Читать книгу Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina - Antonius C. G. M. Robben - Страница 11

Chapter 2

The Time of the Furnaces: Proscription, Compromise, and Insurrection

“There hung a murmurous atmosphere resembling the sea,” one reporter wrote of the crowd that celebrated the installation of General Lonardi as Argentina’s new president on 23 September 1955, “a constant surf of sounds: shouts and applause.”¹ The people were in a festive mood on this warm first day of Spring. Some fainted from the heat and the crowd’s pressure, while others refreshed themselves in the fountain at the Plaza de Mayo. The reporter compared the crowd to the Peronist crowds that used to monopolize the square, and asserted that never “has there gathered such a dense crowd as the one which yesterday tried to find a place at [the Plaza de Mayo] and overflowed into the converging avenues….”² Perón had consecrated the Plaza de Mayo during ten years of mobilizations as the nation’s foremost political arena where the Argentine people and the authorities determined their destiny. Packing the square with an immense crowd became henceforth a proof of political legitimacy for every future Argentine president and dictator.

The 23 September crowd expressed as much its support for the military government as its aversion of Peronism. The final years of Peronist rule with its increasing suppression of public speech, imprisonment and mis-treatment of political opponents, curtailment of civil liberties, and the confrontation with the Catholic Church had blown deep divisions in Argentine society which had manifested themselves in several crowd competitions. The 23 September crowd marked only the first of several street mobilizations that legitimized the Liberating Revolution. There were crowds on 11 January 1956 to support the new Aramburu government, on 10 June 1956 to listen to President Aramburu after a failed Peronist rebellion, and on 16 September 1956 to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution. Finally, there was a massive farewell on 21 October 1957 for a military junta which was voluntarily abandoning power through general elections in February 1958.

The repression of Peronist crowds after the 1955 coup became particularly harsh when the moderate Lieutenant-General Lonardi was pushed aside in November 1955 by the hardliners General Aramburu and Admiral Rojas. Four months after the palace coup, the Peronist party was declared illegal. Systematically, the Peronist Organization was dismantled and with it the dignity of the working class.³ What became now of the leaderless Peronist masses? How would they be able to recapture their feelings of dignity, unity, and power without the presence of Perón, and what would motivate them to take to the streets and brave the repressive climate?

The prohibition of Peronist mobilizations had a tremendous impact which compelled Peronists to remember the 1945 Day of Loyalty through sabotage and undo the bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo with acts of defiance. Bombs exploded every 17 October and slogans were painted hastily on the walls. Canetti’s stings of command accumulated again, not only in the working class, but also among a younger generation that had been raised with stories about the glorious days of Perón and Evita. Some guerrillas of the 1970s were only children in 1956 when they had their first brush with violence and repression. Ernesto Jauretche recalls how deeply the search for his mother affected him when she was arrested after the failed Peronist rebellion of June 1956. “The first time they took my mother, they also disappeared her. For one month, we searched for her everywhere but they told us: ‘She’s not here, she’s not here.’ We searched for her at military bases, everywhere. Executions were taking place and we didn’t have any news about my mother, we didn’t know where she was. The history of the disappearances is indeed very old.”⁴ Jauretche believes that this episode and the frequent visits to his incarcerated mother caused a profound class hatred that fed his political activity during the rest of his life.

These experiences were shared by many Peronists, and contrasted with happier and increasingly idealized memories of the Peronist years. Hardship and happiness shaped militant Peronists who romanticized about Eva Perón helping the poor and the sick, the jubilant Labor Day crowds at the Plaza de Mayo, and the holidays at the seaside resorts built for the workers. Added to these memories came the traumatic bombardment of the Peronist crowd on 16 June 1955 and the frustration of not being able to manifest the loyalty to Perón and his ideals, because if the crowd was not the progenitor, then it was certainly the womb of the Peronist movement. As Perón wrote on 3 November 1956 to John William Cooke: “I have given them an organization, a doctrine and a mystique. I have worked eleven years to politicize the masses. I have prepared them to fight against a reactionary response and I have left them with an example of how to achieve important reforms.”⁵ The leader-crowd relation stood at the origin of the mystique of Peronism, and the obstruction of the public expression of that sentiment, either in crowds or in votes, added fuel to its manifestation in surrogate forms such as strike mobilizations, protest marches, illegal gatherings on commemorative days, public disturbances, and street violence.

In this chapter, I concentrate on the attempts to express Peronist sentiments in public by establishing a diverse presence in the streets of Argentina’s large cities. These public manifestations had an emotional and a political component. The protests arose in reaction to the repression of Peronist sympathies and from a grass roots belief in popular insurrection as the best strategy to restore Perón to power. Strike crowds and small public outcries of Peronist sentiment were at their most intense between 1956 and 1959, only to come to a standstill after increased police and military repression. The labor movement fractured into several segments which each pursued its objectives with different political instruments, only to reappear again with revolutionary fervor in 1969.

Retreat and Reconquest

The leaders of the Liberating Revolution saw Peronism as a belated out-crop of fascism. Its elimination would grant Argentina the same post-war prosperity as Europe and the United States. Decree 4161 of March 1956 prohibited all references to Perón, Evita or Peronism. President Aramburu only spoke of Perón as “the monster,” and newspapers identified him as “the fugitive tyrant.” The display of his pictures and books, the singing of Peronist themes, and the commemoration of days important to the Peronist movement were forbidden. The expression of Peronist sentiments and identity markers was banned from public space. Any violation was punishable by a prison sentence, and would bar the violators from assuming a political or union office.⁶ These anti-Peronist measures were experienced by Peronists as anti-working-class measures. The Argentine workers were expelled politically from the city centers to their poor neighborhoods in the periphery.

