If there was a political movement that “benefited” the most from the politicization of young people, it was Peronism. It was within this political space that youths were more forcefully framed as political actors and as a category, and it was within Peronism that a generational language served to codify and enact ideological and political disputes. The youths that strove to “connect with the people” believed that Peronism was the natural venue for that encounter. Yet the engagement of young people with revolutionary trends within Peronism was anything but natural. At its most basic level, Perón understood that “youth” meant the chance of transcending the temporal limits of his movement, and since the mid-1960s he had called for a trasvasamiento generacional (generational transference) to infuse Peronism with “new blood” and ideological vitality. For many young people, that call for ideological and generational change implied the chance of conceiving of Peronism as the incarnation of a “national liberation” movement and as the national road toward Socialism. By the early 1970s, youth took up an ideological position as well, reflecting the radicalized young people who embraced Peronism while identifying with the Montoneros. A generational interpellation served to codify political and ideological battles within Peronism. Those battles turned more dramatic once elections were held in March of 1973 and Perón was given a last chance to make his comeback as president until his death in July of 1974. The disputes within Peronism were shaped like a dramatic family romance, in which the “young” would try to share power with the “old,” while everyone depended on the authority emanating from the only father-like figure, namely Perón himself.
The Argentine May and the Politicization of Youth
In July of 1969, Perón compared the events of May of 1968 in Paris with the revolt in Córdoba province in May of 1969. He quoted graffiti that appeared on Parisian walls, chiefly one that read, “we are the guerrillas against the air-conditioned death they want to sell us with the name of future.” Perón believed that the spirit of struggle against cultural and political conformism was rampant among Córdoba rebels. He foresaw, too, the beginning of a “global revolution” in which Argentine youth was destined to take the lead (tomar el rabo).3 For rising numbers of youth, mostly students, the message of the exiled leader was growing in significance. Ironically, only a few of them would have agreed with his comparison. As protagonists of the interwoven popular revolts in Corrientes, Rosario, and Córdoba, many youths saw theirs as incomparable to the French events. In the Argentine May of 1969, young people tried to erase markers of youthfulness, chiefly their student condition, in order to merge with “the people.” Yet for most observers, as for Perón, the May events broadcast an unequivocal meaning: the emergence of youth as a political actor.
In 1968, the Argentine press informed its readers about the revolts sweeping across the world, while it showed surprise at the apparent calmness domestically. Student leaders Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn-Bendit became household names after appearing in many news reports while images of barricades in cities that upper- and middle-class Argentines had long conceived of as cradles of culture, such as Paris, dominated the newsmagazines and television newsreels.4 Local journalists strove to explain to their readers how and why the “student” revolts were happening. Some analysts focused on what they believed were attitudes of ethical rebellion and wrote about the new humanism, the refusal to follow the rules of a technocratic-oriented society, and the vindication of values related to the creation of a “new man.” Some observers also scrutinized new sexual mores, interpreting them in the light of the position that Herbert Marcuse achieved among the “antiauthoritarian, antirepressive youth.”5 In that seemingly chaotic scenario, some journalists were embarrassed when observing the apparent stolidity of the local students. “How could it be possible,” a journalist asked, “that in the country which shaped the possibility of student participation in politics [the Reform Movement] things are so calm?” His answer pointed to the depoliticizing effects of the military intervention in the universities that the Onganía regime carried out in July of 1966.6 Far from deterring students, however, the intervention intensified and transformed their political engagement.
