The Cordobazo, a debate about strategy within the the Argentinean left forty years later In the 1960s

Latin America was, politically speaking, a region of many contrasts. The era of Cardenas, Peron and Getulio Vargas had come to a close. Because of their nationalist tendencies these presidents had often developed a strained relationship with the Imperialist powers. In the best of cases, it was a time marked by Developmentalism. If certain people felt a need to transform the structures of Latin-American countries, it was through a revolution for liberty (rvolution en libert) as the Chilean Christian Democrat President Frei, elected to office in 1965, proclaimed. But elsewhere in Latin America, authoritarian and even dictatorial regimes were the norm: Ren Barrientos ruled Bolivia, where Che Guevara died in 1967; General Humberto Castello led Brazil; and Alfredo Stroessner commanded Paraguay. Moreover, despite its comprehensive defeat at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the US Department of State clearly had not renounced its interventionist ways in April 1965, the Marines landed again in the West Indies, this time in the Dominican Republic. It is in this context that the Cuban tempest, which was still very much a reality, can be seen as crucially significant. To quote Fernand Braudel the Cuban Revolution remains the line of fire, the partition line between the fates of Latin America. The truth is that a series of latent revolutions, outlined as possibilities often poorly organised occur constantly on this huge continent, echoing The Cuban drama (Braudel 497). It may be an exaggeration to say that the masses were constantly thinking of revolution, but what is certain is that thoughts of revolution did occupy the minds of a whole section of the younger, and the wage-earning, population of South America. The Cuban example was central to their thoughts in the sense that the adventures of the small island served to confirm the feasibility of the revolution: for the first time in Latin America, North American imperialism had been defeated, the bourgeoisie had been expropriated and the foundations of socialism had been laid out. Other examples from further afield also lent credence to the idea that revolution was achievable. Frantz Fanons writings on the Algerian revolution were being widely circulated, as were those of Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho-Chi-Minh, who were fighting the Vietnam War. Under the impetus of the Cultural Revolution, Maos writings, which until then had been kept relatively confidential, were beginning to be discussed. What the young generation of militants (who in the 1960s were becoming political) rejected was the official Marxist strategy of the Latin American Communist parties of the time. Until the very end of the 1960s the latter identified themselves more and more closely to what was happening in Cuba. However, in the name of orthodox Marxist theory, they continued to defend a political strategy that was strongly electoral, trade unionist and pacifist. They believed that social transformation required a revolution in two stages, starting with a revolution against the feudal system and

imperialism, which entailed various alliances with the national bourgeoisie . The socialist phase of the revolution could come later. It is this aspect that the organizations that were created to the left of Latin American Communist parties of the time, came to consider with aversion. They saw it as the negation of what they regarded as two of the main lessons of the Cuban Revolution those that Che Guevara had successfully synthesized in two slogans: create one, two, three or more Vietnams and socialist revolution, or caricature of revolution. By distancing themselves from the official Communist parties, or forming in direct opposition to them, these young organizations challenged what continued to serve, ultimately, as the Latin American Communist parties orthodox ideological cover: the issue of the role of the working class and its forms of struggle, as well as the role of the party. Cuba, Vietnam, the Algerian or Chinese Revolution brought back to life what Daniel Bensad has recently renamed the debate on the strategic hypotheses of revolution. Because of the Latin American Communist parties stance (which was dictated by Moscow), the strategic hypothesis of extended popular war (Bensad 105) with its Cuban or Vietnamese variations gained popularity. The extended popular war hypothesis was sometimes coupled, at least formally, to a more classical hypothesis of Insurrectional General Strike, ISG (ibid.)1. On the topic of the subject, other social groups, notably the peasant sector, the urban poor and the most exploited sections of the proletariat, often superseded the classic working class. It was a third-world version of assertions that were popular in Europe and in the United States, of which Herbert Marcuse was one of the main figures. In the capitalist world, Marcuse stated in his Introduction to One-Dimensional man, first published in 1964, that (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) are still the basic classes. However, the capitalist development has altered the structure and function of these two classes in such a way that they no longer appear to be agents of historical transformation (Marcuse, XIII) The role of the most classic form of struggle - the strike - as an instrument for social transformation was
1