Decree 4161 turned the shouting of Perón’s name in public into a small act of resistance in which, at least for a few seconds, the street was retaken. There were many such instances, and they turned into a civil disobedience that became more violent with the day. Jorge Rulli became involved in the political struggle after the failed Peronist rebellion of June 1956. He attended the silent protest marches in Buenos Aires that attracted two to three thousand people, and felt the brunt of the revolutionary civil commandos that had emerged in the resistance against the Peronist government in 1954 and 1955. These commandos were workers affiliated with the Socialist and Radical parties. They took over Peronist union branches and suppressed public expressions of Peronism. In 1956 and 1957, young Peronists began to dispute the center of Buenos Aires with these civil commandos. Their motto was to win the streets for Peronism.

Public space was conquered through physical confrontations with bludgeons or bare hands. For example, Rulli’s group would hang a photo of Perón at the corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda Streets in Buenos Aires, and lie in wait for their victims. Every person who tore down the image was severely beaten. Thus, they intimidated passersby into not reacting at all on any public expression of Peronist sentiment. They sang the Peronist march and shouted “Viva Perón.”⁷ The shouting of Perón’s name united the orphaned Peronists in their yearning and enhanced their desire to manifest their allegiance together. These protests were the response of a dispersed crowd in search of something or someone around which to gather.

Perón himself continued to have faith in the masses.⁸ Civil resistance would wear out the government and organize a general strike paralyzing the country and inciting a mass insurrection. He emphasized that it is important to hit “when it hurts and where it hurts” as well as to learn to “throw a stone and hide the hand.”⁹ However, the majority of the Peronist following was not receptive to such insurrectional disobedience. John William Cooke, Perón’s head of resistance in Argentina, complained in June 1957 that there was considerable sabotage and widespread aversion of the government, but that “This mood doesn’t translate, however, into a total civil resistance in the way that we would like.”¹⁰ Cooke’s assessment was correct at that particular moment, but unjustified when seen over a longer period of time. Strike mobilizations became the hotbed of political militancy that fed into an insurrectional movement of slow maturation. Peronists would have to wait fourteen long years before the moment for insurrection appeared.

Strikes and Barricades

The first major strike after Perón’s fall occurred between 13 and 16 November 1955 to protest the usurpation of union locales by non-Peronist unionists. These confrontations between Peronist and non-Peronist workers demonstrated that the Liberating Revolution had cut right across class lines. As James has observed, an anti-Peronist (gorila) could just as well be an oligarch as a fellow worker.¹¹ Many Peronist workers adhered to the November strike, but did not manifest their protest publicly. Workers and union delegates were arrested, and an inspector-general appointed by the government took control of the CGT.¹² One worker recalled years later that “there were no protest marches, nor assault groups … it was a calm, peaceful strike as though the workers had still not got over the shock caused by the fall of the Leader….”¹³ Perón’s fall had a devastating effect on the Peronist movement which had deemed itself almighty.

Compared to the previous five years, there was a great willingness to strike in 1956, but this disposition declined significantly in 1957, only to increase rapidly in 1958 and 1959.¹⁴ The national elections of February 1958 had been won by Arturo Frondizi of the Radical party (UCR) thanks to the Peronist vote ordered by Perón. Frondizi extended his hand immediately to the unions by withdrawing the inspector-general from the CGT union central. Nevertheless, major strikes struck his government after July. Most strikes in 1958 were organized by non-Peronist unions. Peronist union leaders were still supporting Frondizi because of his conciliatory attitude and legislation that reinstated the Peronist supremacy in many unions.¹⁵ When Frondizi implemented a wage freeze in late 1958 to resolve a serious imbalance of payments, the unwritten pact with the Peronist unions was broken.

The year 1959 became a watershed for government and labor. In confrontation upon confrontation, the two parties were staking out their territory and redefining the rules of engagement. The unions were defending worker employment and the principal tenets of Peronism, namely social justice and national sovereignty. Instead, Frondizi wanted to diminish Argentina’s dependence on agricultural exports and develop its industry by attracting foreign capital and raising labor productivity. The privatization of the Lisandro de la Torre meatpacking plant on 14 January 1959 fitted perfectly in his development plan. However, there were strong nationalist and Peronist sentiments attached to the plant. Like the railroads, the Lisandro de la Torre plant had been nationalized by Perón. Its privatization was felt as another retreat from the Peronist policies and a sell-out to foreign capital.

Upon hearing the news about the privatization, nearly nine thousand workers gathered in general assembly and decided to occupy the plant. Solidarity strikes erupted throughout the country through grass roots activism, instead of union leadership. On 17 January, fifteen hundred policemen, gendarmery, and soldiers accompanied by four Sherman tanks assaulted the Lisandro de la Torre plant.¹⁶ What concerns me here are not the mass arrests and the eviction of the workers, but the street protests that broke out afterwards and their interpretation by the Peronist resistance movement. This local insurrection in Buenos Aires (known as the porteñazo), showed that strikes about labor issues might easily escalate into political confrontations attracting the solidarity of other social groups. Behind each general strike, there lurked the danger of an insurrectional crowd.