In the second half of the 1960s, Catholic and Peronist student groups came to occupy the prominent place that Reformism had previously occupied. Catholic groups had begun to make inroads in public and private universities in the late 1950s, but they gained momentum primarily in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). In mid-1968, the “Humanists” at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Littoral and the Integralistas at the Universities of Córdoba and the Northeast joined in the Unión Nacional de Estudiantes (UNE, National Student Union). Its president claimed that the only requirement for membership was “to be a revolutionary: to be a student is a trivial fact” and posited that the intervention had positively pushed students to reach out to the “proscribed people,” a reference to Peronism.7 In that encounter they also met the students who, coming from Marxism, created the Federación de Estudiantes Nacionales (FEN, National Student Federation), key to “Peronizing” the student movement.8 Whether Catholic, Peronist, or Marxist, the most prominent groups rejected what they perceived as the main legacies of Reformism: the focus on the university as a site for generating social reform and the belief that democratizing university life would pave the way to democratizing the country. In June of 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the launching of the Reform Movement, while the UNE celebrated the end of the “dream of the university as a democratic island,” the students with the FEN and with the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT, Revolutionary Workers’ Party) reached more nuanced conclusions. They noted that “initially the Reform was an important link in the movement for democratic reforms,” led by the Radical president Hipólito Yrigoyen, the first elected after the passing of the law of secret, mandatory, and universal male suffrage. However, the FEN pamphlet argued, “the reformists isolated themselves in the University.” The Reform represented “the past” and, now, the FEN and the PRT wanted the students to build “bridges to the people.”9
A similar drive of creating “bridges to the people” fueled the Catholic students. Together with their specific organizations, the most radicalized students had the journal Cristianismo y Revolución as a reference point. Launched in 1966 by a former seminarian, Juan García Elorrio, its first editorial noted that the journal would reflect “the feeling, the urgency, the forms, and the moments of Christian commitment to the revolution.” The journal—whose readership numbered as many as forty thousand—published frequent reports on the situation in war-torn Vietnam because, as one editorial predicted, “we, the oppressed in Latin America, will be the 1970s Vietnam.” It also promoted materials authored by local clerics who founded the Third World Priests Movement. The journal likewise served as the nexus for two dozen activists who founded the Camilo Torres commando—and who latter on would create the Montoneros guerrillas.10 The commando was named for the Colombian priest turned guerrilla (assassinated in 1966), an inspirational figure for the journal’s staff and followers. In its second issue, for example, Cristianismo y Revolución published a letter addressed to students, wherein Torres reminded them that they were privileged in “underdeveloped societies.” If they wanted to become revolutionary, Torres asked them to “ascend to the masses and share their poverty.” Paraphrasing Torres, the Movimiento Ateneísta, from Santa Fe, urged their members to “engage with the poor and persecuted people.”11
The articulation between the new student groups and “the people” crystallized, in particular, in the experience of the Confederación General de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CGTA, General Labor Confederation of Argentina). Founded in March of 1968, the CGTA was the outcome of cleavages within the labor movement caused by the differing positions vis-à-vis the Onganía regime. The unions that coalesced into the CGTArepresented those workers most affected by the regime’s economic policies and those who had long opposed the bureaucratic tendenc
y of the labor movement.12 Led by Raimundo Ongaro—a fervent Catholic and Peronist representative of the print workers—the CGTA called for the creation of a worker-based, democratic, and anticapitalist alliance to oppose Onganía. Although short-lived, this experience served as a point of encounter between the working class and radicalized artists, intellectuals, professionals, and students. The FEN and the UNE, for example, used the CGTA headquarters in Córdoba, Buenos Aires, and Rosario to hold meetings and helped with administrative and press tasks, while they participated in the permanent “worker-student” committee. The identification of the new student groups with this experience was so strong that the “bureaucratic” unionists mocked the CGTA by labeling it “the students’ CGT.”13
In 1968, when the global revolts were unleashed, the Argentine student activists questioned their “status” and university politics alike. Sharing similar perceptions with left-wing students in Mexico and Brazil, the Argentines did not take heed of the notion that their European equivalents also tried to “bridge the gaps” with the working classes, as was evident in the demonstrations in Paris and in the joint occupations of university and factory buildings in Turin.14 Even though from today’s vantage point former young people tie the Mexican Movement or the Argentine May to a global wave of rebellion in which most protagonists were young, in 1968 and 1969 that scope was denied and oftentimes the commonalities rejected.15 In 1968, for example, a popular magazine surveyed Argentine youth about their opinions of the “youth revolt” in Europe and many responded that they did not agree with demands “centered on their problems.” Another survey, seeking to elucidate the circulation of Marcuse’s ideas, showed that “his influence is minimal.” In fact, the interviewees disagreed with Marcuse’s statement regarding the student revolutionary status in societies where the working class had presumably lost its vanguard role. “If that thesis works for Europe, it does not for us,” one student argued. The UNE’s leader was more emphatic: “Marcuse can go to hell.”16 The FEN’s leader clarified that, in Argentina, “those who think that the workers would follow the students are dreaming of Paris, when the revolution is taking place in [the working-class suburb] Avellaneda or in Tucumán.”17 “Our” rebellion would sharply differ from the European: “here” students would always go behind the workers.
