Argentina's Missing Bones. James P. Brennan

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СКАЧАТЬ suspicion. Even more damning, Primatesta appeared to forge a close personal relationship with Menéndez, defended the military government publicly on several occasions, and, as ample oral histories and witness testimony at the human rights trials insist, refused repeatedly to intercede on behalf of families seeking information on disappeared family members. Other priests, most of them military chaplains and priests associated with the Third Army Corps, were identified by former prisoners at the La Perla detention center as frequent visitors to the death camp, some reputedly even hearing confessions shortly before prisoners were executed.³⁹ The heroic defiance of the dictatorship by other Catholic churchmen such as Enrique Angelelli, the bishop of La Rioja, or Jaime de Nevares, the bishop of Neuquén, had no counterpart in Córdoba. Whatever Primatesta’s interest is in keeping the Church neutral and equidistant from both the revolutionaries and the repressors, his actions belied such neutrality during the dictatorship. He may have simply been afraid, but his fear overwhelmed his sacred oath.

      More difficult to corroborate is the degree of complicity of local business groups. Business was virtually unanimous in its support for the coup and showered the country’s new military leaders with fulsome praise. Given the social upheavals of preceding years, the two Cordobazos, the presence of the country’s most militant unions, a greatly radicalized local student population, and the recent emergence of the guerrilla organizations, it is not hard to imagine why military rule was accepted enthusiastically by some, with relief by many. Outright collaboration in the terror is not as clear. For other parts of the country, some have argued that management in some of the country’s leading industrial firms actively aided and abetted the military in identifying union militants, facilitating their abduction and murder.⁴⁰ The evidence offered for such a serious charge, one that would seem to warrant judicial proceedings and convictions against the individuals if not the firms involved, is largely circumstantial, mostly confined to the oral testimonies of workers in the plants, but compelling.⁴¹ The unhindered abduction of workers on company grounds, management’s providing of personnel files and home addresses of workers later abducted and disappeared, the cooperation between the plant security forces and the military happened so frequently that the only reasonable conclusion is collaboration by the companies. That the country’s leading firms had an interest in ridding themselves of union militants among an increasingly combative and in some cases politically radicalized working class, and took advantage of the new situation to remove bumptious individuals within their labor forces, there now seems little doubt.

      In 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 СКАЧАТЬ