Andrés ‘Cuervo’ Larroque is the Community Development minister for Buenos Aires Province. A key Peronist voice, , he has been a deputy for both Buenos Aires City and Province and was a co-founder of La Cámpora political organisation in his youth and served as its secretary-general for 15 years.
Larroque, 47, reflects on the current crisis of Peronism, affirming that it is one of the deepest in its history.
“I cannot be optimistic,” he declares, regarding the Javier Milei government, while manifesting that Argentine democracy is strongly consolidated.
If I’m not being disrespectful, Peronism today looks like a political grouping in anarchy without any premeditated plan. Do you think that Peronism will sort itself out and that my description is unjust?
I believe we are undergoing one of the deepest crises in the history of Peronism.
Peronism has also demonstrated a great capacity for recuperation and revival thanks to its doctrinal platform, its great political organisation and the diversity of sectors it has convened. But we are in a period of dispersion, beyond doubt, and that naturally has to do with a disorder or dispersion at the level of leadership because Peronist order has always come from its leadership and also with a certain transitory crisis in ideological terms, which will have to be a renaissance of Peronism, returning to its essence while understanding that it has lacked maturity in recent times and that we did not rise to the enormous expectations we generated in 2019, paying the consequences today.
And would the other crises have been in 1983 and 2002?
Yes, perhaps but there have also been much more complex and difficult moments. Peronists were bombarded in the Plaza de Mayo [in 1955]. Persecution and the ban, disappearances, everything which has to do with that darkest hour. Within the times of contemporary democracy we might single out those dates as the most critical.
So compared with those two, that first electoral defeat in 1983 and then the convertibility crisis of 2002, what does that leave you?
They are different situations because this latest defeat is pretty weird, coming at the hands of Milei.
It was not just any old defeat.
Sure. In the case of 1983, we were defeated by a historical political adversary, the first time that Peronism lost in an open electoral process, without being banned.
But against an adversary with whom you could empathise …
Totally. The 2001-2002 stage has to do with the most profound crisis in Argentine history, at least in democratic times. Being defeated by [former president] Mauricio Macri also seems tough to me but it was a very slender electoral margin with [ex-president] Cristina [Fernández de Kirchner] taking her leave on the December 9 of 2015 in front of a full Plaza de Mayo and leaving behind an administrative performance permitting an almost immediate reconstruction. If there was a crisis in the 2016-2017 period, it was also the product of the Macri government’s own difficulties and could be rapidly repaired.
You were the secretary-general of La Cámpora for a good 15 years, how was your link over time and what is it like today?
I'm a founder of La Cámpora before it even had a name because that came over time. For me it was almost all my life because when I began, I was already almost a ‘veteran’ in terms of militant experience when I joined that group of comrades in the embryonic stages of what would be La Cámpora.
Yes, naturally over many years, we could construct the greatest or most important political organisation of democracy until now with much passion and effort. But I also believe and understand that there are different processes and moments in life and I’m treading another path today.
Were you [secretary-general] between 2006 and 2023?
From mid-2008 until March, 2023.
There is a classic metaphor that some people age well and some badly and that good wine ends up being better with the passage of time. Does that metaphor extend to saying that La Cámpora aged badly?
La Cámpora, like any Peronist grouping today, is not exempt from participation in a general crisis. We all need to rewind regarding spirit and essence but, of course, it seems to me that nowadays we are undergoing a complex moment of confusion. And it also seems to me that when there are very good comrades with enormous militancy, it is possible to rebuild.
In my case there was a series of debates and I understood that my contribution was exhausted, deciding to take a path which has more to do with building a broader character, which is what I understand to be needed at this stage, and knowing that there are other comrades more predisposed and even more capable and perhaps passing through a stage of their lives when they are more inclined to put effort into developing an organisation.
Another cliché is that grandmother’s phrase about the defects of youth only being cured by the passage of time because they stop being young. Something similar happened to the [Radical] Coordinadora in the times of [Raúl] Alfonsín – it became stigmatised and at the same time perhaps did not age well. Can you make a comparison between the two most important youth groupings since the return of democracy?
