A Funny Dirty Little War

Osvaldo Soriano

4 ideas

1. The one-day siege of Colonia Vela

   In 1974, after Perón's return, the local Peronist boss of Colonia Vela orders Ignacio Fuentes, the town's longtime Peronist municipal delegate, to resign because he supposedly harbors Marxists on his staff. Fuentes refuses and barricades himself in the town hall with a clerk, a policeman and a few loyal townspeople. Over one day, rifles, improvised explosives, hired gunmen and a small plane escalate the dispute into a lethal siege between neighbors who all shout 'Viva Perón.'

2. Shared Perón loyalty did not prevent Peronist infighting

   In Colonia Vela, both the purging faction and Fuentes's defenders shout 'Viva Perón,' so loyalty to the leader offers no common ground. The purge is not simply a clash of equally sincere devotees: it is a deliberate right-wing attack that the novel presents as backed from above, with Perón's name used to justify it. The shared symbol does not restrain the violence and helps each side cast the other as traitors.

3. Ideological labels as purge instruments

   A charge like 'Marxist infiltrator' works as a weapon because its content is irrelevant. It is defined by the authority of whoever makes the accusation, not by the accused's actual beliefs. The label lets local rivals settle ordinary power disputes and grudges under the cover of national doctrine, and no display of loyalty can disprove it, because denial is read as further proof.

4. Farce and atrocity as the same event

   Political violence in small communities often escalates through amateurism, personal pride, bureaucratic pettiness and improvised weapons rather than grand strategy. Its absurd surface does not soften its lethality. Treating the ridiculous and the brutal as one phenomenon shows how ordinary neighbors slide into killing through a chain of small, face-saving refusals to back down.

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