The Frigorífico Nacional Lisandro de la Torre was located in Mataderos, a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The police assault was received with indignation. Mataderos and adjoining neighborhoods turned into a barricaded zone of resistance as had never been seen before in Argentina. According to the clandestine Peronist National Command or CNP (Comando Nacional Peronista), thousands of young workers joined the struggle. A new generation of Peronists had become incorporated into the Peronist movement. They cut the street lights, overturned trees, and erected barricades.¹⁷ Meanwhile, Mataderos was enveloped in the stench of rotting flesh from the corrals surrounding the meatpacking plant. Due to the insurrection, the animals had been left without care in the high summer temperatures.¹⁸

The CNP document exalted the combativeness of the Argentine working class, and regarded the general strike as a confirmation of the central position of the Peronist masses in the struggle for national liberation. Only the Peronist rank and file had thrown itself entirely into the struggle to protect the national patrimony, while many union leaders had struck unacceptable compromises with the government.¹⁹ Here, a conflict surfaced that had been brooding for several years between on one side the so-called integrationist unions which pursued an accommodation with the government to save what there was to save of the embattled labor conditions, and on the other side the intransigent unionists and the vanguardists. The intransigents rejected all deals and engaged in sabotage, while the vanguardists of the CNP tried to organize a guerrilla insurgency. The events in January 1959 led the CNP to believe that they and the intransigents, not the integrationists, were in step with the people.

The CNP report mentioned also the mass appeal of the general strike. Not just the workers of Lisandro de la Torre, but workers from other branches of industry as well as students and shopkeepers joined the protest. Yet, the general strike was never at any moment an insurrection because of the absence of a recognizable political leadership which could have planned the general strike, provided armed support, and thus achieved more success.²⁰ Nevertheless, the Lisandro de la Torre protests fed dreams of future insurrections, taught valuable lessons about how to better organize the popular defenses, and added one more episode to the memory of the Peronist resistance movement.

Frondizi took the strike movement very seriously. He had already declared a thirty-day state of siege on 9 November 1958 to deal with the Mendoza oil workers’ strike, and kept renewing it till a military coup ended his government on 29 March 1962. The state of siege did not prevent workers from striking throughout 1959, but the protests met with little success.²¹ The Lisandro de la Torre plant continued in private hands, and only half of the nine thousand workers were rehired. Strikes of bank employees and textile and metal workers were broken, and street protests were facing new tough repressive measures as the Frondizi government installed the CONINTES Plan (Plan de Conmoción Interior del Estado) on 14 March 1960. This Plan of Internal Upheaval of the State had been put in place by Perón on 16 September 1955 to make headway against the growing opposition that would end in the Liberating Revolution. Now, the same repressive measures were used to curtail the Peronists. The CONINTES Plan gave extensive powers to the armed forces dealing with public disturbance. The country was divided into defense zones and subzones; an organizational structure which was used again during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. The police was placed under the command of the armed forces, and the country became subject to martial law on 16 March 1960. The CONINTES measures were suspended on 2 August 1961, but the state of siege continued unabated.²²

The labor strikes dropped dramatically in Buenos Aires city from over ten million working days lost in 1959 to 1.6 million in 1960, and then declined rapidly to less than three thousand days in 1967.²³ Thousands of militant unionists had been blacklisted, and factory managers were granted extensive powers over their workers. Rising unemployment in a worsening economy, the CONINTES repression, and the realization that the strikes and street protests of 1959 had accomplished little, had disillusioned the rank and file. Understandably, many workers drifted into the orbit of integrationist union leaders who could at least achieve some modest material advances through their negotiations with the government. Occasional street protests became instrumental means during negotiations instead of emotional manifestations of political sentiment. The street presence became always related to sectorial interests, and only seldom acquired the transgressive quality of the previous five years. During this period, a division developed between integrationists who pursued a strategy of pragmatic negotiation and intransigents who continued with a grass roots resistance. The intransigents would eventually split into those who tried to incite a mass mobilization that intended to overthrow the ruling powers, and those who joined the vanguardists and propagated a guerrilla insurgency.

Integrationism, Intransigence, and Vanguardism

The 1959 tug of war between the unions on one side and the government, armed forces, and industry on the other, disconnected the political goals from the economic objectives of the Peronist workers. The call for Perón’s return had been a motivating force in the labor disputes since 1955, but became a remote ideal as more pressing economic concerns arose after the 1959 defeat. The façade of Peronist militancy was maintained in order not to betray the hardships suffered by the rank and file, but a new style of union politics was taking shape. The years between 1961 and 1966 were times of institutional pragmatism.²⁴ Institutional pragmatism implied a strategy of “hit and negotiate” (golpear y negociar) in which strikes, work stoppages, and factory occupations were used as bargaining tools.²⁵ It led to the growing isolation of militant union activists from the majority of the Peronist workers organized by the integrationist unions. Sabotage never ceased entirely, but it was the work of small groups. Militant Peronists were admired by their co-workers for their tenacious resistance to the authorities, but their political intuition was no longer trusted.

