On October 17, 1945, Peronism was born in a long collective journey that ended with the rescue of then Colonel Juan Perón from forced retirement from public affairs, and that same day the new political movement had its first victim: Darwin Passaponti, 16, a student at Normal Mariano Acostakilled by a bullet.
The deadly shot was fired after midnight from the Crítica newspaper building, at 1333 Avenida de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, when the crowd that had demanded Perón’s return was deconcentrated from Plaza de Mayo and a group of young people from the Nationalist Union of Secondary Students (Unes)Passaponti among them, passed in front of the newspaper.
In the evening edition (fifth) of that October 17, Crítica -which from its pages confronted the Government of Edelmiro Farrell but in particular the Secretary of Labor and Welfare- had published on its cover a title that would become famous: “Isolated groups that do not represent the authentic Argentine proletariat try to intimidate the population.”
Passaponti’s crime occurred in the midst of a very tense episode about which there are different versions, although it is clear that it began with an exchange of insults between protesters who were returning from the rally for Perón’s freedom and his return to office, for a side, and a left group that remained within the facilities of the Crítica newspaper, on the other.
One of the young people who participated in the event on October 17, who walked down Avenida de Mayo in the direction of Once because “there was no longer an underground” and who walked past the Crítica building, was Aldo Capece, today 94 years oldin 1945, a 17-year-old high school student at the Otto Krause Industrial College on Paseo Colón street, in the Lower Buenos Aires area.
Capece, doctor in Chemistry and Exact Sciences from the University of La Plata (UNLP) and a historical militant of Peronism in the Buenos Aires town of Merlo, recalled in dialogue with Télam that the day of October 17, 1945 “ended around midnight” so, due to the time, many groups decided to return to Eleven “walking down the Avenida de Mayo”.
“In one of those groups I was Darwin Passaponti. I was singing like everyone else. Arriving at the height of the newspaper Crítica (at Avenida de Mayo 1333, where today there is a division of the Federal Police), which had workshops in the basement, it came out from there, from like a small iron window, a shot that hit Darwin in the heartwho dropped dead, and inexplicably there was never a call for justice,” Capece said.
The reconstruction of the crime made by the historian Roberto Baschetti varies in some details: consulted by this agency, he pointed out that “when the masses were losing concentration they were shot from the balconies of the Crítica newspaper” although “other sources say that it was the other way around, that the demonstrators attacked the newspaper and that from there they fired to defend themselves“.
In any case, Baschetti stressed, “what is concrete is that as a result of that action, Passaponti, a young nationalist affiliated with Unes, died of a shot to the head at only 16 years of age, the first martyr of insurgent Peronism.”
The early death of Darwin Passaponti is reflected in the book “Tacuara” by journalist Daniel Gutman (Unes was associated with the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista), as well as in Álvaro Abós’s biography of the magnetic founder of the newspaper Crítica, the media entrepreneur Natalio Botana.
In that last book, a journalist who worked at Crítica in 1945 said that the young Unes students had tried to set fire to the door of the newspaper building with a couple of chairs from nearby bars and that at one point both parties began shooting at each other, shooting that ended with the death “of a nationalist kid, Darwin Passaponti”.
Regarding the same event, the late poet Alfredo Carlino, another assistant on October 17 when he was just 13 years old and worked as a cadet at The Standard newspaper, once said that Crítica “threw the heap”, so “he fell (by Passaponti), who was an intimate friend, how could I have fallen”.
In his testimony, Carlino rejected that the people who had mobilized for Perón had “caused excesses” when arriving at Avenida de Mayo at 1300 and said that in that place, rather, “quite the opposite happened, we were victims,” he replied.
Historian Norberto Galasso, author of a book on the founding day of Peronism (titled “October 17, 1945”, published by Página/12), recalled Passaponti’s crime in dialogue with Télam by stressing that “from within (from the Crítica newspaper) they shoot him and kill him”.
Galasso later delved into the family of the nationalist student who supported Perón and arrived dead at the Durand hospital, whose father Trento Passaponti – pharmacist with anarchist ideas and obvious Italian descent – had met his wife, the entrerriana and very believer Cándida Quiroga, while sharing classrooms at the University of Tucumán.
Trento and Cándida settled in the Santa Fe town of Zenón Pereyra, in the center-west of the province, where two daughters were born and finally Darwin, but years later They moved to the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Caballitoto open a pharmacy there on the corner of Acoyte and Neuquén, an activity that supported the family and accompanied Trento throughout his life.
The pharmacist liked to write, in the mid-’40s he had already written a play (“La hora incerta”) and would later publish a novel (“La Chacra del Mangrullo”), a taste that he probably passed on to his son Darwin: after his death, a poem by the young militant circulated among those who shared his ideas.
The poem acquired another symbolic charge after what happened to him on the night of October 17: “I wanted to cross life with the light of the ray that space illuminates, sure of not living more than an instant, sure of not dying weakened. Just like lightning, short, brief and sovereign”, Passaponti had written in what, without looking for it, seemed like a premonitory exercise.
The death of the high school student on the day that consecrated a new leadership and ratified the emergence of a mass movement of working-class extraction was not overlooked by Perón himself.
In a letter addressed much later to Trento Passaponti, dated 1967 and sent from Madrid, when he was already in exile, Perón defined the murdered young man as the “first Peronist” and said that from a distance he would be part “with emotion” of a tribute that would be held in the Chacarita cemetery.
Trento, for his part, ascribed with conviction to Peronism and after moving with his family to the Buenos Aires town of Moreno, he opened another pharmacy there and even He became a candidate for mayor of the commune for the Popular Union party (seal used by the PJ, banned) in the 1962 Buenos Aires elections, in which he shared the ballot with the Andrés Framini-Marcos Anglada ticket.
