Chapter 3

       A Breeze Turned into Hurricane: The Apogee of Crowd Mobilization

      The revolutionary insurrection of tens of thousands of workers and students, raising hundreds of barricades and fighting off police and army during two days of pitched battle on 29 and 30 May 1969 in Córdoba, constitutes the second crowd myth of twentieth-century Argentine history. Lieutenant-General Alejandro Lanusse recalled in 1977: “I sensed on that difficult 29th of May in 1969 that something was happening in the country, something new whose uniqueness I tried to gauge within the framework of my greater worries. I couldn’t know in what it would end, how I would react to the events, or what were the indirect and deeper causes. But I became convinced that other elements, unusual until then, were entering the political reality and the way in which we were living this reality.”¹ These “other elements” were snipers belonging to a tiny communist party with grand ambitions.

      The tragedy of May 1969 consists of the widespread myth that the events in Córdoba were the beginning of a revolutionary process that could only be advanced or stopped with violence. This fatal conclusion gave a decisive impulse to an urban guerrilla insurgency intent on leading the masses to victory and an entrenched military determined to halt the revolutionary process through indiscriminate repression. The outburst of collective violence in Córdoba became known as the Cordobazo, and has been hailed and condemned as the beginning of a social revolution that ushered in a decade of mass mobilizations, guerrilla insurgency, and a deadly factionalism within the Peronist movement ending in the coup of March 1976.

      The military and the radicalized left did not doubt that the Cordobazo signaled a revolutionary moment in Argentine history. Lieutenant-General Onganía declared that: “The tragic events in Córdoba responded to the actions of an organized extremist force intending to produce an urban insurrection.”² The Marxists interpreted the Cordobazo as an expression of class consciousness: “On May 29, 1969, the people of Córdoba flung themselves into the streets to reveal all the hatred accumulated during years of misery, exploitation and humiliation…. The just fury of the people poured like burning lava through the city streets, demolishing whatever vestige of exploitation crossed its path, trapping and harassing the police which, overrun by the crowd, left the city in the hands of the working class and the people.”³ The Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT) concluded that the latent yearning for revolutionary change on 17 October 1945 became redirected into the reformist program of Perón, but that the Cordobazo signaled a qualitative jump towards a social revolution. “The breeze has turned into a hurricane. History, the real history written by the people, is in motion.”⁴ The working class had liberated itself from its patronage by Perón, and would finally realize its revolutionary mission.

      The Cordobazo marked a watershed in mass mobilization. The rank and file took the initiative without Perón or the national union leadership. The street demonstrations between 1969 and 1972 arose from uncontainable grass roots resentments, while national union leaders tried in vain to hold their grip on the disgruntled working class by negotiating better labor conditions with the dictatorial government.

      The Cordobazo also demonstrated the cracks in the vertical discipline and ideological purity of the Peronist movement. A decentralized unionism with political overtones of shop floor mobilization had developed. Ideological differences between Peronist and non-Peronist workers made space for a common opposition to the government. Labor demands continued to be made after 1969 but they must always be understood within a larger political framework that created an alliance among various social sectors. The working class became increasingly militant and was joined by middle class students. It was this grass roots protagonism that was feared most by the military. As Perón had already said in 1944, a leaderless crowd was dangerous to society because it could be taken advantage of by agitators and revolutionaries. The military, the union leaders, and the revolutionaries all concluded that the Cordobazo revealed that the fighting spirit of the Argentine working class remained unbroken despite years of military repression, and that its capacity for resistance had neither been domesticated by the Peronist hierarchy nor paralyzed by Perón’s prolonged absence. On the contrary, the Cordobazo showed that the people could become violent, that the violence might be spontaneous, and that this collective violence was begging for the direction of a revolutionary vanguard. Those who succeeded in captivating the potentially violent collectivity could overthrow all principal institutions of society.

       Cordoban Violence and Euphoria

      The months preceding the Cordobazo had been turbulent. The Cordoban unions associated in the combative CGTA union central had held numerous street mobilizations against the deterioration of worker rights and called for mass mobilizations and armed resistance.⁵ Cordoban students were protesting the restrictions on student enrollment, the raise in meal tickets, and the deaths incurred in Rosario and Corrientes. Metal workers were complaining about the unfavorable pay scale differences between Córdoba and Buenos Aires, while auto workers were angry about the increase of the work week by four hours. Cordoban bus drivers were intermittently on strike about a planned reorganization of public transport, and electricians were opposing the privatization of the provincial electricity company. Finally, Córdoba’s middle class was upset by the higher property taxes imposed in early 1969.⁶ Each social sector had its ax to grind with the Onganía dictatorship, but they shared a resentment of the abuses and injustices suffered. Their specific economic grievances were framed in a dissatisfaction with the political proscription and cultural patronizing by a dictatorial government which even forbade certain types of bathing suits.⁷ Working class, middle class, and student resentment coalesced in May 1969. Two events in the streets of Córdoba set the tone of the protests and established the practice of violent engagement that was to erupt on an unimaginable scale.

      The rescindment of the English Saturday was received with much indignation by the Cordoban auto workers. The English Saturday (sábado inglés) meant that certain categories of industrial workers in several provinces received a forty-eight-hour remuneration for a work week of forty-four hours. This privilege had been won in 1957, and the auto workers of the SMATA union assembled on 14 May to decide about their protest strategy. In the middle of a heated debate, the police launched tear gas into the enclosed space. Six thousand asphyxiated workers ran for the only major exit and once in the street were attacked. The workers responded with such force that the police fled from the scene.⁸

      The second violent street confrontation occurred during protests against the death of Juan José Cabral in Corrientes. Together with workers from various Cordoban labor unions, thousands of students took to the streets on 23 May. Just as had happened a week earlier at the auto workers assembly, the police attacked with tear gas to disperse the crowd. The students retreated to the Clínicas neighborhood in downtown Córdoba and began to erect barricades. The police tried to overrun the makeshift obstacles but were repelled with molotov cocktails. It would take until the early hours of the next day before the police succeeded in conquering the area.⁹ These two street victories enhanced the confidence of workers and students, sealed their political pact, and motivated them to press their demands with even more vigor. Street battle practices—mobilizations, barricades, molotov cocktails—that were established then were used with even greater intensity a week later.

      On 28 May, student and union leaders met to coordinate the massive protest of 29 May. They anticipated a considerable police repression and divided the city into four zones of contestation in order to disperse the security forces. The workers of Luz y Fuerza (electricians), the UOM (metal workers), SMATA (auto workers), and UTA (bus drivers) would march upon the center of Córdoba from two directions,