The dominance of the integrationists pushed the intransigents to the margins of the Peronist movement. Most former activists joined the unions in their move towards political moderation. Intransigent workers in Buenos Aires were ousted from Peronist unions, and reorganized over the years into two small groups.²⁶ The most militant intransigents became involved in guerrilla warfare. The other group continued with their sabotage and political work in factories and neighborhoods. These intransigents-turned-insurrectionists hoped for a return to the crowd mobilizations of the Peronist era, and became convinced that nothing should be allowed to stand between the masses and Perón. However, despite their rhetorical appeal to the myths of the past, they lacked a clear conception on how to mobilize the masses, and wean the rank and file from the bosom of union clientelism.²⁷

Many workers recognized that the institutional pragmatism had reaped material results. The integrationist union leaders summoned a large following, and had the means to maintain people in a clientelistic relation. They controlled the union dues and pension funds, maintained health clinics, gave jobs to loyal members, and acted as brokers between labor, management, and the government. In return for swallowing rationalization schemes, greater managerial control, and an overall depolitization on the work floor, the workers received fringe benefits such as maternity benefits, bonuses for years of employment, and furloughs on social occasions.²⁸ Still, the workers rejected the personal life styles of the union leaders, the corruption, bodyguards, expensive cars, and imported whiskey. Rubbing shoulders with politicians and captains of industry, union leaders stood at a growing distance from the oppressive climate on the work floor. The workers were also bitter about the fraudulent union elections, and the removal of shop floor union representatives considered too radical. A clear indication of this withdrawal was the declining participation in union elections. In other words, the pragmatic stance of the workers conflicted with how they experienced this process emotionally.

This unresolved tension between material gains and emotional losses worked itself out in a crowd demobilization. Labor conflicts in the first half of the 1960s were increasingly confined to the work place, and did no longer transbord into the streets and squares of the major industrial cities. The Peronist workers had lost their leader in 1955, yet his ideas continued to be of collective inspiration, but his place remained vacant and was not occupied by either integrationists or intransigents. The crowd as a political means in a conflict and as an emotional force for its participants failed therefore to materialize.

The gap between intransigents and integrationists was as much vertical as regional. The integrationist union leaders dominated labor politics in the city and province of Buenos Aires and at the national level, but they were less influential in the city of Córdoba. Córdoba had become Argentina’s second largest industrial center since the arrival of Fiat in 1954 and the IKA car manufacturer in 1955. Local unions kept their independence from the overbearing union centrals based in Buenos Aires and cultivated an internal democracy which maintained an active participation of the rank and file in union politics. Attempting to prevent the Peronist union establishment from dominating the newly founded auto industry of Córdoba, the Aramburu government had granted in 1956 the union rights of the IKA auto workers to the tiny garage mechanics union SMATA (Sindicatos de Mecánicos y Afines del Transporte Automotor), and not to the Peronist UOM metal workers union (Unión Obrera Metalúrgica). The embattled UOM in Córdoba adopted therefore a more hard-line, intransigent position than both the Buenos Aires UOM and the UOM union central.²⁹

The SMATA auto workers union in Córdoba pursued a line relatively independent from the national union centrals. Peronists commanded only a small majority in SMATA, and had to tolerate a critical communist presence. SMATA succeeded in raising the number of shop stewards on the work floor and organized open assemblies at which workers could express their opinions. Various governments did not succeed in preventing the politicization of the auto workers. Grass roots participation forged the workers’ identification with the union and with each other. This solidarity would become crucial in the considerable crowd mobilizations of 1969.³⁰

The bloc of Independents, a group of unaffiliated unions not subject to the Peronist union centrals, played a pivotal role in Cordoban union politics. Many members were anti-Peronists with strong Radical, socialist or communist sympathies. The bloc stood under the inspired leadership of Agustín Tosco, the secretary-general of the light and power workers union Luz y Fuerza. Despite a membership of less than three thousand members, the union occupied a strategic position in Córdoba because of its ability to cut off the city’s power supply. The militancy of the electricians can be attributed to their grass roots involvement in union issues cultivated by Tosco and the inability of the union centrals to assume control over the Cordoban working class. The prominence of the Independents in Cordoban labor politics prevented local Peronist unions from slipping into the soft-line strategies of the Buenos Aires unions, and made Luz y Fuerza spearhead an uncompromising position towards the government.³¹

So, at the beginning of the 1960s, there were two major currents in the Peronist labor movement: intransigents and integrationists. The intransigents were mainly based in Córdoba. They were more prone to take to the streets to lend force to their demands, and were ready to enter into loose alliances with non-Peronist Independent unions to further their interests. The intransigent union leaders were not averse to pragmatic negotiations to achieve concrete gains, but did not give in entirely to the integrationism of the Buenos Aires-based union centrals.

Peronism Without Perón

In control of the majority of the Peronist workers, the integrationist union leaders in Buenos Aires began to acquire political aspirations. Augusto Vandor, the leader of the powerful metal workers union, succeeded in placing unionists on the provincial election slates. The resounding victory on 18 March 1962 of Peronist candidates in nine provinces, including the province of Buenos Aires, triggered the downfall of the Frondizi government.³² The armed forces did not tolerate a Peronist victory, let alone the return of Perón to Argentina. The elections were annulled on 19 March, and Frondizi was arrested on 29 March. José María Guido was sworn in that day as head of the transitional government. General elections were held on 7 July 1963.³³

The 1963 elections were won by Arturo Illia of the Radical Party (UCR) with only 25 percent of the total vote because the proscribed Peronists cast blank votes en masse.³⁴ In the eyes of many Peronists Illia lacked the legitimacy to lead the country, while the union leaders feared his desire to cut their clientelism and improve the internal union democracy.³⁵ The opposition to Illia’s government began with nationwide Peronist demonstrations on 17 October 1963 to commemorate the Day of Loyalty and proclaim a popular mobilization. The protesters demanded new general elections, the withdrawal of all repressive measures, an embargo on the export of capital, extensive nationalizations, and the return of Perón.³⁶ Perón had declared on New Year’s eve of 1963 that he would return to Argentina before the end of 1964. Economic and political demands merged again. The political climate added increased credibility to the slogan “Perón returns” (Perón vuelve) which began to appear on street walls throughout Argentina. A massive rally was held at Plaza Once on 17 October 1964 attended by more than one hundred thousand people. On the economic front, almost four million workers participated in the occupation of eleven thousand factories during seven operations between 21 May and 24 June 1964.