Bensad states that the GIS and the EPW encapsulate two types of crisis, two forms of dual power, two ways of resolving the crisis. As far as the insurrectional general strike is concerned, dual power takes a mainly urban form, of the Commune varietynot just the Paris Commune, but also the Petrograd Soviet, the insurrections in Hamburg in 1923, Canton in 1927, Barcelona in 1936. Dual power cannot last long in a concentrated area. Confrontation therefore leads to a rapid resolution, although this may in turn lead to a prolonged confrontation: civil war in Russia, the liberation war in Vietnam after the 1945 insurrection. () In the case of the extended popular war strategy, the issue is one of territorial dual power through liberated and self-administered zones, which can last much longer. Mao understood the conditions for this as early as his 1927 pamphlet Why is it that Red Political Power can Exist in China? and the experience of the Yenan Republic shows how it operates. According to the insurrectionary general strike scenario, the organs of alternative power are socially determined by urban conditions; according to the extended popular war scenario, they are centralized in the (predominantly peasant) peoples army. There are a whole range of variants and intermediary combinations between these two hypotheses in their ideal form. So the Cuban Revolution made the guerrilla foco (focus) the link between the kernel of the rebel army and attempts to organize and call urban general strikes in Havana and Santiago. () The strategic hypothesis of the Argentinean PRT and the MIR in Chile made greater use, at the beginning of the 1970s, of the Vietnamese example of extended popular war (and, in the PRTs case, of a mythic version of the Algerian war of liberation) (Bensad, 105-106).

also contested by the new left with Communist Parties seeing strikes strictly as an economic tool or a means of prodding the national bourgeoisie. Class war came to be seen as war full stop, or as guerrilla war. The principal question, as far as the far left wing was concerned, was whether guerrilla war should be rural, foquista or urban. The nature of the Party was also re-examined. It was above all a Cuban- or Vietnamese-style Party that dominated the thinking of the far left in South America. Even if a formal distinction was made between its political and the military dimensions, the Party liked to characterize itself especially by its voluntarist capacity to intervene, and thus by its military dimension. The situation in Argentina, Ernesto Che Guevaras native country, where the more classic roads to social and political transformation appeared to be completely blocked, the organisation of armed struggle seemed all the more urgent. Juan Carlos Ongania, who had come to power by force in 1966, claimed that he needed to rule the country for the next thirty years in order to apply the precepts of the Argentinean Revolution. Not only did the unionist bureaucracy of the Workers General Confederation collaborate in the putsch but the working class barely reacted to it. In spite of the authoritarian swing of the Argentinean Revolution regime, which rapidly turned against the trade union hierarchies, the proletariat suffered blow after blow. Its reactions were much less important than during the famous era of Peronist Resistance when, in the middle of the fifties, the workers were able to prevent the post-Peron military or democratic governments from becoming stable. Given this context, who could provide the impetus for revolutionary change? No one in the Argentinean extreme left dared deny, even symbolically, the role of the working class - which was one of the pillars of national politics owed to Peronism. But if workers were called upon to play a role in the revolutionary process which the far left wished to establish, it would be above all its most badly exploited constituents, those that traditionally made up the Peronist workers union. Tens of thousands of out of work provincial and rural workers who were forced to migrate to the large cities were now packed in shantytowns which young militants began to visit, in collaboration with the Movement of Priests for the Third World. There were also the sugar cane workers from the Tucumn region who had resisted attempts to restructure the large farming estates since the beginning of the 1960s. Which means of struggle should be adopted? Strikes had certainly to be supported, whenever they occurred, but, above all, a military capacity needed to be established, capable of weakening the dictatorship and prepare the ground for armed struggle. This was the idea that a number of organizations, coming from revolutionary Peronism, Maoists factions of the Communist Party, or from a Trotskyist background, began to put into practice. Even though they were little known and relatively feebly implanted among the working class, some have been remembered by history as the main far left organizations of the following decade. I will focus on the strategic hypotheses of two of these organizations, which were among the most radical

