ONE
A brief history of movements and repression in Argentina
Historical events are not points, but extend to before and after in time, only gradually revealing themselves.
(Jameson 2008: 1, cited in Zibechi 2008b)
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps.
(Said 1994: 3)
From what are new movements born? Are they ever entirely new? What role does the past play? Must it be a conscious past? What is the role of myth and stories in the historical and collective imagination? Must the stories be real? How, or indeed, are we motivated by historical events? Do the events of previous generations, events perhaps that we never learned about, live in our collective memories? Can history be carried forward in a collective unconscious? Can history and memory perhaps be, as Walter Benjamin so eloquently put it, a ‘secret rendezvous between past generations and our own’ (1973: 179)?
An action
It is growing dark. A group of young people begin to gather in front of a hospital. It is an old hospital, which now serves the general population and was formerly a military hospital. It is a hospital with a memory. It is a hospital that was not used to heal. This hospital was used by the military for torture during the brutal dictatorship that lasted from 1976 until 1983.
More young people arrive. There is a small stage erected. People grow quiet. Clearly something has been planned. Many people have masks and wear costumes. The mood is somber. No, it is not so much somber as chilling and quiet … we are waiting … the feeling is that you do not really want to be there, but you don’t want to leave either. It is a strange and powerful sensation. Like the pull of watching a suspenseful film, your heart begins to beat faster as you know something bad will take place, but yet you cannot turn away.
Photo 3 One of the weekly marches of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (the banner reads ‘No to the payment of the external debt’)
A performance begins. A woman is alone. She is in a cell. Three men in military uniforms enter the cell. She begins to whimper … the crowd begins to shift a little uncomfortably … I shiver, dreading what they are going to act out. As the men get closer to her, her whimpers begin to get louder – it becomes a scream as the two men hold her down and the third rapes her. She screams again, they change places, and again … and then there is silence.
The stage goes dark.
The stage begins to lighten, brighter and brighter until there is a harshly lit bed, surrounded by white lights. We are no longer in a prison cell but a small hospital room. The same woman is there. She is pregnant. She is chained to the bed. Her legs are in stirrups. She cries out again, this time in labor. Two men and a woman enter the room: they deliver the baby. A military man smiles widely to the crowd and takes the infant. He holds it up in the air for all to see, like a proud father. The woman screams – she is injected – her screams fade …
The infant is gone.
A speaker with a mask tells us that this was done at the military hospital that we have all assembled in front of – we are told that some of the doctors from the time of the dictatorship still work there. Ones like we just saw deliver the baby before the woman, the mother, was murdered.
The crowd erupts – things are thrown at the hospital walls that explode on impact, creating huge red splatters. It looks like blood is dripping down the walls. It moves down the wall, and the chill remains in the air.
This is an escrache.
In 2006, in an action against the dictatorship, Victoria, a daughter and one of hundreds stolen by the military as described in the above theater production, spoke:
‘A sector of society continues to respect beasts like Jorge Rafael Videla, who led this massacre. And that is why we are going to do the escrache at Videla’s house – because we don’t forget and we don’t forgive.’ Victoria Donde Perez is the daughter of a ‘disappeared’ woman. Thanks to the work of HIJOS and the Abuelas they have recuperated the identity of 82 sons and daughters.
Victoria continued, ‘We want to tell our dear disappeared compañeros and parents not to worry because we are here and we will find your children. Today we are 82 but soon we will find all of them. Along with your children we are recovering the dreams of the disappeared, their dreams of life, their dreams of freedom, because that’s who our parents were, they were builders of courageous dreams.’
(Trigona 2006b)
HIJOS: an introduction to the movements
Where to begin with the history and context of the contemporary revolutionary movements in Argentina? Is it based in the anarcho-syndicalism of the 1930s? Is it grounded in the guerilla movements of the 1960s, in part a reaction to hierarchy but inspired by militancy? Is it a part of the complicated history of Peronism, both a rejection of gift politics and hierarchy, but also inspired by the mass popularity that affected day-to-day life? Is it not related to any of this, or is it related to all of it? What is the role of history and previous generations’ experiences on contemporary actions? What about the movements that took place only a decade or two ago: do they still somehow inspire contemporary action? The latter question is one that is argued by many in Argentina, particularly those who were a part of these movements. I am referring here to the MTDs that emerged in the 1990s as well as HIJOS (Hijas y HIJOS por Identidad y Justicia y contra el Olvido y Silencio; Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice and Against Silence and Forgetting) and the Mesa de Escrache (the ‘table’ of organizing the escrache). The latter two, discussed in this chapter, organized in ways that are quite similar to current ideas of horizontalidad.
