Ismael Viñas and the Quest for an Argentine National Project
- Eduardo Montes-Bradley
- Sep 19
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 22
Two decades have passed since the premiere of Testigo del Siglo at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, where the memoirs of Ismael Viñas—a man who shaped Argentina’s intellectual and political landscape—first flickered on screen. Viñas, the founder of Contorno magazine, a collaborator of Arturo Frondizi, and the creator of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), left Argentina in 1976, never to return. His story, one of revolution, exile, and unrelenting conviction, remains as vital today as ever.
"Testigo del Siglo" will be rereleased this fall on streaming platforms, allowing a new generation to access this fundamental testimony of Argentine political history.
A Ghost in Miami
Finding Ismael was like chasing a shadow. Rumors in Buenos Aires claimed he had died in Israel,
but his brother, the renowned writer and critic David Viñas, set me straight one afternoon in his Barrio Norte apartment. “My brother’s alive,” he said. “He’s in a trailer park in Miami. You need to find him—and his granddaughter, too." His grandaughter father had been killed in action by the Armed Forces in 1978.”
For four months, I searched Miami’s suburbs for a man who seemed to have vanished. Then, one day at Aventura Mall, I spotted him: an elderly figure in a light blue guayabera, moving slowly, drawn to the mall’s air-conditioned comfort—a luxury his retiree’s pension couldn’t afford in his trailer home.
Ismael was nearly 80, a living archive of Argentine history. He was a decade older than my father, Nelson, but the two hit it off instantly, meeting weekly at cafés in Aventura or Hallandale alongside other exiles like León Rozitchner and Juan José Sebreli. Their conversations felt like a ghostly revival of 1960s Buenos Aires cafés, transplanted to Florida’s unlikely soil.
For four years, Ismael and I worked to preserve his testimony. When Testigo del Siglo premiered in 2003, I was still blacklisted by Néstor Kirchner’s government and used the pseudonym Diana Hunter as director. Ismael didn’t attend the Buenos Aires premiere—he never would return—but his old comrades gathered, rekindling a buried past in an emotional reunion.
From Patagonia to Exile
Born on May 22, 1925, in the harsh Patagonian winter, Ismael was the son of a judge sent by Yrigoyen to mediate labor strikes that ended in massacre. The image of executed workers buried up to their necks in Patagonian beaches haunted his father, who was sacked for being “too friendly with the workers.” This early brush with political violence shaped Ismael’s path.
As a teenager, he witnessed a radical militant stabbed during a campaign in Chaco. In Buenos Aires, he brawled with nationalists on Florida and Corrientes streets, alongside Mauricio, a German communist who “tossed Argentine fascists” into shop windows. His political awakening deepened through love: a Trotskyist girlfriend introduced him to Pedro Milesi, an anarchist-turned-communist expelled for being “too leftist.” Marxism came to him not just through theory but through Rosa Luxemburg’s love letters.
Contorno: A Literary Revolution
In the 1950s, Ismael, his brother David, Ramón Alcalde, León Rozitchner, and Susana Fiorito founded Contorno, a magazine that defined a generation. Far from the Sartrean label later pinned on them, their roots were in Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and Trotsky. “Sartre didn’t invent commitment,” Ismael insisted. “Commitment predates him.”
Contorno wasn’t just literary—it was a political force, influencing university federations across Argentina. Through David and Alcalde’s networks, it reached Córdoba, Santa Fe, Mendoza, and Tucumán, becoming, in Ismael’s words, “a kind of mass movement, if you can call university students a mass.”
This influence led them to Arturo Frondizi, though the alliance was uneasy. David distrusted Frondizi’s middle-class tastes—“MDF furniture and an oil painting of his wife in the living room”—but they joined him, launching the newspaper Política and working as censors for Frigerio’s magazine. Frondizi’s grasp of class struggle won them over: “Classes don’t just exist; the class struggle is permanent, even when it seems dormant.”
Betrayal and the Birth of Malena
The partnership with Frondizi collapsed over oil contracts with Shell, private university permits, and the intervention in Buenos Aires after Framini’s victory. Ismael’s discovery of a letter to Jorge Sábato, pilfered from a mail basket, led him to denounce the deals on Radio Rivadavia. From this rupture, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN)—nicknamed “Malena” after a tango sung by the Cedrón brothers in a Corrientes bodegón—was born.
Susana Fiorito led Malena’s vote-blank campaign, facing down 400 radicals at a convention with fearless resolve. Her stand, born of conviction (and perhaps fear), galvanized a movement that bridged intellectual ideals with revolutionary militancy.
Cuba, the Che, and Lost Illusions
The Cuban Revolution split Argentina’s left, and Contorno’s circle was no exception. Ismael’s doubts grew when a right-wing Catholic, Beveraggi Allende, backed Castro’s forces. Meeting Che Guevara in Havana at 4 a.m. was both thrilling and disorienting. Expecting a towering figure, Ismael found a “relatively short” man. When he asked about the executions, Che’s reply was chilling: “The left is for purges after taking power.”
Ismael’s view of John William Cooke, a key Peronist in Cuba, is equally layered. Cooke, radicalized by Perón, returned to Buenos Aires a broken man, ignored by the youth who later idolized him, spending his days in cinemas watching double features.
From Liberation to Disillusionment
Ismael later saw the MLN’s name as a misstep. Reading Lenin’s works clarified that Argentina wasn’t a colony but a dependent nation, its liberation achieved a century earlier. This “Damascus moment” led to Malena’s dissolution and the founding of Acción Comunista, his final Argentine organization. But the escalating violence of the 1970s—exemplified by Aramburu’s assassination, which he saw as vengeance, not justice—pushed him away. When Acción Comunista comrades began collaborating with police, Ismael chose exile.
A Life in Exile
Ismael’s exile took him first to Israel, where he grappled with its democratic ideals and its military control over Palestinians. In the U.S., he saw imperialism not as uniquely American but as a historical constant. He viewed Latin American coups, like those of Pinochet and Videla, as driven by local elites as much as by CIA influence.
His comparison of Argentina and the U.S. is stark: while the U.S. built a “real bourgeoisie” through land distribution, Latin America birthed a “lumpen bourgeoisie” incapable of creativity or vision.
A Warning to Allende
Ismael’s meeting with Salvador Allende in Chile is a poignant moment. He and his comrades warned Allende that his confrontational stance—especially inviting Fidel Castro—would provoke the right. Allende’s faith in the Chilean military’s democratic spirit proved misplaced, and their talk ended in futile handshakes and Chilean wine. History, tragically, vindicated Ismael.
A Legacy of Memory
Ismael Viñas’s story is that of a generation caught between Argentina’s liberal past and its turbulent present. From Contorno’s pages to the barricades of revolution, they dreamed of change, only to face violence, exile, and disillusionment. Yet, in Florida’s malls, Ismael pieced together his country’s history—not out of nostalgia, but duty.
When he died shortly after the documentary’s completion, Argentina lost a direct link to an unrepeatable era. His words, now preserved in book form, remain a map of what Argentina was—and what it might have been. As the nation grapples with ongoing crises, Ismael’s reflections on violence, corruption, and the absence of a national project feel hauntingly relevant.
The final image of Ismael, in a trailer he knew he’d soon leave, isn’t one of defeat. It’s a portrait of dignity—a man who bore witness to the 20th century’s revolutions and betrayals, never compromising his lucid, unflinching gaze.
Comments