of those which emerged at the time. They were both organic members of the International Trotskyist Movement. The two organizations had merged in 1965, before splitting in February 1968 over the question of how ready Argentina was for armed struggle. On the one hand, there was Mario Santuchos Revolutionary Workers Party - El Combatiente (PRT-EC), which until 1973 was the official section of USEC. The PRT-EC was also known as the PRTERP, taking its name from the Spanish acronym of the Revolutionary Peoples Army. The other organization was Nahuel Morenos Revolutionary Workers Party - La Verdad (PRTLV), who was the USEC sympathizer section in Argentina, and would in 1972 become the Socialist Workers Party (PST). Both therefore belonged to USEC, which, generally-speaking, aligned itself on the GIS strategic hypothesis but also argued at the time for the necessity to urgently reorient part of the movement, notably in Africa and in Latin America, towards the preparation for armed struggle. This was perceived to be the only way forward in a situation which, from an objective point of view, was pre-revolutionary but which, subjectively, was blocked by a ferocious fascist type repression (Coggiola 216). The PRT-LV had a different way of seeing how this policy could be successfully implemented in Argentina and continued to stress, as it did during the schismatic congress of 1968, that the Cuban Revolution marked the start of a process of continental civil war and that the goal for Argentina was the intervention in the defensive struggles of the working class by integrating methods of partial resistance as the only guarantees for victory and union between these fights, the continental revolution and the future of generalized armed struggle. (La Verdad) A few months later, however, the working class was to re-emerge on the political scene in as classic as ever, using its methods and its combative qualities. Moreover, it was unexpectedly radical after years of apparent quiet. Events in such places as Paris, Torino, Warsaw and La Paz marked the beginning of what Xavier Vigna calls the 1968 years . How would the PRT-EC and the PRT-LV react, given their strategic orientation, to the political and historical turning point which was the semi-insurrectional general strike of Crdoba, in May 1969? The strike marked the start of a widespread movement of worker and popular insubordination to which only Rafael Videlas military coup would finally put an end in March 1976. The Cordobazo, May 29th 1969 The social upheaval of May 1969, which the Argentineans call the Cordobazo,2 took the far left organizations - be they revolutionary Peronists, Trotskyists or Maoists - by surprise. They
2

In Argentinean castellano, the intensifying suffix azo serves to stress an action or event of outstanding importance. That is why the semi insurrection of Crdoba in 1969 rapidly became known as the Cordobazo. It was notably followed by the Rosariazo in September 1969, the Choconazo in 1970, the second Cordobazo, or Viborazo in May 1971, and the Mendozinazo in 1972

had to review their strategic hypotheses and the policies that they were preparing. On May 29th the countrys third largest town fell to workers and students who had mobilized in answer to the trade unions nationwide call for a general strike. This strike was meant as a protest against the repression of the student movement. Nevertheless the strike stretched over two days in Cordoba because of the specific demands that were made over working hours in industry, and begins on the eve of the 30th. The semi insurrection of Cordoba proceeded, by virtue of its nature, in a most classic fashion. The main protagonists were relatively well-paid workers, notably in the energy and carmanufacturing sectors, such as those working for the multinationals Renault and Fiat. They were not organised within the metalworkers union, the UOM - the Peronist trade union par excellence - but within SMATA3, the mechanics union, or even in the home made unions of the Italian multinational, SITRAC and SITRAM. 4 The action was also extremely classic, though unexpectedly so, in the Argentinean context of the time, which was characterized by a workers backward surge, as we have seen, as well as union leaders stronghold on their wage earners. In the 1960s the CGT used to routinely mobilize its members in the hope of opening negotiations with those in power and management, but not to put them in difficulty. In May 1969 the call to strike was very widely answered. Workers actively participated by downing their tools in the morning. As they moved towards the town centre, the protesters came up against police and mounted police squadrons who opened fire. The news that Mximo Mena, a young mechanic from IKA-Renault, had been shot dead turned the workers anger into rage. The police were forced back and made to retreat to their barracks. In the town, the workers joined the students and found themselves supported by the population in general, which threw out old items of furniture which would serve, together with overturned cars, for the construction of the barricades. Symbols of foreign multinational companies, as well as those of the dictatorship became targets for the protesters: they burned the buildings of the Citroen concession holder, the Xerox offices, the low ranking officers mess, and attacked public buildings. The trade union leaders had no control over the worker/student uprising. Snipers made their appearance and for the first time since 1955 in a major demonstration, there were no slogans in favour of Perons return. Prosperous ladies noted Anibal Tesoro, a PRT-LV militant who witnessed the events, who every morning would go to the market, that day supplied (young people) with petrol and bottles. At the crossroads of the Rioja Road and La Caada (in the town centre) a group (of protesters) not knowing how to build a barricade, was advised by a 70 years old man of. Office workers were telling anyone who would listen that it is no longer just the Communists
3 4

Sindicato de Mecnicos y Afines del Transporte Automotor, Union of Mechanic workers. Respectively, Sindicato de Trabajadores de Fiat Concord, Workers Union of the Fiat Concord factory, and the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Fiat Materfer, Workers Union of the Fiat Materfer factory.