Ironically, it was Perón’s attempt to return to Argentina which provided Augusto Vandor with an opportunity to displace him from the pinnacle of the Peronist movement.³⁷ Perón tried to enter Argentina on 2 December 1964 but the Argentine military asked the Brazilian authorities to deny him free passage. Perón was ordered to disembark in Rio de Janeiro, and forced to await the return flight to Madrid.³⁸ The failure of Operation Return gave Vandor an important political victory. He had demonstrated his unfailing loyalty by accompanying Perón on his ill-fated trip, and could now return to Argentina with the laurels of his heroism.

Vandor tried to use his newly gained prestige to consolidate his political influence in the Peronist movement during the March 1965 congressional elections as he maneuvered his candidates into the key tickets of the Peronist Unión Popular. When the votes had been counted, there were seventy seats in the House of Representatives for Illia’s Radical party UCR and fiftytwo seats for the Unión Popular.³⁹ For the first time since 1955, Peronists returned to Congress, now under the tutelage of the UOM leader Augusto Vandor. The victory would be short-lived because a military coup on 28 June 1966 deposed President Illia and brought retired General Juan Carlos Onganía to power.

The Onganía dictatorship proclaimed the beginning of the Argentine Revolution which sought to consolidate the nation’s moral and spiritual values, jump-start the stagnant economy, improve labor relations, and uphold the ideals of dignity and freedom which were the patrimony of Argentina’s Christian and Western civilization.⁴⁰ These ideals were implemented by closing Congress, dissolving the political parties, and dismissing the Supreme Court.⁴¹

The coup was initially welcomed by the principal union leaders José Alonso and Augusto Vandor because the Onganía government suspended many measures of the Illia government intended to curtail the political power of the labor unions.⁴² The Cordoban union leader Tosco stood practically alone in his condemnation of the military takeover, while Vandor and Alonso were prominently present at the swearing in ceremony.

The first blow to the unions came in August 1966 when the government imposed obligatory arbitration on labor conflicts and denied collective bargaining and the right to strike.⁴³ In line with the hitherto successful hit and negotiate strategy, Alonso and Vandor organized strikes. In Córdoba, auto workers went on strike and the Independent union leader Tosco organized work stoppages. The Onganía government, on the instigation of the National Security Council (CONASE) headed by General Osiris Villegas, responded with surprising harshness. Unions were placed under the control (intervenido) of inspectors-general, bank accounts frozen, and strikes and street demonstrations prohibited. In 1967 there were only six strikes in Greater Buenos Aires, in which no more than 547 workers participated.⁴⁴

In the two years following the defeat of the union protests, the union leadership disintegrated into a collaborationist, a participationist, and a combative bloc. The collaborationists, headed by Juan José Taccone and Rogelio Coria, were willing to submit workers to the government’s tutelage. Instead, Vandor and Alonso wished some degree of participation in the collective negotiations with the government to bargain for more favorable labor conditions. Finally, the combative union leaders condemned the accommodating attitude of the other two blocs and demanded a return to active resistance. In their opinion, the pact between labor, government, and capital had led the labor movement away from the class struggle and the pursuit of a socialist revolution. The combative unionists provoked a breach within the CGT union central in March 1968 and formed the CGTA (Confederación General de Trabajo de los Argentinos), also known as the CGT de Paseo Colón, under the leadership of Raimundo Ongaro. The CGTA received the support of most unions in the provinces, including Tosco’s electricians union and the UOM metal workers union in Córdoba.⁴⁵ The collaborationists and the participationists constituted the CGT de Azopardo under the control of Augusto Vandor.⁴⁶

The incendiary speech in Córdoba on 1 May 1968, by CGTA leader Ongaro, had all the tenets of the revolutionary discourse of the coming unruly years. He denounced the growing power of foreign multinationals and the dependence on the IMF and the World Bank. He condemned the high infant mortality, the slums on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and the many infectious diseases that troubled the poor. He verbalized the images of an impoverished Argentina many had seen in Fernando Solanas’ impressive 1966 documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (La Hora de los Hornos).⁴⁷ Ongaro called upon students and intellectuals to join the workers in combating the nation’s social ills.⁴⁸ Precisely in this period, the struggle of the combative Peronists took a revolutionary turn, as Carlos Villagra testifies: “The revolution became possible for us and we began to talk about organizing ourselves in a totally different way. The people wanted to fight, wanted to confront the system…. It wasn’t just the return of Perón, it was no longer throwing a stone or placing a pipe bomb. We said already that the system had to be changed, that a revolution had to be made. People were already saying that the struggle was going to be long and extensive. Peronism must make a revolution, yes or yes.”⁴⁹ The CGTA combatives embarked on a collision course with the Onganía dictatorship that culminated in June 1968 in a series of street protests in Argentina’s major cities.

