Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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in the city center or join the worker columns along the way. The final meeting place was the center (casco chico)of Córdoba where all major political, financial, and cultural institutions were located. The SMATA and Luz y Fuerza unions would supply their men with metal bars, ball bearings, caltrops (miguelitos), molotov cocktails, sling shots, and small firearms in case the police would try to repress the street mobilization.10
At around eleven o’clock on Thursday morning, 29 May, a column of four thousand auto workers depart on foot under the leadership of the Peronist SMATA leader Elpidio Torres from the IKA-Renault plant at Santa Isabel, eight kilometers outside the city. Their number swells with thousands of students and workers as they walk on the Avenida Vélez Sarsfield to the CGT union central headquarters in downtown Córdoba. Other groups of students advance from Avenida Colón together with the electricians and bus drivers, but are forced to take an alternative route when the police blocks their way. Elsewhere, workers abandon factories and also converge on the city. Meanwhile, the two principal columns are informed by motorized workers about the police forces ahead of them. Unlike the case of the Rosariazo where the police tried to prevent the crowd from taking shape, the police forces in Córdoba are determined to defend the center against the penetration of the advancing protesters. The situation escalates when the auto worker column reaches the Plaza Vélez Sarsfield several blocks from the CGT building, and only five blocks from Plaza San Martín. A large police force lies in wait. A confrontation becomes inevitable. The police shoot tear gas at the protesters, and are pelted in return with homemade tear gas bombs. As the crowd diverts to another boulevard, the police open fire and kill the worker Máximo Mena. Indignation reverberates through the crowd and angry protesters charge at the police who withdraw in haste to the Plaza San Martín.
The other column of workers and students headed by Agustín Tosco also encounters stiff police opposition. They are attacked at their gathering point outside the headquarters of the electricians’ union. They succeed finally in crossing the six blocks that separate them from the autoworkers near the Plaza Vélez Sarsfield.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, the united crowd turns violent. Union leaders Tosco and Torres try to get a grip on the collective violence, but to no avail. Cars are overturned to erect barricades. Furniture is taken from stores and offices to reinforce the obstructions. Middle class residents participate actively in the protest, and throw paper on the street to feed the inflamed barricades. Every large display window in sight is smashed. When a car dealer tries to prevent his cars from being burnt in the street, one of the participants responds: “No complaints, sir. If you have so much money, then you must have taken it from the people. We are destroying what is ours. Because we can’t take it home, we simply smash it to pieces.”11 The violence of the people is specifically directed at the symbols of repression and privilege: banks, government buildings, police stations, foreign companies, and luxury stores.
Tosco remarks that afternoon: “This can’t be possible. This is incredible. The people went by themselves. Here, the leaders died…. the people went by themselves. Nobody is in charge now. It all slipped through our fingers.”12 The same day, an official communiqué reads: “The city of Córdoba has been ruined by popular hordes that destroyed everything in their way, without respecting private property and without taking fundamental differences between large, small and middle-size businesses into account.”13
A quarter after one o’clock in the afternoon, the commander of the Third Army Corps of Córdoba, General Sánchez Lahoz, installs martial law and orders the protesters to abandon the barricades and return home. Many workers leave but others remain to witness what is to become an outbreak of collective violence only comparable to the 1919 Tragic Week and the 1959 Lisandro de la Torre street battles. An estimated crowd of fifty thousand people occupy the adjoining student neighborhoods Barrio Clínicas and Barrio Alberdi, while snipers assume positions on roof tops to detain the advancing military. As they had done one week earlier, students begin to build barricades. Barrio Clínicas with its hospital buildings and private clinics is the center of resistance. Orators incite people to resist the military force converging on the city. The military arrive at about five o’clock in the afternoon at Barrio Alberdi, and take the area street by street. The neighborhood consists of narrow streets of two-story houses with wrought-iron balconies and flat roof tops providing an optimal mobility to protesters and snipers. Sniper fire is returned with machine gun bursts, and student boarding houses are combed for activists.
The confrontation of crowd and army takes an unexpected turn when at eleven o’clock in the evening of 29 May, a small group of Luz y Fuerza workers shuts off the electricity to the city. The blackout severely disrupts the communications among the various military units. Students, workers, and local residents win valuable time to reinforce the barricades. A small group attempts to incinerate the national bank. The army resumes its assault when power is restored at one o’clock in the morning of 30 May. Meanwhile, the street occupation spreads to the city’s periphery where the military presence is not so prominent. In addition, the unions most closely associated with the CGT union central proceed as planned with their twenty-four-hour general strike and protest march. The workers hinder the troop movements considerably and the final military assault can only begin at around six o’clock in the evening. The Barrio Clínicas is retaken in one hour, even though incidental outbreaks of collective violence continue to flare up in other parts of Córdoba. Gas stations are assaulted to obtain fuel for molotov cocktails, more stores are ransacked, and railways are obstructed.
The union leaders Torres and Tosco were arrested earlier that day. They were immediately court-martialed, and sentenced to prison terms of four to eight years, but were released in December 1969. The official toll of two days of collective violence was sixteen dead, even though figures as high as sixty have been mentioned. There were hundreds of wounded, and over six hundred people were arrested. About four thousand policemen and five thousand soldiers had been mobilized to control the insurrection.14
General Lanusse visited Córdoba on Monday, 2 June, and observed that the turmoil was not exclusively the work of an organized extremist force, as President Onganía was to declare two days later. “Subversive elements acted and at some moment marked the beat. But in the street one could see the dissatisfaction of everybody. For what I could see and hear … I can say that it was the people of Córdoba, in either an active or passive way, who showed that they were against the National Government in general and the Provincial Government in particular.”15 General Lanusse sensed the beginnings of a broad-based rebellion which might turn into a social revolution if the direction of the Argentine dictatorship would not change soon.
The Historical Cordobazo
There are three explanations of the Cordobazo. They are all situated within the context of a repressive political climate, deteriorating economic conditions, years of labor resistance, and the student opposition to the Onganía dictatorship. The emphasis of the three approaches lies respectively on the maturing class struggle, the resistance to authoritarianism, and grass roots militancy.
Ernesto Laclau and Beba and Beatriz Balvé emphasize that the Cordobazo marks a stage in the mounting class antagonism in Argentine society. Parts of the middle class (students, professionals, progressive priests) united with the working class against capitalist exploitation and political oppression, while pursuing a new morality and social order.16 Delich, Lewis, Munck, and Smith attribute the Cordobazo to the decline of the Cordoban auto industry, a divided middle class, combative labor unions, and the authoritarianism of the national and local government. Unable to express their dissatisfaction through democratic channels, the discontent exploded, as if in a pressure cooker, into collective violence.17 Finally, Brennan and James interpret the Cordobazo as a combination of diverse economic grievances of the workers, political forces within local unions, a fierce rank-and-file militancy, and rising frustrations among multiple layers of Cordoban society accumulated during the Onganía dictatorship. The large Cordoban student population added fuel to the widespread resentment about the authoritarian government, and contributed to the insurrectional atmosphere.18
Brennan and James are most convincing with their sophisticated understanding of the complexities of the Cordoban working class. Nevertheless, all three analyses fail to account