- its all of us, the whole population, who cant take any more (Gonzlez 140-141). The Cordobazo was taking shape. Order was eventually re-established but only through the intervention of the army. To the list of dead and wounded one needs to add the hundreds of arrests which the army made as it reclaimed, district-by-district, the town, which had been placed under curfew. 5 But the essence lies elsewhere. As Daniel James notes, perhaps most disquieting for the armed forces was the unpredictability, ferocity and uncontrolled nature of the upheaval (James 223). During the events of May, Onganias only asset, the myth of order, went up in smoke (Romero 175). One of the lessons of Cordoba is that Onganias police, Ongania himself and the Economic Minister Krieger Vasena were far from invincible, and this news spread rapidly across the country. The far left, however, failed to draw a coherent lesson from the experience. Building the Popular Revolutionary Army, the position of the PRT-EC The PRT-EC expected the outburst to originate from the most exploited sectors of the rural exploited proletariat and the poor peasantry of the Tucumn hinterland, and not from the Cordobese working class aristocracy. The weakest link in the chain (of Argentinean capitalism) is the North of the country (...). That is what underlines the theses, of what was understood to be the forerunner of the PRT, the FRIP (Revolutionary and Popular Indoamericano Front), in early 1964. The rural proletariat, with its vanguard sugar proletariat, will become the discharger of the Argentinean revolution. (...) In Indo-America, the rural proletariat is the most volatile sector of the working class through its antagonistic nature, making it the irreconcilable enemy of imperialism, through the over-exploitation to which it is subjugated (De Santis 62-64). It is on the contrary, in one of these primary industrial basins that the first social eruption of scale is to take place. More so than the sugar cane workers, the protagonists of the Cordobazo resemble the workers of Peugeot Montbliard, who had managed to sustain a general strike in France, one year earlier, until the 20th of June, or the workers of the Fiat Mirafiori factory in Torino, who from the month of September 1969, would cause the onset of what would become known as the warm Italian autumn. 6 Moreover, the class violence in Cordoba did not wait for small armed groups to create the conditions necessary for its
5

It is generally agreed that twenty protesters were shot dead and 200 injured. Important union leaders such as Augustin Tosco, leader of the energy trade-union, were arrested during the massive army raids. Tosco would be condemned to 8 years in prison. All the militants appeared before a military court. 6 For a comparative vision of the process of the workers insubordination in May 1969, in the car industry in Cordoba and at Fiat Torino, in the beginning of July 1969, see Jean Baptiste Thomas, Lors que mai 68 advient un an plus tard. 29 mai et 3 juillet 1969. Le soulvement de Crdoba et la bataille de Corso Traiano de Turin, in Dissidences, vol V, October 2008, Editions le Bord de leau, p. 124-140.

expression. It was the collective movement of workers and students that created a dynamic that caught the totality of the organisations, including the most radical, off guard. Furthermore, the night of the 29th, the sharpshooters that appeared on the rooftops of the Clnicas district were no more than militants of the armed left that started to use their weapons without any prior instructions from their organisations. Despite this fact, the PRT-EC did not see anything more in the Cordobazo but a simple confirmation of its strategic hypotheses, strongly influenced, as Bensad emphasizes, by the Vietnamese example of extended popular war (and, in the PRTs case, of a mythic version of the Algerian war of liberation (Bensad 105) 7. In the 30th edition of his journal, El Combatiente, published after the events that took place in Cordoba, the party line is clear. Along the pages, the headings of the articles reinterpret what happened in Cordoba in May, and articulate the party orientation: from the miguelitos (kind of bent nails, sown by the workers to puncture the tires of police vehicles, and stop the passage of the mounted police) to the barricades (...) from the barricades to the snipers (...) from snipers to a revolutionary army 8. In the next issue, the instructions for the construction of what is to become the ERP, were announced: join us in the construction of the great revolutionary party, and the peoples army! 9 For the PRT-EC, the surpassing of the political limits of the semi-insurrection primarily went through the constitution of an armed instrument which could guarantee the capacity of a military response from the proletariat in the face of repression, but also to suppress it. The intervention in the factories during this period was conditioned by the necessity of finding workers leaders to join the combat units, and not by a need to form a large mass movement. The ERP apparatus also intervened in external support to the struggles to enforce the balance of power, through spectacular action. It is in this light that one has to view the tragic abduction of Oberdan Sallustro, managing director of Fiat in Argentina, in support of the struggle against the 700 redundancies at Fiat Concord in Cordoba, in 1972. The organisation did not, on a parallel level, abandon the perspective of rural guerrilla. Even before the official founding of the ERP, at the time of the 5th PRT-EC Congress in June 1970, the guerrilleros had started to intervene in the hills of Tucumn. It is at this occasion that Santucho, will get himself arrested for the first time, and consequently liberated by a military commando. As Luis Mattini, former leader of the PRT, underlines, the party continued to be dominated by an idea of a Buenos Aires petit bourgeois and of the proletarian interior of the country; an idea engrained up until the moment of the great general strike of the
7