After initially backing Ongaro for mobilizing the Peronist following, Perón became suspicious of the Marxist leaning of the combative CGTA and had in the end more faith in the institutional continuity of the old union establishment than a revolutionary union leadership which was hard to control.⁵⁰ However, the CGTA had put a militant momentum in motion which was hard to stop. Perón sensed the widespread resentment and emphasized in September 1968 the importance of a civil disobedience and mass protests comparable to Gandhi’s anticolonial struggle in India.⁵¹

Vandor also sensed the growing discontent among the rank and file. He declared war on the dictatorship in May 1969, and began to regain some of the ground lost after the partition of the CGT in March 1968. The influence of the CGTA dwindled rapidly. Their street mobilizations were repressed, they lost the support of Perón, and Vandor’s new oppositional strategy preempted their struggle. Nevertheless, the combatives continued to be a power to reckon with in Córdoba.⁵²

The institutional pragmatism and participationism of the 1960s had provided basic subsistence needs to many workers in times of political disenfranchisement.⁵³ Yet they had also created enduring hatreds within the labor movement. Vandor and Alonso were assassinated in 1969 and 1970 by hit squads of the revolutionary left for being traitors to the Peronist movement. The reign of the imposing union bosses had come to an end, and it was up to the rank and file to take the initiative again. A new generation of mostly young Peronists began to take the crowd initiative which the pragmatic union leaders had abandoned in the early 1960s. These revolutionary Peronists succeeded in dominating the streets with large demonstrations that would eventually contribute to the return of Perón in 1972. They created the means for an expression of Peronist sentiments submerged for a decade. Crowds gave the participants an identity and esprit de corps that could never be attained in equal emotional measure by institutional pragmatism, clientelism, and participationism. The political vigor was in the hands of a new generation of Peronist leaders who were untainted with the comforts of a union office, and who dreamed of seeing Perón raising his arms in salute from the balcony of the presidential Casa Rosada. The longing for these crowd sentiments was nowhere stronger than among the young second-generation Peronists who had never experienced them.

Crowd Alliances: Students, Workers, and Peronists

The involvement of young Peronists in the street conquests during the second half of the 1950s, as described earlier in this chapter, came to an abrupt halt in 1960. The crackdown on the Peronist worker resistance also imprisoned many youth leaders and incapacitated the Peronist Youth organization or JP (Juventud Peronista) founded in late 1957.⁵⁴ Surprisingly, their place was taken by the student body, an unsuspected segment of society that had always shown an aversion to Perón and his mass movement.

The rapprochement of university students and young working-class Peronists was rooted in the student protests against Frondizi’s 1958 proposal to allow the foundation of private universities. Rectors and students opposed the legislation because it would lead to the creation of private Catholic universities with a conservative curriculum. Street fights took place around the National University of Buenos Aires as rival groups of students in favor or against the legislation tried to occupy the buildings. Many students and young Peronist working-class activists received their fire baptism together in these clashes. So also did an adolescent Ernesto Jauretche who came from a family of militant Peronists, and became impressed by the battles with the police near the Medical School: “There, I saw the police back away for the first time. I saw the police run, I saw them fall under a shower of stones. For the first time I saw what a street fight was. There I began to learn throwing stones, to fight…. to see them withdraw was thrilling, to see the police run away suddenly gave a rush of happiness. It was marvelous. I think that this was for me the beginning of almost a linear process and so it was for almost all the other activists…. We began to discover there that they were not invulnerable.”⁵⁵ The street opposition culminated on 19 September 1958 in a protest crowd of about three hundred people who listened to speeches by politicians and student and union leaders. Frondizi’s bill was defeated in the house of representatives, amended and approved in the senate, and finally adopted by Congress.⁵⁶

The social and ideological rapprochement of workers and students intensified considerably in the early 1960s as increasingly more students began to have leftist political sympathies. This radicalization was worldwide, and had to do with the rebellious mood of the times. The radicalization of students in Argentina had its roots in the development of an intellectual new left which stood initially under the influence of Sartre’s existentialism and later became attracted to Marxism. Sartre argued that the objective structures of exploitation did not predetermine people’s consciousness, but that people were active subjects who produced history. Volition entered the political thought of Argentine intellectuals, a volition demonstrated in practice by the Cuban revolution.⁵⁷

These heterogeneous influences fell in fertile soil among the Argentine students of the early 1960s. They were a disenfranchised generation which felt politically gagged by the proscription of Peronism, the repeated military coups, and the paternalism of the authorities. The former Montonero guerrilla commander Fernando Vaca Narvaja recalls the growing social consciousness of his student days: “The university begins to embrace Peronism, begins to nationalize itself in the sense that the student breaks with his own isolation, his own environment and begins to develop … a social commitment with his people…. We became close to the working-class neighborhoods through social work.”⁵⁸ Student leaders wanted a curriculum that addressed social rather than purely scientific problems, and a research agenda that relieved the poor health and social distress of the underprivileged classes. The working class was, in the eyes of students and intellectuals, the only social sector in Argentine society with a true revolutionary potential. Solidarity with the working class in their struggle against the ruling powers was an inevitable step, even if many workers were Peronist and not socialist.

The July 1963 amnesty of Peronist activists incarcerated in 1960 gave a new impetus to the political alliance of students and young Peronists. The Peronist Youth held its first national congress on 27 October 1963 and elected Héctor Spina, Envar El Kadri, and Jorge Rulli as the executive committee. Perón supported the insurrectional convictions of these leaders. He reiterated in a letter of 20 October 1965 that the JP must “Have a close relation with the masses—the tactics and strategy must fuse with the masses—never forget that the combatants emerge from the masses and that revolutionary work is impossible without support from the masses.”⁵⁹ Similar ideas were heard in the prisons of Caseros and Villa Devoto where militant Peronists were held. John William Cooke invited university students to join the Peronist movement because they could help raise the revolutionary consciousness of the working class.⁶⁰ The time of dialogue had passed. Time had come for a revolutionary takeover. This revolution had to be fought with all means at its disposal, and should not shun the use of violence.