Yes, it seems to me that the La Cámpora process is longer, lasting longer and retaining the capacity to revive, beyond any doubt, I believe. I’ve always argued that this revival fits into the framework of Peronism, understanding the organisation as a dynamic, not excluding factor of political construction. That’s my outlook or has been historically. I don’t know how that debate will develop because these days I do not participate in the organic spheres but I do have permanent links with many comrades, most of whom I’ve seen enter the organisation, obviously.
Do you have any dialogue with Máximo Kirchner?
When he asks, I’m ready to talk, of course. We do not have the same fluency or daily contact as in other moments.
What is Máximo’s role today?
Whatever he determines, I’m not the one to define that. He is a person of great capacity who, of course, has a different and more complex situation than any of us because it is not easy being the son of two ex-presidents, and, of course, I believe that he carries a burden which the rest of us do not share. Beyond that, he has the capacity to develop where he feels most in his comfort zone and where he can also contribute to the consolidation and development of his political force because, as I was saying before, rather than thinking our politics in personal terms, we have a philosophy where the idea is how each individual can contribute to the collective project. Afterwards reality goes determining the roles and situations where we must weigh ourselves to find our best role.
Andrés, I’ve heard you being self-critical about the infighting, the divisions which could have been as electorally negative as the government performance. Don’t you fear that those arguments with Alberto Fernández could now be repeated in the Peronism of the future?
That is what must not happen because I believe that the great problem we had in Frente de Todos was precisely the loss of the essence of Peronism, which clearly has its defects – you cannot say: “We do everything perfectly.” But if there is one thing which has always been recognised, it is the exercise of power, the vertical of the Executive, perhaps in order not to founder in deliberations but to be eminently a movement of action.
I believe that this got lost because of the coalition format of Frente de Todos and I understand that this cannot happen again. That is resolved by an ordered leadership. Neither society nor our political force will accept the processes of a delegated government. Neither a delegated nor an outsourced nor a double-headed leadership can exist any longer. It seems to me that political and institutional leadership must clearly be unified.
You were one of the leaders who pushed Cristina’s candidacy last year. Peronism was just three points shy of winning in the first round. If the candidate had been Cristina instead of Sergio Massa, and obviously we can only do scientific research in social sciences with might-have-beens, what do you think would have happened?
Sergio was an excellent candidate and I think his campaign was laudable, we all felt proud. Because campaigns are like everything in life, at times you identify with them to a greater or lesser degree, that is the reality. You always try to make a winning contribution but sometimes you say: “This candidate appeals to me and moves me.” Sergio managed that. He was clearly in a very hard place because he was the Economy minister and also the candidate in the context of an Argentina with high inflation and problems going way back.
Was it a mistake to become the Economy minister and then candidate afterwards?
I don’t know because in reality he entered the Economy Ministry at a very complex time – perhaps we were not even going to make it to the elections but we reached the electoral process in competitive shape because he took on that challenge. In my previous outlook, coming back to the question about Cristina, I was considering the process of disillusionment triggered by the internal contradictions ... I don’t want to go any deeper into this because every person has their position and outlook. But it seemed to me that Cristina could restore order to the political system of Peronism and to a future government, which in this case is already hypothetical, as you said. But finally Sergio ran a great campaign and we were where we were. It should not be overlooked that save Santa Cruz and Buenos Aires, practically all the provincial elections were held on different dates. And that matters when the difference is 2.6 percent ... There are many factors but clearly one there: political disorder.
[Joe] Biden is 81, [Donald] Trump and [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] almost 80 with the latter analysing re-election within two years. Cristina is much younger than all of them, do you imagine her as a candidate in 2027?
I don’t know. I wanted her to be the candidate in 2019 and 2023. We would have somehow had difficulties, for sure, but perhaps not the ones we had in this context. Cristina has clearly won the right to do what she wants.
You said: “Peronism must not travel along progressive liberal roads.” In relation to the previous question, were you referring to [Daniel] Scioli, Alberto Fernández and Sergio Massa?
