LITMIR.BIZ

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the case of Córdoba’s leading industry, the auto terminals, the evidence is even stronger of close collaboration between the company and state terrorism. Major Ernesto Barreiro, one of the principal figures in the dirty war in Córdoba, asserted the willing collaboration of politicians, student and professor informants from the local university, and business leaders in drawing up the lists of “subversives,” with an especially active participation by Fiat managers, a company that had seen a number of its executives kidnapped by various leftist organizations.⁴² A team of researchers has documented carefully Barreiro’s claims and made a compelling case for company collaboration in the dirty war. In the Fiat plants, the harsh repression of the clasista SITRAC-SITRAM unions between 1971 and 1976 was followed by a targeting of Fiat workers by the military. Some fifty Fiat workers, mostly union or political activists, were disappeared and an even larger number were arrested and passed through one of the city’s many detention centers. The close links between Fiat management and the local security forces, including regular, ongoing consultations and even shared personnel, help explain the particularly grim fate suffered by the Fiat workers.⁴³

      The lack of research in other Cordoban firms nonetheless does not prevent acknowledging the widespread belief among the local working class that such collaboration was real and widespread, and the consequences deadly.⁴⁴ The accuracy of the testimonies is impossible to verify with company or military sources, but they do point to an essential characteristic of the dictatorship in Córdoba: a perception of its brutal tactics as a response to Córdoba’s previous history as a center of social and union mobilization and political radicalism. The final years of the 1973–76 Peronist government had been particularly volatile in Córdoba. Labor unrest added to the activities of the armed Left made the city a horror in the eyes of the Argentine bourgeoisie generally and that in Córdoba in particular. Its initial tactic was to adhere to the Peronist program of the so-called Social Pact, an agreement with at least the dominant Peronist sectors of the labor movement to defuse tensions in the workplace and to establish a mechanism to control wages and prices simultaneously. Such a labor-capital truce it was hoped would weaken the appeal of the more radical, militant currents within the local unions as well as isolate the armed Left from union matters, in which it had an increasing tendency to coordinate actions in response to workplace conflicts. The failure of the Social Pact was especially felt among Córdoba’s bourgeoisie, perhaps because expectations were so high given the volatile nature and indeed escalating violence surrounding management’s relations with its labor forces.⁴⁵ With expectations dashed, business supported a frontal onslaught against the unions including the interdiction of the more militant unions and arrest warrants for union leaders such as Agustín Tosco and René Salamanca. Given such behavior, it is not all surprising that local business interests would not only sympathize with the military’s harsh tactics, but perhaps even participated actively in them. Repression of the unions and especially union activists also complemented the military government macroeconomic policies, which sought to concentrate economic assets, shatter former political alliances, and particularly reduce of the power of the labor movement, in the broader political economy as well as in the workplace, something it achieved with notable results. Tosco’s powerful Light and Power unions, one of the main protagonists of the Cordobazo that had also achieved a notable degree of union worker participation in its industry, not only suffered large numbers of arrests and disappearances but also witnessed a wholesale dismantling of wages, working conditions, and union influence in management decisions, including planning for Córdoba’s power industry.⁴⁶

      The fate of the small Perkins factory illustrates the antiworker animus of the military authorities in Córdoba. Perkins, a British manufacturer of diesel engines, experienced a shop floor rebellion of the kind that became so common in the city in the aftermath of the Cordobazo. Union rebellions in Perkins and in other factories in the city often revolved around issues of union affiliation, not as a trivial bureaucratic matter but one tied to effective rank-and-file representation. In the case of Perkins, workers widely regarded the company union established by the British firm as a mere appendage of management with contracts rubber-stamped and bereft of any genuine collective bargaining. In the social ferment and factory mobilizations following the Cordobazo, young workers, some with party affiliations and some not, occupied the Perkins plant demanding the ouster of the entrenched company union leadership and affiliation with SMATA, the national autoworkers’ union. Effective union representation and revolutionary politics merged in yet another clasista movement and culminated in a 1973 affiliation with SMATA, now under the leadership of an alliance of Maoist and other left-wing party members.⁴⁷ Following the coup, the military occupied the factory, abducted the more prominent union and political activists Pedro Ventura Flores and Adolfo Ricardo Luján, and murdered them and other Perkins workers. Perkins management lodged no protests against the security forces in the brutal treatment of its labor force, before and after the coup.

      Yet in the end, the cravenness and even collaboration of the courts, the complicity or at least silence of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the involvement of business groups notwithstanding, it was the security forces themselves, controlled and coordinated by the Third Army Corps, that perpetrated the violence and carried out the dirty war. The death squads, detentions, and disappearances took place at their hands. These formed part of a well-oiled and organized apparatus, cogs in a deliberate plan unrelenting in its implementation, devised by the military hierarchy and executed by subordinates throughout the country, though with considerable room for regional variations given local conditions and the composition of the local military commanders and their subordinates. One characteristic of Córdoba’s experience with state terrorism did resemble that of the rest of the country: the chances for survival in the city’s detention centers were slight. In Córdoba, detention almost automatically translated to death. The testimony of the few survivors of the detention centers, especially La Perla, offers a unique glimpse into the terrifying world there but also the dreadful mechanisms of repression that existed in Córdoba and the role of the detention center–turned–death camp in the dirty war.

3

       DEATH CAMP

      La Perla

       La Perla, did it exist? Yes. It was a meeting place for the prisoners, not a secret prison . . . the subversives were there but in the protection of each other’s company.

      —GENERAL LUCIANO BENJAMÍN MENÉNDEZ

      From the highway, the former death camp known as La Perla is barely visible, just as it was at the height of the dirty war. One of a number of the death camps from the dictatorship converted into sitios de memoria. La Perla functions now as an education center, a museum, and a memorial to the victims of state terrorism.¹ It is a place where schoolchildren and the occasional curious tourist can wander the large hall where political prisoners were once held, view the nearby sala de tortura (torture chamber) where men and women, some mere adolescents, were subject to electric shocks and beatings, terrorized, humiliated, and threateningly questioned, and now listen to the young guides laconically offer lurid details and anecdotes about the camp’s sinister history. Pictures of the victims with their names and date of disappearance, articles of clothing and jewelry left behind, writings scribbled to while away the long periods of boredom, crude rosary beads created from whatever materials were at hand, fragments of lives suspended from reality awaiting death, are among the museum’s displays. The bucolic setting, on a hillock overlooking a sloping field, and the relaxed atmosphere found there now can almost make one forget its history as a site of terror, torment, and death. The vast majority who rode in unmarked police cars or military vehicles up the winding driveway, blindfolded and handcuffed, never made the return journey. Some died under torture; most died in mass executions, their remains burned or buried in graves still never located.

      During the dictatorship, La Perla functioned as an integral piece of the repressive apparatus that waged the dirty war in Córdoba. With the official name of “Lugar de Reunión de Detenidos por el Destacamento de Inteligencia General. Iribarren del III Cuerpo de Ejército” (Meeting Place of those Arrested by Intelligence Task Force General Iribarren Third Army Corps), it occupied a position of dubious distinction as one of the largest of the death camps and the most important in the country’s interior.²

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