Argentina's Missing Bones. James P. Brennan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 public act by the Montoneros anywhere in the country took place outside the city in the small town of La Calera, the July 1970 abortive raid on a local police station and bank robbery, culminating in a shootout and the death of local Montonero leader Emilio Maza. La Calera was the first of many armed actions perpetrated by the Peronist Left in and around Córdoba, not just the Montoneros but also FAR and FAP. The ERP in Córdoba was even more prone to such tactics, and there were some notorious examples of assassinations of businessmen and military and police officers.

      Yet the revolutionary threat represented by the Peronist and Marxist Left cannot be reduced simply to “redemptive and retributive” violence, as one anthropologist has described it.¹² The militarization of the Left was a reality, but sole focus on its violent tactics simplifies and distorts its history, both as an actor and perceptions of it by the military. In Córdoba, as a new scholarship has demonstrated in the case of other urban areas, both the Peronist and Marxist Left expended greater efforts to recruit among university students, workers, and in the city’s poorest neighborhood and employed strategies in the city that were more political than military in nature. The Montoneros’ surface organization and political wing, the Juventud Peronista (JP) was especially active in the university and in the city’s slums or villas miserias. Often working in tandem with activist priests drawn from the Third World Priests (Sacerdotes del Tercer Mundo) movement, rather than firefights with the army and police, they engaged in such unglamorous behavior as running literacy campaigns and soup kitchens.¹³ The ERP’s political wing, the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT), also was active in the university and won a large following there, but concentrated more than the JP/Montoneros on political recruitment among the city’s large working-class population, especially in its large automotive complexes. Other leftist groups (the Partido Comunista Revolucionario [PCR], Peronismo de Base [PB], Vanguardia Comunista [VC], Poder Obrero [Organización Comunista Poder Obrero or OCPO]), stronger in Córdoba than in other urban centers, also concentrated on gaining working-class followers. To reduce their activities to violence underestimates the complexity of their revolutionary praxis and also the perceived threat that their actions represented to the military. Therein lay part of the explanation why the state terrorism continued long after the Left’s armed contingents had been defeated and its leadership dead or in exile.

      In Córdoba, the Peronist Left, the largest of the country’s leftist factions, demonstrated this complexity of the threats it posed and of the Left’s revolutionary praxis better than any other. After the disastrous and abortive armed action in La Calera, the local branch of the Montoneros undertook a period of reflection and self-criticism. The result was the formation in late 1972 of the “Montoneros-Columna José Sabino Navarro,” named for an autoworker and former SMATA (autoworkers union) shop steward who had joined the Montoneros and perished in an armed confrontation with security forces. Local Montonero dissidence with the national leadership and that leadership’s emphasis on strategies of armed struggle was reflected months later in the abandonment of the word Montoneros altogether and self-appellation as the Columna José Sabino Navarro. In the early 1970s, the Sabinos were the largest contingent of the Peronist Left in Córdoba and concentrated, much like the PB, on grassroots work in the city’s shantytowns, factories, and universities. With their Catholic origins in the Movimiento Universitario Cristo Obrero (MUCO), the Sabinos garnered considerable support among the city’s large student population whose efforts focused more on political organization, indoctrination, literacy campaigns, and soup kitchens in the city’s poor neighborhoods than armed struggle. Such efforts were intended for consciousness-raising and mass protest tactics of the kind Córdoba had already dramatically demonstrated its aptitude for in the 1969 Cordobazo and 1971 viborazo. In many ways, it was the Left’s diverse revolutionary praxis coming from youth with traditional Catholic backgrounds that so alarmed the country’s military leaders and made “subversion” perceived as an assault on the national culture, more than just an adversary in counterinsurgent war.¹⁴

      A return to violent tactics and armed struggle within student ranks eclipsed the Sabinos’ influence only with the return of Peronism to power in 1973 and the unleashing of paramilitary violence against the Left. Though often at cross-purposes in the early 1970s, with the Montoneros agitating for the return to power of Perón and the ERP pursuing more conventional revolutionary strategies and indifferent to bourgeois politics, their combined actions had served to weaken military rule and allow elections to take place, this time with proscription of the Peronists, though not yet Perón, lifted. In Córdoba, the 1973 election brought to power figures closely associated with the Peronist Left, governor Ricardo Obregón Cano and vice-governor Atilio López, a Peronist union leader opposed to the national labor bureaucracy and its local representatives in the ortodoxo faction. Despite the fact that once in power the provincial government followed rather centrist policies, Cordoban business groups and the army commanders in the nearby Third Corps regarded the Obregón Cano-López government as little more than a JP-Montonero front, a realization of their worst fears about the ascendancy of the Left and the city’s increasing radicalization. Perón, back from exile and elected president in special elections held in September 1973, apparently shared those suspicions.

      In his government’s campaign to purge the Peronist Left from its ranks, Córdoba became a notorious target. Within months of Perón’s election, Córdoba, along with other provincial governments associated with Peronist Left tendencies, came under assault. Obregón Cano and Lopez were removed from office forcibly in March 1974 in a putsch by the local police with the support of several military officers, an event that came to be known as the Navarrazo, named for the local police chief, Antonio Domingo Navarro, who led the putsch. The Navarrazo was partly due to the attempt by the provincial government to restructure the Cordoban police force, including allowing the readmission of police officers cashiered in an anti-Peronist purge in 1955, but more deeply was the product of growing political tensions emanating from Buenos Aires, with Perón himself denouncing the “foco de infección” that was Córdoba. Perón and the Peronist government’s sanction of a blatantly illegal act that forced the resignation of two democratically elected officials, fellow Peronists moreover, marked a further deterioration of the rule of law in Córdoba, making possible the utter lawlessness of the state terrorism that was soon to follow.¹⁵

      After months of uncertainty and unrest, Córdoba came under dictatorial rule by Air Force Brigadier Gen. Raúl Oscar Lacabanne in September 1974, named “interventor” by Isabel Perón’s government, and the so-called antisubversive campaign began in earnest in the city long before the March 1976 coup.¹⁶ With a long list of names provided by the police intelligence service, the Departamento de Informaciones de la Policía de la Provincia de Córdoba СКАЧАТЬ