Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
in themselves as a movement, not an ideology or political party. The protesters were regarded as the authentic voice of the Argentine people who had a right to determine their destiny. This belief was carefully cultivated. On 17 October, according to Félix Luna, “the people had corrected the course of history.”7 In this founding myth, Perón and the Peronist movement gave birth to each other on 17 October 1945. The masses were “driven by a dark and undetainable instinct, almost without leaders or a prepared plan.”8 In this rendition, nothing stood between the emotions of these humble people and their call for Perón. But was the popular mobilization of 17 October 1945 really so spontaneous?
The intellectual debate about the events on 17 October 1945 has crystallized into three positions. Gino Germani emphasizes the irrationality of the mass protests, and attributes the success of the Peronist movement to the able manipulation of impoverished, ignorant, and leaderless rural migrants by the charismatic Perón.9 Murmis and Portantiero argue, on the other hand, that the mass support of Perón was entirely rational and self-interested. The unions asserted their political might and mobilized the workers to defend a leader who had championed their rights and delivered social reforms and better working conditions.10 Finally, Torre and James have provided in my opinion the most accurate account. They show that the worker mobilization was prepared by the union confederation and instigated by local representatives.11
Torre and James explain that under pressure from locally declared strikes in Rosario, Greater Buenos Aires, and the province of Tucumán, the CGT union central decided on 15 October to call for a national strike on 18 October. Everywhere, workers were prepared for action by union representatives to give expression to their feelings of exploitation and social exclusion. However, on 16 October, it became clear that the protest could no longer be contained. Meatpacking plants were picketed at daybreak, workers in other branches of industry were alerted about the upcoming strike, shopkeepers were warned not to open their establishments, and several street protests erupted in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The 17 October mobilization occurred because the rank and file had already been put on the alert by the CGT decision to strike on 18 October.12 Even though the precise moment of the mobilization was not orchestrated, the strike directive of the CGT and the grass roots work by local labor representatives had been essential.13
The image of 17 October as a popular feast has been debunked by Daniel James. Félix Luna speaks of a “festive atmosphere,” a “great party,” and an “orgiastic, triumphant” event.14 Myth and reality are again at odds. James reveals the secular iconoclasm of the day. He interprets the mass mobilization as a Bakhtinean ritual reversal of traditional hierarchies in which workers danced in the streets as in “a form of ‘counter-theatre,’ of ridicule and abuse against the symbolic authority and pretensions of the Argentine elite.”15 There were outbursts of violence against the symbols of hierarchy. Buildings were stoned, stores pillaged, and windows broken in 167 major incidents. Centers of leisure, like the Jockey Club, offices of conservative newspapers, and student bars and lodging houses, were favorite targets in various cities. There was at least one death to mourn. Stones hurled at the offices of the antiPeronist newspaper Crítica were answered by gun fire, killing one seventeen-year-old demonstrator and wounding forty.16
Daniel James and Juan Carlos Torre have given the most accurate account, with a sharp eye for the feelings of worker resentment that built massive adherence to Peronism, but they pay little attention to actual crowd experiences. However, these profound feelings are indispensable to understand the founding myth. It was the crowd experience that remained most vivid to participants, and that gave the day its mythic quality. I therefore turn again to 17 October, asking four questions related to the formation of the crowd. Why would workers respond to a call for mobilization? How did they experience being in the crowd? What conception did activists have of the crowd as a political phenomenon? Why did the representation of the crowd as a spontaneous protest become the hegemonic version of 17 October?
It was not just the threat of economic and social deprivation or the strike preparation by the labor unions that drove people to the streets, but rather the injury to the feelings of dignity articulated effectively by Perón. The decades before the rise of Perón were marked by exploitative and humiliating labor relations. Perón’s policies tried to remove the origins of these “stings of command,” to use Elias Canetti’s trope, but it was at the 17 October crowd gathering at the nation’s capital that these resentments and humiliations were emotionally shed en masse. “For that period at any rate they were free of stings and so will always look back to it with nostalgia.”17 Canetti’s thought is suggestive, and can be supported historically because the stings of command were real experiences of oppression. The violence directed at the symbols of oppression can only be understood in conjunction with the joy of throwing off the yoke of exploitation and the fraternal equality felt by the workers. Peronists drew strength from the event for decades on end, and its spirit made them soldier on in times of repression.
Another reason why people responded to the mobilization was the existence of a rival crowd. Street demonstrations in Argentina often become a competitive show of force between opposing crowds. The first major street mobilization by workers, on 12 July 1945, protested a proclamation by landowners and industrialists against Perón. The opposition responded with street demonstrations on 9, 10, and 11 August whereupon the military government declared a state of siege.18 The fire of opposition was kindled. On 19 September, the middle classes demonstrated for free elections and against the Farrell-Perón military government. The march expressed anger at the junta that had been contained since May of that year. As V-Day crowds in Europe were celebrating, street celebrations were forbidden in Argentina. The police declared that they had discovered a communist plot to create disturbances, unleash a revolutionary strike, and overthrow the government.19 The end of World War II was openly celebrated on 31 August, and this street mobilization soon developed into a call for a return to a constitutional government in Argentina.
The public resentment at the Farrell-Perón military government culminated on 19 September 1945 in a peaceful crowd of roughly one-quarter million people who walked from the National Congress to Plaza Francia, singing the Marseillaise and shouting “National unity hurts Perón” and “From corporal to colonel, let them return to the barracks.”20 The march was described as a spontaneous mobilization, surprisingly similar to that of the upcoming 17 October crowd. “The people of Buenos Aires experienced yesterday one of its greatest days. Lacking means of transportation, they mobilized, organized, engaged in and won a great battle for the cause of democracy…. The need to walk five or ten kms. to keep an appointment with their own honor as citizens didn’t scare away men and women determined to much more than that….”21 The newspaper La Prensa observed that the streets of Buenos Aires had never witnessed such a large crowd. 17 October was going to rival this crowd as in a contest. Both crowds fought for freedom, but freedom meant different things to the two social groupings. The middle class wanted freedom of speech, an end to the state of siege, and the restoration of civil liberties. The freedom of the working class was emancipatory, observed Luna, “to look upon the foreman as an equal, to feel protected by the union representative, not to hear every moment the bark of misery….”22 17 October was thus an outpouring of feelings of oppression by the working class in rivalry with the middle class.
How did the participants experience 17 October as a crowd? Canetti has suggested that, “It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it.”23 17 October was not by chance both a celebration and a riot. Just like in carnival, it became a ritual reversal of hierarchy and an expression of equality. Working-class people appropriated a public space that had been the privilege of “decent people,” the gente decente who had demonstrated on 19 September. They did so in defiance of established codes of dress and conduct as they danced in the streets in their working clothes, and refreshed themselves in the fountain of the Plaza de Mayo.24 Seen from Canetti’s perspective, the mixture of violence and elation is therefore not as contradictory as it might seem. The 17 October crowd was not one homogeneous mass but was comprised of several crowds with several causes and objectives. Many celebrated the freeing of Perón, others experienced a sense of personal dignity, while