THE Plaza de Mayo, the main square in the centre of Buenos Aires, is home to both the presidential palace and the Roman Catholic cathedral. Before sunrise on March 19th the square was packed with Argentines who had come to watch a live broadcast of the inauguration in Rome of their compatriot, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as Pope Francis.

Unsurprisingly in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, ordinary Argentines were overjoyed about the elevation of the archbishop of Buenos Aires to be the new head of the church. But the reaction of the occupant of the presidential palace, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her acolytes to the news that her former neighbour has become the world’s most powerful Argentine was a lot more ambivalent. And reaction to the new pope also revealed how far Argentina remains divided about what happened before and during its military dictatorship of the 1970s.

Ms Fernández rushed to Rome for lunch with Pope Francis the day before his inauguration. She gave him a gourd for drinking maté, a traditional herb tea, and gushed on receiving a papal kiss in return. She told reporters that she had asked Francis to intervene in support of her government’s demand for a dialogue with Britain over Argentina’s claim to the Falkland (Malvinas) islands. That the islands should be Argentine is one of the few things the pope and the president agree on, though he will now have many higher priorities.

As neighbours in the Plaza de Mayo, their relations ranged from frosty to hostile. Cardinal Bergoglio backed farmers who clashed with Ms Fernández in 2008 over a tax rise. They also disagreed over the president’s approval of a 2010 law to legalise gay marriage. Perhaps unfairly, he accused Ms Fernández and her predecessor and husband, Néstor Kirchner, of doing too little to tackle the widespread poverty that followed Argentina’s economic and financial collapse of 2001-02.

The president’s trip to Rome looked like a swift exercise in damage limitation. Her initial letter of congratulation was stiff, in contrast to the enthusiasm expressed by other Latin American leaders. When news of his election broke, her supporters in Argentina’s Congress refused to interrupt a eulogy to Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez. While private television channels streamed uninterrupted footage from the Vatican, state-owned Channel 7 preferred a children’s cartoon.

One of Ms Fernández’s closest backers then raked up an accusation that Cardinal Bergoglio, when head of the Argentine branch of the Jesuit order in the 1970s, had been complicit in the crimes of Argentina’s cruel and repressive military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Horacio Verbitsky, an investigative journalist who as editor of Pagina 12, a newspaper, has been chief propagandist for the Kirchner governments, claimed in 1999 that Father Bergoglio had handed over two Jesuit priests to the navy, which held them for five months. The priests had failed to heed his warning that they should leave the poor district where they worked, for their own protection, after a lay worker had joined the Montoneros, a guerrilla movement.

This week Mr Verbitsky published a foreign-ministry document of 1979 which appeared to suggest that Father Bergoglio had recommended that one of the priests, Franz Jalics, who had fled to Germany after his release, should be denied a passport because of his suspected links with leftist guerrilla groups. The new pope was deceitful, argues Mr Verbitsky: while pretending to help the priests publicly, he had privately worked against them.

At first glance, the document looks damning. But academics who have studied Argentina’s political violence of the 1970s think there is no evidence that Father Bergoglio helped the dictatorship, and he himself has rejected that allegation. Marcos Novaro, a sociologist at the University of Buenos Aires, thinks that Father Bergoglio did not want Father Jalics to be granted a passport because he was afraid he would be killed if he returned to Argentina. Father Jalics himself stated this week that Father Bergoglio did not inform on him and his colleague. Loris Zanatta, a historian of the Argentine church, says he has found much documentary evidence of the Jesuits’ efforts to free their colleagues. Others add that Father Bergoglio personally led these.

Mr Verbitsky’s allegation against Pope Francis is an example of the way in which, under the Kirchner governments, history has become a political weapon. The government has promoted trials of retired military officers; unlike previous trials in the 1980s, which ended in an amnesty after threats of military coups, these ones have not included any guerrilla leaders. Several senior officials are former Montoneros, as is Mr Verbitsky. In referring to the past, Ms Fernández never criticises the guerrillas, who were responsible for some 600 deaths and whose terrorism provoked the formation of a right-wing death squad and the 1976 military coup.

Although nobody doubts that the dictatorship’s violence was hugely disproportionate to that of the guerrillas, quite how much so is disputed. An independent truth commission found that at least 8,900 had died or disappeared at the dictatorship’s hands (many of them innocent civilians with no guerrilla links). Yet officials often state as fact that 30,000 died.

While much of Argentina’s Catholic hierarchy was complicit with the dictatorship, part of the church’s base, identified with liberation theology, “theorised and practised violence in the name of a…kingdom of justice in which it was legitimate to sacrifice individuals”, says Mr Zanatta. The Montoneros “had their own chaplains”, he adds. Father Bergoglio’s commitment to the poor took a different form. After becoming archbishop in 1998, he expanded a team of “shantytown priests” from ten to 23 and made regular visits to their parishes, where violence, drug addiction and domestic abuse are common.

The pope is unlikely to intervene in his country’s politics. Nevertheless, an opinion poll found that around half of respondents believed that his election would hurt the government. It will increase the clout of Argentina’s bishops, many of whom are critics of Ms Fernández. Perhaps recognising this, her supporters have abruptly changed their tune. Having first jeered at references to the papal election, members of La Campora, a group founded by the president’s son which identifies with the Montoneros, held a celebration in Villa 21-24, a shantytown, to mark Francis’s inauguration. That looked like recognition of a higher power.