You were saying how the passage of time affects things and, of course, it leaves modifications, some of them perceptible and induced, others imperceptible. What I’m beginning to observe with concern in a sector of Kirchnerism is a sectarian tendency to ideological purity, yet not in a good sense but within a sectarian and divisive logic of turning a political force into an elite, thus losing simplicity, any sense of reality and links with the essence of Peronism. Because Justicialism is a doctrine emanating from popular feeling. The gift of [Juan Domingo] Perón was to do what other sectors could not do when trying to construct worker movements with the most stricken social sectors most on the fringes of the economic policies of those times. Perón’s great virtue was simplicity. And I believe that we or a sector are starting to become more embroiled every day when politics has to be simple because if not, it expels.
Have Peronists lost the capacity to be transgressors?
No. Perón always spoke of Justicialism as a revolution in peace so we have to take care of that balance, I believe. That was the great contribution of Perón in times when transformations or social justice or equality could only be seen or conceived within the debates of the 19th and 20th centuries via convulsions or social cataclysms. I believe that Perón placed great emphasis on the collaboration of different social, economic and productive sectors with confrontation as the final instance. At times there are rapid moves towards confrontation, avoiding all the instances of confluence and collaboration which should naturally nestle in a society with pretensions of solidarity. And I’m saying this at a time when this tendency is perhaps at a peak since Milei reached the Presidency due to many factors and amid great confusion but with a discourse clearly placing its accent on the individual and confrontation.
I don’t know if I’m misinformed but I believe that you recently met up with Alberto Fernández. If you did, I’d like you to tell me how that meeting and conversation went. You were very critical of him at one point.
Yes. I accompanied the first stage of his government because it had seemed to me a brilliant move by Cristina and I believed that we logically had to back up Alberto when arguing the case. But afterwards we unfortunately did not make the front institutional nor find mechanisms of collective resolution and the government clearly entered into crisis. In that tension I was in one of the two sectors and all my political life, I have always been in the front line of combat. So when I understood that there was tension and a dispute, my place was naturally clear. Nobody liked that, of course, it was bad for everybody.
Do you repent of that today?
I don’t repent because I understood that when there was a sort of hegemonic deadlock amid tension, one of the sectors had to impose itself to resolve it. There was also Sergio, who tried to balance things a bit – there were not just two sectors.
Wouldn’t it be logical in that case for the president, if he does not step down, to let things happen?
At that time?
Yes. How does that deadlock end? With the president resigning?
From the start it was not clear how that mechanism was going to work. It seems clear to me that Cristina had provided the electoral clout so that she should be the main reference [point]. But at the same time Alberto was also the president and society clearly dislikes voting for somebody on the understanding that the power lies elsewhere. That mismatch had to be resolved and we resolved it badly.
Rather than repenting, what worries me is that, as the product of all those situations, Milei is president today, among other things. That's the most worrying thing. Afterwards Alberto wrote to me with the intention of having a chat and that seemed perfect to me because, of course, it was a traumatic period. And fundamentally we spoke of the present, how badly off Argentina is, of the difficulties we are undergoing and the future. And it clearly seems good to me to meet again and see when and where we went wrong or what happened so that it does not happen again.
What does libertarian Peronism, Daniel Scioli or the senators and deputies who voted for the ‘Ley de Bases’ say to you?
I don’t see that concept of a libertarian Peronism, I don’t know if it exists.
It’s an oxymoron.
An absolute contradiction. Firstly, because Peronism, contrary to what many people believe, or Justicialism, if we are to speak with doctrinal precision, is synonymous with equilibrium. Perón thought it up as a political force seeking a balance between the two dynamic hegemonies of the 20th century – capitalism and socialism.
The third position.
Of course, a position which respects the individual and the community, seeking an equilibrium which is dynamic and which is not equidistant – it’s not about saying let's put 50 percent individuals and 50 percent ... According to the era, the cycle, the situation and the context, that equilibrium can lean more towards one side or the other. So taking Peronism to extremes seems to have nothing to do with the essence of that philosophy and doctrine.
I remember, Andrés, that when I raised my idea of Cristina placing Alberto Fernández being an electoral masterstroke because an election polarised between [Mauricio] Macri and herself could have been lost, [Horacio] Verbitsky always corrected me saying ‘No, Cristina would have won just the same but then been unable to govern because part of society was confronted against her.”’Today in hindsight, do you believe she would have won and been able to govern better than the bicephalous executive we had?
In 2019?
Yes.
