Читать книгу Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina - Antonius C. G. M. Robben - Страница 12

Chapter 3

A Breeze Turned into Hurricane: The Apogee of Crowd Mobilization

The revolutionary insurrection of tens of thousands of workers and students, raising hundreds of barricades and fighting off police and army during two days of pitched battle on 29 and 30 May 1969 in Córdoba, constitutes the second crowd myth of twentieth-century Argentine history. Lieutenant-General Alejandro Lanusse recalled in 1977: “I sensed on that difficult 29th of May in 1969 that something was happening in the country, something new whose uniqueness I tried to gauge within the framework of my greater worries. I couldn’t know in what it would end, how I would react to the events, or what were the indirect and deeper causes. But I became convinced that other elements, unusual until then, were entering the political reality and the way in which we were living this reality.”¹ These “other elements” were snipers belonging to a tiny communist party with grand ambitions.

The tragedy of May 1969 consists of the widespread myth that the events in Córdoba were the beginning of a revolutionary process that could only be advanced or stopped with violence. This fatal conclusion gave a decisive impulse to an urban guerrilla insurgency intent on leading the masses to victory and an entrenched military determined to halt the revolutionary process through indiscriminate repression. The outburst of collective violence in Córdoba became known as the Cordobazo, and has been hailed and condemned as the beginning of a social revolution that ushered in a decade of mass mobilizations, guerrilla insurgency, and a deadly factionalism within the Peronist movement ending in the coup of March 1976.

The military and the radicalized left did not doubt that the Cordobazo signaled a revolutionary moment in Argentine history. Lieutenant-General Onganía declared that: “The tragic events in Córdoba responded to the actions of an organized extremist force intending to produce an urban insurrection.”² The Marxists interpreted the Cordobazo as an expression of class consciousness: “On May 29, 1969, the people of Córdoba flung themselves into the streets to reveal all the hatred accumulated during years of misery, exploitation and humiliation…. The just fury of the people poured like burning lava through the city streets, demolishing whatever vestige of exploitation crossed its path, trapping and harassing the police which, overrun by the crowd, left the city in the hands of the working class and the people.”³ The Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT) concluded that the latent yearning for revolutionary change on 17 October 1945 became redirected into the reformist program of Perón, but that the Cordobazo signaled a qualitative jump towards a social revolution. “The breeze has turned into a hurricane. History, the real history written by the people, is in motion.”⁴ The working class had liberated itself from its patronage by Perón, and would finally realize its revolutionary mission.

The Cordobazo marked a watershed in mass mobilization. The rank and file took the initiative without Perón or the national union leadership. The street demonstrations between 1969 and 1972 arose from uncontainable grass roots resentments, while national union leaders tried in vain to hold their grip on the disgruntled working class by negotiating better labor conditions with the dictatorial government.

The Cordobazo also demonstrated the cracks in the vertical discipline and ideological purity of the Peronist movement. A decentralized unionism with political overtones of shop floor mobilization had developed. Ideological differences between Peronist and non-Peronist workers made space for a common opposition to the government. Labor demands continued to be made after 1969 but they must always be understood within a larger political framework that created an alliance among various social sectors. The working class became increasingly militant and was joined by middle class students. It was this grass roots protagonism that was feared most by the military. As Perón had already said in 1944, a leaderless crowd was dangerous to society because it could be taken advantage of by agitators and revolutionaries. The military, the union leaders, and the revolutionaries all concluded that the Cordobazo revealed that the fighting spirit of the Argentine working class remained unbroken despite years of military repression, and that its capacity for resistance had neither been domesticated by the Peronist hierarchy nor paralyzed by Perón’s prolonged absence. On the contrary, the Cordobazo showed that the people could become violent, that the violence might be spontaneous, and that this collective violence was begging for the direction of a revolutionary vanguard. Those who succeeded in captivating the potentially violent collectivity could overthrow all principal institutions of society.

Cordoban Violence and Euphoria

The months preceding the Cordobazo had been turbulent. The Cordoban unions associated in the combative CGTA union central had held numerous street mobilizations against the deterioration of worker rights and called for mass mobilizations and armed resistance.⁵ Cordoban students were protesting the restrictions on student enrollment, the raise in meal tickets, and the deaths incurred in Rosario and Corrientes. Metal workers were complaining about the unfavorable pay scale differences between Córdoba and Buenos Aires, while auto workers were angry about the increase of the work week by four hours. Cordoban bus drivers were intermittently on strike about a planned reorganization of public transport, and electricians were opposing the privatization of the provincial electricity company. Finally, Córdoba’s middle class was upset by the higher property taxes imposed in early 1969.⁶ Each social sector had its ax to grind with the Onganía dictatorship, but they shared a resentment of the abuses and injustices suffered. Their specific economic grievances were framed in a dissatisfaction with the political proscription and cultural patronizing by a dictatorial government which even forbade certain types of bathing suits.⁷ Working class, middle class, and student resentment coalesced in May 1969. Two events in the streets of Córdoba set the tone of the protests and established the practice of violent engagement that was to erupt on an unimaginable scale.

