Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina - Antonius C. G. M. Robben The Ethnography of Political Violence

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by a Thomist world view, as will be shown in Chapter 9, they believed firmly that society was an expression of a divine hierarchy. The leaderless crowd subverted the divine social order temporarily as in a ritual reversal.

      The military commanders who took power in 1976 wanted to end the cycle of recurrent political conflict incited by violent street mobilizations because they feared that the crowds might come under the influence of revolutionary leaders. The junta wanted to inoculate the Argentine people against their subversion in future crowd mobilizations.67 The conviction that the antiauthoritarian tendency of spontaneous crowds had to be broken for the good of the nation by inculcating notions of hierarchy led the military to stage parades, religious processions, commemorations, and celebrations of military victories.

      The military’s fear of the revolutionary potential of crowds was complicated by a fascination with their spiritual cohesion and dogged resolution. Such force made Argentine dictators beam with an air of potency and invincibility in the sight of a crowd chanting their name; a crowd that was excited yet disciplined. There seemed among Argentine rulers a need to measure their power by freeing a leviathan which thereupon was dominated. It is this fascination with the gift to harness crowds that made these leaders fond of summoning them. The crowd empowered them by submitting to their authority. The everexistent danger that the crowd might turn against them, as happened several times in Argentine history, enhanced their appeal as proofs of legitimization, power, and authority.

      In a series of thirty-four communiqués on 24 March 1976, the military junta declared first its total control over the country, and in its second communiqué prohibited all street demonstrations and crowd formations. “With the objective of maintaining order and calm, the population is reminded that the state of siege is in effect. All inhabitants must abstain from assembling along public routes and from spreading alarming news. Those who disobey this communiqué will be detained by the military, security or police authorities. It is forewarned, likewise, that any street demonstration will be severely repressed.”68

      Silence fell. The streets were empty. Now, an entirely different crowd stood in the wings to impress its stamp on the streets and squares of Argentina. The armed forces were determined to end the internecine fighting between right and left in the Peronist movement, the increasingly audacious assaults by the guerrilla organizations, and the legitimacy crisis of a crippled government. This repression was not merely antirevolutionary or a measure of state security, but it rested on a profoundly different conception of the place of leaders and crowds in Argentine society. Crowds were feared for creating an uncontrollable horizontal solidarity among people which threatened to disentangle them from the powerholders. Therefore, crowds had to be domesticated so that they would uphold authority and reproduce the hierarchical values of the natural order. Thus, an attempt was made at social engineering, at altering people’s sociality away from a unifying gregariousness and towards obedience, discipline, respect for God, and awe of the nation’s military leaders who had saved the country from a communist revolution and the loss of its Western, Christian civilization.

       Part II

       Utopia Lost: Guerrilla War and Counterinsurgency

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      Apartment of Vice-Admiral Lambruschini, destroyed by Montonero guerrillas on 12 August 1978. Courtesy of Diario Clarín.

      Chapter 5

       Shots in the Night: Revenge, Revolution, and Insurgency

      The execution of eight workers at the garbage dump of José León Suárez in June 1956, after a failed military rebellion against the leaders of the 1955 coup against Perón, remained an enduring social trauma of the Peronist movement. The 1957 account by Rodolfo Walsh nestled itself firmly in the popular sentiment, and inspired militant Peronists for decades. Walsh had initially supported the Liberating Revolution, but the sight of a survivor’s face, “the hole in the cheek, the largest hole in the throat, the injured mouth and the opaque eyes where the shadow of death remained floating,” compelled him to investigate the killings. His discovery of the true circumstances made him embrace Peronism.1

      Walsh narrates that a group of fourteen men were listening to a boxing match on the evening of the 9 June rebellion, when the police burst into the house. The commanding officer asks about the whereabouts of General Tanco and, after receiving no answer, gives the order to take the men to the police station for aiding the rebels. Only the house owner and two visitors are vaguely connected to the rebels, all others are unaware of the conspiracy. Early next morning, after the military rebels have already been defeated, the head of police of Buenos Aires province, Lieutenant-Colonel Fernández Suárez, gives orders to execute the men. They are driven to the garbage dump of José León Suárez and summoned out of the truck. “They make the persons under arrest walk by the edge of the vacant lot,” narrates Rodolfo Walsh. “The guards push them with the barrel of their guns. The pick-up truck enters the street and lights their backs with the headlamps. The moment has arrived.”2 A few men realize that they are about to be shot and walk away slowly from the headlights. The others still cannot believe that their end has come. As one man falls on his knees and pleads for his life, the first shot rings out. Three men succeed in fleeing under the cover of darkness, while three others survive by playing dead. The remaining eight are assassinated. “In the glare of the headlights where the acrid smoke of the gun powder boils, a few moans float over the bodies stretched out in the garbage dump. A new crackling of gun shots seems to finish them off.”3

      These summary executions became known as the massacre at the garbage dump of José León Suárez. The assassinations symbolized the repression of the Peronist movement during the second half of the 1950s. The narrative talent of Walsh and a general indignation kept this tragedy alive for future Peronist generations. Months after the failed 1956 rebellion Perón remarked about the military rulers: “The hatred and wish for revenge which these despicable persons have awakened among the people will one day burst into the street as a moving force and only then will it be possible to think about the pacification and unity of the Argentine people.”4

      The assassinations were so traumatizing because they revealed the defenselessness of the Peronists and the regime’s willingness to use excessive violence against political opponents. The massacre became commemorated in the decade thereafter through impromptu street protests and the detonation of homemade pipe bombs reliving the trauma by seeking redress through violence. The proscription of Peronism, worsening labor conditions, mass arrests, and the repression of Peronist sentiments resulted in strike protests, civil disobedience, and sabotage.

      The Peronist resistance movement wanted to take revenge and punish the repressive forces for bombing the Plaza de Mayo, executing workers, and overthrowing Perón. Perón shared these feelings because of his call for boundless violence. He suggested the creation of thousands of temporary secret groups which were to kill the principal opponents, harass their families, and incinerate their homes. “We must make them feel the terror themselves…. The more violent and intense the intimidation campaign will be, the more certain and faster will be its effects…. The greatest violence is the general rule.”5

      Perón also proposed the organization of a cellular structure of permanent, secret cells covering every province, city, village, and labor union in Argentina. The members were the dispossessed, the persecuted, and the relatives and friends of persons killed by the repression. They would pass through an initiation ceremony swearing eternal hatred towards the people’s enemies. Members would wear hoods to hide their identity, and receive a number and pass word. Each sect would have a list with the names and addresses of their enemies, with the coup leaders Aramburu and Rojas at its head. Traitors received the death sentence.6 Little came of this popular retaliation and one must seriously consider whether Perón’s proposal was an instance of psychological warfare. Nevertheless, Perón’s call for violence did encourage the emergence of small sabotage groups in the so-called Peronist Resistance, and the first

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