Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
return to power that same year. Argentine crowds have of course also often failed to achieve their objectives because of their severe repression by police and military. The defeated crowd stands in stark opposition to the victorious crowd. Fear takes the place of aggrandizement as people fall left and right, and the crowd flees in panic. Whether victorious or defeated, the crowd constituted between 1945 and 1975 the groundswell of Argentine political life.
Argentine crowds have during the third quarter of the twentieth century been leader-inspired, vanguard-inspired, mass-inspired or issue-inspired. The crowds between 1945 and 1958 were leader-inspired. People assembled in crowds till 1955 because of the presence of Perón. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, Juan Domingo Perón drew on his knowledge of crowds to mobilize a political following in the 1940s and played on widespread fears about either a leaderless rioting crowd or a revolutionary insurrectional crowd to silence his critics. As an army officer, he sensed better than anyone else the ambiguous feelings about crowds among the Argentine military and conservative civilian circles. Yet Perón believed that he had the political acumen and charisma to domesticate the crowd and prevent the popular masses from falling victim to the enchanting call of communism.
After Perón’s fall in 1955, the Argentine middle classes gathered in leader-inspired crowds to support the military junta that had deposed Perón. The forced exile of Perón left the Peronist movement without its leader but not without the desire to express its political convictions and protest its disenfranchisement.
The year 1959 witnessed several major protest crowds that arose around matters of economic policy. These issue-inspired crowds would most likely have continued to appear were it not for the harsh repressive measures taken against street protests in 1960, and the increasing ability of union leaders to negotiate settlements before major strikes and street marches would break out. The period between 1961 and 1969 was by and large a crowd interlude with only a few leader-inspired outbreaks of Peronist sentiment in 1963 and 1964, and occasional issue-inspired street marches by striking workers.
The issue-inspired crowds evolved by 1969 into mass-inspired crowds mobilized by grass roots organizations. Slowly, the notion began to emerge among Peronists that the initiative for crowd formation did not come from the leader but from the people themselves. The period from 1969 to 1972 was characterized by mass-inspired crowds. Students and workers took entire city centers in an insurrectional atmosphere, despite the efforts of union leaders to discourage such collective violence.
The revolutionary left interpreted the belief among Argentine workers in the grass roots crowd model as a sign of an emerging class consciousness. Leaning heavily on Leninist insurrectional theory, the revolutionary left embraced a vanguard crowd model. The vanguard-inspired model implied that the popular masses would arise in protest against the injustices of capitalist society but needed the guidance of a revolutionary vanguard to be successful in overthrowing the exploitative socioeconomic order. The grass roots and vanguard crowd models both departed from the understanding that leaders did not elicit and dominate crowds but that crowds allowed leaders to usurp and feed on them. In other words, behind each leader-inspired crowd lurked the force of a spontaneous and uncontrollable mass-inspired crowd.
The period between 1972 and 1974 gave rise to composite crowds that were partly leader-, partly vanguard- and partly mass-inspired. The presence of Perón drew his following into the streets and squares of Argentina, but these people were equally impelled by the grass roots mobilization of the Peronist left, and the appeal of a revolutionary Peronist vanguard. Finally, issue-inspired crowds appeared again in 1975. Perón had died in 1974, the grass roots organizations of the Peronist left had been dismantled, and the revolutionary organizations had decided to wage a guerrilla insurgency. The worsening economic situation became therefore the central focus of worker protest in 1975.
Twenty-five years of crowd mobilizations had formed a mold in which other political expressions matured. Strikes, sabotage, armed struggle, factionalism, guerrilla insurgency, and state repression occurred in a climate of crowd mobilization which shaped Argentine political culture. The roles accorded to leader and crowd were recognized by all but were weighed differently by opposed social sectors. Conservative and right-wing segments—the military, landowners, industrialists, and political elites as well as corporatist labor leaders—regarded leaders as the architects of history who organized the at heart irrational masses. The revolutionary and political left considered the masses, the people, as the driving force of history—whether or not this force was delegated to a revolutionary vanguard.62
It is on these two political practices, mass mobilization and vanguardism, that the Argentine armed forces began to concentrate their repression when they took power in 1976. As the Generals Martínez and Jáuregui declared at a press conference in 1977: “The subversion develops two lines of action to obtain power: armed action and the insurrectional action of the masses. The Army, with the support of the other two armed forces, is defeating the executive organs of the armed action and the activists of the insurrectional action of the masses.”63
The military strategy was guided by a multidimensional conception of crowds. Each dimension corresponded to one of several relations between armies and crowds. First of all, there was an instrumental conception based on repressing crowds, irrespective of their origin or objective. Military field manuals gave the same tactical directions for a disorderly soccer crowd, a strike crowd, or a crowd of people in a state of panic after a major natural disaster. The instrumental treatment of crowds by the Argentine army was built on classic notions of crowd psychology, and was almost identical to the tactical instructions used by other armed forces, and in particular the U.S. army.64
There was also a political conception of crowds. Crowds were evaluated in terms of their political origins and objectives. This analysis was more directed towards preventing and redirecting future crowd demonstrations than repressing them in the present. The political conception varied much more with the ideological mood of the times than the instrumental treatment. In the late 1960s, the understanding of crowds was framed by the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution, and the political radicalization of broad layers of Argentine society. The political crowd conception was geared towards understanding the revolutionary potential of popular protest crowds.
The instrumental and political crowd conceptions were anchored in a cultural conception. This conception was seldom spelled out, but can be understood by analyzing the complex relation among army, crowd, and society. This perspective owed much to nineteenth-century thinking about crowds as irrational, destructive, and vulnerable to deceit. Popular crowds were believed to be antithetical to Argentine society, and a denial of its natural hierarchy.
In chapter 1, I mentioned how Perón’s understanding of crowds carried the stamp of Gustave Le Bon, and how the fear of crowds by the Argentine ruling class was fed by a rendition of Le Bon’s ideas in the work of Ramos Mejía. Le Bon, and his late nineteenth-century contemporaries Taine, Sighele, Fournial, and Tarde, feared the irrationality and unpredictability of the crowd. The individual in the crowd was reason transformed into passion, and identity into animal anonymity. Swept away by mass hysteria, the individuals in the crowd acted as one and could be driven to destruction by their collective mind.65 The concern of nineteenth-century mass psychologists was not merely the violence of a rioting crowd but a much deeper fear of the dominance of the multitude over the individual. These conservative social scientists feared that Western civilization might be torn asunder by violent popular masses determined “to destroy utterly society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation.”66 They regarded the popular riots in nineteenth-century Europe as symptoms of a deep cultural and moral crisis of Western civilization, very much as the Argentine military perceived the incessant street mobilizations of the 1970s.
Still, the Argentine military were less worried by the destructive capacity of the violent crowd itself—a fury which could never surpass the army’s capacity for repression—than that people would disengage themselves from hierarchy and authority, and negate the vertical structure of society by feelings of equality and solidarity generated among crowd participants.