The rescindment of the English Saturday was received with much indignation by the Cordoban auto workers. The English Saturday (sábado inglés) meant that certain categories of industrial workers in several provinces received a forty-eight-hour remuneration for a work week of forty-four hours. This privilege had been won in 1957, and the auto workers of the SMATA union assembled on 14 May to decide about their protest strategy. In the middle of a heated debate, the police launched tear gas into the enclosed space. Six thousand asphyxiated workers ran for the only major exit and once in the street were attacked. The workers responded with such force that the police fled from the scene.⁸

The second violent street confrontation occurred during protests against the death of Juan José Cabral in Corrientes. Together with workers from various Cordoban labor unions, thousands of students took to the streets on 23 May. Just as had happened a week earlier at the auto workers assembly, the police attacked with tear gas to disperse the crowd. The students retreated to the Clínicas neighborhood in downtown Córdoba and began to erect barricades. The police tried to overrun the makeshift obstacles but were repelled with molotov cocktails. It would take until the early hours of the next day before the police succeeded in conquering the area.⁹ These two street victories enhanced the confidence of workers and students, sealed their political pact, and motivated them to press their demands with even more vigor. Street battle practices—mobilizations, barricades, molotov cocktails—that were established then were used with even greater intensity a week later.

On 28 May, student and union leaders met to coordinate the massive protest of 29 May. They anticipated a considerable police repression and divided the city into four zones of contestation in order to disperse the security forces. The workers of Luz y Fuerza (electricians), the UOM (metal workers), SMATA (auto workers), and UTA (bus drivers) would march upon the center of Córdoba from two directions, while the students were planning to gather near the university buildings in the city center or join the worker columns along the way. The final meeting place was the center (casco chico)of Córdoba where all major political, financial, and cultural institutions were located. The SMATA and Luz y Fuerza unions would supply their men with metal bars, ball bearings, caltrops (miguelitos), molotov cocktails, sling shots, and small firearms in case the police would try to repress the street mobilization.¹⁰

At around eleven o’clock on Thursday morning, 29 May, a column of four thousand auto workers depart on foot under the leadership of the Peronist SMATA leader Elpidio Torres from the IKA-Renault plant at Santa Isabel, eight kilometers outside the city. Their number swells with thousands of students and workers as they walk on the Avenida Vélez Sarsfield to the CGT union central headquarters in downtown Córdoba. Other groups of students advance from Avenida Colón together with the electricians and bus drivers, but are forced to take an alternative route when the police blocks their way. Elsewhere, workers abandon factories and also converge on the city. Meanwhile, the two principal columns are informed by motorized workers about the police forces ahead of them. Unlike the case of the Rosariazo where the police tried to prevent the crowd from taking shape, the police forces in Córdoba are determined to defend the center against the penetration of the advancing protesters. The situation escalates when the auto worker column reaches the Plaza Vélez Sarsfield several blocks from the CGT building, and only five blocks from Plaza San Martín. A large police force lies in wait. A confrontation becomes inevitable. The police shoot tear gas at the protesters, and are pelted in return with homemade tear gas bombs. As the crowd diverts to another boulevard, the police open fire and kill the worker Máximo Mena. Indignation reverberates through the crowd and angry protesters charge at the police who withdraw in haste to the Plaza San Martín.

The other column of workers and students headed by Agustín Tosco also encounters stiff police opposition. They are attacked at their gathering point outside the headquarters of the electricians’ union. They succeed finally in crossing the six blocks that separate them from the autoworkers near the Plaza Vélez Sarsfield.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, the united crowd turns violent. Union leaders Tosco and Torres try to get a grip on the collective violence, but to no avail. Cars are overturned to erect barricades. Furniture is taken from stores and offices to reinforce the obstructions. Middle class residents participate actively in the protest, and throw paper on the street to feed the inflamed barricades. Every large display window in sight is smashed. When a car dealer tries to prevent his cars from being burnt in the street, one of the participants responds: “No complaints, sir. If you have so much money, then you must have taken it from the people. We are destroying what is ours. Because we can’t take it home, we simply smash it to pieces.”¹¹ The violence of the people is specifically directed at the symbols of repression and privilege: banks, government buildings, police stations, foreign companies, and luxury stores.

Tosco remarks that afternoon: “This can’t be possible. This is incredible. The people went by themselves. Here, the leaders died…. the people went by themselves. Nobody is in charge now. It all slipped through our fingers.”¹² The same day, an official communiqué reads: “The city of Córdoba has been ruined by popular hordes that destroyed everything in their way, without respecting private property and without taking fundamental differences between large, small and middle-size businesses into account.”¹³

A quarter after one o’clock in the afternoon, the commander of the Third Army Corps of Córdoba, General Sánchez Lahoz, installs martial law and orders the protesters to abandon the barricades and return home. Many workers leave but others remain to witness what is to become an outbreak of collective violence only comparable to the 1919 Tragic Week and the 1959 Lisandro de la Torre street battles. An estimated crowd of fifty thousand people occupy the adjoining student neighborhoods Barrio Clínicas and Barrio Alberdi, while snipers assume positions on roof tops to detain the advancing military. As they had done one week earlier, students begin to build barricades. Barrio Clínicas with its hospital buildings and private clinics is the center of resistance. Orators incite people to resist the military force converging on the city. The military arrive at about five o’clock in the afternoon at Barrio Alberdi, and take the area street by street. The neighborhood consists of narrow streets of two-story houses with wrought-iron balconies and flat roof tops providing an optimal mobility to protesters and snipers. Sniper fire is returned with machine gun bursts, and student boarding houses are combed for activists.

The confrontation of crowd and army takes an unexpected turn when at eleven o’clock in the evening of 29 May, a small group of Luz y Fuerza workers shuts off the electricity to the city. The blackout severely disrupts the communications among the various military units. Students, workers, and local residents win valuable time to reinforce the barricades. A small group attempts to incinerate the national bank. The army resumes its assault when power is restored at one o’clock in the morning of 30 May. Meanwhile, the street occupation spreads to the city’s periphery where the military presence is not so prominent. In addition, the unions most closely associated with the CGT union central proceed as planned with their twenty-four-hour general strike and protest march. The workers hinder the troop movements considerably and the final military assault can only begin at around six o’clock in the evening. The Barrio Clínicas is retaken in one hour, even though incidental outbreaks of collective violence continue to flare up in other parts of Córdoba. Gas stations are assaulted to obtain fuel for molotov cocktails, more stores are ransacked, and railways are obstructed.

