violence only comparable to the 1919 Tragic Week and the 1959 Lisandro de la Torre street battles. An estimated crowd of fifty thousand people occupy the adjoining student neighborhoods Barrio Clínicas and Barrio Alberdi, while snipers assume positions on roof tops to detain the advancing military. As they had done one week earlier, students begin to build barricades. Barrio Clínicas with its hospital buildings and private clinics is the center of resistance. Orators incite people to resist the military force converging on the city. The military arrive at about five o’clock in the afternoon at Barrio Alberdi, and take the area street by street. The neighborhood consists of narrow streets of two-story houses with wrought-iron balconies and flat roof tops providing an optimal mobility to protesters and snipers. Sniper fire is returned with machine gun bursts, and student boarding houses are combed for activists.
The confrontation of crowd and army takes an unexpected turn when at eleven o’clock in the evening of 29 May, a small group of Luz y Fuerza workers shuts off the electricity to the city. The blackout severely disrupts the communications among the various military units. Students, workers, and local residents win valuable time to reinforce the barricades. A small group attempts to incinerate the national bank. The army resumes its assault when power is restored at one o’clock in the morning of 30 May. Meanwhile, the street occupation spreads to the city’s periphery where the military presence is not so prominent. In addition, the unions most closely associated with the CGT union central proceed as planned with their twenty-four-hour general strike and protest march. The workers hinder the troop movements considerably and the final military assault can only begin at around six o’clock in the evening. The Barrio Clínicas is retaken in one hour, even though incidental outbreaks of collective violence continue to flare up in other parts of Córdoba. Gas stations are assaulted to obtain fuel for molotov cocktails, more stores are ransacked, and railways are obstructed.
The union leaders Torres and Tosco were arrested earlier that day. They were immediately court-martialed, and sentenced to prison terms of four to eight years, but were released in December 1969. The official toll of two days of collective violence was sixteen dead, even though figures as high as sixty have been mentioned. There were hundreds of wounded, and over six hundred people were arrested. About four thousand policemen and five thousand soldiers had been mobilized to control the insurrection.14
General Lanusse visited Córdoba on Monday, 2 June, and observed that the turmoil was not exclusively the work of an organized extremist force, as President Onganía was to declare two days later. “Subversive elements acted and at some moment marked the beat. But in the street one could see the dissatisfaction of everybody. For what I could see and hear … I can say that it was the people of Córdoba, in either an active or passive way, who showed that they were against the National Government in general and the Provincial Government in particular.”15 General Lanusse sensed the beginnings of a broad-based rebellion which might turn into a social revolution if the direction of the Argentine dictatorship would not change soon.
The Historical Cordobazo
There are three explanations of the Cordobazo. They are all situated within the context of a repressive political climate, deteriorating economic conditions, years of labor resistance, and the student opposition to the Onganía dictatorship. The emphasis of the three approaches lies respectively on the maturing class struggle, the resistance to authoritarianism, and grass roots militancy.
Ernesto Laclau and Beba and Beatriz Balvé emphasize that the Cordobazo marks a stage in the mounting class antagonism in Argentine society. Parts of the middle class (students, professionals, progressive priests) united with the working class against capitalist exploitation and political oppression, while pursuing a new morality and social order.16 Delich, Lewis, Munck, and Smith attribute the Cordobazo to the decline of the Cordoban auto industry, a divided middle class, combative labor unions, and the authoritarianism of the national and local government. Unable to express their dissatisfaction through democratic channels, the discontent exploded, as if in a pressure cooker, into collective violence.17 Finally, Brennan and James interpret the Cordobazo as a combination of diverse economic grievances of the workers, political forces within local unions, a fierce rank-and-file militancy, and rising frustrations among multiple layers of Cordoban society accumulated during the Onganía dictatorship. The large Cordoban student population added fuel to the widespread resentment about the authoritarian government, and contributed to the insurrectional atmosphere.18
Brennan and James are most convincing with their sophisticated understanding of the complexities of the Cordoban working class. Nevertheless, all three analyses fail to account for the crowd dynamic of the Cordobazo and its social consequences. The strike and march that preceded the events had been carefully planned by militant union leaders, but the massive adhesion, the violent response to the repression, the raising of barricades, and the attacks on police stations were not. These manifestations cannot be explained by delineating the structural or political conditions of the social sectors among which the protest arose. Instead, the analytical lead of Brennan and James must be followed into the crowd itself.
The protest march on 29 May was carefully planned, including the tactical decisions to distribute defensive weapons and to approach the center from various directions preventing a concentration of police forces. However, as had happened on 17 October 1945, the street mobilization developed a distinct crowd dynamic once the protesters stood face to face with the heavily armed police. The union leaders Torres and Tosco tried to prevent an escalation into violence, but were overtaken by the more militant protesters. The collective violence manifested feelings of repression among the mass of Argentine society, among workers, Peronists, and students. Their anger was released in the crowds and transformed into a sense of empowerment.
In their public declarations, the authorities portrayed the Cordobazo as an irrational outburst of collective violence. Yet the protesters were never entirely out of control. For example, the fire brigade was allowed free passage when the fire at the Xerox corporation threatened to consume the homes of residents. Policemen were stripped of their helmets and weapons, but five policemen who had been briefly taken hostage were released unharmed.
Several eyewitnesses described the protesters as festive and euphoric. Around noontime on 29 May, an area of about one hundred and fifty blocks was in festive turmoil. The pastries and hams taken from expensive upper class stores were eaten with delight.19 The piano at the junior officers’ club was dragged outside and became the center of an impromptu dance. The sabers were taken off the walls and used to parody medieval duels. One of the participants remarked later: “But do you know why there was also so much happiness as the events progressed and the whole city was being taken? Do you know why the emotions ran so high at Plaza Colón when we were having the party? Because everyone was also settling a personal score. The Radical against the coup against Illia, the Peronist because he rejected once more the coup against his leader and was fighting for his return to the country, the leftist because he felt that he was taking revenge for so many exiles, prisoners, and dead comrades since times unknown….”20 Another experience by one witness makes this emotional release even clearer: “Very special moments were lived at Plaza Colón because there men of seventy years old embracing youths of fifteen, and they both cried. The youngest because he had been born under repression and felt that he was liberating himself; the older because after many years he felt that it was possible to win.”21 These stings of the past did not motivate the general strike, but they did emerge during the crowd mobilization and were temporarily relieved through the outbursts of collective violence and euphoria.
The collective violence was not the work of an irrational horde, but was highly organized. The shop floor politics and grass roots participation, so distinctive of the Cordoban unions and student organizations, found their expression in the street actions. A division of labor emerged in building barricades which resembled the typical organization of any production process. There were groups specializing in the extraction of raw materials from construction sites, their transformation into suitable components for the barricades, their distribution and transportation to
