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people were “disappeared,” now a transitive verb, in 1975. A large number of these took place in Córdoba.¹⁹

      In Córdoba, most menacing for the military was the insertion of the revolutionary Left in the local labor movement and the workplace. Córdoba’s Left was a uniquely diverse and successful one in the Argentine context, with not only the Peronist Left in its manifold expressions and the ERP-PRT enjoying influence but even small Maoist and Trotskyist groups gaining a following. The 1972 electoral victory of the lista marrón slate, a coalition of left-of-center activists headed by a Maoist leadership, in the local autoworkers union—the SMATA, the largest and most influential in the city—was only one of many examples of this ideological and political pluralism.²⁰ The military, business, and Peronist trade union bureaucracy responded to the Left’s growing presence on the factory floor with charges of “industrial and factory guerrillas,” with Córdoba the prime example. The three conspired to destroy these so-called clasista movements, a policy they would extend to other parts of the country where similar left-wing activism appeared in the unions and in the workplace.²¹

      Though hardly industrial and factory “guerrillas,” the Left did undoubtedly develop a revolutionary praxis that combined effective rank-and-file representation with a larger project of a fundamental transformation of Argentine society, with the working class its major protagonist. Following the Cordobazo, the city witnessed factory occupations, wildcat strikes, and street protests on an unprecedented scale. The Left assumed a prominent and deliberate sponsorship of what were largely workplace-driven conflicts and spontaneous grassroots, rank-and-file agitation to challenge the ortodoxo Peronist trade union leadership in many industries and workplaces. The two Maoist parties, the PCR and the VC, inserted party activists and recruited young workers on the shop floor to serve as a nucleus of union insurgencies against the entrenched ortodoxo leadership, most notably in the form of comisiones obreras, factory committees meant to address workplace issues while also raising political consciousness. Breakaway Peronist factions, of whom the most important in Córdoba was the PB, adopted similar tactics. The PRT, the ERP’s surface organization, adopted similar tactics, with less notable results than it experienced in other parts of the country such as the Rosario industrial belt and in Tucumán’s sugar mills, but still gaining a sizable shop floor presence and recruiting some committed working-class activists as party members. Smaller left-wing organizations such as OCPO likewise adopted a strategy of entrismo, of inserting themselves into the city’s many factories and workplaces, including the white-collar government bureaucracies and the bank and teachers’ unions, and linking revolutionary strategies to broader working-class demands and struggles.²²

      Collectively, these clasista movements challenged important local, national, and even foreign interests, a number of them interlocking. Italian capital in particular felt threatened. Fiat was in many ways the dominant foreign enterprise in Córdoba, a major employer with its massive automotive complex on the city’s outskirts in Ferreyra but also with ties to sundry other local enterprises, the provider of the turbines to the public provincial power company, EPEC, for example, and with prominent presence in the city’s cultural life. The clasista movements in the Fiat plants in the early 1970s marked a turning point in the company’s increased contacts with local right-wing groups and especially the military, represented locally by the Third Army Corps with its headquarters in Córdoba. The strikes, factory occupations, and hostage taking in Fiat’s Córdoba plants, culminating in the 1972 murder by the ERP of Fiat general manager Oberdán Sallustro, had led to serious financial losses in the Italian company’s most important Latin American operations. Shortly thereafter, the Italian Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P-2) began to fund the right-wing death squad, the AAA, most active in Buenos Aires and during the 1976–83 military dictatorship, which became a major investor in the banking, publishing, and other industries as Italy emerged as Argentina’s major economic partner. The Italian government for its part was silent on the human rights issue, refused to grant Argentine exiles (many of them of Italian descent) asylum, forcing them to rely on tourist visas and adopting a circumspect position towards Argentina’s military authorities so as not to damage Italian business interests.²³

      The radicalization of at least sectors of the Catholic Church perhaps disturbed the deeply Catholic military commanders in Córdoba more than any other. The officers of the Third Army Corps adhered stubbornly, defiantly to an “antisecular” Catholicism, opposed to Vatican II and the Church’s engagement with the modern world as embodied in those “committed” Catholics who stressed public engagement with the poor.²⁴ The socially progressive, activist current in Córdoba’s Catholicism was represented most famously in the Sacerdotes del Tercer Mundo movement, but was not confined to it. Catholic activists, lay and clergy alike, appeared with increasing frequency in the city’s working-class and poor neighborhoods through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, inspired by changes and initiatives coming from the Vatican and the Latin American Church such as the 1968 Latin American Bishop’s Conference in Medellín. In Córdoba, the sites of Catholic social activism were many: the Catholic University, integralista student groups in the public university, neighborhood parishes, and informal Catholic study circles. Córdoba developed the so-called cursillos (Short Courses on Christianity) in the form of three-day retreats, an important innovation to reinvigorate the city’s Catholic culture with its new social doctrines and the formative experience for many future Catholic activists in the city.²⁵

      Córdoba distilled the radical, and in the military’s eyes “subversive,” forces at work in the country more than anywhere else: a highly politicized youth culture, a socially activist Catholic Church, and a militant, combative, even radicalized trade union movement. Nor did these threats exist in isolation from one another. A synergy between this triad increased the radical tendencies within each. Committed Catholics and activist priests worked sedulously in the city’s poor and working-class neighborhoods. Young party militants from the city’s universities attended worker mobilizations and even entered the factory as worker-activists. Unions called solidarity strikes in support of the student struggles and its victims. An organization such as the Juventud Trabajadora Peronista (JTP) counted committed Catholics in its ranks as it sought to recruit young workers in the city’s factories to a revolutionary Peronism. Such actors existed in other parts of the country, but the size of each and especially their collective influence in the political and cultural life of the city made Córdoba in many ways unique. The priority given to Córdoba by the military regime and the brutal nature of the dirty war there were not by chance.

2

       DICTATORSHIP

      Terrorizing Córdoba

       I say again that this war, like all wars, is total. One loses the war that one does not wage in a total way.

      —GENERAL LUCIANO BENJAMÍN MENÉNDEZ

      On March 24, 1976, the Argentine armed forces overthrew the government of Isabel Perón and assumed power with every intention of wielding it indefinitely. The military junta immediately issued an edict that superseded the national constitution giving the military sweeping new powers, prohibiting public demonstrations, suspending collective bargaining, and interdicting numerous organizations associated with the former Peronist government. The latter included the Peronist trade union confederation, the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), and the Confederación General Económica (CGE), the business association that adhered most to nationalist economic policies and one generally supportive of Peronist governments. Mass firings of public employees followed suit, a draconian censorship was imposed, the national congress and provincial legislatures shut down, and a series of labor laws were repealed.¹

      Yet Argentines had seen this drama before. What was novel, and most characteristic of this new experience with military dictatorship, was not its hostility to civilian rule, its union-busting tactics or even efforts to muzzle any expression of dissent and free speech. It was the scale of violence and terror that accompanied such policies. The regime initially directed most of its fury against the by now gravely wounded and tottering but still active Left. At its most benign, the junta proscribed all the country’s left-of-center parties, and froze their bank accounts and impounded their assets. At its most

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