of Raimundo Ongaro. The CGTA received the support of most unions in the provinces, including Tosco’s electricians union and the UOM metal workers union in Córdoba.45 The collaborationists and the participationists constituted the CGT de Azopardo under the control of Augusto Vandor.46
The incendiary speech in Córdoba on 1 May 1968, by CGTA leader Ongaro, had all the tenets of the revolutionary discourse of the coming unruly years. He denounced the growing power of foreign multinationals and the dependence on the IMF and the World Bank. He condemned the high infant mortality, the slums on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and the many infectious diseases that troubled the poor. He verbalized the images of an impoverished Argentina many had seen in Fernando Solanas’ impressive 1966 documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (La Hora de los Hornos).47 Ongaro called upon students and intellectuals to join the workers in combating the nation’s social ills.48 Precisely in this period, the struggle of the combative Peronists took a revolutionary turn, as Carlos Villagra testifies: “The revolution became possible for us and we began to talk about organizing ourselves in a totally different way. The people wanted to fight, wanted to confront the system…. It wasn’t just the return of Perón, it was no longer throwing a stone or placing a pipe bomb. We said already that the system had to be changed, that a revolution had to be made. People were already saying that the struggle was going to be long and extensive. Peronism must make a revolution, yes or yes.”49 The CGTA combatives embarked on a collision course with the Onganía dictatorship that culminated in June 1968 in a series of street protests in Argentina’s major cities.
After initially backing Ongaro for mobilizing the Peronist following, Perón became suspicious of the Marxist leaning of the combative CGTA and had in the end more faith in the institutional continuity of the old union establishment than a revolutionary union leadership which was hard to control.50 However, the CGTA had put a militant momentum in motion which was hard to stop. Perón sensed the widespread resentment and emphasized in September 1968 the importance of a civil disobedience and mass protests comparable to Gandhi’s anticolonial struggle in India.51
Vandor also sensed the growing discontent among the rank and file. He declared war on the dictatorship in May 1969, and began to regain some of the ground lost after the partition of the CGT in March 1968. The influence of the CGTA dwindled rapidly. Their street mobilizations were repressed, they lost the support of Perón, and Vandor’s new oppositional strategy preempted their struggle. Nevertheless, the combatives continued to be a power to reckon with in Córdoba.52
The institutional pragmatism and participationism of the 1960s had provided basic subsistence needs to many workers in times of political disenfranchisement.53 Yet they had also created enduring hatreds within the labor movement. Vandor and Alonso were assassinated in 1969 and 1970 by hit squads of the revolutionary left for being traitors to the Peronist movement. The reign of the imposing union bosses had come to an end, and it was up to the rank and file to take the initiative again. A new generation of mostly young Peronists began to take the crowd initiative which the pragmatic union leaders had abandoned in the early 1960s. These revolutionary Peronists succeeded in dominating the streets with large demonstrations that would eventually contribute to the return of Perón in 1972. They created the means for an expression of Peronist sentiments submerged for a decade. Crowds gave the participants an identity and esprit de corps that could never be attained in equal emotional measure by institutional pragmatism, clientelism, and participationism. The political vigor was in the hands of a new generation of Peronist leaders who were untainted with the comforts of a union office, and who dreamed of seeing Perón raising his arms in salute from the balcony of the presidential Casa Rosada. The longing for these crowd sentiments was nowhere stronger than among the young second-generation Peronists who had never experienced them.
Crowd Alliances: Students, Workers, and Peronists
The involvement of young Peronists in the street conquests during the second half of the 1950s, as described earlier in this chapter, came to an abrupt halt in 1960. The crackdown on the Peronist worker resistance also imprisoned many youth leaders and incapacitated the Peronist Youth organization or JP (Juventud Peronista) founded in late 1957.54 Surprisingly, their place was taken by the student body, an unsuspected segment of society that had always shown an aversion to Perón and his mass movement.
The rapprochement of university students and young working-class Peronists was rooted in the student protests against Frondizi’s 1958 proposal to allow the foundation of private universities. Rectors and students opposed the legislation because it would lead to the creation of private Catholic universities with a conservative curriculum. Street fights took place around the National University of Buenos Aires as rival groups of students in favor or against the legislation tried to occupy the buildings. Many students and young Peronist working-class activists received their fire baptism together in these clashes. So also did an adolescent Ernesto Jauretche who came from a family of militant Peronists, and became impressed by the battles with the police near the Medical School: “There, I saw the police back away for the first time. I saw the police run, I saw them fall under a shower of stones. For the first time I saw what a street fight was. There I began to learn throwing stones, to fight…. to see them withdraw was thrilling, to see the police run away suddenly gave a rush of happiness. It was marvelous. I think that this was for me the beginning of almost a linear process and so it was for almost all the other activists…. We began to discover there that they were not invulnerable.”55 The street opposition culminated on 19 September 1958 in a protest crowd of about three hundred people who listened to speeches by politicians and student and union leaders. Frondizi’s bill was defeated in the house of representatives, amended and approved in the senate, and finally adopted by Congress.56
The social and ideological rapprochement of workers and students intensified considerably in the early 1960s as increasingly more students began to have leftist political sympathies. This radicalization was worldwide, and had to do with the rebellious mood of the times. The radicalization of students in Argentina had its roots in the development of an intellectual new left which stood initially under the influence of Sartre’s existentialism and later became attracted to Marxism. Sartre argued that the objective structures of exploitation did not predetermine people’s consciousness, but that people were active subjects who produced history. Volition entered the political thought of Argentine intellectuals, a volition demonstrated in practice by the Cuban revolution.57
These heterogeneous influences fell in fertile soil among the Argentine students of the early 1960s. They were a disenfranchised generation which felt politically gagged by the proscription of Peronism, the repeated military coups, and the paternalism of the authorities. The former Montonero guerrilla commander Fernando Vaca Narvaja recalls the growing social consciousness of his student days: “The university begins to embrace Peronism, begins to nationalize itself in the sense that the student breaks with his own isolation, his own environment and begins to develop … a social commitment with his people…. We became close to the working-class neighborhoods through social work.”58 Student leaders wanted a curriculum that addressed social rather than purely scientific problems, and a research agenda that relieved the poor health and social distress of the underprivileged classes. The working class was, in the eyes of students and intellectuals, the only social sector in Argentine society with a true revolutionary potential. Solidarity with the working class in their struggle against the ruling powers was an inevitable step, even if many workers were Peronist and not socialist.
The July 1963 amnesty of Peronist activists incarcerated in 1960 gave a new impetus to the political alliance of students and young Peronists. The Peronist Youth held its first national congress on 27 October 1963 and elected Héctor Spina, Envar El Kadri, and Jorge Rulli as the executive committee. Perón supported the insurrectional convictions of these leaders. He reiterated in a letter of 20 October 1965 that the JP must “Have a close relation with the masses—the tactics and strategy must fuse with the masses—never forget that the combatants emerge from the masses and that revolutionary work is impossible
