Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
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On 18 March, Córdoba was put under martial law. A warrant for the arrest of Tosco and other union leaders was issued, and hundreds of workers were detained.48
Once more, an Argentine president was forced to resign because of collective violence. General Lanusse ousted Lieutenant-General Levingston on 22 March 1971 and assumed full powers four days later. The Cordobazo and the Viborazo drove Onganía and Levingston from the seat of power because they failed to make haste with a democratization process that might have defused the popular anger and increased the political participation of the Argentine people. Within a period of less than two years, the string of crowd mobilizations changed the national course from an ill-coined and ill-conceived Argentine Revolution without clear time limits to a speedy return to democracy.
The crowd mobilizations and the collective violence did not cease. Lieutenant-General Lanusse’s call for national unity and promise of democracy were taken as an encouragement. The strikes and street mobilizations by combative and clasista workers in Córdoba continued for several months after the Viborazo, but quickly subsided in October 1971 when the military arrested the principal SITRAC-SITRAM union leaders and occupied the Fiat factories, and management fired the union representatives. The center of street mobilization shifted from the interior to the nation’s capital, and students took over the crowd initiative from the workers, principally through the activities of the Peronist Youth.49
The Hour of the People
Lanusse envisioned a two-pronged strategy to pacify Argentine society: the call for national harmony was his carrot, and counterinsurgency his stick. Lanusse launched in July 1971 his Great National Accord (Gran Acuerdo Nacional) among Argentina’s principal social sectors (political parties, unions, industry, financial institutions). This plan came too late because Argentina’s principal political parties had already joined forces on 11 November 1970 in a document entitled The Hour of the People (La Hora del Pueblo). Peronists, Radicals, socialists, and conservatives had demanded free elections and the right to political expression. The politicians did not want to commit themselves to the Great National Accord and neither did Perón, who became once more an active player in Argentine politics.50
Lanusse’s counterinsurgency strategy was only in part successful. Even though all principal guerrilla commanders had been imprisoned by mid-1972, and their influence on the labor movement curtailed by a crackdown on the clasista unions, their revolutionary ideology had a captivating effect on many young Argentines. They came to swell the ranks of a radical and often violent political opposition. The rise in crowd mobilizations had become so dramatic, and the fear of an unstoppable revolutionary process so great, that the armed forces were deployed with every threat of collective violence.51
Immediately after his ascendance to the presidency, Lanusse opened a dialogue with Perón. Despite these overtures, Lanusse sought to demystify Perón as an old man in poor health and to coax him into denouncing the guerrilla movement. However, Perón refused to play along with Lanusse’s game. He operated on several political fronts and used different weapons to strike at the embattled military government. As he was negotiating with Lanusse’s representatives about a return to democracy, Perón instructed Peronist politicians to take a tough stand against the government and cultivated contacts with army officers susceptible to overthrowing Lanusse. Perón also praised the violence of the Peronist guerrilla organizations and encouraged the Peronist Youth to maintain an active street presence.52
The year 1972 marked the end of the violent street protests (azos) that began in May 1969. There were labor conflicts and public disturbances during the months of April and July 1972 in Mendoza, San Juan, San Miguel de Tucumán, Córdoba, and General Roca.53 Yet the crowd momentum had shifted from the labor unions to the Peronist movement as the prospect of free elections dominated the political scene. The CGTA had virtually disappeared in 1970. Many Independent union leaders, among them Tosco, were imprisoned in 1971. The SITRAC-SITRAM Fiat auto worker unions had lost their legal status in October 1971, and clasista shop stewards were fired. The union bureaucracy with its Vandorist tendency towards verticalism began to accumulate strength again in 1972.54 The UOM and CGT union centrals pursued a nonconfrontational course in order not to endanger the elections. The crowd initiative was left to the Peronist Youth and the students.
Anger, Flight, and Celebration of Argentine Crowds
The violent crowd protests of 1969 marked the second watershed in Argentine crowd history, October 1945 being the first. The Cordobazo, Rosariazos and Viborazo arose from local union conditions and economic grievances, but their political significance was nationwide. The 1969–1972 period witnessed insurrectional crowds that emerged from uncontainable grass roots resentments and sought structural changes in Argentine society. Collective violence was a reaction to the violence of disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, the loss of worker privileges, social injustice, and outright military repression. The guerrilla insurgency sprouted from the collective violence. The crowds did not cause the emergence of the guerrilla organizations in a direct way, but provided a medium in which they could grow and mature.
Radical sectors of Argentine society attributed a revolutionary meaning to the 1969 crowd demonstrations which they did not possess. The Marxist guerrilla organizations pictured themselves as the vanguard of the working masses on the move, shunned a direct involvement in crowd politics, and concentrated on building a revolutionary army. The revolutionary Peronists believed that the popular masses were the propelling force of history, whose most authentic political expression was found in the assembled Peronist crowd clamoring for dignity and social justice. They tried to place themselves at the head of the Peronist crowd and transform its spontaneous force into a collective insurrection. This was not an easy task because time and again Argentine crowds had disengaged themselves from their leaders and disintegrated into outbursts of rage, only to reorganize into a violent grassroots resistance. This combination of spontaneous and calculated collective violence, and the rage, euphoria, and sudden panic that could come over crowds, turned street mobilizations into an unpredictable political instrument for revolutionary organizations.
In his groundbreaking study of South Asian crowds, Stanley Tambiah explains their characteristic oscillation between attack and flight as a dynamic of anger/rage and fear/panic. The South Asian ethnic crowd becomes violent towards another ethnic group because it feels harmed in its well-being and identity. Such destructive rage may suddenly turn into panic and hysteric flight. Encouraged by rumors, the violent crowd fears the retaliation from a rival group defined as dangerous and threatening. The heightened sense of power experienced by the violent crowd is thus inextricably tied to a sudden awareness of its vulnerability.55
Anger/rage and fear/panic have also been qualities of Argentine crowds but, unlike in South Asia, the most direct threat in Argentina did not come from a rival group but from the State. The panic provoked by the bombardment of the Peronist crowd at the Plaza de Mayo on 16 June 1955 is the most dramatic example of the recurrent threat posed by police and armed forces. The key to understanding this panic lies in the crowd’s dual qualities as violent and euphoric.
Both in South Asia and in Argentina, crowds often turn festive while engaged in destruction. According to Tambiah, the jubilation arises from “their temporary sense of homogeneity, equality, and physical intimacy, their sense of taking righteous action to level down the enemy’s presumed advantage and claim their collective entitlements.”56 In other words, violence and euphoria constitute a pair opposite to fear and flight. What unites these two pairs is, according to Tambiah, the loss of restraint by people in a crowd.
This loss of restraint is caused by the boundless sociality experienced in crowds, a sociality which Durkheim described as social effervescence and Canetti identified as the feeling of equality. Euphoria emerges from the sense of unity, equality, and the shedding of injustices in a crowd; a powerful feeling which may make the crowd turn violent towards perceived sources of social injury. The vulnerability of crowds, their propensity towards panic, and their potential traumatization lie precisely in this feeling of aggrandizement. People in a crowd lower their personal defenses as they surrender to its collective emotions. A violent repression causes an emotional overload because people have their guard down in the crowd. In other words, the boundary