today is badly divided and unable to define what it stands for. But it has allowed itself the luxury of fielding three candidates, convinced that at least one of them will advance to a second round next month and then emerge triumphant by mobilizing the loyal Peronist masses.

Whether Gen. Juan Domingo Perón would recognize the movement that bears his name were he still alive is another matter, though. While the fascist thuggery that was an essential part of his political style may have been toned down for appearances' sake, so have most of the ideals that he espoused.

"I define Perón as an opportunist with principles, principles that were rudimentary but clear, and guided him throughout his life," said José Nun, author of "Inquiries Into Some Meanings of Peronism" and director of the Institute of Advanced Social Studies at San Martín National University here. Today, he said, "those who describe the Peronist movement as a collection of provincial mafias struggling for supremacy are telling the truth."

The origins of Peronism can be traced to Social Christian doctrine, most notably the emphasis on social justice, equality and harmony implicit in the movement's official name in Spanish, "Justicialismo." First articulated in the 1940's, Peronism sought to steer a middle course between capitalism and Communism, taking what Perón liked to call "the third position."

But over the decades, especially after his death in 1974, the main focus has shifted to obtaining and wielding power. That tendency became even more pronounced after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which coincided with the rise of Carlos Menem, Argentina's president for most of the 1990's, front-runner by the narrowest of margins in Sunday's vote and an advocate of free markets.

Argentines often argue that no foreigner can truly understand Peronism, but most efforts to define the doctrine end up sounding like pure gobbledygook. "Peronism is like a river in movement, it is the river itself and at the same time it is not the same because it is always in movement," Carlos Corach, a former minister of the interior and close associate of Mr. Menem, said recently.

Rather than classify Peronism as a party, Argentines prefer to talk of it as a movement, capable of sheltering both left and right, or even a "mystique" that goes beyond rational understanding. A whole body of myths and legends, rather than a consistent body of ideas, have become the glue that holds everything together.

Even now, Peronist candidates refer constantly to Oct. 17, 1945, when a mass march by workers angry at the arrest of Perón forced his release, and of course to the entire saga of the rise, death and posthumous sanctification of Eva Perón. "That is a story I could never write," Argentina's greatest writer, the fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, once said.

After Perón was overthrown in 1955, Borges, who had been stripped of his job at the National Library during the dictatorship and forced to become a poultry inspector, wrote a famous essay dismissing Peronism as "the comic illusion." But he and other critics have always underestimated the appeal of Peronism precisely because they scorn it for its contradictions and incoherencies.

The party faithful who tend the shrines to "Saint Evita" in working-class suburbs like Ciudad Evita, tell a very different story. They condemn current party leaders for betraying Peronist ideals, proudly recount their own years spent in prison and dream of returning to a time of social justice, economic independence and national sovereignty.

But nothing associated with Peronism seems fixed or immutable. As Óscar Steimberg, an Argentine intellectual who specializes in semiotics, said, "Peronism has no book and no center of discourse, and that allows many to reaccommodate themselves."

That ideological malleability helps explain Peronism's continuing appeal to generations of on-the-make politicians in other parts of Latin America. It is not just the swaggering figure of Perón himself — the caudillo, the strongman and charismatic leader par excellence — that has captivated dictators ranging from Augusto Pinochet to Omar Torrijos and Fidel Castro, but his insistence on personal loyalty and also his oft-repeated statement that "political parties are an anachronism."

Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chávez, for example, can hardly be considered a man of the right. But with the help of an Argentine Peronist guru, he rode to power by latching on to Perón's concept of a postdemocratic mystical bond between the leader and the people in which progressive military and "nationalist" business elements would also have a place.

Encouraged by an economic crisis that has sharpened internal divisions, die-hard anti-Peronists have begun suggesting that Peronism may finally be imploding. But Peronists dismiss that notion as wishful thinking, and, to the detriment of an Argentina that sorely needs modern political parties and new ideas and leaders, they are probably right.