R.I.P. Tomás Eloy Martínez, with a lament for Argentina

A youthful Tomás Eloy Martínez

I’m a little late on this. But widely admired longtime Rutgers professor, Argentine journalist and author Tomás Eloy Martínez died January 31. He was a prolific author of political analysis, reportage and books, both fiction and nonfiction. Arguably, though, he’s best known for his historical novels about Peronism, Argentina’s home-grown, nearly undefinable, populist political movement.

Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita told the convoluted, morbid story of Evita’s corpse, which improbably wound up being shipped between continents, in the custody of one unsavory sort after another. The other novel, La novela de Perón is my favorite and tells the story of Gen. Juan Domingo Perón’s disastrous return to Argentina in the early 1970s after over 15 years of exile in Franco’s Spain.

To make a long story short there was a bloodbath outside Buenos Aires at the Ezeiza international airport. Perón had encouraged both the right and left-wing to believe he was their savior, and when the two factions saw each other face-to-face in the hours before Perón’s plane touched down, the gunfire erupted. Tomás Eloy will be remembered as the premier chronicler of Peronism, its tics, obsessions, and pathologies.

But he wrote about a lot places, people and topics, and is often mentioned as a Latin American practitioner of the New Journalism style exemplified by Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. And few understood the complexities and contradictions of modern Argentina better.

Here is a translation of what Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote about Tomás Eloy Martínez in Argentine newspaper La Nación just after the death was announced. I think these paragraphs are just right, intertwining the work of  Tomás Eloy with the tragic 20th Century fate of Argentina (thanks Dad, for passing this along):

Tomás Eloy Martínez wrote the history of a self-deceived Latin American country, a country that imagined itself European, rational, civilized, and one day awoke without illusions, as Latin American as Mexico or Venezuela, as brutally savage as its military dictators, as brutally corrupt as its politicians, as blind as anyone to the miserable slum settlements that began creeping up to Buenos Aires avenues, where the masses now salvage trash at midnight in order to eat.”

The richness of Argentine culture contrasted with the poverty of its political and economic life. That’s the enigma of that great nation, an enigma that’s brought up again and again in Tomás Eloy’s work: Why did Argentina, having it all, end up with nothing? Why did the vigorous and uninterrupted culture of the Republic of Silver not grant vigor and continuity to its political life?