The union leaders Torres and Tosco were arrested earlier that day. They were immediately court-martialed, and sentenced to prison terms of four to eight years, but were released in December 1969. The official toll of two days of collective violence was sixteen dead, even though figures as high as sixty have been mentioned. There were hundreds of wounded, and over six hundred people were arrested. About four thousand policemen and five thousand soldiers had been mobilized to control the insurrection.¹⁴

General Lanusse visited Córdoba on Monday, 2 June, and observed that the turmoil was not exclusively the work of an organized extremist force, as President Onganía was to declare two days later. “Subversive elements acted and at some moment marked the beat. But in the street one could see the dissatisfaction of everybody. For what I could see and hear … I can say that it was the people of Córdoba, in either an active or passive way, who showed that they were against the National Government in general and the Provincial Government in particular.”¹⁵ General Lanusse sensed the beginnings of a broad-based rebellion which might turn into a social revolution if the direction of the Argentine dictatorship would not change soon.

The Historical Cordobazo

There are three explanations of the Cordobazo. They are all situated within the context of a repressive political climate, deteriorating economic conditions, years of labor resistance, and the student opposition to the Onganía dictatorship. The emphasis of the three approaches lies respectively on the maturing class struggle, the resistance to authoritarianism, and grass roots militancy.

Ernesto Laclau and Beba and Beatriz Balvé emphasize that the Cordobazo marks a stage in the mounting class antagonism in Argentine society. Parts of the middle class (students, professionals, progressive priests) united with the working class against capitalist exploitation and political oppression, while pursuing a new morality and social order.¹⁶ Delich, Lewis, Munck, and Smith attribute the Cordobazo to the decline of the Cordoban auto industry, a divided middle class, combative labor unions, and the authoritarianism of the national and local government. Unable to express their dissatisfaction through democratic channels, the discontent exploded, as if in a pressure cooker, into collective violence.¹⁷ Finally, Brennan and James interpret the Cordobazo as a combination of diverse economic grievances of the workers, political forces within local unions, a fierce rank-and-file militancy, and rising frustrations among multiple layers of Cordoban society accumulated during the Onganía dictatorship. The large Cordoban student population added fuel to the widespread resentment about the authoritarian government, and contributed to the insurrectional atmosphere.¹⁸

Brennan and James are most convincing with their sophisticated understanding of the complexities of the Cordoban working class. Nevertheless, all three analyses fail to account for the crowd dynamic of the Cordobazo and its social consequences. The strike and march that preceded the events had been carefully planned by militant union leaders, but the massive adhesion, the violent response to the repression, the raising of barricades, and the attacks on police stations were not. These manifestations cannot be explained by delineating the structural or political conditions of the social sectors among which the protest arose. Instead, the analytical lead of Brennan and James must be followed into the crowd itself.

The protest march on 29 May was carefully planned, including the tactical decisions to distribute defensive weapons and to approach the center from various directions preventing a concentration of police forces. However, as had happened on 17 October 1945, the street mobilization developed a distinct crowd dynamic once the protesters stood face to face with the heavily armed police. The union leaders Torres and Tosco tried to prevent an escalation into violence, but were overtaken by the more militant protesters. The collective violence manifested feelings of repression among the mass of Argentine society, among workers, Peronists, and students. Their anger was released in the crowds and transformed into a sense of empowerment.

In their public declarations, the authorities portrayed the Cordobazo as an irrational outburst of collective violence. Yet the protesters were never entirely out of control. For example, the fire brigade was allowed free passage when the fire at the Xerox corporation threatened to consume the homes of residents. Policemen were stripped of their helmets and weapons, but five policemen who had been briefly taken hostage were released unharmed.

Several eyewitnesses described the protesters as festive and euphoric. Around noontime on 29 May, an area of about one hundred and fifty blocks was in festive turmoil. The pastries and hams taken from expensive upper class stores were eaten with delight.¹⁹ The piano at the junior officers’ club was dragged outside and became the center of an impromptu dance. The sabers were taken off the walls and used to parody medieval duels. One of the participants remarked later: “But do you know why there was also so much happiness as the events progressed and the whole city was being taken? Do you know why the emotions ran so high at Plaza Colón when we were having the party? Because everyone was also settling a personal score. The Radical against the coup against Illia, the Peronist because he rejected once more the coup against his leader and was fighting for his return to the country, the leftist because he felt that he was taking revenge for so many exiles, prisoners, and dead comrades since times unknown….”²⁰ Another experience by one witness makes this emotional release even clearer: “Very special moments were lived at Plaza Colón because there men of seventy years old embracing youths of fifteen, and they both cried. The youngest because he had been born under repression and felt that he was liberating himself; the older because after many years he felt that it was possible to win.”²¹ These stings of the past did not motivate the general strike, but they did emerge during the crowd mobilization and were temporarily relieved through the outbursts of collective violence and euphoria.

The collective violence was not the work of an irrational horde, but was highly organized. The shop floor politics and grass roots participation, so distinctive of the Cordoban unions and student organizations, found their expression in the street actions. A division of labor emerged in building barricades which resembled the typical organization of any production process. There were groups specializing in the extraction of raw materials from construction sites, their transformation into suitable components for the barricades, their distribution and transportation to the various barricades, and the actual building of the obstacles. Other groups were specialized in making molotov cocktails, while messages and molotov cocktails were distributed by motor bike to various locations. Logistic support was provided to supply young activists at the front lines with a continuous supply of bricks to throw at the police. Small groups of women prepared food for the various teams. These small production and defense teams emerged throughout Córdoba without any preestablished plan.

