at factory gates and taking blue collar jobs in auto plants.
The strategy of the revolutionary parties proved successful. On 12 May 1970, Revolutionary Communist Party activists persuaded the workers at the IKA-Renault tool and die factory to occupy the plant and take the French supervisors hostage after management tried to replace left-wing candidates in the shop steward elections by more conciliatory Peronist candidates. The reinstatement of the original candidates was an important victory, but even more important was the introduction of hostage-taking as a new combative tactic besides work stoppages, strikes, street mobilizations, and plant occupations.
The Fiat workers followed suit. The members of the two company-controlled Fiat unions SITRAC and SITRAM demanded new union elections after more than a decade of docile union leadership. The Fiat workers elected a steering committee to prepare new elections. Years of frustration, subjugation, unfair treatment, and underpayment were shed that night in the decision to take matters into their own hands. Still, it would take an unprecedented three-day factory occupation of the Fiat Concord factory, starting on 15 May 1970, at which Fiat officials were taken hostage, before the Ministry of Labor allowed the elections to take place. Colleagues at another Fiat plant followed suit on 3 June. On the same day, IKA-Renault auto workers also took hostages and occupied various plants to pressure management into reopening labor contract negotiations. The crisis ended when the Cordoban police broke into the IKA-Renault tool and die factory and arrested around two hundred and fifty workers.41
The Cordobazo and Rosariazos, and the factory occupations and hostage-taking in Córdoba, had evaporated Onganía’s authority. Street mobilizations had taken place despite police ordinances. Railroad workers had defied martial law and had refused the military order to return to work. Rank-and-file union members had dismissed government-imposed union leaders, and militant union leaders had gone on hunger strike. The street had been Onganía’s Achilles heel. Civil disobedience could cripple even a curfew, the most far-reaching crowd control measure, as army manuals admitted, “Civil disobedience en masse will be the only effective action against a curfew….”42 The kidnapping of retired Lieutenant-General Aramburu by the Montoneros guerrilla organization on 29 May 1970, exactly one year after the Cordobazo, gave the final blow to Onganía’s precarious position. He was deposed on 8 June 1970, and General Roberto Levingston became the new president of Argentina.
Calm did not return to Córdoba after the changing of the guard in the presidential palace. The strikes, occupations, and street mobilizations continued unabated. At their root rested a complex array of demands about higher wages and better working conditions, more honest union leadership, and an end to the military dictatorship. The clasista practice of open assemblies and internal union democracy contributed significantly to the permanent state of mass mobilization. The Cordobazo had paved the way for numerous grass roots crowd mobilizations and provided a fertile environment for the development of the clasista internal union democracy.43
On 1 March 1971, the conservative Dr. José Camilo Uriburu became governor of the province of Córdoba. Two days later, the CGT of Córdoba declared a general strike, and refused to negotiate with the new authorities: “Action and Struggle. The people in the street are invincible.”44 Uriburu was determined to cut off with one slash, as he called it, the head of the poisonous snake directing the militant activism.45 The indignation at Uriburu’s scoffing at what many workers saw as legitimate protests was great. Factory occupations and a street mobilization of Fiat workers in downtown Córdoba followed on 12 March 1971. Several barricades were erected and set afire. The police launched large quantities of tear gas into the crowd, and began to shoot at the protesters. They killed eighteen-year-old worker Adolfo Cepeda. As so often before, a violent death precipitated more intense protests.46
On Sunday, 14 March, thousands of people accompanied the funeral of Adolfo Cepeda. One union leader called upon the mourners at San Vicente cemetery to “turn pain into hatred, into hatred and combat against the exploiters,” and take revenge for Cepeda’s death.47 The next morning, two thousand Fiat workers marched to downtown Córdoba in protest against the police violence. At 12:30 P.M., the protesters began to erect barricades. A second Cordobazo was in the making. Several neighborhoods were taken, including the Barrio Clínicas and Barrio Alberdi where around two hundred barricades were raised in defense, securing an area of five hundred and fifty blocks for a period of twelve hours. This collective violence was to a much larger extent the work of the Cordoban working class, and in particular the nonaffiliated and unemployed workers. The students and middle class had a far less notable presence than during the Cordobazo. Particularly troubling to the authorities was the sniper support given by members of the People’s Revolutionary Army or ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo), the armed wing of the Workers Revolutionary Party or PRT. Clasismo had forged close ties among the most radical unions and several revolutionary organizations which were sealed on the barricades of Córdoba.
At nightfall, the police had not yet moved into action. A special antiguerrilla brigade was flown in from Buenos Aires which advanced rapidly in the early hours of 16 March from barricade to barricade under the light of star shells. The security forces were again in control of the city at sunrise. Governor Uriburu resigned the same day, and a Cordoban newspaper printed a cartoon that depicted a viper (víbora), satisfied after having devoured the ill-fated Dr. Uriburu. This second Cordobazo became known as the Viborazo. On 18 March, Córdoba was put under martial law. A warrant for the arrest of Tosco and other union leaders was issued, and hundreds of workers were detained.48
Once more, an Argentine president was forced to resign because of collective violence. General Lanusse ousted Lieutenant-General Levingston on 22 March 1971 and assumed full powers four days later. The Cordobazo and the Viborazo drove Onganía and Levingston from the seat of power because they failed to make haste with a democratization process that might have defused the popular anger and increased the political participation of the Argentine people. Within a period of less than two years, the string of crowd mobilizations changed the national course from an ill-coined and ill-conceived Argentine Revolution without clear time limits to a speedy return to democracy.
The crowd mobilizations and the collective violence did not cease. Lieutenant-General Lanusse’s call for national unity and promise of democracy were taken as an encouragement. The strikes and street mobilizations by combative and clasista workers in Córdoba continued for several months after the Viborazo, but quickly subsided in October 1971 when the military arrested the principal SITRAC-SITRAM union leaders and occupied the Fiat factories, and management fired the union representatives. The center of street mobilization shifted from the interior to the nation’s capital, and students took over the crowd initiative from the workers, principally through the activities of the Peronist Youth.49
The Hour of the People
Lanusse envisioned a two-pronged strategy to pacify Argentine society: the call for national harmony was his carrot, and counterinsurgency his stick. Lanusse launched in July 1971 his Great National Accord (Gran Acuerdo Nacional) among Argentina’s principal social sectors (political parties, unions, industry, financial institutions). This plan came too late because Argentina’s principal political parties had already joined forces on 11 November 1970 in a document entitled The Hour of the People (La Hora del Pueblo). Peronists, Radicals, socialists, and conservatives had demanded free elections and the right to political expression. The politicians did not want to commit themselves to the Great National Accord and neither did Perón, who became once more an active player in Argentine politics.50
Lanusse’s counterinsurgency strategy was only in part successful. Even though all principal guerrilla commanders had been imprisoned by mid-1972, and their influence on the labor movement curtailed by a crackdown on the clasista unions, their revolutionary ideology had a captivating effect on many young Argentines. They came to swell the ranks of a radical and often violent political opposition. The rise in crowd mobilizations had become so dramatic, and the fear of an unstoppable revolutionary process so great, that the armed forces were