History can deeply affect the ways in which people relate and organize, but this does not necessarily mean that history is repeated or imitated. Often historical experiences are rejected, as can be witnessed in frequent, drastic governmental shifts from Left to Right. Indeed, this has been seen in contemporary Argentina, where conscious rejections of previous ways of organizing within the Left have occurred. However, rejecting the type of hierarchical organizing that took place in previous decades does not necessarily equate with embracing the anarcho-syndicalism of the early 1900s. My argument here is that history is important, but one should be careful not to overemphasize or, worse, prescribe activities and organizations based on the past.
While the late 1800s and early 1900s have many similarities to the social movements in Argentina today, and will be addressed, the main focus of this chapter will be the more recent past. It is this recent past that most adults in Argentina either lived through themselves, or through which their parents lived. It is to these pasts and stories of the past that most movement participants refer and use as a point of conscious reference. There is no longer an active conscious memory of the movements of the early 1900s, but these stories still loom large in the current imagination. Interestingly, there is little direct research and information on exactly what took place during these early years of revolutionary foment, thus making it that much more mythical, and perhaps allowing it to loom that much larger in the collective imagination.
The beginning: the 1990s
Beginning with the most recent past, and the one which has had the most direct influence on autonomous movements today in their affirmative action (rather than rejection) are HIJOS, Mesa de Escrache and the Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC, Street Artists Group). All three of these groups comprise to varying extents the children of those who disappeared during the dictatorship; their contemporaries as well as the relatives of the children of the disappeared. With 30,000 disappeared, the number of children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc., the number of family members who could be a part of HIJOS could easily reach many hundreds of thousands – all touched directly by the dictatorship.
HIJOS is significantly different from the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Disappeared), who continue to demand that the government return their children and that those responsible are punished; or even the Abuelas, the grandmothers, who continue to look for those children stolen and ‘adopted’ from the prisons and torture chambers during the dictatorship. HIJOS is not placing demands upon the government, but rather speaks to society as a whole. Its members address society as a way of consciously breaking with the silence around what took place, what it calls a ‘social silence’ (Benegas forthcoming).
Most of the HIJOS generation were in their twenties during the 1990s. They were born of a rupture – not the sort of rupture that I discuss, from which new movements are created, but rupture in a much more literal sense. Most of the HIJOS grew up without a parent, aunt, cousin, or other close relative, that person having been literally taken from their home and family, tortured, and perhaps dropped into the river to die. Murdered – and murdered because of their ideas of social change, or their identification with those who wanted and sought change. These children grew up with other relatives caring for them, sometimes in Argentina, Brazil (as with Paula, who is quoted at length in this book), and Cuba (as with Diego from Colectivo Situaciones, a militant research and writing group in Buenos Aires, also interviewed for this book). HIJOS is a group of young people who grew up with an ever-present rupture: the mother who never came home, or the father who was tortured so badly that despite surviving, seemed only the shell of a human being. Perhaps worst of all, these children grew up in a society that did not blame or punish the people who tortured and killed their parents. They grew up in an atmosphere of silence and forgetting.
The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who have won respect from people all over the world for their struggle to win back their children, are demanding justice – and demanding punishment. Now their children, the children of the disappeared – HIJOS – are demanding justice. HIJOS is a central social movement actor in Argentina. HIJOS formed as an organization in 1995, but began meeting much earlier. It began in the time of ‘democracy’, in 1983, when people were taken much less frequently from their homes, never to be seen again. Repression and kidnapping did not stop but were reduced greatly. It was less a time of terror and more a time of repression. What it was not was a time of remembering or punishing those responsible for the dictatorship – quite the opposite.
