Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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chapter discusses the Peronist Resistance, and the appearance of an incipient guerrilla insurgency under the influence of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Peronism was adopted in the 1960s by a new generation of Peronists trying to achieve through armed struggle what the older generation had tried to accomplish with massive strikes, crowd mobilizations, and economic sabotage. These diverse outcrops of political violence in Argentina, the determination of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to export their revolution to the Latin American continent, and the guerrilla training received by young Argentines in Cuba, made the Argentine military prepare themselves for an impending counterinsurgency war.
The 1956 Peronist Rebellion
On 9 June 1956 Generals Juan José Valle and Raúl Tanco rose in rebellion. They demanded free elections, the restoration of civil and political liberties, and the reincorporation of dismissed officers. Although Valle and Tanco seem to have been driven more by resentment than by Peronist fervor, the belief that the rebellion tried to return Perón to power attracted many militant Peronists.7 These civilians were to move into place once the rebellion got under way. However, they never received the weapons that had been promised, and many were arrested without having come into action.
The Valle-Tanco rebellion was doomed to fail because the military intelligence service had detected the plan weeks in advance.8 Lieutenant-General Aramburu had already signed undated decrees to proclaim the state of siege in his absence and establish martial law. Admiral Rojas went to Navy headquarters when the rebellion took place and ordered Lieutenant-General Aramburu to pass from the presidential yacht to a naval vessel for his own safety. Next, Rojas communicated to all commanders not to execute anybody without his written approval.9
Lieutenant-Colonel Fernández Suárez, the commanding officer of the operation at José León Suárez, declared later that he had received information about the hiding place of General Tanco. However, arriving too late, he found only fourteen men armed with Colt pistols. In the early hours of 10 June, according to Fernández Suárez, he received an order from the Executive Office to execute the men.10 Walsh denounced the execution as murder because the men had been arrested on 9 June at 11:30 P.M. more than one hour before martial law was announced publicly by radio on 10 June at 12:32 A.M., so the death penalty for aiding the rebels should not have been applied to them retroactively.
Admiral Isaac Rojas stated thirty-four years later that around midnight on 9 June, he had sent the order that nobody could be executed without his official permission. Unfortunately, Lieutenant-Colonel Fernández Suárez never received this order, and thus acted on his own authority against “a large group of troublemakers with fire arms and abundant means of communication.”11 Walsh, with his usual irony, appraised the actions of Fernández Suárez differently: “Everybody knows the drive with which his troops defeated the enemy; the heroism with which his Mausers triumphed over the clenched fists; the 45 caliber pistols over the moans. Your victory was overwhelming …, Colonel.”12
The rebellion was quelled within twelve hours, and its leaders arrested. General Tanco sought refuge in the Haitian embassy, but General Valle surrendered voluntarily to the police.13 The death toll of the rebellion was thirty-four. Most deaths were caused by execution, because only seven died in combat. These executions were openly publicized to intimidate any rebels at large, prevent an escalation into a civil war, and discourage future rebellions.14 General Valle was executed three days after the start of the rebellion. Rojas confesses having been instrumental in the execution. Lieutenant-General Aramburu wanted to give Valle a life sentence, but Rojas disagreed. “‘President,’ I say, ‘I totally disagree…. the first who must be executed is General Valle because he is the leader of the thing.’ And so it went. This decision was taken … and Valle was executed.”15
The execution of Valle and the summary executions at José León Suárez as well as the hundreds of arrests gave a new impetus to the Peronist Resistance. Perón had strongly condemned the Valle-Tanco rebellion as naive, and suspected them of acting out of personal ambition. On 12 June 1956, he wrote that not a coup but civil resistance was the only road to success. “From now on, we must organize a total struggle at all costs. Every man, every entity, every labor union, every organization must have the struggle as its purpose. But it is necessary that the struggle will basically be a guerrilla struggle. The reactionary force must never know where to hit but must receive the blows of the resistance each and every day…. We have to oppose the arms of the people to the arms of usurpation.”16
This call to arms resonated well with thousands of militant Peronists already engaged in sabotage on their own account since the Aramburu-Rojas palace coup against Lonardi. Perón’s call for revenge in the January 1956 directive gave an important justification for the use of violence. “We must take revenge for our assassinated brothers in all of Argentina. We must take revenge for the thousands of comrades scoffed at and imprisoned by the reactionary force.”17 With each new death, and each new wave of arrests, new traumatizing experiences were added to existing ones, and new causes for revenge arose.
Peronist Resistance and Guerrilla Insurgency
The rank-and-file sabotage erupting after Perón’s overthrow increased considerably when the moderate Lonardi government was replaced by the hard-liners Aramburu and Rojas in November 1955. The new government took measures to raise the productivity of Argentine industry, such as the reduction of worker participation in management decisions, less favorable labor conditions, and the introduction of incentive schemes. Some changes cut deep into the everyday working climate. For instance, Alberto Belloni recalls how workers at the Rosario shipyard no longer received protective masks, special clothing, and a free pint of milk when cleaning the engine rooms.18 Workers felt that such labor measures were tarred with the brush of revanchismo or vindictive retaliation. The policies added more fuel to their resentment about Perón’s ouster and intensified the worker resistance at the shop-floor level. Perón supported the intensification of violence, and proposed in his January 1956 directive three forms of opposition: individual civil resistance, collective civil resistance, and guerrilla warfare.19
The individual resistance was to consist of civil disobedience, such as leaving the water running at night, withdrawing savings, sending hate mail, making offensive phone calls, creating bomb scares, painting slogans, and spreading rumors about strikes, corruption, political deals, and troop movements. The damage done by a casually dropped cigarette, a piece of wood thrown into a machine, and the wasting of electricity at the work place would be considerable. We have no way to assess whether or not many people followed Perón’s call for individual civil disobedience, but the prevailing mood was certainly conducive to such sabotage.20
Collective civil resistance was to take place in the social, economic, and political domains. The social and political resistance, already described in chapter 2, tried to destabilize public life and question the government’s legitimacy. Strikes were organized, and the streets became the terrain of public protest by young Peronists. Neighborhood-based groups of rabble-rousers would soon disintegrate under the growing repression and their interest in guerrilla warfare would be awakened.
Economic resistance aimed at undermining the government’s economic policies through sabotage.21 The most militant workers in each plant were to form small groups operating also outside the work place. Trains were to be derailed, grain deposits set on fire, power stations outed, and locales of the political opposition torched. This resistance movement attracted considerable support. There were more than two hundred groups operating in Greater Buenos Aires with an estimated ten thousand participants.22
Between September 1955 and June 1956, there was a predominance of fire bombings and other forms of arson, while the period from July 1956 to January 1958 was characterized by the use of pipe bombs (caños). Around seven thousand explosive devices were detonated between September 1955 and February 1958.23 There were periods of greater and lesser intensity, but a general level of political violence continued for years on end. Between 1 May 1958 and 30 June 1961, there were 1,022 incidents with explosive devices, 104 cases of arson,