The spontaneity of the grass roots movement and the rapid organization of the resistance undermined the repressive state. The Cordobazo gave people confidence in the power of mobilization, the strength of their number, the ability to organize a protest, and the force to make the government change its authoritarian policies. Particularly worrying to the military junta was the presence of snipers, and the attempt of a revolutionary vanguard to organize the protests and assume its leadership. The nightmare of a revolutionary insurrection was becoming a likely reality for the Argentine military, and they intended to discourage future protests with massive displays of force. The military junta did not just move into action to protect property and lives but to quell the challenge to their authority and the order which they sought to impose on society. These deeper motives become clear after a close examination of military crowd control tactics.

Military Conceptualization of Crowds

The Cordobazo was military doctrine come true. Contemporary field manuals of the Argentine army explained that vanguardism and mass mobilization were the two principal strategies of revolutionary warfare.²² Attempts had been made in the 1960s to start a guerrilla insurgency, but they failed because of the lack of resonance within Argentine society and the energetic military response. The Cordobazo proved to the military and the left that the consciousness of the working class was ripe for a mass insurrection.

Army instructions on how to control violent crowds began with the assumption that mass mobilizations were inevitable because every society has malcontents. The causes of popular dissatisfaction and collective violence identified by Argentine military analysts and revolutionary thinkers such as Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Guevara were remarkably similar: social and economic inequality, authoritarianism, frustrated expectations, and relative deprivation among large segments of the population. The roots of mass protest were subdivided into economic, social, psychological, and political causes.²³ Typical of the Argentine army field manuals was the complete absence of any reference to concrete situations or historical events. The instructions were presented in an objectifying language as if they built on universal and timeless knowledge, but behind the neutral, almost clinical, descriptions rested a keen awareness of national circumstances.

The social, economic, and psychological causes of popular dissatisfaction relate largely to the unequal distribution of wealth in society: widespread poverty, high unemployment, and an unjust concentration of land and capital. Social factors, like stark class divisions, high illiteracy rates, a poor educational system, and inadequate health services, will make people feel frustrated and hopeless. These feelings translate psychologically into a lack of faith in the government. People have a profound feeling of injustice and believe that the government does not intend to make amends. There reigns uncertainty and anxiety about the future provoking alternatively aggressive and apathetic behavior.²⁴

Finally, the Argentine army manuals identify the political causes of unrest: a repressive government which does not respond to the aspirations of its people, proscribes certain political interests, and does not tolerate a political opposition. The field manuals indicate furthermore the danger of a polarization in society between the middle class and an extreme right and left wing.

Did President Onganía recognize the political situation in Argentina of the late 1960s in this diagnostic instrument devised by the staff of Army commander Lanusse? Onganía ruled in an authoritarian fashion, Peronism was proscribed, a large part of the Peronist movement was swinging to the political left and talking about class struggle, while there was also a noticeable growth of right-wing nationalist splinter groups. Furthermore, there was widespread indignation about the proscription of political parties, the concentration of wealth, thwarted social mobility, an unjust land tenure system, the dependency on multinationals, and rising unemployment. Finally, the feelings of injustice pervading the angry protests in Córdoba resonated throughout the country.

Why did Onganía not change his political course? Onganía decided to follow his original long-term strategy for transforming Argentina. One of his principal advisers, General Osiris Villegas, convinced him that the development of Argentine society was a matter of national security. The communist incursion in Argentina would have less chance if the government stimulated the country’s industrial, regional, political, scientific, and military development.²⁵ Onganía envisioned a three-stage development that began with a rapid modernization of the economy, was followed by economic growth allowing for a period of social reforms, and eventually led to a mature democracy.²⁶

The only problem was that these changes could take as much as twenty years. Many Argentines were unwilling to wait so long, and this impatience might stimulate the rise of a revolutionary movement. In this situation, the army field manuals stated that insurrection movements could only be prevented from taking root when “the original causes have been removed or attenuated, or when the repressive action has been sufficiently effective and energetic to discourage new subversive actions.”²⁷ Lieutenant-General Onganía chose repression rather than reform to deal with civil unrest.

What does a crowd try to obtain, according to the Argentine military specialists?²⁸ The crowd wants to display its strength in public, demonstrate its popular support, intimidate the authorities, and demoralize the security forces. An outburst of violence provokes panic among the people, paralyzes their normal activities, and challenges public order. It may create a revolutionary climate and be used to test the strength of the legal forces. The emergence of an urban insurrection consists of two main phases and one subsidiary phase: the gathering of a large multitude, the organization of civil disturbances and, if the occasion arises, the creation of martyrs.²⁹ The armed and security forces must focus their repressive action on these three phases.