At that time Alberto was arguing that the candidate had to be Cristina. We held meetings and we clearly all agreed. I believe that the election was probably at risk – we had just seen what had happened in Brazil.
There were many occult external factors – it was not a clean political scenario but complex. Beyond that, we felt and understood that the best alternative was Cristina. Alberto himself said so, it was a question of consensus. What's more, in 2019 there was an immense consensus in the social base whereas we had suffered a certain erosion at the end of Cristina’s second term.
At the start of the Macri Presidency there was also a very fierce debate within Peronism but that had been settled. And what is more, last year there was far more consensus within the political superstructure that Cristina should be the candidate. That was very striking because last year we were perhaps more conditioned in electoral terms. We had, of course, the baggage of the costs of inflation and all the problems of that administration. But even so, there was among the governors and the political and trade union leadership in general more consensus than in 2019, which is perhaps what ended up defining Cristina to go looking not only for a more centrist candidate but also one permitting the return of sectors with whom we had entered into a manifest enmity in recent times.
You said in a recent interview: “We are heading towards an economic and social tragedy, palpably felt from day to day in the increased demand for food and assistance because until last year our main worry was inflation with wages running behind but now our main worry is unemployment. It’s one thing to battle for wage recovery and quite another to try and regain a job when the productive apparatus is being gutted.” Your words. Do you believe that some of those who voted for Milei and are now suffering the consequences are changing their minds?
Beyond doubt they are suffering and I see them changing their minds, of course. We are undergoing a very delicate period because if you look at the numbers, the fall in Gross Domestic Product is only comparable to the end of the Macri government and the Lehman Brothers crisis. I would remind you that there is a universe of distance between unemployment and the depreciation of the purchasing power of wages. Until last year we had the problem of inflation but the opinion polls now show unemployment overtaking inflation as the leading worry. Now the drama is about job loss and what that means to a family and a community, which starts to fall apart ... I experienced that in the 1990s when my militancy began as a secondary school student. Then I turned to social militancy when our neighbourhoods were hit by the Tequila crisis and unemployment started to take off, a drama for which we thought that there was not going to be a solution. As from 2003, with the recovery of a model of work and production, things started to ease but it had been traumatic to see in our neighbourhoods how every day more people were staying home and the social decomposition that signified, all the issues linked to addictions. And we’re talking about 30 years ago when the narcos etc. were still starting out in Argentina. So when you see this scenario with a president who celebrates such things, you get worried. And I remember our own Cristina in the crisis of Lehman Brothers, the efforts made so that not a single job should be lost because that is a social drama, it’s about a family in decay, a person who cannot reenter the labour structure and is transformed into a social pariah. We are at the cusp of that crisis situation. I implore the President to revise his policies and avoid what could be a leap into the abyss. You saw that when you jumped, you jumped. Today we are hanging on by our fingertips but when you fall, you fall.
What is your prognosis, how does this continue?
I cannot be optimistic. You have the desire and pray every day for Argentina, you look for a way out in faith but reason has a hard time finding it with this economic policy and a president who has transformed himself into a salesman touring the world with the feeling that they send him out on those trips in order not to have him here in Argentina.
In [Carlos] Menem’s time, [Economy Minister Domingo] Cavallo also decided everything.
But Menem was a picture politician, words too big for Milei, please. I always say, this is the outlet for what was left of Menem's B-team, they found what was there. And now we see [Federico] Sturzenegger showing up so it seems that [Luis] Caputo was in reality a fundraiser because with his contacts and his track record in JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, he was supposed to bring in foreign currency which is not appearing. Farmers are cashing in less than this time last year amid the drought when they gave more to Massa. So we are in a very complicated period with the International Monetary Fund talking about a 30 percent devaluation. Imagine what such a devaluation could be in today's context in Argentina? The President said that they were going to give him the Nobel Prize for Economics.
In Menem's time it was said: “We’re doing badly but we’re on the right track.” If I interpret you correctly, you are saying that we’re doing badly but getting worse.
Beyond any doubt. A lot of damage has been done.
What is worse socially and what is worse politically and how is it resolved?
What Milei seeks is to disfigure Argentina. If this is deepened and consolidated, in a short time we will not be able to recognise the country we had.
Production: Melody Acosta Rizza & Sol Bacigalupo.
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