Most members of the military were left untouched by the transition to ‘democracy’. This protection was legislated with Law No. 23492 – the Ley de Punto Final of 1986 (the ‘Full Stop’ Law), which was passed at the end of the dictatorship. This law prohibited not only the prosecution but also the investigation of people accused of political violence during the dictatorship. New ‘democratic’ rule took place on 10 December 1983, and the Ley de Punto Final was passed three years later on 24 December 1986. As a complement to the law, Law No. 23521, the Ley de Obedencia Debida of 1987 (Law of Due Obedience) was passed, which included the exemption of subordinates from prosecution if they were carrying out orders. These laws were not repealed until 2003, and not removed from the Argentine Statute Book until the end of 2005.
One of the most emblematic of these pardons, although they are numerous, was Alfredo Ignacio Astiz, known as the ‘blond angel of death’. Astiz was the director of ESMA, one of the most famous torture and death centers during the dictatorship. Many Argentines refer to these places as concentration camps. It is believed that more than 5,000 people were tortured and murdered there under his command (Trigona 2010). It is unclear for which act he is most famous. He is responsible for infiltrating the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, kidnapping one of the founders, Azucena Villafor, on International Human Rights Day – the day that the Mothers published a list of the disappeared in the newspaper. Villaflor was never seen again, not after entering ESMA. Astiz’ actions resulted directly in the murder of two French nuns, a seventeen-year-old Swiss-Argentine citizen, and the journalist Rodolfo Walsh. Astiz was not only excused from standing trial, based on the Ley de Punto Final of 1986, but was promoted in the navy twice after the transition to ‘democracy’, holding an important military position as Argentina’s naval attaché in South Africa.1 In 1988 he was made a full captain and decorated for valor in the ‘fight against subversion’. This was five full years into ‘democracy’.
There was no public outcry at the Ley de Punto Final, neither at the fact that military officials and torturers from the dictatorship were living, seemingly happily enough, among everyone else in society. People were afraid. People were silent. HIJOS organized to speak specifically to this silence. Many in HIJOS have, and had, little confidence in the government, whether ‘democratic’ or otherwise. When HIJOS formed in 1995 there were hundreds to thousands of known genocidas (those who committed genocide) living in society,2 unpunished, free – and not only unpunished by the state, but living in peace in society as a whole. The term genocidas was chosen by HIJOS, as well as other human rights groups, to describe those who participated in the torture and killing under the dictatorship, and it since has become quite commonplace among those who opposed the dictatorship. HIJOS’ goal is not to speak to the genocidas, but their neighbors and society in general: those who were letting people who committed such atrocities live in peace and silence (Benegas forthcoming). The form that their protest took was more of a public outing than a protest, and part of a serious and long campaign which became known as the escrache. An escrache is this process of outing – a tactic for social awareness using direct action, theater and education against silence and forgetting.
Another important aspect of speaking to neighbors and community goes back to the time of the dictatorship itself, as according to reports in the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), the majority of the kidnappings occurred in the person’s home and in front of witnesses, usually neighbors.
Un escrache: an action
As mentioned previously, an escrache, or escrachar in slang, means ‘to put into evidence, disclose to the public, or reveal what is hidden’ (Colectivo Situaciones et al. 2009). Escraches begin with research. The person who is ‘outed’ has been researched in great depth. There are often people who can testify directly that they tortured them, or that they witnessed this person carrying out torture. There are oral or actual records of the person’s participation in or with the military. Once the person’s actions have been confirmed, education in the neighborhood begins. Maps are made, based on the city maps used by tourism or the subway system, and a location is pinpointed which says ‘AQUI’ (‘here’) – as many maps can indicate where one lives – then it says, ‘Aqui vive un genocida’ (‘Here lives a person who has committed genocide’). The map contains footnotes which go into detail as to who the person is, what atrocities they have committed, and so forth. These maps are pasted over local maps, on street lamps, newspaper stands, store fronts, walls, and throughout the neighborhood.
HIJOS and its supporters distribute information leaflets to the people who live in the neighborhood, asking if they know that a genocida lives there. The flyer campaign continues for a few weeks and then action is scheduled.3 Action takes on different forms. There is the one described above, outside of a hospital, but most often they are in front of a person’s home. The police are always there, in large numbers, protecting the house. However, HIJOS’ intention is not to attack the house; instead, it does street theater, sometimes acting out what the person did, the horrors they committed. Sometimes it is more informational: HIJOS states what the person has done, then throws red paint bombs at the door of the house or apartment at the end. Sometimes it creates songs, and goes through the neighborhood singing about what happened – as is the case with the escrache against a priest and church that collaborated with the military in the neighborhood of Paternal, Buenos Aires.4 One of the main chants at an escrache is ‘Si no hay Justicia, Hay escrache!’ (‘If there is no justice, then there is an escrache!’). Justice here signifies both definitions of the word, as in social justice and making a situation equal or fair, and justice referring to the legal process in which one is accused by the state and judicial system (in Spanish the word is the same).
