Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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