The army field manuals stated that crowds do not arise spontaneously, but that they are summoned by activists and professional agitators. These agitators infiltrate labor unions, student organizations, or political movements, and then inculcate revolutionary ideas creating a fertile climate for civil disturbance. They translate the people’s legitimate demands into a discourse that coincides with their hidden political aspirations. They try to create a common enemy, like the military dictatorship, foreign imperialism, or the capitalist system. Once the idea has caught on that a street demonstration is necessary, then the leading activists choose a public space such as a park, square, or avenue to hold a protest. There, they provoke the collective violence and trigger the crowd’s psychological mechanisms. During the street fighting “seemingly fanatic or insolent elements (so prepared to act) will contaminate in an irrational manner the persons who are near them, influencing the mood of the crowd and pulling along the moderates and undecided.”³⁰ The crowd is thus seen as the fertile soil of collective violence and revolutionary action, so public gatherings must be forbidden during times of military repression.³¹

According to the field manuals, all civil disturbances are tightly orchestrated. They write about the crowd as if it were a regular enemy force carrying out a tactical plan with military precision. There is an external crowd commander who observes the protest area and confrontation from an apartment or office building. The external commander gives orders to an internal commander about when and where to incite the collective violence. The crowd commanders are located near mail boxes and street signs or wear visible signs so that they can be identified easily. Most multitudes contain activists who carry banners, placards, and protest signs conveying the grievances, and are aided by an agitation group shouting slogans. Their place will be eventually taken by other activists who will incite the demonstrators to violence.

Protest crowds organize their offensive and defensive capabilities. There are shock groups which distract or pin down the legal forces, so that other protesters can proceed to the gathering place. These shock groups may throw stones, incinerate cars and buildings, smash windows, and provoke people into ransacking stores. There are supply groups providing bombs and arms to the activists, and security guards who protect the internal commanders and prepare their flight from the scene of confrontation. There may also be snipers who try to detain the legal forces or provide cover to retreating comrades.³²

After the collective violence has waned, the army field manuals continued, the protest leaders will exploit the loss of life to create martyrs. One field manual explained further that deaths may occur during the disturbances, either by the use of force to which the legal forces have been provoked, or by assassinations carried out by the activists themselves. “The creation of martyrs will try to aggravate the emotional state of the crowd, will seek to attract sympathizers to the movement, discredit the legal forces and drag along the protesters in an insane frenzy, thus ensuring the success of the riot.”³³

The instruction manuals recommend an array of repressive means (megaphones, tear gas, war dogs, snipers, artillery, armored vehicles, helicopters) and tactics (patrols, blockades, entrapments, incursions, ambushes, hand-to-hand combat) to deal with the collective violence. The field manuals also suggest that snipers should “eliminate the leaders located in a crowd.”³⁴

Despite occasional references to its irrationality and emotional discharge, the crowd is treated as a rational organization in which the various groups (agitation groups, shock groups, supply groups, security guards, internal and external command) are hierarchically linked. As an authoritative text on crowd control stated, “In general, the same principles of war which govern the movements and disposition of large armies in the field may be applied in controlling rioting mobs.”³⁵ It seems as if the military strategists tried to get a grip on a collective phenomenon that bewildered them and imposed a familiar organizational form that made leaders responsible for the crowd’s actions. Crucial in the thinking of the military was that revolutionary leaders ride the wave of popular resentment.

The resentment about declining labor conditions, political repression, authoritarianism, and the proscription of Peronism reached unprecedented proportions in 1969. The decision to repress mass mobilizations, instead of taking away the grievances through a political solution, galvanized the opposition. An editorial in Criterio summed up the political balance of the Rosariazo and the Cordobazo: “And so, in fifteen days, the government’s political leadership achieved what the opposition could not in three years. It succeeded in uniting the two CGTs [labor union centrals], the different student groups, the students with the professors, the students and professors with employees and workers, and Catholic universities with public universities. And all of them against the government, as became clear at the successful strike of the 30th of May.”³⁶ The link between workers, students, and middle class professionals was recognized as a broad-based alliance in Argentine society with ominous prospects.

Second Rosariazo and Liberation Syndicalism

The civil unrest stirred up by the Cordobazo refused to die down. Strikes and protest marches were held throughout the country.³⁷ A student was shot down by police during a demonstration in Córdoba, and the once powerful union leader Augusto Vandor was assassinated by a guerrilla hit squad on 30 June 1969. Lieutenant-General Onganía declared that same day a state of siege which would only be lifted on 23 May 1973. The authority of the military government had been severely damaged by the unabated strike and protest activities. Four months after the Rosariazo and Cordobazo, a second Rosariazo took place.

The street violence in Rosario was triggered by striking railroad workers placed under martial law and ordered back to work. Striking workers and students marched together at ten o’clock in the morning on 16 September towards the city center with every intention of attacking the police forces frontally. The strategy of a combined police force of three and a half thousand men was to prevent the crowd from gathering strength by thwarting its assembly. The tactical plan consisted of positioning a defensive cordon around the city center. I will not enter into a detailed description of the second Rosariazo, but what was remarkable in comparison to the Cordobazo was the offensive nature of the crowd mobilization.

Rosario was transformed into a battlefield. About thirty thousand demonstrators, including four thousand students, defended the territory covered with barricades. Commercial buildings were torched and stores were ransacked in an area the size of ninety street blocks. At 1:30 P.M., the police had only secured an area of six blocks comprising the radio stations, army and police headquarters, the courts, and the principal government buildings. One worker died from police bullets in the afternoon of 16 September and a twelve-year-old boy was killed by an armed civilian.³⁸ At nine o’clock in the evening, the Second Army Corps moved into action, and the quiet of martial law descended on the city.

The organization of the second Rosariazo had been far more complex than that of the Cordobazo, and resembled the crowds described in the army field manuals analyzed above. In Rosario the crowd proceeded in a well-planned offensive and was not a runaway crowd, as the authorities tried to make the Argentine people believe. The second Rosariazo manifested a crowd consciousness, an awareness of its power. The protesters realized that their superior number and determination to undo the many injustices that united them could provoke a legitimacy crisis for the military dictatorship.