However, the point of this action is not for justice in either definition. The point is that there is no justice by the very nature of the person living freely in society, without any social outcry. HIJOS makes that outcry. HIJOS takes the silence and breaks it. HIJOS speaks to neighbors, to society, and makes people uncomfortable. HIJOS makes noise in the silence. The point is that there cannot be silence. HIJOS began making noise in this silence in the mid-1990s and continues through 2012, at the time of writing.
HIJOS works with a number of other groups, from human rights groups, such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and the Abuelas, to having relationships with most of the new social movements after the rebellion, from recuperated factories to neighborhood assemblies and MTDs. In the 1990s, when it first began to organize, the groups that HIJOS was closest to were the Mesa de Escrache and GAC. Both groups played a pivotal role in the tactics used by HIJOS. Mesa de Escrache is literally translated as the ‘table of the Escraches’, which discusses which action to organize next, against which genocida, when, how, and so forth. It then brings these proposals to HIJOS, and from there, works with the GAC. GAC is a group of artists that use public space to make political interventions. This can range from ‘public art’ or graffiti to making the maps that are used by HIJOS to publicize an escrache or the location of a genocida, including signs that look like road detours, but instead say things like, ‘Beware, a genocida lives 500 meters ahead.’
Organization
The ways in which HIJOS, GAC, and Mesa de Escrache work is in network formations, without hierarchy or central power structures. In fact, many in the groups refer to the ways in which they organize as horizontal. They were not using the language of horizontalidad before the rebellion, but the ways in which they organized were much the same. It is not that HIJOS or GAC stake any sort of ideological claim on nonhierarchy or horizontal ways of relating; the way that many of the participants described it to me was just that it made more sense for organizing and was the only way that they could all feel like full participants and create the affective relationships that they desired. Since the popular rebellion and widespread use of horizontalidad as a social relationship and word, HIJOS and GAC both use it to describe their ways of functioning:
Horizontalidad and consensus: this expresses a form of construction without bosses or hierarchy, that democratizes political practices and brings forward the role of the individual with the collective. Respect for the opinion of the other person and diversity of thought is all part of what we bring together to create a synthesis.
(HIJOSriocuarto.blogspot.com)
As Diego Benegas writes, based on his personal experience in HIJOS as well as his research into the group:
H.I.J.O.S. emerged as a network, a loose collective that evolved into a union of groups, thus it rather looks like a federation. The different local chapters, called ‘the regionals’, do not respond to a central authority. The principle of group autonomy was present from the start and H.I.J.O.S. members defended it consistently throughout the years (Mendoza interview 2002c), but they remain one national organization rather than an articulation of local chapters. Local groups are autonomous and all their members meet weekly in an assembly that makes all the decisions for the regional (group). The commissions are smaller subgroups that perform the actual work. They are for example: Legal Matters, Siblings, Direct Action, Anthropological Investigation, Schools, Reception, Archive, and Radio. Recently, individuals outside of the organization have begun to participate in the commissions without becoming full (organic) members.
(Benegas forthcoming; emphasis in original)
The politics of HIJOS, GAC and Mesa de Escrache, together with their horizontal form of organizing, created a bit of a precursor to the ways in which people organized after 19 and 20 December 2001. This is not linear, as history never is, but there is more than coincidence in the fact that these groups rejected hierarchical methods of organization, chose not to focus on demands of the state, but instead spoke to, and speak to, society as a whole. Breaking with silence, cultures of silence, and looking to one another and the community generally to rethink history, the future and justicia. (More about the forms of organization and political interventions of HIJOS, GAC and Mesa de Escrache will be discussed in future chapters, which describe the movements in detail along with their horizontal and affective forms of organization.)
