Abstract:

This article analyzes the uses of the past by some of the groups that made the Partido Socialista de la Revolución Nacional (PSRN), a grouping of several leftist trends which were getting closer to Peronism. It focuses on two groups split from the Partido Socialista, characterized by its hard opposition to Perón’s government. The PS had relied upon the uses of the past to sustain the struggle against Peronism. Hence, for the leaders and activists who came from that party, their recent support to the Peronist government raised the need to try a political explanation, which implied to some extent a review of the national history and/or the previous trajectory of socialism: they had to either reconsider the place occupied by Peronism in Argentine history, re-inscribing it in some way within the strongly liberal genealogy claimed by the party tradition, or to review some of the liberal topics that were hard to assimilate to the new experience. Through the analysis of the two newspapers through which these political trends were expressed, La Vanguardia (Tercera etapa) and Argentina de Hoy, the article seeks to determine the place occupied by reinterpretations of the past in the articulation of their new discourse. Hence the reinterpretations of national and partisan pasts are seen through the prism of a Peronist present which was under deep reassessment as well.

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