What is noteworthy about the Cordobazo and Rosariazos of 1969 is that the name Perón was not mentioned, even though the essence of the Peronist doctrine (social justice, economic independence, and political sovereignty) appeared in several proclamations.³⁹ The majority of the workers maintained their Peronist sympathies, but Perón was no longer indispensable to summon a large crowd. Years of resistance and repression had not only emancipated the Peronist following from Perón, but had cultivated a class consciousness. It became impossible to conceive of a pact among capital, State, and labor similar to that of the 1945–1955 Peronist rule. The labor conflicts of the following fourteen years, the repression by successive military governments, and the free reign given to foreign multinationals—most visible in the Cordoban auto industry—made the subjugated social layers aware of Argentina’s class nature. The Cordobazo and Rosariazos revealed this class consciousness in a most forceful way, and gave rise to a radical ideological current in the labor movement, known as clasismo or liberation syndicalism (sindicalismo de liberación).

Clasismo began in the Cordoban auto industry with the demand for honest union representation and shop floor democracy, and evolved ideologically in a Marxist direction under the influence of nascent revolutionary organizations. Its Marxist agenda was in 1970 even too radical for Agustín Tosco, who preferred combative trade unionism over divisive class-struggle unionism. Clasismo was at even greater odds with Peronism. The idea of an open class struggle to bring about a socialist revolution did not find broad acceptance among Peronist workers, while the demand for greater union democracy did of course not find any support among the verticalist union leaders, such as Vandor’s successors Lorenzo Miguel and José Rucci. Most militant union protests during the 1969–1973 period therefore took place in Córdoba, and not in Buenos Aires.⁴⁰

What united the Cordoban labor movement was an active opposition to the Onganía dictatorship, and continued crowd mobilizations as the principal tactic to force the government to its knees. This resistance was reinforced in 1970 with the radicalization of the Fiat auto workers unions SITRAC and SITRAM. The Fiat workers had shunned union activism for many years, and had not participated in the Cordobazo. The prominent role of their IKA-Renault colleagues inspired the Fiat auto workers to demand a genuine union democracy with honest elections and leaders willing to confront management. This objective made the Fiat workers an ideal target for grass roots revolutionary activity. Organizations such as the Revolutionary Communist Party (Partido Comunista Revolucionario), the Communist Vanguard (Vanguardia Comunista), and the Workers Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores) did their best to create an ideological foothold in the auto industry by distributing pamphlets at factory gates and taking blue collar jobs in auto plants.

The strategy of the revolutionary parties proved successful. On 12 May 1970, Revolutionary Communist Party activists persuaded the workers at the IKA-Renault tool and die factory to occupy the plant and take the French supervisors hostage after management tried to replace left-wing candidates in the shop steward elections by more conciliatory Peronist candidates. The reinstatement of the original candidates was an important victory, but even more important was the introduction of hostage-taking as a new combative tactic besides work stoppages, strikes, street mobilizations, and plant occupations.

The Fiat workers followed suit. The members of the two company-controlled Fiat unions SITRAC and SITRAM demanded new union elections after more than a decade of docile union leadership. The Fiat workers elected a steering committee to prepare new elections. Years of frustration, subjugation, unfair treatment, and underpayment were shed that night in the decision to take matters into their own hands. Still, it would take an unprecedented three-day factory occupation of the Fiat Concord factory, starting on 15 May 1970, at which Fiat officials were taken hostage, before the Ministry of Labor allowed the elections to take place. Colleagues at another Fiat plant followed suit on 3 June. On the same day, IKA-Renault auto workers also took hostages and occupied various plants to pressure management into reopening labor contract negotiations. The crisis ended when the Cordoban police broke into the IKA-Renault tool and die factory and arrested around two hundred and fifty workers.⁴¹

The Cordobazo and Rosariazos, and the factory occupations and hostage-taking in Córdoba, had evaporated Onganía’s authority. Street mobilizations had taken place despite police ordinances. Railroad workers had defied martial law and had refused the military order to return to work. Rank-and-file union members had dismissed government-imposed union leaders, and militant union leaders had gone on hunger strike. The street had been Onganía’s Achilles heel. Civil disobedience could cripple even a curfew, the most far-reaching crowd control measure, as army manuals admitted, “Civil disobedience en masse will be the only effective action against a curfew….”⁴² The kidnapping of retired Lieutenant-General Aramburu by the Montoneros guerrilla organization on 29 May 1970, exactly one year after the Cordobazo, gave the final blow to Onganía’s precarious position. He was deposed on 8 June 1970, and General Roberto Levingston became the new president of Argentina.

Calm did not return to Córdoba after the changing of the guard in the presidential palace. The strikes, occupations, and street mobilizations continued unabated. At their root rested a complex array of demands about higher wages and better working conditions, more honest union leadership, and an end to the military dictatorship. The clasista practice of open assemblies and internal union democracy contributed significantly to the permanent state of mass mobilization. The Cordobazo had paved the way for numerous grass roots crowd mobilizations and provided a fertile environment for the development of the clasista internal union democracy.⁴³

On 1 March 1971, the conservative Dr. José Camilo Uriburu became governor of the province of Córdoba. Two days later, the CGT of Córdoba declared a general strike, and refused to negotiate with the new authorities: “Action and Struggle. The people in the street are invincible.”⁴⁴ Uriburu was determined to cut off with one slash, as he called it, the head of the poisonous snake directing the militant activism.⁴⁵ The indignation at Uriburu’s scoffing at what many workers saw as legitimate protests was great. Factory occupations and a street mobilization of Fiat workers in downtown Córdoba followed on 12 March 1971. Several barricades were erected and set afire. The police launched large quantities of tear gas into the crowd, and began to shoot at the protesters. They killed eighteen-year-old worker Adolfo Cepeda. As so often before, a violent death precipitated more intense protests.⁴⁶