The dictatorship
As this chapter is working in reverse chronological order, after the 1990s, the next significant period for discussion is that of the dictatorship. The time of the early 1970s through to 1983, reaching a high point of terror in 1976, was the most brutal and terrifying in Argentine history:
There were many victims, but the true objective was to reach the living, the whole of society that, before undertaking a total transformation, had to be controlled and dominated by terror and by language … Only the voice of the state remained, addressing itself to an atomized collection of inhabitants.
(Romero 2002[1994]: 219)
Juan Corradi called this a ‘culture of fear’ (Corradi et al. 1992). Some who were able, fled abroad, mainly for political reasons but for professional ones as well. Every level of society was monitored and censored. Artists, psychologists and architects were under particular attack, but no one was exempt. However, many others that did not leave lived in what the Argentine historian Luis Alberto Romero has called ‘internal exile’. With this term he refers to people who hid out within Argentina, sometimes just by keeping a low profile, and others who literally were hidden in basements and attics, as with the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. He also refers to something much more profound affecting society at the time and future generations: those people who saw what was taking place and had the opinion of no te metas or, when the brutality was impossible to ignore, with the opinion that ‘they must have done something’ (Romero 2002[1994]). Between 1976 and 1978 the vast majority of people were ‘disappeared’. One-third were women, hundreds of whom gave birth in captivity. The vast majority of all people were between fifteen and thirty-five.
What role did and does the dictatorship play in the social movements that emerged out of 19 and 20 December 2001? In this case, a great deal. As HIJOS intended, and so many participants in the movements explain, the rebellion was a break with the past. It was a break with fear and a massive break with not being together. No te metas no longer held. People were together, and were no longer afraid – not of one another anyway, but perhaps still afraid of the state. However, no longer was there to be the silence of the past. (The experience of breaking with this past is dealt with more in Chapter 2.)
HIJOS has recorded the difference in the participation and reception of the escraches, particularly looking at the changes after the popular rebellion in 2001. In the mid-1990s they were met with hesitation, sometimes fear, and the escraches themselves were never very large. They were almost always repressed by the police, and participants were often followed, filmed and harassed by phone by government agents.
In the months following 19 and 20 December 2001 the escraches became increasingly larger, often reaching the thousands and even tens of thousands (Benegas forthcoming). HIJOS, GAC and Mesa de Escrache have all been a part of the new social movements, in the organizations mentioned as well as often in their neighborhood assembly, local MTD or other art and media groups.
The role that the dictatorship plays on memory and the new movements is as a break and a memory. It is a break with the past, but not just the past of horror and repression. As HIJOS says, it is for remembering, and against forgetting.
Revolutionary armed struggle: the 1960s–1970s
Of those captured and murdered by the dictatorship, some did belong to revolutionary armed groups, mainly the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP, People’s Revolutionary Army) and the Montoneros. The ERP was completely destroyed by the state’s campaign of repression and murder. The Montoneros continued, but shifted its tactics mainly to terrorism, including high-profile kidnappings and assassinations, including killing the chief of police of Buenos Aires. However, before the dictatorship, armed struggle in Latin America was spreading like wildfire. ‘Be like Che Guevara’, the leader of the Cuban Revolution, was a popular slogan, and movements throughout the Americas fought to create anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutions; this was also the growing desire of poor and working people throughout the continent and the world. The forms that this revolutionary struggle took varied. In many parts of Latin America, armed struggle was a component of the fight for a better world – for the future and in the present, with armed groups sometimes supporting local infrastructural projects. In Colombia for example, the slogan of the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (ELN, National Liberation Army) was ‘El poder no se toma se construya’ (‘Power is not taken, it is constructed’), and the ELN worked consistently in the countryside as well as taking up arms. In Argentina, the armed struggle was the largest recorded in all of Latin America. Social and political revolution, in the sense of taking over the state, was becoming a very a real question and possibility.
What effect did the past mass guerilla army and revolutionary armed forces have on the social movements that emerged after 19 and 20 December 2001? From the interviews I conducted it does not seem that it has had the effect that one might have imagined – or at least I would have imagined that people would have been more inspired by the revolutionaries and want to walk in their footsteps by picking up a gun and taking out the repressive state, for example. However, the agenda is a different one: it is not about taking up arms (although very few people I spoke with would call themselves pacifists or even disregard the need for some sort of armed defense at some point). The point is not to take over the state, but to recreate society, individually, socially, and grounded in neighborhoods and workplaces. Person after person would explain to me that on 19 and 20 December there was a real possibility of taking over the Casa Rosada (the Pink House, the official executive mansion of Argentina), but they did not want to do that. Some said that power is not located there, while others just said that they were going back to their neighborhood – not to go home and watch television, but to organize. To create an assembly and begin to recreate what was broken during the dictatorship. The rupture that people spoke of was a rupture with ways of being, with not being together, with no te metas.
