LITMIR.BIZ

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the “Noche de los Bastones Largos.” In Córdoba, university politics moved largely underground with the military’s assumption of power that same year and the government’s interdiction of the university that followed. Occasional acts of state violence became routine with the onset of the Juan Carlos Onganía dictatorship (1966–70). These mostly took the form of unlawful arrests and abusive police interrogations, excessive force by the military and police alike in suppressing strike actions by local unions and student protests, and a few violent deaths at the hands of security forces, such as the shooting of autoworker Máximo Mena, an event that triggered the 1969 Cordobazo, which marked a turning point in the escalation of violence in the city by public authorities. The mass arrest of protesters, the ignoring of writs of habeas corpus and lengthy prison sentences swiftly imposed by military tribunals, as well as accusations of police and army abuse of prisoners ushered in a decade of intimidation, terror, and torture. Army occupation of the Fiat factories in 1971, one of the largest industrial complexes in the city, was followed by a terror campaign against the deposed leadership of the clasista unions there. The frequent arrests of union leader Agustín Tosco and harsh treatment of student activists and protesters in these years formed part of an established pattern now of interpreting any acts of civil disobedience and legitimate protest as unlawful, to be met with a summary, decisive response and indifferent to due process and established legal procedures.⁵ The military government in power at the time of the Cordobazo ignored both the social underpinnings of the uprising and the reports on its causes by the local military commanders responsible for suppressing the protest, attributing it strictly to the work of “extremist organizations” and, what was soon to become a favorite characterization, “subversive groups,” providing the military henceforth with its institutional interpretation of the events of May 1969 that would greatly influence its subsequent behavior.⁶

      Contemporary with its repressive policies, the military established the legislative scaffolding authorizing its tactics. In 1970 the military government decreed a law (ley 18.670) that made certain crimes exempt from appeal, and the following year penalties were increased for crimes that would have fallen under the vague rubric of “subversion” while establishing a new legal body, the Cámara Federal, with jurisdiction over such crimes. In June of that year, a revised version of the 1966 Ley de Defensa Nacional from the Onganía dictatorship authorized the executive to employ the armed forces to investigate, prevent, and combat subversion during declared states of siege, and the following year a newly decreed law actually passed jurisdiction for certain crimes to military courts.⁷ Onganía’s Ley de Defensa Nacional would not be repealed until the Alfonsín presidency (1983–89) and other “antisubversive” legislation from the 1966–73 military governments, though briefly repealed with the return of Peronism to power in 1973, would in piecemeal fashion be resuscitated with Perón’s 1974 assumption of the presidency and then under his widow and successor, Isabel Perón.

      Such severe reactions deepened sympathy for equally violent responses. Following the Cordobazo, a marked shift took place toward political radicalism and a popular sanctioning of violence occurred, both sentiments particularly potent within the ranks of Córdoba’s youth. Revolutionary organizations that supported armed struggle and had existed before the Cordobazo, such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR) and the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas (FAP), redoubled their commitment to direct, violent confrontation with the government and with so-called counterrevolutionary forces, while new ones equally convinced of the legitimacy of violent tactics, such as the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) and the Montoneros, emerged in the wake of the Cordobazo. The onset of the 1973–76 Peronist government escalated the situation as Peronism experienced a rancorous and bloody internal struggle for control of the movement. By now violence had become a talisman, viewed as a legitimate and indeed ineluctable way of confronting adversaries now more than just the public authorities and security forces. The eruption of guerrilla violence following the Cordobazo in the form of the Montoneros and the ERP signaled a qualitative change in the political culture, nationally and locally. Nationally, the Peronist Left’s rhetoric and actions invoked revolutionary war to both purge Peronism of traitorous elements from within its ranks in the form of union bureaucrats and fascistic nationalists and for an assault on state power. The Montoneros’ public statements, broadsides, and publications are replete with a language exalting war, a popular army, military strategy, and martyrdom.⁸ A Montonero training manual from 1974, complete with illustrations, gave precise instructions on the use of firearms, bomb making, propaganda work, and how to organize a street demonstration, and detailed a Spartan code of expected comportment from the Montonero militant. The formation of a “Montonero army” and this army’s “Montonero militias” were invoked as a legitimate use of violence, sanctioned, it was said, by Perón himself.⁹

      Born of the long history of fraudulent elections, the proscription of Peronism, as well as manifold intellectual and cultural influences, some domestic and others foreign in origin, the revolutionary Left of both Peronist and Marxist tendencies won recruits and in the beginning enjoyed considerable popular support. Its tactics in these and subsequent years ranged from kidnappings to targeted assassinations to urban and rural guerrilla warfare. The largest attempt at armed struggle was that of the ERP in the mountains of Tucumán province, where an estimated five hundred to six hundred erpistas launched a guerrilla war, heavily influenced by the Cuban example, in the final months of the restored Peronist government. With the restoration of civilian rule and ascension to power in 1973 of the FREJULI electoral alliance dominated by the Peronists, popular support for the Left’s violent tactics flagged among some sectors but remained potent among others, especially university students and, to a lesser extent, working-class youth. The Cámpora government’s May 1973 release from prison of Montonero, ERP, and other leftist militants, who in most cases immediately resumed their activism, in many ways marked the high point of their influence, though the amnesty also enraged the military, galvanized its resolve to purge the country of its various leftist factions and influences, and undoubtedly contributed to the extreme tactic of the death camps and disappearances that would follow the 1976 coup. It convinced the military that legal procedures and civilian government could not be entrusted with responsibility for neutralizing the “subversives.”

      Repression of the Left did not have to wait for military rule. With Perón’s return to power in late 1973, the Peronist government undertook a sustained, brutal campaign against it, one that included the military, police, and a separately organized death squad, the AAA, run out of the offices of the Social Welfare Ministry. Both Perón and his successor to the presidency, his wife Isabel, passed a cluster of laws intended to legitimize harsh government measures, including broad powers to arrest, in the name of national security and extirpating subversion. In November 1974 the Peronist government declared a state of siege, greatly curtailing civil liberties and leading to an exponential growth in arrests and imprisonment, a state of siege that would continue under the military government and not be lifted until the restoration of democracy in 1983. A November 1975 proposed bill, supported by the country’s major political parties, essentially ceded all control to the military in the “war against subversion” including powers to decree edicts that would circumvent the legislature and the establishment of military tribunals of the kind employed in the aftermath of the Cordobazo with broad powers that overrode those of the civil courts.¹⁰ Only procedural chaos in the final months of Isabel Perón’s government prevented the bill from becoming law, but the draconian terms revealed the extent to which a full-scale assault on the Left had intensified under the Peronist government. By the time of the 1976 coup, the revolutionary Left had been gravely wounded, its ranks depleted, morale low, and much of the remaining leadership living clandestinely or in exile, though it retained some capacity for another year.¹¹

      In Córdoba this story played out dramatically. The Left there had a most complicated history. Initially, the Montoneros and ERP both had replicated the militarization of their organizations and supported violent strategies, though they were at least as active in the city in other ways. Despite ample available targets among the leadership of the local Peronist ortodoxo union leadership, the Montoneros in Córdoba did not adopt the tactics of targeted assassinations of so-called union bureaucrats that were common in Buenos Aires. They did engage frequently in other violent acts such as bank robberies and kidnappings, and indeed the first

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