Free The New York Review Abroad by Robert B. Silvers

been damaged, or if you think you are being damaged, don’t fail to come.” Five thousand city people turned up, many in motorcars. There were half a dozen stalls selling holy or beneficent objects; there were cubicles for religious-medical consultations, from thirty cents to a dollar a time. It was a little like a Saturday morning market. The officiating priest said,“Every individual is an individual source of power and is subject to imperceptible mental waves which can bring about ill-health or distress. This is the visible sign of the evil spirit.”
    “I can never believe we are in 1972,” the publisher-bookseller says. “It seems to me we are still in the year zero.” He isn’t complaining; he himself trades in the occult and mystical, and his business is booming. Argentine middle-class mimicry of Europe and the United States, perhaps. But at a lower level the country is being swept by the new enthusiastic cult of
espiritismo
, a purely native affair of mediums and mass trances and miraculous cures, which claims the patronage of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. The
espiritistas
don’t talk of mental waves; their mediums heal by passing on intangible beneficent “fluids.” The
espiritistas
say they have given up politics; and they revere Gandhi for his nonviolence. They believe in reincarnation and the perfectibility of the spirit. They say that purgatory and hell exist now, on earth, and that man’s only hope is to be born on a more evolved planet. Their goal is that life, in a “definitive” disembodied world, where only superior spirits congregate.

    Despair: a rejection of the land, a dream of nullity. But someone holds out hope; someone seeks to resanctify the land. With Perón at the Iron Gate is José López Rega, who has been his companion and private secretary for the last thirty years. Rega is known to have mystical leanings and to be interested in astrology and
espiritismo
; and he is said to be a man of great power now. An interview with him fills ten pages of a recent issue of
Las Bases
, the new Peronist fortnightly. Argentines are of many races, Rega says; but they all have native ancestors. The Argentine racial mixture has been “enriched by Indian blood” and “Mother Earth has purified it all.… I fight for liberty,” Rega goes on, “because that’s how I am made and because I feel stirring within me the blood of the Indian, whose land this is.”Now, for all its vagueness and unconscious irony, this is an astonishing statement, because, until this crisis, it was the Argentine’s pride that his country was not “niggered-up” like Brazil or mestizo like Bolivia, but European; and it was his special anxiety that outsiders might think of Argentines as Indians. Now the Indian ghost is invoked, and a mystical, purifying claim is made on the blighted land.
    Other people offer, as they have always offered, political and economic programs. Perón and Peronism offer faith.

    And they have a saint: Eva Perón. “I remember I was very sad for many days,” she wrote in 1952 in
La Razón de mi Vida
(“My Life’s Cause”), “when I discovered that in the world there were poor people and rich people; and the strange thing is that the existence of the poor didn’t cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.” It was the basis of her political action. She preached a simple hate and a simple love. Hate for the rich: “Shall we burn down the Barrio Norte?” she would say to the crowds. “Shall I give you fire?” And love for “the common people,”
el pueblo
: she used that word again and again and made it part of the Peronist vocabulary. She levied tribute from everyone for her Eva Perón Foundation; and she sat until three or four or five in the morning in the Ministry of Labor, giving away Foundation money to suppliants, dispensing a personal justice. This was her “work”: a child’s vision of power, justice, and revenge.
    She