2023-05-27 21:49:00
In it cordobazo were shown for the first time worker and student masses united in the streets repudiating the military dictatorship that began in 1955. Workers and students took over the cities of Rosario, Mendoza, Río Negro, Cipoletti and Tucumán. They demanded free elections, without fraud or proscriptions.
The 62 Peronist Organizations were at the head of the fight until May 29. The social situation in Argentina was an explosion of demands. The Protests in Córdoba became a historical event called “Cordobazo”.
The entire month of May was a chain of conflicts and mobilizations that was dragged by the pressure that had been germinating. On May 14, despite the pickets and repression by the Army and the Federal Police Infantry Corps, the workers met at the Córdoba Sport Club facilities.
In that assembly, Elpidio Torres, leader of the mechanics (Smata), aligned with Augustus Vandor, called to resist the government’s measures and, particularly, to combat the economic policy of Minister Adalbert Krieger Vasena. When leaving the building there were clashes with the police that spread to a large part of the city center and culminated in scuffles, shots and arrests.
50 years after Cordobazo, the worker-student revolt that shook the country
In that historic assembly, the only student leader who spoke was Pascual Bianconi, president of the student union of the Faculty of Law and member of the AUN, a university group that responded to the National Left. There he expressed the importance of the worker-student alliance, the return of peron and active support for CGT fight plan.
while a group of assassins planned the assassination of the leader of the labor movement in the shadows, Augusto Vandor with the 62 Organizations and the UOM was leading the heroic days of 1969 that would lead to the outbreak of the Cordobazo. The popular masses had won the street.
All the groups on the left – without exception – that today claim the Cordobazo, on the eve of it, in the massive student assembly of almost 9,000 students held on the afternoon of May 28 in the Clínicas neighborhood, opposed joining the strike the following day because he was summoned by “the CGT bureaucrats.”
On the student side, the ultra-left called to “go to the neighborhoods.” Only the AUN (National University Association) – which directed the Center for Law Students with the leadership of the student from Catamarca Simón Naked Gómez, and the Student Centers of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, with the presidency of Eduardo González, and of the Faculty of Medicine, with Pascual Bianconi– it was together with thousands of students who kept the repressive forces at bay in Clinics neighborhood.
This is demonstrated by the photographs of the events published by all the press that covered those events: the Naked Gómez, who was arrested and convicted by the Federal “terror” Chamber, serving a 3-year sentence; Pascual Bianconi, who was later elected General Secretary of the FUA; and Eduardo González, all of them militants of the PSIN, Socialist Party of the National Left, whose general secretary was first the metallurgist Manuel Carpio and then Jorge Abelardo Ramos.
The PRT(C) led by Mario Roberto Santucho, head of the ERP – which a few days before the Cordobazo said that “it was suicidal to face the police and other repression organizations empty-handed” – advised against holding mobilizations for a long time , until the masses were armed.
The The left and the ultra-left did not participate in the social struggles that overthrew the oligarchic regime of General Onganía. On the contrary, they sought to ride on them to “sharpen the contradictions.” With its subsequent armed actions and violent conflicts, with the kidnapping of managers or hierarchical employees of factories, they encouraged the military repression against the workers. Definitely, consciously sought to increase repression. The The slogan of Che Guevara’s manual was “to create two, three, many more Vietnams in Latin America.””. These groups argued that “the greater the police or military repression, the conditions for the workers’ revolution increase.” In the same strategic line they maintained that “the worse, the better”. The facts would have to prove otherwise.
the hidden history
Alejo Simó from the UOM, Elpidio Torres from SMATA and Atilio López from UTA were the ones who called the strike and mobilization of May 29, 1969. And these were the unions that began a series of mobilizations, strikes and assemblies that would lead to the heroic days of May in Córdoba.
The anti-peronist press increased the figure of the anti-peronist Agustín Tosco of Luz y Fuerza to relativize the great workers’ power of Peronism, especially that of Elpidio Torres of SMATA and the national CGT of Vandor. Tosco was invited by Torres to join the strike and his commitment was immediate, but the leader of Luz y Fuerza was in no way a promoter of the mobilization.
The CGT –of Ongaro– that later and without any justification, was presented as one of the “engines” of the Cordobazo, was deflating in the same way that it had been born.
On the subject, Lucio Garzón Maceda is conclusive: the Ongaro CGT did not play a decisive role, as did some unions that supported it in Córdoba, such as Luz y Fuerza.
He Cordobazo was the first popular expression of the middle classes together with the labor movement. For the first time in the 20th century, workers and students agreed on a common project: popular sovereignty and the unconditional return of the outlawed General Juan Domingo Perón.
