shock groups which distract or pin down the legal forces, so that other protesters can proceed to the gathering place. These shock groups may throw stones, incinerate cars and buildings, smash windows, and provoke people into ransacking stores. There are supply groups providing bombs and arms to the activists, and security guards who protect the internal commanders and prepare their flight from the scene of confrontation. There may also be snipers who try to detain the legal forces or provide cover to retreating comrades.32
After the collective violence has waned, the army field manuals continued, the protest leaders will exploit the loss of life to create martyrs. One field manual explained further that deaths may occur during the disturbances, either by the use of force to which the legal forces have been provoked, or by assassinations carried out by the activists themselves. “The creation of martyrs will try to aggravate the emotional state of the crowd, will seek to attract sympathizers to the movement, discredit the legal forces and drag along the protesters in an insane frenzy, thus ensuring the success of the riot.”33
The instruction manuals recommend an array of repressive means (megaphones, tear gas, war dogs, snipers, artillery, armored vehicles, helicopters) and tactics (patrols, blockades, entrapments, incursions, ambushes, hand-to-hand combat) to deal with the collective violence. The field manuals also suggest that snipers should “eliminate the leaders located in a crowd.”34
Despite occasional references to its irrationality and emotional discharge, the crowd is treated as a rational organization in which the various groups (agitation groups, shock groups, supply groups, security guards, internal and external command) are hierarchically linked. As an authoritative text on crowd control stated, “In general, the same principles of war which govern the movements and disposition of large armies in the field may be applied in controlling rioting mobs.”35 It seems as if the military strategists tried to get a grip on a collective phenomenon that bewildered them and imposed a familiar organizational form that made leaders responsible for the crowd’s actions. Crucial in the thinking of the military was that revolutionary leaders ride the wave of popular resentment.
The resentment about declining labor conditions, political repression, authoritarianism, and the proscription of Peronism reached unprecedented proportions in 1969. The decision to repress mass mobilizations, instead of taking away the grievances through a political solution, galvanized the opposition. An editorial in Criterio summed up the political balance of the Rosariazo and the Cordobazo: “And so, in fifteen days, the government’s political leadership achieved what the opposition could not in three years. It succeeded in uniting the two CGTs [labor union centrals], the different student groups, the students with the professors, the students and professors with employees and workers, and Catholic universities with public universities. And all of them against the government, as became clear at the successful strike of the 30th of May.”36 The link between workers, students, and middle class professionals was recognized as a broad-based alliance in Argentine society with ominous prospects.
Second Rosariazo and Liberation Syndicalism
The civil unrest stirred up by the Cordobazo refused to die down. Strikes and protest marches were held throughout the country.37 A student was shot down by police during a demonstration in Córdoba, and the once powerful union leader Augusto Vandor was assassinated by a guerrilla hit squad on 30 June 1969. Lieutenant-General Onganía declared that same day a state of siege which would only be lifted on 23 May 1973. The authority of the military government had been severely damaged by the unabated strike and protest activities. Four months after the Rosariazo and Cordobazo, a second Rosariazo took place.
The street violence in Rosario was triggered by striking railroad workers placed under martial law and ordered back to work. Striking workers and students marched together at ten o’clock in the morning on 16 September towards the city center with every intention of attacking the police forces frontally. The strategy of a combined police force of three and a half thousand men was to prevent the crowd from gathering strength by thwarting its assembly. The tactical plan consisted of positioning a defensive cordon around the city center. I will not enter into a detailed description of the second Rosariazo, but what was remarkable in comparison to the Cordobazo was the offensive nature of the crowd mobilization.
Rosario was transformed into a battlefield. About thirty thousand demonstrators, including four thousand students, defended the territory covered with barricades. Commercial buildings were torched and stores were ransacked in an area the size of ninety street blocks. At 1:30 P.M., the police had only secured an area of six blocks comprising the radio stations, army and police headquarters, the courts, and the principal government buildings. One worker died from police bullets in the afternoon of 16 September and a twelve-year-old boy was killed by an armed civilian.38 At nine o’clock in the evening, the Second Army Corps moved into action, and the quiet of martial law descended on the city.
The organization of the second Rosariazo had been far more complex than that of the Cordobazo, and resembled the crowds described in the army field manuals analyzed above. In Rosario the crowd proceeded in a well-planned offensive and was not a runaway crowd, as the authorities tried to make the Argentine people believe. The second Rosariazo manifested a crowd consciousness, an awareness of its power. The protesters realized that their superior number and determination to undo the many injustices that united them could provoke a legitimacy crisis for the military dictatorship.
What is noteworthy about the Cordobazo and Rosariazos of 1969 is that the name Perón was not mentioned, even though the essence of the Peronist doctrine (social justice, economic independence, and political sovereignty) appeared in several proclamations.39 The majority of the workers maintained their Peronist sympathies, but Perón was no longer indispensable to summon a large crowd. Years of resistance and repression had not only emancipated the Peronist following from Perón, but had cultivated a class consciousness. It became impossible to conceive of a pact among capital, State, and labor similar to that of the 1945–1955 Peronist rule. The labor conflicts of the following fourteen years, the repression by successive military governments, and the free reign given to foreign multinationals—most visible in the Cordoban auto industry—made the subjugated social layers aware of Argentina’s class nature. The Cordobazo and Rosariazos revealed this class consciousness in a most forceful way, and gave rise to a radical ideological current in the labor movement, known as clasismo or liberation syndicalism (sindicalismo de liberación).
Clasismo began in the Cordoban auto industry with the demand for honest union representation and shop floor democracy, and evolved ideologically in a Marxist direction under the influence of nascent revolutionary organizations. Its Marxist agenda was in 1970 even too radical for Agustín Tosco, who preferred combative trade unionism over divisive class-struggle unionism. Clasismo was at even greater odds with Peronism. The idea of an open class struggle to bring about a socialist revolution did not find broad acceptance among Peronist workers, while the demand for greater union democracy did of course not find any support among the verticalist union leaders, such as Vandor’s successors Lorenzo Miguel and José Rucci. Most militant union protests during the 1969–1973 period therefore took place in Córdoba, and not in Buenos Aires.40
What united the Cordoban labor movement was an active opposition to the Onganía dictatorship, and continued crowd mobilizations as the principal tactic to force the government to its knees. This resistance was reinforced in 1970 with the radicalization of the Fiat auto workers unions SITRAC and SITRAM. The Fiat workers had shunned union activism for many years, and had not participated in the Cordobazo. The prominent role of their IKA-Renault colleagues inspired the Fiat auto workers to demand a genuine union democracy with honest elections and leaders willing to confront management. This objective made the Fiat workers an ideal target for grass roots revolutionary activity. Organizations such as the Revolutionary Communist Party (Partido Comunista Revolucionario), the Communist Vanguard (Vanguardia Comunista), and the Workers Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores) did their best to create an ideological foothold
