Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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desire to manifest their allegiance together. These protests were the response of a dispersed crowd in search of something or someone around which to gather.
Perón himself continued to have faith in the masses.8 Civil resistance would wear out the government and organize a general strike paralyzing the country and inciting a mass insurrection. He emphasized that it is important to hit “when it hurts and where it hurts” as well as to learn to “throw a stone and hide the hand.”9 However, the majority of the Peronist following was not receptive to such insurrectional disobedience. John William Cooke, Perón’s head of resistance in Argentina, complained in June 1957 that there was considerable sabotage and widespread aversion of the government, but that “This mood doesn’t translate, however, into a total civil resistance in the way that we would like.”10 Cooke’s assessment was correct at that particular moment, but unjustified when seen over a longer period of time. Strike mobilizations became the hotbed of political militancy that fed into an insurrectional movement of slow maturation. Peronists would have to wait fourteen long years before the moment for insurrection appeared.
Strikes and Barricades
The first major strike after Perón’s fall occurred between 13 and 16 November 1955 to protest the usurpation of union locales by non-Peronist unionists. These confrontations between Peronist and non-Peronist workers demonstrated that the Liberating Revolution had cut right across class lines. As James has observed, an anti-Peronist (gorila) could just as well be an oligarch as a fellow worker.11 Many Peronist workers adhered to the November strike, but did not manifest their protest publicly. Workers and union delegates were arrested, and an inspector-general appointed by the government took control of the CGT.12 One worker recalled years later that “there were no protest marches, nor assault groups … it was a calm, peaceful strike as though the workers had still not got over the shock caused by the fall of the Leader….”13 Perón’s fall had a devastating effect on the Peronist movement which had deemed itself almighty.
Compared to the previous five years, there was a great willingness to strike in 1956, but this disposition declined significantly in 1957, only to increase rapidly in 1958 and 1959.14 The national elections of February 1958 had been won by Arturo Frondizi of the Radical party (UCR) thanks to the Peronist vote ordered by Perón. Frondizi extended his hand immediately to the unions by withdrawing the inspector-general from the CGT union central. Nevertheless, major strikes struck his government after July. Most strikes in 1958 were organized by non-Peronist unions. Peronist union leaders were still supporting Frondizi because of his conciliatory attitude and legislation that reinstated the Peronist supremacy in many unions.15 When Frondizi implemented a wage freeze in late 1958 to resolve a serious imbalance of payments, the unwritten pact with the Peronist unions was broken.
The year 1959 became a watershed for government and labor. In confrontation upon confrontation, the two parties were staking out their territory and redefining the rules of engagement. The unions were defending worker employment and the principal tenets of Peronism, namely social justice and national sovereignty. Instead, Frondizi wanted to diminish Argentina’s dependence on agricultural exports and develop its industry by attracting foreign capital and raising labor productivity. The privatization of the Lisandro de la Torre meatpacking plant on 14 January 1959 fitted perfectly in his development plan. However, there were strong nationalist and Peronist sentiments attached to the plant. Like the railroads, the Lisandro de la Torre plant had been nationalized by Perón. Its privatization was felt as another retreat from the Peronist policies and a sell-out to foreign capital.
Upon hearing the news about the privatization, nearly nine thousand workers gathered in general assembly and decided to occupy the plant. Solidarity strikes erupted throughout the country through grass roots activism, instead of union leadership. On 17 January, fifteen hundred policemen, gendarmery, and soldiers accompanied by four Sherman tanks assaulted the Lisandro de la Torre plant.16 What concerns me here are not the mass arrests and the eviction of the workers, but the street protests that broke out afterwards and their interpretation by the Peronist resistance movement. This local insurrection in Buenos Aires (known as the porteñazo), showed that strikes about labor issues might easily escalate into political confrontations attracting the solidarity of other social groups. Behind each general strike, there lurked the danger of an insurrectional crowd.
The Frigorífico Nacional Lisandro de la Torre was located in Mataderos, a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The police assault was received with indignation. Mataderos and adjoining neighborhoods turned into a barricaded zone of resistance as had never been seen before in Argentina. According to the clandestine Peronist National Command or CNP (Comando Nacional Peronista), thousands of young workers joined the struggle. A new generation of Peronists had become incorporated into the Peronist movement. They cut the street lights, overturned trees, and erected barricades.17 Meanwhile, Mataderos was enveloped in the stench of rotting flesh from the corrals surrounding the meatpacking plant. Due to the insurrection, the animals had been left without care in the high summer temperatures.18
The CNP document exalted the combativeness of the Argentine working class, and regarded the general strike as a confirmation of the central position of the Peronist masses in the struggle for national liberation. Only the Peronist rank and file had thrown itself entirely into the struggle to protect the national patrimony, while many union leaders had struck unacceptable compromises with the government.19 Here, a conflict surfaced that had been brooding for several years between on one side the so-called integrationist unions which pursued an accommodation with the government to save what there was to save of the embattled labor conditions, and on the other side the intransigent unionists and the vanguardists. The intransigents rejected all deals and engaged in sabotage, while the vanguardists of the CNP tried to organize a guerrilla insurgency. The events in January 1959 led the CNP to believe that they and the intransigents, not the integrationists, were in step with the people.
The CNP report mentioned also the mass appeal of the general strike. Not just the workers of Lisandro de la Torre, but workers from other branches of industry as well as students and shopkeepers joined the protest. Yet, the general strike was never at any moment an insurrection because of the absence of a recognizable political leadership which could have planned the general strike, provided armed support, and thus achieved more success.20 Nevertheless, the Lisandro de la Torre protests fed dreams of future insurrections, taught valuable lessons about how to better organize the popular defenses, and added one more episode to the memory of the Peronist resistance movement.
Frondizi took the strike movement very seriously. He had already declared a thirty-day state of siege on 9 November 1958 to deal with the Mendoza oil workers’ strike, and kept renewing it till a military coup ended his government on 29 March 1962. The state of siege did not prevent workers from striking throughout 1959, but the protests met with little success.21 The Lisandro de la Torre plant continued in private hands, and only half of the nine thousand workers were rehired. Strikes of bank employees and textile and metal workers were broken, and street protests were facing new tough repressive measures as the Frondizi government installed the CONINTES Plan (Plan de Conmoción Interior del Estado) on 14 March 1960. This Plan of Internal Upheaval of the State had been put in place by Perón on 16 September 1955 to make headway against the growing opposition that would end in the Liberating Revolution. Now, the same repressive measures were used to curtail the Peronists. The CONINTES Plan gave extensive powers to the armed forces dealing with public disturbance. The country was divided into defense zones and subzones; an organizational structure which was used again during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. The police was placed under the command of the armed forces, and the country became subject to martial law on 16 March 1960. The CONINTES measures were suspended on 2 August 1961, but the state of siege continued unabated.22
The labor strikes dropped dramatically in Buenos Aires city from over ten million working days lost in 1959 to 1.6 million in 1960, and then declined rapidly to less than three thousand days in 1967.23 Thousands of militant unionists had been blacklisted, and factory managers were granted extensive powers over their workers. Rising unemployment in a worsening economy, the CONINTES repression, and the realization that the strikes and street protests