On Sunday, 14 March, thousands of people accompanied the funeral of Adolfo Cepeda. One union leader called upon the mourners at San Vicente cemetery to “turn pain into hatred, into hatred and combat against the exploiters,” and take revenge for Cepeda’s death.⁴⁷ The next morning, two thousand Fiat workers marched to downtown Córdoba in protest against the police violence. At 12:30 P.M., the protesters began to erect barricades. A second Cordobazo was in the making. Several neighborhoods were taken, including the Barrio Clínicas and Barrio Alberdi where around two hundred barricades were raised in defense, securing an area of five hundred and fifty blocks for a period of twelve hours. This collective violence was to a much larger extent the work of the Cordoban working class, and in particular the nonaffiliated and unemployed workers. The students and middle class had a far less notable presence than during the Cordobazo. Particularly troubling to the authorities was the sniper support given by members of the People’s Revolutionary Army or ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo), the armed wing of the Workers Revolutionary Party or PRT. Clasismo had forged close ties among the most radical unions and several revolutionary organizations which were sealed on the barricades of Córdoba.

At nightfall, the police had not yet moved into action. A special antiguerrilla brigade was flown in from Buenos Aires which advanced rapidly in the early hours of 16 March from barricade to barricade under the light of star shells. The security forces were again in control of the city at sunrise. Governor Uriburu resigned the same day, and a Cordoban newspaper printed a cartoon that depicted a viper (víbora), satisfied after having devoured the ill-fated Dr. Uriburu. This second Cordobazo became known as the Viborazo. On 18 March, Córdoba was put under martial law. A warrant for the arrest of Tosco and other union leaders was issued, and hundreds of workers were detained.⁴⁸

Once more, an Argentine president was forced to resign because of collective violence. General Lanusse ousted Lieutenant-General Levingston on 22 March 1971 and assumed full powers four days later. The Cordobazo and the Viborazo drove Onganía and Levingston from the seat of power because they failed to make haste with a democratization process that might have defused the popular anger and increased the political participation of the Argentine people. Within a period of less than two years, the string of crowd mobilizations changed the national course from an ill-coined and ill-conceived Argentine Revolution without clear time limits to a speedy return to democracy.

The crowd mobilizations and the collective violence did not cease. Lieutenant-General Lanusse’s call for national unity and promise of democracy were taken as an encouragement. The strikes and street mobilizations by combative and clasista workers in Córdoba continued for several months after the Viborazo, but quickly subsided in October 1971 when the military arrested the principal SITRAC-SITRAM union leaders and occupied the Fiat factories, and management fired the union representatives. The center of street mobilization shifted from the interior to the nation’s capital, and students took over the crowd initiative from the workers, principally through the activities of the Peronist Youth.⁴⁹

The Hour of the People

Lanusse envisioned a two-pronged strategy to pacify Argentine society: the call for national harmony was his carrot, and counterinsurgency his stick. Lanusse launched in July 1971 his Great National Accord (Gran Acuerdo Nacional) among Argentina’s principal social sectors (political parties, unions, industry, financial institutions). This plan came too late because Argentina’s principal political parties had already joined forces on 11 November 1970 in a document entitled The Hour of the People (La Hora del Pueblo). Peronists, Radicals, socialists, and conservatives had demanded free elections and the right to political expression. The politicians did not want to commit themselves to the Great National Accord and neither did Perón, who became once more an active player in Argentine politics.⁵⁰

Lanusse’s counterinsurgency strategy was only in part successful. Even though all principal guerrilla commanders had been imprisoned by mid-1972, and their influence on the labor movement curtailed by a crackdown on the clasista unions, their revolutionary ideology had a captivating effect on many young Argentines. They came to swell the ranks of a radical and often violent political opposition. The rise in crowd mobilizations had become so dramatic, and the fear of an unstoppable revolutionary process so great, that the armed forces were deployed with every threat of collective violence.⁵¹

Immediately after his ascendance to the presidency, Lanusse opened a dialogue with Perón. Despite these overtures, Lanusse sought to demystify Perón as an old man in poor health and to coax him into denouncing the guerrilla movement. However, Perón refused to play along with Lanusse’s game. He operated on several political fronts and used different weapons to strike at the embattled military government. As he was negotiating with Lanusse’s representatives about a return to democracy, Perón instructed Peronist politicians to take a tough stand against the government and cultivated contacts with army officers susceptible to overthrowing Lanusse. Perón also praised the violence of the Peronist guerrilla organizations and encouraged the Peronist Youth to maintain an active street presence.⁵²

The year 1972 marked the end of the violent street protests (azos) that began in May 1969. There were labor conflicts and public disturbances during the months of April and July 1972 in Mendoza, San Juan, San Miguel de Tucumán, Córdoba, and General Roca.⁵³ Yet the crowd momentum had shifted from the labor unions to the Peronist movement as the prospect of free elections dominated the political scene. The CGTA had virtually disappeared in 1970. Many Independent union leaders, among them Tosco, were imprisoned in 1971. The SITRAC-SITRAM Fiat auto worker unions had lost their legal status in October 1971, and clasista shop stewards were fired. The union bureaucracy with its Vandorist tendency towards verticalism began to accumulate strength again in 1972.⁵⁴ The UOM and CGT union centrals pursued a nonconfrontational course in order not to endanger the elections. The crowd initiative was left to the Peronist Youth and the students.