The effect of the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) and Montoneros is not exactly clear. There is no disrespect for them or their memory – quite the opposite, in fact – but their tactics of armed struggle and hierarchical forms of organization are things that are not being borrowed from that particular history. If anything, learning from the period of armed struggle (that went hand-in-hand with the military dictatorship) has brought into question the notion of defense. Neka, from MTD Solano, describes the group’s approach to social change, and it includes rejecting the idea of taking power from the state with weapons:
The issue isn’t just the physical confrontation with the system. Every day we’re forced to confront a system that is completely repressive. The system tries to impose on us how and when we struggle. The question for us is how to think outside this framework. How to manage our own time and space. It’s easier for them to overthrow us when we buy into concepts of power, based on looking at the most powerful, based on something like weapons or the need to arm the people. We’re going to build according to our own reality, and not let them invade it. I think this idea of power as a capability and a potential, not a control, is a very radical change from previous struggles.
(Sitrin 2006: 163)
There is no question that the memory of the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s remains, but it does so without the desire to replicate their methods. There is no need to ‘be like the ERP’, as once people wanted to ‘Be like Che’ or create more Vietnams, more Cubas. Instead, the movements today speak of creating new social relationships – asking while questioning, and doing so horizontally. The revolution is in the day-to-day practice.
Peronism: the 1950s–1960s
My friends in Argentina, especially in my first year there, would regularly ask me how I was dealing with Peronism in my work. I would reply with the same regularity, ‘No tengo ni idea’ (‘I have no idea’) – and then we would all laugh. Peronism is an ideology, a person, a politic, a relationship, and an identity. It can be negative, implying centralized rule or even dictatorship, or it can mean democracy and workers’ power (Auyero 1999). This plurality creates a situation which for some has very little meaning, while for others it can be heavily weighted. It all depends on who is speaking and why.
Based in the person, Peronism, now represented by the Justicialista Party, began with Juan Domingo Perón, a military general and politician. He was elected president three times after serving in several government positions, including Secretary of Labor and the vice-presidency. Juan Perón was overthrown in a military coup in 1955, but there was such an outpouring of support, particularly from working people, and pressure that continued that eventually he returned to power in 1973. He was only president at that time for nine months, when he died and was succeeded by his third wife, Isabel Martinez.
Perón and his second wife, Eva, were immensely popular among many Argentines, and to this day play an incredibly iconic role. One cannot walk down a street in the city of Buenos Aires without passing posters from the Justicialista Party, and since the election of Néstor Kirchner and then his wife Cristina, posters with the faces of Néstor and Cristina have papered the city. Their popularity, as with Perón’s, was with working people, the unemployed and sectors of the middle class: the middle class believing that they will keep the poor under control, the workers believing they will continue working, the poor believing that they will give them gifts, and the unemployed believing that they will get work. Any or none of this can be true. The rhetoric remains, but it is the same Peronist government that crushed labor unions and gave gifts of basic necessities to the poor at the same time.
Overall, what the Peróns and the Justicialista Party have in common, and what many in the new movements are breaking from, is a paternalistic relationship to the population. Some see this relationship as good, when the government is giving out food and unemployment subsidies, while many see this as negative, that the government is forcing people into a dependent relationship. Regardless of opinion, Peronism is something with which any political person must engage.5 The Peronist governments are fighting hard to win back their patrons in the unemployed, including giving people money to leave autonomous movements, or evicting them outright from occupied land and housing. In fact, in some neighborhoods of the unemployed one can see an increase in clientalistic relationships again – relationships of brokerage with political party representatives (Auyero et al. 2009).
Why the historical context is important here is that people have begun to rebel against clientalism in large numbers and consciously; they are breaking with punteros (political party brokers) and creating their own dignity. As Neka from MTD Solano describes, their politics are not measured by poverty, but by the ‘politics of dignity’.6 It is an ongoing and active struggle, but the fact that it is being actively engaged in for the first time in history (and often rejected), opens up many possibilities.