In May of 1969, however, when a series of popular revolts erupted in Corrientes, Rosario, and Córdoba, students were in fact the leading force alongside workers and broad segments of the local populations. Unlike the blend of antiauthoritarian, cultural, and political claims that the students in France, Italy, and Germany enacted through a renewed repertoire of collective action, the Argentine students did not expressly deploy generational rhetoric nor did they question received methods of processing authority and power in the educational system or within the family.18 The unifying thread of the Argentine May was political, although articulated around economic and social demands. The intensity of the revolts signaled a deep-seated discontent with a political order that had excluded, since 1955, the representation of the majority forces and that, since 1966, had closed up all political channels. Most immediately, popular unrest responded to the repressive policies upheld by the Onganía regime, dramatically enacted in May. Some exceptions aside, the studies of that May have focused on the revolt in Córdoba, which quickly came to be known as the Cordobazo. As sociologist Francisco Delich noted in his canonical analysis, the violence and decisiveness shown by Cordoba’s workers (the “best paid in the country”) was as unexpected as it was virulent and showed changes in who made up the workers and what their ideology and practices were.19 By studying the Cordobazo through mid-term changes centered on that province, however, most of these studies have overlooked that it comprised the last and most striking link of a chain of popular revolts. Yet through examining how May unfolded in terms of the interaction of popular activism, government reactions, and press coverage, it is apparent that after that May, “youth” and “rebellion” became linked referents.
The beginning of the Argentine May occurred in Corrientes province, at the University of the Northeast (UNNE). Created in 1959, the UNNE was one of the smallest national universities (it had seven thousand students in 1969), and it had been one of only three whose authorities had not opposed the military intervention in 1966. Opposition to the Onganía regime did escalate among the students. In mid-1968, some groups had begun to mobilize against limitacionismo, the attempts to set limits to the enrollments according to student test scores. A Catholic group issued a communiqué denouncing limitacionismo as part of a broader plan set by Rudolph Atcon, a former member of the State Department’s think tank for higher education who visited Argentina on invitation from the government. Catholic students censured Atcon’s arrival because it signified, for them, “a way through which this regime, a local ally to yanqui imperialism, tries to prevent our liberation.”20 In April of 1969, not only the radicalized Catholics but also many other groups joined to oppose a more localized problem: the university administrators had increased the price for meals in the student canteen. The students improvised canteens and meeting places at the CGTA headquarters and in local parishes. In early May, students carried out silent marches after the rector refused to receive them. On May 15 the police imprisoned dozens of students, raided their houses, and shot to death Juan José Cabral, age nineteen.21 The popular anger incited by Cabral’s death was heightened by the untimely response of the minister of interior, who accused the students of “working for international extremists.”22
The events initiated in Corrientes made visible the fact that repression was the only way the regime coped with dissent, which was rampant among broad segments of Argentines; and that the students could effectively forge alliances with the “people.” The student-“people” alliance was particularly successful in Rosario, which was the epicenter of popular revolts between May 17 and May 22. On May 17 around four hundred students met at the canteen of the local university to then march to the city center. One of these groups, composed of two young women and a young man, was followed to the entrance of a shopping gallery. There the police shot to death Alfredo Bello, a twenty-two-year-old law student. The governor and the police chief accused Bello’s group of having threatened the policemen, yet witnesses wrote to newspapers to state that this was not true. Students and workers affiliated with the CGTA agreed to organize a rally on May 21, and they received the support of the local chapters of most unions, professional groups, and