Anger, Flight, and Celebration of Argentine Crowds

The violent crowd protests of 1969 marked the second watershed in Argentine crowd history, October 1945 being the first. The Cordobazo, Rosariazos and Viborazo arose from local union conditions and economic grievances, but their political significance was nationwide. The 1969–1972 period witnessed insurrectional crowds that emerged from uncontainable grass roots resentments and sought structural changes in Argentine society. Collective violence was a reaction to the violence of disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, the loss of worker privileges, social injustice, and outright military repression. The guerrilla insurgency sprouted from the collective violence. The crowds did not cause the emergence of the guerrilla organizations in a direct way, but provided a medium in which they could grow and mature.

Radical sectors of Argentine society attributed a revolutionary meaning to the 1969 crowd demonstrations which they did not possess. The Marxist guerrilla organizations pictured themselves as the vanguard of the working masses on the move, shunned a direct involvement in crowd politics, and concentrated on building a revolutionary army. The revolutionary Peronists believed that the popular masses were the propelling force of history, whose most authentic political expression was found in the assembled Peronist crowd clamoring for dignity and social justice. They tried to place themselves at the head of the Peronist crowd and transform its spontaneous force into a collective insurrection. This was not an easy task because time and again Argentine crowds had disengaged themselves from their leaders and disintegrated into outbursts of rage, only to reorganize into a violent grassroots resistance. This combination of spontaneous and calculated collective violence, and the rage, euphoria, and sudden panic that could come over crowds, turned street mobilizations into an unpredictable political instrument for revolutionary organizations.

In his groundbreaking study of South Asian crowds, Stanley Tambiah explains their characteristic oscillation between attack and flight as a dynamic of anger/rage and fear/panic. The South Asian ethnic crowd becomes violent towards another ethnic group because it feels harmed in its well-being and identity. Such destructive rage may suddenly turn into panic and hysteric flight. Encouraged by rumors, the violent crowd fears the retaliation from a rival group defined as dangerous and threatening. The heightened sense of power experienced by the violent crowd is thus inextricably tied to a sudden awareness of its vulnerability.⁵⁵

Anger/rage and fear/panic have also been qualities of Argentine crowds but, unlike in South Asia, the most direct threat in Argentina did not come from a rival group but from the State. The panic provoked by the bombardment of the Peronist crowd at the Plaza de Mayo on 16 June 1955 is the most dramatic example of the recurrent threat posed by police and armed forces. The key to understanding this panic lies in the crowd’s dual qualities as violent and euphoric.

Both in South Asia and in Argentina, crowds often turn festive while engaged in destruction. According to Tambiah, the jubilation arises from “their temporary sense of homogeneity, equality, and physical intimacy, their sense of taking righteous action to level down the enemy’s presumed advantage and claim their collective entitlements.”⁵⁶ In other words, violence and euphoria constitute a pair opposite to fear and flight. What unites these two pairs is, according to Tambiah, the loss of restraint by people in a crowd.

This loss of restraint is caused by the boundless sociality experienced in crowds, a sociality which Durkheim described as social effervescence and Canetti identified as the feeling of equality. Euphoria emerges from the sense of unity, equality, and the shedding of injustices in a crowd; a powerful feeling which may make the crowd turn violent towards perceived sources of social injury. The vulnerability of crowds, their propensity towards panic, and their potential traumatization lie precisely in this feeling of aggrandizement. People in a crowd lower their personal defenses as they surrender to its collective emotions. A violent repression causes an emotional overload because people have their guard down in the crowd. In other words, the boundary loss that is so liberating in a euphoric and violent crowd also exposes its vulnerability when subjected to indiscriminate repression. People can no longer rely on the power of their number, or the justice of their demands, and run for their lives.

Such social injury can make people reluctant to gather again in street mobilizations. Repeated repression made Argentine people at times reluctant to attend street demonstrations, as happened between 1961 and 1969 and would happen again between 1975 and 1982. Argentine crowds had incurred several social traumas by 1974. The euphoria and invincibility of victorious crowds were transformed into defeat and traumatization. Repressive violence damaged people’s belief in the force of social association and wounded the crowd as a political force in a society used to manifesting its political convictions through street mobilizations.

The Cordobazo became a watershed in Argentine crowd politics not only because of its revolutionary promise but also because it demonstrated that the Argentine people seemed to have overcome the social traumas of past crowd repressions. In 1969 Argentine crowds became able to shed their spontaneous, passionate, and chaotic quality by quickly organizing a tenacious resistance against the security forces through the erection of barricades, the coordination of counterattacks, the disruption of communications, the preparedness for a lengthy siege, and a readiness to face a trained and disciplined opponent.⁵⁷

This mastery over traumatization was hastened by the specific nature of Argentine crowd politics. Unlike the South Asian ethnic crowds, Argentine protest crowds were generally mobilized in opposition to local and state forces.⁵⁸ Argentine protesters entered into crowd competitions with the advancing police and army by imitating their discipline and organic composition. Argentine crowds therefore tried to show their power by gaining control over public space. In clear awareness of the state’s repressive capabilities, crowds entered into a tug-of-war with the advancing forces and withdrew, rather than flee, when the repression became too overwhelming.

In mid-1972, the Argentine protest crowds were still full of confidence and in awe of their own historical force. Protest crowds railed successfully against the Lanusse dictatorship and allowed Perón to return to Argentina from his exile in Spain. Paradoxically, the Peronist electoral victory of March 1973 offered a greater opportunity for revolutionary change than the Cordobazo of May 1969. Broad layers of Argentine society felt the relief of casting off years of political proscription. New civil servants peopled the ministries, educational reforms were made in the universities, the arts blossomed, and the economy was booming. The willingness to rebuild the country was great, but the myth of the Cordobazo kept haunting the nation.