With the triumph of the National Left in the leadership of the FUA (Argentine University Federation) in 1970, the PC lost its university bastion. The direction of the university center will be held by the AUN, which responded to the Socialist Party of the National Left, whose first secretary general was none other than Manuel Carpio, one of the founders of the UOM together with its first secretary general, Ángel Perelman.
Garzón Maceda, then a lawyer for the CGT Córdoba, maintains: “Without exaggeration, in some circumstances (in the Cordobazo), the CGT set the course for the student movement.”
For the first time in its history, the FUA marched alongside the labor movement, claimed October 17, 1945, and demanded the return of Perón. The general sent several letters to the leaders of the National Left congratulating the triumph of the university in the streets. The cultural process of nationalizing the middle classes had been won, for the moment.
“There would not have been a Cordobazo without the planning of the union leadership,” says researcher James Brennan, a leading historian who investigated the 1969 revolt and who maintains that the struggle of workers and students in the city of Córdoba also called for the return of democracy
About the Cordobazo, as in all of Argentina’s official history, there were and are interested concealments. The decisive and preponderant figure was that of Elpidio Torres, general secretary of SMATA, a fundamental ally of UOM Córdoba and Vandor.
Regarding the decisive gravitation of the leader of the Cordovan mechanics, Garzón Maceda explains: The concealment and inaccuracies related to his role between 1959 and 1969 must end, and especially the participation of the general secretary of Smata in the anti-dictatorial union protest of May 29, 1969. There were several factors that allowed the historical deformation.
A few days before the protest on the 29th, groups with poorly digested ideologies publicly expressed their repudiation of the active strike, considering it a “new bureaucratic manoeuvre.” Later, given the importance of the event, those same groups felt compelled to justify their desertion.
They invoked, with certain originality, a pathetic thesis: that of spontaneism, by virtue of which, the union demonstration was not organized or led by the leaders, but was a spontaneous reaction of the crowd.
Neither unions nor leaders. Just individuals and spontaneity. Once democracy was recovered, the academies reiterated the thesis of “spontaneism” –in the mouths of students who became professors–, omitting SMATA and Torres.
It was even alleged that the perpetrators of the 1969 rebellion had been “class leaders”, including those belonging to the Fiat unions, who, as is known, had public gravitation just two years later. Of legalistic unionism, no news. Of Torres, less.
Recognizing the leadership of Elpidio Torres in the Cordobazo implies recognizing the UOM and Augusto Vandor. It is recognizing that neither the left, nor Ongaro, nor the entire ultra-left had anything to do with the Cordobazo, but rather that the latter were actively against it.
After the failure of “entrism” or “infiltration”, Nahuel Moreno’s group founded the PRT, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, which soon divided into the PRT “La Verdad” and the PRT “Combatiente”. The first was led by Moreno and the second by Mario Santucho, who in 1970 gave rise to the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP).
This last group would soon assassinate labor leaders such as the general secretary of the FOTIA of Tucumán, Atilio Santillán, Rogelio Coria, general secretary of the UOCRA, and José Pedro Chirino, UOM union delegate, among many others.
Nahuel Moreno (Hugo Miguel Bressano’s pseudonym) did not participate in the ERP or the armed struggle and eventually founded the Socialist Workers Party (PST) in alliance with Juan Carlos Coral and other leaders who had split from Juan B. Justo’s Socialist Party.
No armed organization participated in the Cordobazo. Santucho and his group did not support those days. The guerrilla leader Héctor Jouvet of the EGP (People’s Guerrilla Army), who in the years 1963-64 fought in Salta with Jorge Ricardo Masetti and who at that time was detained in the Salta Penitentiary Jail, says that: “What impacted the most was the Cordobazo. Firstly, because I didn’t expect it, and secondly, because it exceeded any forecast. It went over all the organizations.”
Ignacio Vélez Carreras is one of the few survivors of the Montoneros group that participated in the kidnapping of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. Coming from a traditional Cordovan family (with several members judges and lawyers), conservative and Catholic, he was one of the founders of the armed group.
His reflections are enlightening: “We were never affiliated (to the Justicialista Party) nor did we participate in its local structures. In reality, we felt a deep contempt for the PJ… The awareness of the group’s manifest destiny was so strong, the decision so clear, that the Cordobazo passed us by”.
Víctor Ramos, author of Men of Steel. Political history of the Metallurgical Workers Union, From Nelson Mandel to INADI and Biography of Manuel Ugarte.
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