such as strike mobilizations, protest marches, illegal gatherings on commemorative days, public disturbances, and street violence.
In this chapter, I concentrate on the attempts to express Peronist sentiments in public by establishing a diverse presence in the streets of Argentina’s large cities. These public manifestations had an emotional and a political component. The protests arose in reaction to the repression of Peronist sympathies and from a grass roots belief in popular insurrection as the best strategy to restore Perón to power. Strike crowds and small public outcries of Peronist sentiment were at their most intense between 1956 and 1959, only to come to a standstill after increased police and military repression. The labor movement fractured into several segments which each pursued its objectives with different political instruments, only to reappear again with revolutionary fervor in 1969.
Retreat and Reconquest
The leaders of the Liberating Revolution saw Peronism as a belated out-crop of fascism. Its elimination would grant Argentina the same post-war prosperity as Europe and the United States. Decree 4161 of March 1956 prohibited all references to Perón, Evita or Peronism. President Aramburu only spoke of Perón as “the monster,” and newspapers identified him as “the fugitive tyrant.” The display of his pictures and books, the singing of Peronist themes, and the commemoration of days important to the Peronist movement were forbidden. The expression of Peronist sentiments and identity markers was banned from public space. Any violation was punishable by a prison sentence, and would bar the violators from assuming a political or union office.6 These anti-Peronist measures were experienced by Peronists as anti-working-class measures. The Argentine workers were expelled politically from the city centers to their poor neighborhoods in the periphery.
Decree 4161 turned the shouting of Perón’s name in public into a small act of resistance in which, at least for a few seconds, the street was retaken. There were many such instances, and they turned into a civil disobedience that became more violent with the day. Jorge Rulli became involved in the political struggle after the failed Peronist rebellion of June 1956. He attended the silent protest marches in Buenos Aires that attracted two to three thousand people, and felt the brunt of the revolutionary civil commandos that had emerged in the resistance against the Peronist government in 1954 and 1955. These commandos were workers affiliated with the Socialist and Radical parties. They took over Peronist union branches and suppressed public expressions of Peronism. In 1956 and 1957, young Peronists began to dispute the center of Buenos Aires with these civil commandos. Their motto was to win the streets for Peronism.
Public space was conquered through physical confrontations with bludgeons or bare hands. For example, Rulli’s group would hang a photo of Perón at the corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda Streets in Buenos Aires, and lie in wait for their victims. Every person who tore down the image was severely beaten. Thus, they intimidated passersby into not reacting at all on any public expression of Peronist sentiment. They sang the Peronist march and shouted “Viva Perón.”7 The shouting of Perón’s name united the orphaned Peronists in their yearning and enhanced their desire to manifest their allegiance together. These protests were the response of a dispersed crowd in search of something or someone around which to gather.
Perón himself continued to have faith in the masses.8 Civil resistance would wear out the government and organize a general strike paralyzing the country and inciting a mass insurrection. He emphasized that it is important to hit “when it hurts and where it hurts” as well as to learn to “throw a stone and hide the hand.”9 However, the majority of the Peronist following was not receptive to such insurrectional disobedience. John William Cooke, Perón’s head of resistance in Argentina, complained in June 1957 that there was considerable sabotage and widespread aversion of the government, but that “This mood doesn’t translate, however, into a total civil resistance in the way that we would like.”10 Cooke’s assessment was correct at that particular moment, but unjustified when seen over a longer period of time. Strike mobilizations became the hotbed of political militancy that fed into an insurrectional movement of slow maturation. Peronists would have to wait fourteen long years before the moment for insurrection appeared.
Strikes and Barricades
The first major strike after Perón’s fall occurred between 13 and 16 November 1955 to protest the usurpation of union locales by non-Peronist unionists. These confrontations between Peronist and non-Peronist workers demonstrated that the Liberating Revolution had cut right across class lines. As James has observed, an anti-Peronist (gorila) could just as well be an oligarch as a fellow worker.11 Many Peronist workers adhered to the November strike, but did not manifest their protest publicly. Workers and union delegates were arrested, and an inspector-general appointed by the government took control of the CGT.12 One worker recalled years later that “there were no protest marches, nor assault groups … it was a calm, peaceful strike as though the workers had still not got over the shock caused by the fall of the Leader….”13 Perón’s fall had a devastating effect on the Peronist movement which had deemed itself almighty.
Compared to the previous five years, there was a great willingness to strike in 1956, but this disposition declined significantly in 1957, only to increase rapidly in 1958 and 1959.14 The national elections of February 1958 had been won by Arturo Frondizi of the Radical party (UCR) thanks to the Peronist vote ordered by Perón. Frondizi extended his hand immediately to the unions by withdrawing the inspector-general from the CGT union central. Nevertheless, major strikes struck his government after July. Most strikes in 1958 were organized by non-Peronist unions. Peronist union leaders were still supporting Frondizi because of his conciliatory attitude and legislation that reinstated the Peronist supremacy in many unions.15 When Frondizi implemented a wage freeze in late 1958 to resolve a serious imbalance of payments, the unwritten pact with the Peronist unions was broken.
The year 1959 became a watershed for government and labor. In confrontation upon confrontation, the two parties were staking out their territory and redefining the rules of engagement. The unions were defending worker employment and the principal tenets of Peronism, namely social justice and national sovereignty. Instead, Frondizi wanted to diminish Argentina’s dependence on agricultural exports and develop its industry by attracting foreign capital and raising labor productivity. The privatization of the Lisandro de la Torre meatpacking plant on 14 January 1959 fitted perfectly in his development plan. However, there were strong nationalist and Peronist sentiments attached to the plant. Like the railroads, the Lisandro de la Torre plant had been nationalized by Perón. Its privatization was felt as another retreat from the Peronist policies and a sell-out to foreign capital.
Upon hearing the news about the privatization, nearly nine thousand workers gathered in general assembly and decided to occupy the plant. Solidarity strikes erupted throughout the country through grass roots activism, instead of union leadership. On 17 January, fifteen hundred policemen, gendarmery, and soldiers accompanied by four Sherman tanks assaulted the Lisandro de la Torre plant.16 What concerns me here are not the mass arrests and the eviction of the workers, but the street protests that broke out afterwards and their interpretation by the Peronist resistance movement. This local insurrection in Buenos Aires (known as the porteñazo), showed that strikes about labor issues might easily escalate into political confrontations attracting the solidarity of other social groups. Behind each general strike, there lurked the danger of an insurrectional crowd.
The Frigorífico Nacional Lisandro de la Torre was located in Mataderos, a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The police assault was received with indignation. Mataderos and adjoining neighborhoods turned into a barricaded zone of resistance as had never been seen before in Argentina. According to the clandestine Peronist National Command or CNP (Comando Nacional Peronista), thousands of young workers joined the struggle. A new generation of Peronists had become incorporated into the Peronist movement. They cut the street lights, overturned trees, and erected barricades.17 Meanwhile, Mataderos was enveloped in the
