from the corrals surrounding the meatpacking plant. Due to the insurrection, the animals had been left without care in the high summer temperatures.18
The CNP document exalted the combativeness of the Argentine working class, and regarded the general strike as a confirmation of the central position of the Peronist masses in the struggle for national liberation. Only the Peronist rank and file had thrown itself entirely into the struggle to protect the national patrimony, while many union leaders had struck unacceptable compromises with the government.19 Here, a conflict surfaced that had been brooding for several years between on one side the so-called integrationist unions which pursued an accommodation with the government to save what there was to save of the embattled labor conditions, and on the other side the intransigent unionists and the vanguardists. The intransigents rejected all deals and engaged in sabotage, while the vanguardists of the CNP tried to organize a guerrilla insurgency. The events in January 1959 led the CNP to believe that they and the intransigents, not the integrationists, were in step with the people.
The CNP report mentioned also the mass appeal of the general strike. Not just the workers of Lisandro de la Torre, but workers from other branches of industry as well as students and shopkeepers joined the protest. Yet, the general strike was never at any moment an insurrection because of the absence of a recognizable political leadership which could have planned the general strike, provided armed support, and thus achieved more success.20 Nevertheless, the Lisandro de la Torre protests fed dreams of future insurrections, taught valuable lessons about how to better organize the popular defenses, and added one more episode to the memory of the Peronist resistance movement.
Frondizi took the strike movement very seriously. He had already declared a thirty-day state of siege on 9 November 1958 to deal with the Mendoza oil workers’ strike, and kept renewing it till a military coup ended his government on 29 March 1962. The state of siege did not prevent workers from striking throughout 1959, but the protests met with little success.21 The Lisandro de la Torre plant continued in private hands, and only half of the nine thousand workers were rehired. Strikes of bank employees and textile and metal workers were broken, and street protests were facing new tough repressive measures as the Frondizi government installed the CONINTES Plan (Plan de Conmoción Interior del Estado) on 14 March 1960. This Plan of Internal Upheaval of the State had been put in place by Perón on 16 September 1955 to make headway against the growing opposition that would end in the Liberating Revolution. Now, the same repressive measures were used to curtail the Peronists. The CONINTES Plan gave extensive powers to the armed forces dealing with public disturbance. The country was divided into defense zones and subzones; an organizational structure which was used again during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. The police was placed under the command of the armed forces, and the country became subject to martial law on 16 March 1960. The CONINTES measures were suspended on 2 August 1961, but the state of siege continued unabated.22
The labor strikes dropped dramatically in Buenos Aires city from over ten million working days lost in 1959 to 1.6 million in 1960, and then declined rapidly to less than three thousand days in 1967.23 Thousands of militant unionists had been blacklisted, and factory managers were granted extensive powers over their workers. Rising unemployment in a worsening economy, the CONINTES repression, and the realization that the strikes and street protests of 1959 had accomplished little, had disillusioned the rank and file. Understandably, many workers drifted into the orbit of integrationist union leaders who could at least achieve some modest material advances through their negotiations with the government. Occasional street protests became instrumental means during negotiations instead of emotional manifestations of political sentiment. The street presence became always related to sectorial interests, and only seldom acquired the transgressive quality of the previous five years. During this period, a division developed between integrationists who pursued a strategy of pragmatic negotiation and intransigents who continued with a grass roots resistance. The intransigents would eventually split into those who tried to incite a mass mobilization that intended to overthrow the ruling powers, and those who joined the vanguardists and propagated a guerrilla insurgency.
Integrationism, Intransigence, and Vanguardism
The 1959 tug of war between the unions on one side and the government, armed forces, and industry on the other, disconnected the political goals from the economic objectives of the Peronist workers. The call for Perón’s return had been a motivating force in the labor disputes since 1955, but became a remote ideal as more pressing economic concerns arose after the 1959 defeat. The façade of Peronist militancy was maintained in order not to betray the hardships suffered by the rank and file, but a new style of union politics was taking shape. The years between 1961 and 1966 were times of institutional pragmatism.24 Institutional pragmatism implied a strategy of “hit and negotiate” (golpear y negociar) in which strikes, work stoppages, and factory occupations were used as bargaining tools.25 It led to the growing isolation of militant union activists from the majority of the Peronist workers organized by the integrationist unions. Sabotage never ceased entirely, but it was the work of small groups. Militant Peronists were admired by their co-workers for their tenacious resistance to the authorities, but their political intuition was no longer trusted.
The dominance of the integrationists pushed the intransigents to the margins of the Peronist movement. Most former activists joined the unions in their move towards political moderation. Intransigent workers in Buenos Aires were ousted from Peronist unions, and reorganized over the years into two small groups.26 The most militant intransigents became involved in guerrilla warfare. The other group continued with their sabotage and political work in factories and neighborhoods. These intransigents-turned-insurrectionists hoped for a return to the crowd mobilizations of the Peronist era, and became convinced that nothing should be allowed to stand between the masses and Perón. However, despite their rhetorical appeal to the myths of the past, they lacked a clear conception on how to mobilize the masses, and wean the rank and file from the bosom of union clientelism.27
Many workers recognized that the institutional pragmatism had reaped material results. The integrationist union leaders summoned a large following, and had the means to maintain people in a clientelistic relation. They controlled the union dues and pension funds, maintained health clinics, gave jobs to loyal members, and acted as brokers between labor, management, and the government. In return for swallowing rationalization schemes, greater managerial control, and an overall depolitization on the work floor, the workers received fringe benefits such as maternity benefits, bonuses for years of employment, and furloughs on social occasions.28 Still, the workers rejected the personal life styles of the union leaders, the corruption, bodyguards, expensive cars, and imported whiskey. Rubbing shoulders with politicians and captains of industry, union leaders stood at a growing distance from the oppressive climate on the work floor. The workers were also bitter about the fraudulent union elections, and the removal of shop floor union representatives considered too radical. A clear indication of this withdrawal was the declining participation in union elections. In other words, the pragmatic stance of the workers conflicted with how they experienced this process emotionally.
This unresolved tension between material gains and emotional losses worked itself out in a crowd demobilization. Labor conflicts in the first half of the 1960s were increasingly confined to the work place, and did no longer transbord into the streets and squares of the major industrial cities. The Peronist workers had lost their leader in 1955, yet his ideas continued to be of collective inspiration, but his place remained vacant and was not occupied by either integrationists or intransigents. The crowd as a political means in a conflict and as an emotional force for its participants failed therefore to materialize.
The gap between intransigents and integrationists was as much vertical as regional. The integrationist union leaders dominated labor politics in the city and province of Buenos Aires and at the national level, but they were less influential in the city of Córdoba. Córdoba had become Argentina’s second largest industrial center since the arrival of Fiat in 1954 and the IKA car manufacturer in 1955. Local unions kept their independence