Radical labor movements: 19th–early 20th centuries
Argentina has a long and powerful labor history. Some of the strongest labor organizations in the Americas were in Argentina, particularly in the very early 1900s (James 1988). In 1905 La Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA, Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation) and other syndicalist movements had many dozens of groupings, and multiple newspapers published simultaneously (Yerrill and Rosser 1987). Not only was the membership diverse and militant, but the tactics used were often those of strikes and general strike. Influenced by anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, the level of worker consciousness was high, with workers organizing against management, the bosses and often capitalism itself.
From the mid-1800s until almost 1920, Argentina’s economy grew exponentially, making it one of the world’s strongest economies (Romero 2002[1994]). The majority of investment in this growth was from European capital, as were the workers, comprising 84 per cent of the workforce. Workers began organizing as early as the 1870s and formed the first trade union in 1886, with the first national labor association established in 1879 (Romero 2002[1994]). It was during this time that the first formal anarchist group was organized: the International Socialist Circle. By the late 1800s there were dozens of labor organizations, with thirty in the city of Buenos Aires alone. Militancy was a part of the new labor movements, with strikes and occupation beginning at the same time as the formation of the groups. The exact extent of the influence of anarchist ideas on the labor movement has been contested, but what is clear is that it was substantial. Most of the immigrants who migrated to Argentina in the late 1800s were from Italy and Spain: two countries where anarchist ideas held a great deal of sway over working people.
In 1901 the Federación Obrero Argentina (FOA, Argentine Workers’ Federation) was founded. Influenced by anarchism, this federation rejected political parties, including the Socialist Party, and unified around the concept of general strike and working-class solidarity against capitalism. The federation rapidly grew in membership, and by 1904 had close to 11,000 members. In that time it led a number of significant strikes, including twelve general strikes, of which the FOA led the most (Bayer 2002). In 1903 the Union General Trabajador (General Workers’ Union) was founded, in part to counter the militancy of the FOA.
In 1905 the FOA re-founded itself as FORA, adding ‘Regional’ to its name. It also became more explicitly anarchist, adding in its foundation documents: ‘it advises and recommends the widest possible study and propaganda to all its adherents with the object of teaching the workers the economic and philosophical principles of anarchist communism’ (Thompson 1999: 169).
By 1906 FORA comprised more than 30,000 members. Over the course of the next ten years there were a number of splits within the federation, leading to the formation of other groups based on the same ideas, as well as those who split off and either joined the Union General Trabajador or other socialist groups. The new FORA (V and IX) claimed between 100,000 and 120,000 members in 1919. From 1917–1920 there were a large number of militant strikes, as well as a heightened level of repression. The government called the police on strikers, killing dozens of people and then, once the government was forced to stop direct repression due to tremendous pressure, business owners formed a vigilante group who then carried out massive repression against striking workers, killing dozens in one strike. Workers responded in self-defense and in the course of what has become known as the Semana Tragica (the Tragic Week), hundreds of workers were killed (Bayer 2002). By the early 1920s there were many divisions in the labor movement, particularly with a newly-formed Bolshevik-inspired union. These inner debates and fights led to a decrease in labor militancy.
However, what remains is the memory of a very high level of militancy, where workers by the hundreds of thousands were on the streets and striking in national unified action. Were all the unions anarchist, and did they really mobilize by the hundreds of thousands? Possibly, but how true is not the main point here. The larger question is how the imaginary, or real, role of anarcho-syndicalism plays into the imaginations of those organizing in movements today. People refer to the history of militancy and action without hierarchy, and perhaps this is one of the many places from which horizontalidad has developed. Miguel Mazzeo (2007) has written about the importance of myth and tradition in Latin American popular movements, and this is one of those occasions where the role of the story is as important as the historical event.
Conclusion
This chapter has served as a very brief overview into the history of movements and repression in Argentina. Perhaps most directly relevant is the relationship to the dictatorship and the movements that responded to deal with its consequences in society, from the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and the Abuelas to HIJOS. In many ways HIJOS has paved the way for the sorts of organizing taking place in today’s more autonomous movements in Argentina.