Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In May 1969, a group of metal workers held a rally to protest the
mandatory lengthening of the workweek by four hours. Police inter-
vention angered the workers, who marched into downtown Córdoba to
protest. University students, who were undergoing a process of radical-
ization as well, joined the demonstrations. Several days of protests fol-
lowed, and the police abandoned the downtown area to the protesters.
Xerox and Citroën offices were set on fire, and rioters overturned cars
and broke the windows of downtown businesses. Gradually, the work-
ers withdrew, but the students carried on. Army forces arrived and in
a bloody three-day period fought their way into student and working-
class neighborhoods. In the end, up to 60 people lay dead, hundreds
were wounded, and 1,000 arrested.
The violence of the Córdoba riot, which came to be called the
Cordobazo, shook the nation. The strongman, General Onganía, was
forced to resign within a year and a more conciliatory junta took con-
trol. The Cordobazo emboldened workers and students throughout the
nation to stiffen their resistance and to demand that the military allow
Perón to return to his homeland. Soon the military would contemplate
elections again in order to placate the increasingly radical elements
demanding Perón's return. During this process, university students had
gone from being partisans of the right-wing Catholic Action that had
helped bring down Perón's presidency in 1955 to left-wing guerrillas
fighting to bring “the old man” back in the early 1970s. Argentina did
not lack ironies.
Rise of the Guerrilla Movement
The ongoing malaise gave rise to the radicalization of the country's
middle-class youth, whose employment future looked very bleak. They
were educated and proud of their heritage but ashamed of the politi-
cal and economic ineptitude that clouded their future. The students
at the University of Córdoba had struck a blow against the repressors.
After the Cordobazo, a small cadre of around 200 active combatants in
a dozen or so resistance organizations blossomed into a paramilitary
army of 5,000 guerrilla fighters. The guerrillas announced themselves
with a spectacular symbol of defiance. One group kidnapped General
Aramburu, the retired head of the junta who had “disappeared” the
body of Evita Perón. After interrogating him at a “people's prison” in a
safe house, the guerrillas executed Aramburu and returned his body to
his family. The military now confronted a wholly new set of Peronists,
the middle-class youth.