The rapprochement of students and workers was watched with growing concern by the military. Soon after Lieutenant-General Onganía came to power in 1966, he sought to curb the student radicalization by assuming control over the universities. Presidents, rectors and deans lost their autonomy and became administrators in service of the Ministry of Education. The law of 29 July 1966 stipulated that student centers were forbidden to engage in political activities.⁶¹ These repressive measures provoked a nationwide protest of students and faculty.

At 10:00 P.M. on 29 July 1966, about two hundred students barricaded themselves with benches and desks inside the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies in Buenos Aires. Similar occupations occurred at other faculties of the National University of Buenos Aires (UNBA). The Infantry Guard of the federal police responded eagerly.⁶² On the evening of 29 July, policemen ordered students to vacate the Faculty of Exact Sciences within fifteen minutes. After the time was up, the men forced their way in with tear gas while angry students pelted them with all sorts of objects. Once inside, the students were forced to walk the gauntlet with their arms held up high while policemen wielded their rubber batons on the protesters.⁶³ Warren Ambrose of MIT, who was a visiting professor at the time, gave the following eyewitness account to the New York Times: “The police entered firing tear gas and ordered everyone to face the wall with our hands up…. As we stood blinded by the tear gas against the walls of the classrooms, the police then began hitting us. Then one by one we were taken out and forced to run between rows of police spaced about 10 feet apart. That is when I got seven or eight wallops and a broken finger. No one resisted. We were all terrified, what with the curses and gas.”⁶⁴ This incident gave the event the memorable name the “Night of the Long Sticks” (la Noche de los Bastones Largos). The police authorities claimed that their actions had been provoked by the student violence. Their press release emphasized the political character of the occupations stating that Marxist literature and contribution slips to the communist party had been found at the Faculty of Architecture.⁶⁵

The Night of the Long Sticks spoke to the imagination of all Argentine students, and came to stand not only for the beatings and the hundreds of arrests, but also for the exodus of thousands of professors abroad and into private research institutes. The long-term economic and intellectual loss of this brain drain is hard to assess but the political cost became clear immediately. Students and faculty were driven to the political opposition by a dictatorial government whose repressive measures, authoritarianism, and budgetary neglect of the universities contributed to the escalation of violence in Argentine society.⁶⁶ Four years later, Onganía confessed that his approach to the universities had been a serious political error: “It was our first big mistake. And we committed it thirty days after getting into power through a coup.”⁶⁷ The public beatings, arrests, interrogations, and incarcerations during the Onganía dictatorship became markers of political initiation for students that made them kindred in spirit to Peronist activists and intransigent unionists, radicalizing them towards armed resistance.

The repression of the student protests was also a mistake from a crowd perspective. The police drove the students literally and figuratively speaking into the streets. Members of the Peronist Youth entered the university to forge the ties between workers and students.⁶⁸ The crowd began to supersede the unions and student organizations as the principal social collective to which people adhered and through which they expressed their anger. As Moyano has observed, the first step to political involvement consisted often in attending a solidarity meeting, a protest rally, or a street demonstration in the company of friends.⁶⁹ Such experiences had a radicalizing effect, especially if accompanied by police violence.

The student-worker alliance erupted with full force in 1969 with three memorable crowd events in Rosario and Córdoba. The day of street fighting in Córdoba on 29 May has become known as the Cordobazo.⁷⁰ This violent crowd will be discussed in the next chapter because of a historical significance which places it on a par with the epoch-making 17 October 1945. Here, I discuss the events of one week earlier in Rosario because, unlike the Cordobazo, the Rosariazo on 21 May 1969 was initiated by students instead of workers.

As is so typical of major crowd gatherings in Argentina, the events in Rosario of May 1969 had been preceded by months of small street mobilizations. Since the beginning of the year, students had been objecting to the curtailment of student enrollments. These protests were successful in the faculties of Philosophy and Letters, but restrictions continued in other disciplines. Although not all demands were met, the students realized that their demonstrations were effective, and that the authorities were tolerating the street protests. It was in this turbulent climate of May 1969 that student restaurants were privatized, and meal prices raised.⁷¹

The student opposition arose in the northeastern provinces of Santa Fe, Corrientes, and Entre Rios.⁷² Classes were boycotted, student restaurants were occupied, and daily street protests were held in the towns of Rosario, Corrientes, and Resistencia. The students understood that the authorities had no intention of reversing the price hike, and began to approach social sectors sympathetic to their demands. Students in Resistencia sought the support of progressive forces in the Catholic church, while students in Corrientes asked for help from Ongaro’s combative CGTA and Tosco’s electricians union. Of particular importance was the labor unrest among metal workers in Rosario where three hundred workers were confronted with a lockout. The UOM called for a general strike on 23 May 1969.⁷³

The tense situation escalated when police in Corrientes attacked a street demonstration on 15 May, wounding four students, and killing the nineteen-year-old Juan José Cabral.⁷⁴ The indignation was nationwide, and unions condemned the disproportionate police response. The UOM national headquarters expressed its solidarity with the students in Corrientes and the striking workers in Rosario, while continuing to strengthen the links between the two sectors: “We refuse to accept the hunger to which they are submitting us, and the violent repression of every form of protest. We already know that the regime kills, here in Corrientes, in Córdoba, or in any other place. They are killing the best we have: our young students and workers.”⁷⁵ The protests multiplied in all major Argentine cities, and a student strike was announced for Tuesday 20 May. The students intensified their protests during the intervening days when another casualty fell to police bullets. Rosario was this time the location of police brutality.⁷⁶

