Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
leaders, businessmen, and the conservative press alike for endangering the Social Pact. Rumors about food shortages had led to sudden price hikes, while workers had demanded substantial salary increases. The strike activity was picking up again, and inflation was on the rise. Perón threatened to abandon the presidency if these political attacks on his government did not cease.
In a last masterful stroke, Perón orchestrated his final crowd gathering. The CGT leaders had been notified in advance of Perón’s threat to resign, and called for a mass mobilization at the Plaza de Mayo in his support. Hundreds of buses were waiting at factory gates to transport the workers. A large crowd gathered that afternoon in the cold winter weather of 12 June. The labor union centrals had not lost their power of mobilization, as the Peronist left had believed, but continued to count on the support of most Peronist workers.54 Perón was certainly warmed by the welcome as he appeared on the balcony at 5:15 in the afternoon. He took in the chants as if they were a political nourishment, and confessed: “I carry in my ears what to me is the most remarkable music of all, the voice of the Argentine people.”55 It was to be his last crowd appearance, and it seemed as if the Peronist crowd had died with him.
For weeks, Perón had been suffering from a cold contracted on his 6 June visit to Paraguay. The 12 June speech on the freezing balcony of the Casa Rosada had deteriorated his condition. Bedridden for a week, Perón delegated his presidential powers on 30 June to the vice-president, his wife Isabel Martínez de Perón. The seventy-nine-year-old Juan Domingo Perón died of cardiac arrest on Sunday 1 July 1974 at 1:15 P.M. at the presidential residence in Olivos. The funeral was held on Tuesday 3 July at the Metropolitan Cathedral on Plaza de Mayo, after which the remains lay in state at Congress. The line of mourners stretched for many blocks in the pouring rain, but “Neither the cold drizzle, nor the wet clothes stopped the crowd from saying goodbye to the president’s remains.”56 Unlike the wake of two weeks after Evita’s death, the grieving public was given less than forty-eight hours to pay their respects. The principal Peronist Youth and Montonero leaders also bid farewell to Perón, giving a V-victory salute.57 Despite their falling out with Perón, they could not afford not paying homage. It would have been political suicide, and most important, they were as profoundly grief-stricken as all Peronists, left or right. Miguel Bonasso confessed in his diary at the day of Perón’s death: “Several of us have cried this afternoon. For him and for ourselves. Because we were his soldiers and his children and his chosen and his rejected ones…. we felt that the old bastard, whom we had loved and hated as one loves and hates a father, was taking our own youth with him into his crypt. We knew that difficult times were ahead….”58
Two generations of Peronists had come of political age since Perón founded his popular movement in 1945. Their political identities were as much linked with Perón as with the victories they reaped and the defeats and hardships they suffered in his name. Many Peronists might have lost faith in Perón’s political ability to govern a country rapidly falling apart through political violence, but their Peronist identity stood firm. This Peronist identity had been shaped by the crowd and by resistance, by street mobilizations and collective violence. Mobilization and violence continued again as important expressions of political practice after Perón’s death, even though the first was more rhetorical and the second frightfully real.
The transference of power to Vice-President María Estela Martínez de Perón on 1 July 1974 might have been constitutional, but it was not accepted by the Peronist left, which considered itself the true political heir of Perón.59 On 6 September 1974, the Montoneros declared that a new period of Peronist Resistance had begun, and that their organization would go underground to resume the armed struggle. Their crowd mobilizations ceased entirely. The state of siege declared on 6 November 1974 further discouraged mass meetings. Public demonstrations between July 1974 and March 1976 consisted either of small crowds in support of Isabel Perón or street protests by striking workers. These strikes and protests were mostly about internal union disputes, shop floor democracy, poor working conditions, and deteriorating wages.
After Perón’s death, the UOM and CGT union centrals, which counted on the support of the Ministry of Economy, the federal police, and the death squads headed by López Rega, began a crackdown on Independent and clasista unions. The arrest of combative labor leaders, like Ongaro, Tosco, and Salamanca, was ordered, the legal status of Independent and clasista unions was taken away, militant workers were assassinated, and union locals were bombed. Strikes and factory seizures declined rapidly because of this repression.
The first stand in this retreat was made in Villa Constitución. On 25 November 1974, steelworkers voted en masse for a clasista slate in the UOM metal workers union elections. Combative local union leaders began to demand better safety measures, higher wages, and control over production speeds. On 20 March 1975, a security force of over four thousand men entered Villa Constitución with helicopters and assault cars, and arrested the forty principal labor leaders on the charge of organizing a subversive plot to paralyze the regional industry.
The workers mounted a massive strike that lasted for fifty-nine days until several union leaders were released. This spirited protest awakened the worker opposition in Argentina. The ensuing open confrontation of forces led to the only significant crowd eruption between Perón’s death in July 1974 and the military coup in March 1976 as a last gasp of the groundswell of mass protest which had begun in 1969.
On 27 June 1975, the CGT organized a demonstration to ask Isabel Perón to ratify negotiated wage increases of up to 150 percent. The crowd filled the Plaza de Mayo to capacity and turned rapidly against Isabel Perón, López Rega, and the Minister of Economy Celestino Rodrigo. President Isabel Perón announced the next day that only a 50 percent wage correction would be granted. The CGT declared a forty-eight-hour strike for 7 and 8 July. This national strike triggered a series of wildcat strikes and factory occupations called the Rodrigazo. Thousands of workers took to the streets in Argentine cities to voice their disenchantment with the Peronist government. The protest was successful. Once more, a popular crowd shook the foundations of the Argentine government. Celestino Rodrigo resigned on 18 July, López Rega was forced out of the country two days later, and Isabel Perón ratified the negotiated wage raise after all.60
The crowd had won a Pyrrhic victory because the Rodrigazo further destabilized the Peronist government: a government which had already lost the support of various factions within the Peronist movement and was now also facing a fractured and hostile working class as inflation skyrocketed to an annual rate of 335 percent in 1975.
The year 1975 had been the most combative year in Argentine labor history in terms of strike activity and loss of working days. The crisis was heightened in January 1976 by work stoppages, factory seizures, the threat of more strikes, and more wage demands. Rather than rallying at the Plaza de Mayo under the tutorship of once powerful union leaders, the Argentine workers were organizing in independent, grass roots coordinating committees (coordinadoras) of shopfloor activists and workers’ commissions. A lockout of workers on 16 February 1976, organized by employers dissatisfied with the government’s new economic policies, shut down newspaper stands, grocery stores, and small commercial establishments.61 The military takeover was only weeks away.
The Demise of Argentine Crowds
Crowds exert a strange attraction on people. They are menacing and enticing, inspire fear and incite captivation. What lured the Argentine people during the second half of the twentieth century to streets and squares in increasing numbers, often at the risk of death? And what made Argentine military rulers so fearful of and at the same time so fascinated by large crowds? Is it that unpredictable power of the dense crowd packed shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip that both fascinates and frightens, threatens and beckons? The crowd seems possessed of a strange, passionate quality which when dominated invigorates their masters with omnipotence, but when unleashed paralyzes them with fear. What made crowds so mesmerizing to both Argentine leaders and the Argentine people?
Argentine crowds had created and toppled governments and dictatorships since the end of World War II. Crowds brought Perón to power in 1945, supported his deposition in 1955, contributed to the palace coups against Onganía in 1970 and against Levingston in 1971. Finally, popular crowds accomplished the downfall of