protest march. On the way to the CGTA building, the demonstrators intended to pass by the shopping center where Adolfo Bello had been shot four days earlier.
At this stage of the month-long demonstrations, the authorities were faced with a crowd that was no longer concerned with the conflict over expensive meal tickets, but wanted to mourn their dead in a collective gathering and control public space as a political protest. Police and military mounted an impressive force at three core locations. Their defense capability of fire engines and assault cars was concentrated around the Plaza 25 de Mayo. The force wanted to prevent the protesters from gathering there before they proceeded to the CGTA offices where also several radio stations, the court, the university’s administrative center, and the police and army headquarters were located. The march through the city symbolized a political supremacy which the security forces were not willing to concede.
At six o’clock in the evening, about two thousand protesters are circulating around the Plaza 25 de Mayo. Many are students, but there are also blue- and white-collar workers. They try to enter the square in small groups but are immediately dispersed by the police, whereupon they try to circumvent the barrier through another passage. The tug of war undulates back and forth through the streets of Rosario until the police decides to attack. They launch large quantities of tear gas into the streets, and charge on horseback towards the protesters. The crowd disperses but regroups seven blocks away from the square in the direction of the CGTA headquarters.
A new element is added to the volatile situation when people begin to burn papers in the street, initially to neutralize the tear gas. Fires can be seen at various places and are even fed by local residents who throw paper onto the street. The protest begins to acquire an insurrectional appearance when barricades are erected to halt the advancing security forces. Buses are overturned and building materials are taken from construction sites to reinforce the improvised obstructions. The protesters even go on the offensive. They attack the mounted police and throw them off their horses. At 9:20 in the evening, the police withdraw from the area in the direction of their headquarters near the CGTA offices. The jubilant crowd can finally form a whole, and begin to advance on their trajectory, shouting slogans about the unity of students and workers. Protesters force their way into the LT8 radio station, and destroy the furniture when they cannot enter the studio. Others try to advance to the CGTA building, but are stopped by a barrage of tear gas and gunfire from the police. The fifteen-year-old metal worker and high school student Luis Norberto Blanco is killed. The crowd disperses at midnight, and Rosario is placed under martial law.79
The high price for maintaining public order in Rosario was two dead adolescents, many wounded, and the much-feared alliance of students and workers.80 The inordinate police repression of the student-worker crowd evoked a mutual identification with each other’s suffering and forged a new social configuration through collective violence. The protest crowds were fast on their way to becoming insurrectional crowds which in the political heat of the times threatened to consolidate into a revolutionary movement.
The Resurrection of Peronist Crowds
By the end of 1969 Peronist crowds had finally resolved the social trauma of the 1955 bombardment, overcome the fear of violent repression, let go of their dependence on Perón, and become once again aware of their strength. The yearning for expressing discontent in the presence of tens of thousands of equally indignant protesters, and the moral example of uncompromising Peronist workers resisting oppression, had slowly swayed a growing segment of the Argentine working class towards an historic crowd alliance with a politicized student body in Argentina’s radicalized universities. These crowds were summoned by grass roots mobilization and lacked national leaders. The fear of the revolutionary crowd among the military, upper, and middle classes was becoming a reality.
The Argentine military had tried to rein in popular crowds in various ways after 1945. Their strategies arose from two assumptions: first of all, crowds are irrational by nature and potentially subversive of the established order, and second, the Argentine people had an inbred tendency toward crowd mobilization. The popular mobilizations between 1945 and 1955 were tolerated in the belief that Perón could control the passionate crowd and prevent its political radicalization. The strategy changed to selective repression between 1955 and 1960. Middle class crowds were encouraged, whereas Peronist crowds were forbidden. The occasional street demonstrations during the crowd interlude between 1961 and 1969 can be characterized as strike crowds because they were in most instances directly related to major labor disputes. Negotiation had taken the place of repression by 1961 as pragmatic union leaders obtained material benefits for the rank and file without taking resort to street protests. This crowd demobilization strategy worked until 1969, when street crowds returned with a vengeance.
Chapter 3
A Breeze Turned into Hurricane: The Apogee of Crowd Mobilization
The revolutionary insurrection of tens of thousands of workers and students, raising hundreds of barricades and fighting off police and army during two days of pitched battle on 29 and 30 May 1969 in Córdoba, constitutes the second crowd myth of twentieth-century Argentine history. Lieutenant-General Alejandro Lanusse recalled in 1977: “I sensed on that difficult 29th of May in 1969 that something was happening in the country, something new whose uniqueness I tried to gauge within the framework of my greater worries. I couldn’t know in what it would end, how I would react to the events, or what were the indirect and deeper causes. But I became convinced that other elements, unusual until then, were entering the political reality and the way in which we were living this reality.”1 These “other elements” were snipers belonging to a tiny communist party with grand ambitions.
The tragedy of May 1969 consists of the widespread myth that the events in Córdoba were the beginning of a revolutionary process that could only be advanced or stopped with violence. This fatal conclusion gave a decisive impulse to an urban guerrilla insurgency intent on leading the masses to victory and an entrenched military determined to halt the revolutionary process through indiscriminate repression. The outburst of collective violence in Córdoba became known as the Cordobazo, and has been hailed and condemned as the beginning of a social revolution that ushered in a decade of mass mobilizations, guerrilla insurgency, and a deadly factionalism within the Peronist movement ending in the coup of March 1976.
The military and the radicalized left did not doubt that the Cordobazo signaled a revolutionary moment in Argentine history. Lieutenant-General Onganía declared that: “The tragic events in Córdoba responded to the actions of an organized extremist force intending to produce an urban insurrection.”2 The Marxists interpreted the Cordobazo as an expression of class consciousness: “On May 29, 1969, the people of Córdoba flung themselves into the streets to reveal all the hatred accumulated during years of misery, exploitation and humiliation…. The just fury of the people poured like burning lava through the city streets, demolishing whatever vestige of exploitation crossed its path, trapping and harassing the police which, overrun by the crowd, left the city in the hands of the working class and the people.”3 The Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT) concluded that the latent yearning for revolutionary change on 17 October 1945 became redirected into the reformist program of Perón, but that the Cordobazo signaled a qualitative jump towards a social revolution. “The breeze has turned into a hurricane. History, the real history written by the people, is in motion.”4 The working class had liberated itself from its patronage by Perón, and would finally realize its revolutionary mission.
The Cordobazo marked a watershed in mass mobilization. The rank and file took the initiative without Perón or the national union leadership. The street demonstrations between 1969 and 1972 arose from uncontainable grass roots resentments, while national union leaders tried in vain to hold their grip on the disgruntled working class by negotiating better labor conditions with the dictatorial government.
The Cordobazo also demonstrated the cracks in the vertical