On 17 May, there were the usual daily demonstrations in Rosario. The Night of the Long Sticks was casting its shadow over the protests when protesters linked the death of Juan José Cabral two days earlier to that of Santiago Pampillón, a student and part-time auto worker who died in September 1966 during a student protest in Córdoba. Some activists were carrying molotov cocktails and shouted the slogan “Cabral and Pampillón, the martyrs of the road to freedom.”⁷⁷ That afternoon, groups of students were throwing stones at the police and at several financial institutions in Rosario, when police officer Lezcano stepped out of his car and shot the student Adolfo Ramón Bello through the head. According to a police communiqué, the victim was part of a group that had cornered the officer, thrown molotov cocktails, and tried to overturn his car. The officer drew his pistol in self-defense and fired an accidental shot which killed Adolfo Bello.⁷⁸

The killings provoked a public resentment impossible to appease. The students called upon everybody to repudiate the deaths of Cabral and Bello in a silent protest march on 21 May. The demonstration was called for six o’clock in the evening at the Plaza 25 de Mayo in downtown Rosario. The trajectory of the march was to run for twelve blocks from the square to the headquarters of the CGTA. As an indication of the alliance between students and workers, secretary-general Raimundo Ongaro promised to address the crowd at the end of the protest march. On the way to the CGTA building, the demonstrators intended to pass by the shopping center where Adolfo Bello had been shot four days earlier.

At this stage of the month-long demonstrations, the authorities were faced with a crowd that was no longer concerned with the conflict over expensive meal tickets, but wanted to mourn their dead in a collective gathering and control public space as a political protest. Police and military mounted an impressive force at three core locations. Their defense capability of fire engines and assault cars was concentrated around the Plaza 25 de Mayo. The force wanted to prevent the protesters from gathering there before they proceeded to the CGTA offices where also several radio stations, the court, the university’s administrative center, and the police and army headquarters were located. The march through the city symbolized a political supremacy which the security forces were not willing to concede.

At six o’clock in the evening, about two thousand protesters are circulating around the Plaza 25 de Mayo. Many are students, but there are also blue- and white-collar workers. They try to enter the square in small groups but are immediately dispersed by the police, whereupon they try to circumvent the barrier through another passage. The tug of war undulates back and forth through the streets of Rosario until the police decides to attack. They launch large quantities of tear gas into the streets, and charge on horseback towards the protesters. The crowd disperses but regroups seven blocks away from the square in the direction of the CGTA headquarters.

A new element is added to the volatile situation when people begin to burn papers in the street, initially to neutralize the tear gas. Fires can be seen at various places and are even fed by local residents who throw paper onto the street. The protest begins to acquire an insurrectional appearance when barricades are erected to halt the advancing security forces. Buses are overturned and building materials are taken from construction sites to reinforce the improvised obstructions. The protesters even go on the offensive. They attack the mounted police and throw them off their horses. At 9:20 in the evening, the police withdraw from the area in the direction of their headquarters near the CGTA offices. The jubilant crowd can finally form a whole, and begin to advance on their trajectory, shouting slogans about the unity of students and workers. Protesters force their way into the LT8 radio station, and destroy the furniture when they cannot enter the studio. Others try to advance to the CGTA building, but are stopped by a barrage of tear gas and gunfire from the police. The fifteen-year-old metal worker and high school student Luis Norberto Blanco is killed. The crowd disperses at midnight, and Rosario is placed under martial law.⁷⁹

The high price for maintaining public order in Rosario was two dead adolescents, many wounded, and the much-feared alliance of students and workers.⁸⁰ The inordinate police repression of the student-worker crowd evoked a mutual identification with each other’s suffering and forged a new social configuration through collective violence. The protest crowds were fast on their way to becoming insurrectional crowds which in the political heat of the times threatened to consolidate into a revolutionary movement.

The Resurrection of Peronist Crowds

By the end of 1969 Peronist crowds had finally resolved the social trauma of the 1955 bombardment, overcome the fear of violent repression, let go of their dependence on Perón, and become once again aware of their strength. The yearning for expressing discontent in the presence of tens of thousands of equally indignant protesters, and the moral example of uncompromising Peronist workers resisting oppression, had slowly swayed a growing segment of the Argentine working class towards an historic crowd alliance with a politicized student body in Argentina’s radicalized universities. These crowds were summoned by grass roots mobilization and lacked national leaders. The fear of the revolutionary crowd among the military, upper, and middle classes was becoming a reality.

The Argentine military had tried to rein in popular crowds in various ways after 1945. Their strategies arose from two assumptions: first of all, crowds are irrational by nature and potentially subversive of the established order, and second, the Argentine people had an inbred tendency toward crowd mobilization. The popular mobilizations between 1945 and 1955 were tolerated in the belief that Perón could control the passionate crowd and prevent its political radicalization. The strategy changed to selective repression between 1955 and 1960. Middle class crowds were encouraged, whereas Peronist crowds were forbidden. The occasional street demonstrations during the crowd interlude between 1961 and 1969 can be characterized as strike crowds because they were in most instances directly related to major labor disputes. Negotiation had taken the place of repression by 1961 as pragmatic union leaders obtained material benefits for the rank and file without taking resort to street protests. This crowd demobilization strategy worked until 1969, when street crowds returned with a vengeance.