Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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and eventually led to a mature democracy.26
The only problem was that these changes could take as much as twenty years. Many Argentines were unwilling to wait so long, and this impatience might stimulate the rise of a revolutionary movement. In this situation, the army field manuals stated that insurrection movements could only be prevented from taking root when “the original causes have been removed or attenuated, or when the repressive action has been sufficiently effective and energetic to discourage new subversive actions.”27 Lieutenant-General Onganía chose repression rather than reform to deal with civil unrest.
What does a crowd try to obtain, according to the Argentine military specialists?28 The crowd wants to display its strength in public, demonstrate its popular support, intimidate the authorities, and demoralize the security forces. An outburst of violence provokes panic among the people, paralyzes their normal activities, and challenges public order. It may create a revolutionary climate and be used to test the strength of the legal forces. The emergence of an urban insurrection consists of two main phases and one subsidiary phase: the gathering of a large multitude, the organization of civil disturbances and, if the occasion arises, the creation of martyrs.29 The armed and security forces must focus their repressive action on these three phases.
The army field manuals stated that crowds do not arise spontaneously, but that they are summoned by activists and professional agitators. These agitators infiltrate labor unions, student organizations, or political movements, and then inculcate revolutionary ideas creating a fertile climate for civil disturbance. They translate the people’s legitimate demands into a discourse that coincides with their hidden political aspirations. They try to create a common enemy, like the military dictatorship, foreign imperialism, or the capitalist system. Once the idea has caught on that a street demonstration is necessary, then the leading activists choose a public space such as a park, square, or avenue to hold a protest. There, they provoke the collective violence and trigger the crowd’s psychological mechanisms. During the street fighting “seemingly fanatic or insolent elements (so prepared to act) will contaminate in an irrational manner the persons who are near them, influencing the mood of the crowd and pulling along the moderates and undecided.”30 The crowd is thus seen as the fertile soil of collective violence and revolutionary action, so public gatherings must be forbidden during times of military repression.31
According to the field manuals, all civil disturbances are tightly orchestrated. They write about the crowd as if it were a regular enemy force carrying out a tactical plan with military precision. There is an external crowd commander who observes the protest area and confrontation from an apartment or office building. The external commander gives orders to an internal commander about when and where to incite the collective violence. The crowd commanders are located near mail boxes and street signs or wear visible signs so that they can be identified easily. Most multitudes contain activists who carry banners, placards, and protest signs conveying the grievances, and are aided by an agitation group shouting slogans. Their place will be eventually taken by other activists who will incite the demonstrators to violence.
Protest crowds organize their offensive and defensive capabilities. There are shock groups which distract or pin down the legal forces, so that other protesters can proceed to the gathering place. These shock groups may throw stones, incinerate cars and buildings, smash windows, and provoke people into ransacking stores. There are supply groups providing bombs and arms to the activists, and security guards who protect the internal commanders and prepare their flight from the scene of confrontation. There may also be snipers who try to detain the legal forces or provide cover to retreating comrades.32
After the collective violence has waned, the army field manuals continued, the protest leaders will exploit the loss of life to create martyrs. One field manual explained further that deaths may occur during the disturbances, either by the use of force to which the legal forces have been provoked, or by assassinations carried out by the activists themselves. “The creation of martyrs will try to aggravate the emotional state of the crowd, will seek to attract sympathizers to the movement, discredit the legal forces and drag along the protesters in an insane frenzy, thus ensuring the success of the riot.”33
The instruction manuals recommend an array of repressive means (megaphones, tear gas, war dogs, snipers, artillery, armored vehicles, helicopters) and tactics (patrols, blockades, entrapments, incursions, ambushes, hand-to-hand combat) to deal with the collective violence. The field manuals also suggest that snipers should “eliminate the leaders located in a crowd.”34
Despite occasional references to its irrationality and emotional discharge, the crowd is treated as a rational organization in which the various groups (agitation groups, shock groups, supply groups, security guards, internal and external command) are hierarchically linked. As an authoritative text on crowd control stated, “In general, the same principles of war which govern the movements and disposition of large armies in the field may be applied in controlling rioting mobs.”35 It seems as if the military strategists tried to get a grip on a collective phenomenon that bewildered them and imposed a familiar organizational form that made leaders responsible for the crowd’s actions. Crucial in the thinking of the military was that revolutionary leaders ride the wave of popular resentment.
The resentment about declining labor conditions, political repression, authoritarianism, and the proscription of Peronism reached unprecedented proportions in 1969. The decision to repress mass mobilizations, instead of taking away the grievances through a political solution, galvanized the opposition. An editorial in Criterio summed up the political balance of the Rosariazo and the Cordobazo: “And so, in fifteen days, the government’s political leadership achieved what the opposition could not in three years. It succeeded in uniting the two CGTs [labor union centrals], the different student groups, the students with the professors, the students and professors with employees and workers, and Catholic universities with public universities. And all of them against the government, as became clear at the successful strike of the 30th of May.”36 The link between workers, students, and middle class professionals was recognized as a broad-based alliance in Argentine society with ominous prospects.
Second Rosariazo and Liberation Syndicalism
The civil unrest stirred up by the Cordobazo refused to die down. Strikes and protest marches were held throughout the country.37 A student was shot down by police during a demonstration in Córdoba, and the once powerful union leader Augusto Vandor was assassinated by a guerrilla hit squad on 30 June 1969. Lieutenant-General Onganía declared that same day a state of siege which would only be lifted on 23 May 1973. The authority of the military government had been severely damaged by the unabated strike and protest activities. Four months after the Rosariazo and Cordobazo, a second Rosariazo took place.
The street violence in Rosario was triggered by striking railroad workers placed under martial law and ordered back to work. Striking workers and students marched together at ten o’clock in the morning on 16 September towards the city center with every intention of attacking the police forces frontally. The strategy of a combined police force of three and a half thousand men was to prevent the crowd from gathering strength by thwarting its assembly. The tactical plan consisted of positioning a defensive cordon around the city center. I will not enter into a detailed description of the second Rosariazo, but what was remarkable in comparison to the Cordobazo was the offensive nature of the crowd mobilization.
Rosario was transformed into a battlefield. About thirty thousand demonstrators, including four thousand students, defended the territory covered with barricades. Commercial buildings were torched and stores were ransacked in an area the size of ninety street blocks. At 1:30 P.M., the police had only secured an area of six blocks comprising the radio stations, army and police headquarters, the courts, and the principal government buildings. One worker died from police bullets in the afternoon of 16 September and a twelve-year-old boy was killed by an armed civilian.38 At nine o’clock in the evening, the Second Army Corps moved into action, and the quiet of martial law descended on the city.
The organization of the second Rosariazo had been far more complex than that of the Cordobazo, and resembled the crowds described in the army field manuals analyzed above.