Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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Such experiences had a radicalizing effect, especially if accompanied by police violence.
The student-worker alliance erupted with full force in 1969 with three memorable crowd events in Rosario and Córdoba. The day of street fighting in Córdoba on 29 May has become known as the Cordobazo.70 This violent crowd will be discussed in the next chapter because of a historical significance which places it on a par with the epoch-making 17 October 1945. Here, I discuss the events of one week earlier in Rosario because, unlike the Cordobazo, the Rosariazo on 21 May 1969 was initiated by students instead of workers.
As is so typical of major crowd gatherings in Argentina, the events in Rosario of May 1969 had been preceded by months of small street mobilizations. Since the beginning of the year, students had been objecting to the curtailment of student enrollments. These protests were successful in the faculties of Philosophy and Letters, but restrictions continued in other disciplines. Although not all demands were met, the students realized that their demonstrations were effective, and that the authorities were tolerating the street protests. It was in this turbulent climate of May 1969 that student restaurants were privatized, and meal prices raised.71
The student opposition arose in the northeastern provinces of Santa Fe, Corrientes, and Entre Rios.72 Classes were boycotted, student restaurants were occupied, and daily street protests were held in the towns of Rosario, Corrientes, and Resistencia. The students understood that the authorities had no intention of reversing the price hike, and began to approach social sectors sympathetic to their demands. Students in Resistencia sought the support of progressive forces in the Catholic church, while students in Corrientes asked for help from Ongaro’s combative CGTA and Tosco’s electricians union. Of particular importance was the labor unrest among metal workers in Rosario where three hundred workers were confronted with a lockout. The UOM called for a general strike on 23 May 1969.73
The tense situation escalated when police in Corrientes attacked a street demonstration on 15 May, wounding four students, and killing the nineteen-year-old Juan José Cabral.74 The indignation was nationwide, and unions condemned the disproportionate police response. The UOM national headquarters expressed its solidarity with the students in Corrientes and the striking workers in Rosario, while continuing to strengthen the links between the two sectors: “We refuse to accept the hunger to which they are submitting us, and the violent repression of every form of protest. We already know that the regime kills, here in Corrientes, in Córdoba, or in any other place. They are killing the best we have: our young students and workers.”75 The protests multiplied in all major Argentine cities, and a student strike was announced for Tuesday 20 May. The students intensified their protests during the intervening days when another casualty fell to police bullets. Rosario was this time the location of police brutality.76
On 17 May, there were the usual daily demonstrations in Rosario. The Night of the Long Sticks was casting its shadow over the protests when protesters linked the death of Juan José Cabral two days earlier to that of Santiago Pampillón, a student and part-time auto worker who died in September 1966 during a student protest in Córdoba. Some activists were carrying molotov cocktails and shouted the slogan “Cabral and Pampillón, the martyrs of the road to freedom.”77 That afternoon, groups of students were throwing stones at the police and at several financial institutions in Rosario, when police officer Lezcano stepped out of his car and shot the student Adolfo Ramón Bello through the head. According to a police communiqué, the victim was part of a group that had cornered the officer, thrown molotov cocktails, and tried to overturn his car. The officer drew his pistol in self-defense and fired an accidental shot which killed Adolfo Bello.78
The killings provoked a public resentment impossible to appease. The students called upon everybody to repudiate the deaths of Cabral and Bello in a silent protest march on 21 May. The demonstration was called for six o’clock in the evening at the Plaza 25 de Mayo in downtown Rosario. The trajectory of the march was to run for twelve blocks from the square to the headquarters of the CGTA. As an indication of the alliance between students and workers, secretary-general Raimundo Ongaro promised to address the crowd at the end of the protest march. On the way to the CGTA building, the demonstrators intended to pass by the shopping center where Adolfo Bello had been shot four days earlier.
At this stage of the month-long demonstrations, the authorities were faced with a crowd that was no longer concerned with the conflict over expensive meal tickets, but wanted to mourn their dead in a collective gathering and control public space as a political protest. Police and military mounted an impressive force at three core locations. Their defense capability of fire engines and assault cars was concentrated around the Plaza 25 de Mayo. The force wanted to prevent the protesters from gathering there before they proceeded to the CGTA offices where also several radio stations, the court, the university’s administrative center, and the police and army headquarters were located. The march through the city symbolized a political supremacy which the security forces were not willing to concede.
At six o’clock in the evening, about two thousand protesters are circulating around the Plaza 25 de Mayo. Many are students, but there are also blue- and white-collar workers. They try to enter the square in small groups but are immediately dispersed by the police, whereupon they try to circumvent the barrier through another passage. The tug of war undulates back and forth through the streets of Rosario until the police decides to attack. They launch large quantities of tear gas into the streets, and charge on horseback towards the protesters. The crowd disperses but regroups seven blocks away from the square in the direction of the CGTA headquarters.
A new element is added to the volatile situation when people begin to burn papers in the street, initially to neutralize the tear gas. Fires can be seen at various places and are even fed by local residents who throw paper onto the street. The protest begins to acquire an insurrectional appearance when barricades are erected to halt the advancing security forces. Buses are overturned and building materials are taken from construction sites to reinforce the improvised obstructions. The protesters even go on the offensive. They attack the mounted police and throw them off their horses. At 9:20 in the evening, the police withdraw from the area in the direction of their headquarters near the CGTA offices. The jubilant crowd can finally form a whole, and begin to advance on their trajectory, shouting slogans about the unity of students and workers. Protesters force their way into the LT8 radio station, and destroy the furniture when they cannot enter the studio. Others try to advance to the CGTA building, but are stopped by a barrage of tear gas and gunfire from the police. The fifteen-year-old metal worker and high school student Luis Norberto Blanco is killed. The crowd disperses at midnight, and Rosario is placed under martial law.79
The high price for maintaining public order in Rosario was two dead adolescents, many wounded, and the much-feared alliance of students and workers.80 The inordinate police repression of the student-worker crowd evoked a mutual identification with each other’s suffering and forged a new social configuration through collective violence. The protest crowds were fast on their way to becoming insurrectional crowds which in the political heat of the times threatened to consolidate into a revolutionary movement.
The Resurrection of Peronist Crowds
By the end of 1969 Peronist crowds had finally resolved the social trauma of the 1955 bombardment, overcome the fear of violent repression, let go of their dependence on Perón, and become once again aware of their strength. The yearning for expressing discontent in the presence of tens of thousands of equally indignant protesters, and the moral example of uncompromising Peronist workers resisting oppression, had slowly swayed a growing segment of the Argentine working class towards an historic crowd alliance with a politicized student body in Argentina’s radicalized universities. These crowds were summoned by grass roots mobilization and lacked national leaders. The fear of the revolutionary crowd among the military, upper, and middle classes was becoming a reality.
The Argentine military had tried to rein in popular crowds in various ways after 1945. Their strategies arose from two assumptions: first of all, crowds are irrational by nature and potentially subversive of the established order, and second, the Argentine people had an inbred tendency toward crowd mobilization. The popular mobilizations between 1945 and 1955 were tolerated in the