business associations.23 On that day, four thousand secondary school and university students took to the streets and were accompanied by workers and other city residents. The police did not allow them to march, and many groups opted for organizing sit-ins. It was at a sit-in where the police shot to death a metalworker named Luis Blanco who was only fifteen. When news about his death spread, the revolt generalized: “at every corner,” a reporter wrote, “homemakers, children, all helped keep bonfires burning.”24 Bonfires and barricades lasted until 2:00 A.M., when the government declared Rosario a “military zone” subject to military justice, including the death penalty for those “resisting authority.” The city was paralyzed when, on May 23, a general strike was declared and people overtly challenged government policy.25
The regime’s pax, which had thus far constituted its main source of legitimacy since it represented itself as a guarantor of social order, had been unequivocally broken, and the students had been the main force initially fueling that crisis. In that context the press tried to uncover whether the revolts were spontaneous or not. When interviewed, the student leaders of UNE and FEN recognized that, in Rosario at least, the rank-and-file students surpassed any directive and were eager to “stone the police.” Bringing the memories of European protests and comparing the two Mays, they rightly pointed out that “there, people did not die in the streets, while here—as in Mexico—people did,” and insisted that “ours is different, we are fighting for, and alongside the people.”26 In fact, in the wake of the massive rebellion in Rosario
, where “the people” had joined in what at first was a student-led protest, most student leaders noted that it had been insufficient. A representative of a Maoist group stated that the students should insert themselves into a “process of liberation led by the workers” if they did not want to be protagonists of “isolated episodes.” A Peronist spokesperson, meanwhile, stated that the students should become involved with the “only national movement that allows for the people’s liberation.”27 Consistent with the motto guiding student activism, the leaders downplayed the significance of any student-led revolt. For them, as for most observers then and now, the Cordobazo was the turning point.
The Cordobazo was distinct in that the labor movement was the force leading the popular revolt. As scholars have shown, the most immediate dynamics driving the workers’ massive involvement were grievances related to working conditions, which created an opening for airing the most diverse grievances within the labor movement.28 After several partial strikes, the workers called for a general strike in the city on May 29. Gathered in massive meetings (of about eight thousand people), the students discussed whether to participate, and if so, how, and on May 29 most went into the streets.29 The usual chronology of the Cordobazo divides the day into three moments. The first moment (until noon) was marked by the presence of unionized workers accompanied by students. Coming largely from the automobile plants in the suburban areas, the workers marched toward the city center in columns. Their leaders were at the front—notably Augusto Tosco, from the Power Workers Union. The police tried to prevent the columns from arriving at the central plaza, and, in doing so, they shot to death a worker named Máximo Mena. The second moment (the afternoon) was the time of generalized rebellion, which involved not only the strike spreading around the city but also the active incorporation of larger segments of the local population. Groups of people battled with the police and set fire to the Development Bank, the Jockey Club, and the Citroen and Xerox stores, among other buildings targeted as belonging to the “oligarchy” or to imperialist businesses. At 5:00 P.M., when the government decided to militarize Córdoba, a third moment began. Most workers abandoned the streets, some of them hiding from the military. The epicenter thus shifted to the student bastions in Barrio Clinicas and Barrio Güemes, which were both barricaded. While the military went house to house, some snipers from the “Santiago Pampillón” commando fired shots throughout the night, intending to distract rather than kill the soldiers. Of the fourteen people who were killed, most were students and workers, and only one was a soldier. Moreover, three hundred and fifty were arrested and five thousand were wounded.30
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