Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
alive, return the abducted babies, and dismantle the repressive apparatus. What I remember most vividly is my shock at the display of force when we reached the intersection of Avenida 9 de Julio and Avenida de Mayo. It seemed as if a human stockade had been stacked against the advancing crowd to prevent its direct passage to the presidential palace. An assembly of policemen on horseback stood in front, closely followed by rows of riot police, behind them bumper-to-bumper squad cars, and finally a barrier of armored vehicles with gun-toting soldiers on top. As the protesters veered toward the right, away from Avenida de Mayo and into a narrow parallel street, several mounted policemen charged into the crowd. Like everyone else, I shrank away and felt a tremendous surge of anger because of this intimidation. I quickly entered Hipólito Yrigoyen street. Each side street was blocked by armed policemen and soldiers. The crowd was cheered from the balconies, and finally arrived at the Plaza de Mayo. Prominent human rights leaders, among them Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, approached the Casa Rosada presidential palace to hand over the petition, supported by more than two hundred thousand signatures, but there was no government official to receive them and the doorman refused to accept any papers. “Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!” the crowd chanted incessantly. This was my crowd baptism in Argentina.
When seven years later I began conducting research for this book and read the newspapers of the 1970s and 1980s, studied military riot control procedures, and listened to the participants of historic crowd manifestations like the 1945 Day of Loyalty, the 1969 uprising in the city of Córdoba, the deadly 1973 confrontation among Peronists at Ezeiza airport, and also the 1983 March for Human Rights in which I had participated, I became convinced that at least one key to the political violence and traumatization of Argentine society was to be found in the extraordinary importance of crowds in Argentine political culture. As one protagonist of those turbulent decades has commented, Argentine street mobilizations are “like hinges where years of history are compressed, and where one sees history turning a page to start a new chapter.”1
Another key to the political violence and especially the disappearances relates to an earlier experience. The memories are much vaguer, but several troubling and indelible images still come to mind. Strolling across the Plaza de Mayo in April 1978, where Evita and Juan Domingo Perón had addressed their incendiary speeches to huge Peronist crowds, I was suddenly approached by several women who spoke anxiously about their disappeared children. Before I could realize what was happening, they had already been taken away by police. These mothers were obviously a second key to Argentina. The guerrilla insurgency and the systematic torture in secret detention centers of the Argentine police and military provided the third and fourth key toward understanding the country’s spiral of violence and trauma.
More than two years of fieldwork were carried out in the city of Buenos Aires, its outskirts, and surrounding towns between April 1989 and July 1991. Additional field trips were made in 1995, 2000, and 2002. I realize that Buenos Aires is not representative of Argentina and that I have missed out on the richness of provincial capitals, regional towns, and the vast countryside. When I arrived in April 1989, less than six years after the fall of the military regime, it so happened that most protagonists of the decades of violence were living in Buenos Aires, whereas the few who resided elsewhere would visit the city often enough to set up a meeting. Furthermore, as the nation’s federal capital, Buenos Aires housed most human rights organizations, political parties and organizations, labor union centrals, military headquarters, and ecclesiastic authorities. Buenos Aires was therefore a hotbed of political activity and thus the most suitable place for my research.
The length of the historical period covered, the complexity of Argentine politics, and my ambition of trying to understand political violence from various ideological sides demanded a variety of research methods. I conducted more than one hundred in-depth interviews with many protagonists of the historical period under scrutiny and analyzed newspapers, court records, clandestine publications, secret documents, and the writings and speeches of the principal political actors, many of whom died tragic deaths. Participant observation was conducted at exhumations, funerals, reburials, commemorations, parades, and especially many crowd gatherings like the political rallies, street demonstrations, and protest marches so typical of Argentine political culture, and so mesmerizing to the Argentine people and their leaders.2
The analysis of political violence and collective trauma in Argentina during five turbulent decades in an equally turbulent century is a daunting undertaking. I have resisted the temptation to begin this book in 1976 when state terror hit Argentina with full force. The dirty war did not come about all of a sudden. A comprehensive understanding of this most tragic of Argentine political convulsions must therefore start much earlier because the historical roots are long and convoluted. Some Argentines advised me to start with the return of Perón from exile in 1973 or with his overthrow in 1955. Others pointed at the 1969 mass uprising in the industrial city of Córdoba, while still others harked back to the 1919 Tragic Week when police killed striking workers. Some even emphasized that political violence had been endemic to Argentine society since the civil wars following Argentina’s War of Independence against Spain during the early nineteenth century. I have chosen 17 October 1945 as my starting point, the day when the Argentine working class marched on the presidential palace at the Plaza de Mayo, became a crucial player in Argentine politics, and made crowds essential to Argentine political culture. The predicament of this working class motivated many young people to grab arms in the 1970s to achieve a social revolution. This political radicalization persuaded the Argentine armed forces to use military force and state terror to defeat the guerrilla insurgency, disassemble the radicalized political opposition, subjugate the working class, and reeducate the Argentine people.
This book’s narrative structure combines historical chronology with social complexity, separating out particular social domains in distinct periods to interpret Argentina’s multilevel political violence and traumatization. Taken together, these four parts demonstrate how various strands of violence arose at different times and interlocked in the 1970s to create an overdetermined traumatized whole that had penetrated four levels of social complexity. Part I analyzes the development and decline of political crowds between 1945 and 1976. It pays close attention to the ambiguous relation between political crowds and military regimes, and how the repression and traumatization of protest crowds led to political radicalization and revolutionary violence. Part II focuses on the comings and goings of armed violence between 1955 and 1979. I analyze the dynamics of the guerrilla insurgency and the mimetic response by the Argentine armed forces. The relation between increasing levels of violence and the traumatization of the Peronist resistance movement and the guerrilla organizations becomes apparent here. Part III covers the state terror between 1976 and 1983 when the Argentine military believed that neither the repression of crowds, the proscription of political movements, nor the annihilation of the guerrilla organizations were sufficient to cure Argentina of its political ills. The military were convinced that their just war had to continue into the hearts and minds of their political enemies through torture, disappearance, captivity, and either assassination or reeducation. Finally, Part IV focuses on the period between 1976 and 1990, when family members, mothers in particular, embarked on an interminable search of disappeared relatives. The growing working-class and human rights protests, together with the British victory over Argentine troops in the Falkland/Malvinas war, brought down the military regime by 1982. The rise of democracy in 1983 ended the armed violence and state terror but not the political turmoil as the post-traumatic sequels of decades of abuse and suffering dominated Argentina into the twenty-first century.
Part I
Groundswell: The Rise and Fall of Argentine Crowds
Workers expressing their loyalty to Perón, 17 October 1945. Courtesy of Archivo General de la Nación.
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