As Luis Mattini, former leader of the ERP, after the death of Santucho in July 1976, underscores in a very critical way, we began to search (after the split with the Morenists in 1968) for party models, and following the image that the foco adepts had made, in deforming the Cuban experience, we reinterpreted, in our own way, the poorly known trajectory of the Workers Party of Vietnam (Mattini 45). 8 El Combatiente n30, sl (clandestine edition) 11/06/1969. Original consulted at Centro Studi Livio Maitan (CSLM), Rome. 9 El Combatiente n31, sl (clandestine edition), 09/07/1969. Original consulted at CSLM.

Rodrigazo (June and July 1975). This idea coincided perfectly with the new ideas (that came from the direction of the USEC, according to Mattini): the country side (monte) was proletarian, and the city petit bourgeois (Mattini 84). The corollary tot this orientation, is a certain populism, that would underlie the party strategy on a long-term basis. To elaborate, after the Cordobazo, and the semi-insurrection that ensued in Rosario, in September 1969, the militants of this zone became the pioneers of the armed struggle within the PRT-EC. As Mattini underscores, many of these militants and combatants originated, or were born in San Nicols, there where the most important industrial corporation of the country was situated (Acindar), as well as a large number of subcontractors. Nevertheless (these militants) directed all of their efforts in the direction of the University of Rosario, the slums (villas miserias) and above all, Swift (an enormous meat-processing factory). To go to Rosario, they had to pass Villa Constitucin (adjoining San Nicols), which was going to become famous a few years later with the mass workers uprising (during the large antibureaucratic strike of the metal workers, the Villazo of March 1974). But the prejudice existed, that the workers of Villa Constitucin were working-class aristocracy. The meatprocessing industry was already a sector in crisis, and the workers situation was extremely precarious. The working conditions and the wages were worse than at Acindar, and a large number of workers lived in the shantytowns. It involved a social sector that was a lot more explosive than that of the metallurgy, but less lasting, and less reliable (Mattini 49)10. The return to normalcy for the PRT-LV The PRT-LV was equally caught off guard by the outbreak of the events in Cordoba. On a practical level, the schism of 1968 signified, for the Morenists, the loss of the majority of their militants in the province, notably in Cordoba. They were thus incapable of interceding during the Cordobazo. Politically speaking, in spite of the agreements made with Santucho, Moreno had started to revise his own political Castro-Guevarist orientation as off 1967-68. 11 The
10

The armed and populist logic was to remain in command, not only of the PRT-ERP, but also within the minority faction that separated itself in 1973, when Santucho decided to break with the USEC. Bensad testifies in his autobiography that, during a discussion with the militants of the Red Faction of Crdoba, in October 1973, he was incapable of convincing the latter of their erroneous strategy. Convinced that the Algerian FLN had triumphed with a military victory (the Red Faction militants), defended a project of prolonged popular war, more along the lines of the Vietnamese model, than those of the Cuban model. I tried hard to dissuade them, explaining that the Algerian liberation struggle, was well and clearly a political victory, but a military defeat, but they persisted (Bensad 2004 184). In essence the militants of the Red Faction did nothing but radicalise the positions of the USEC, who reaffirmed its pro-guerrilla orientation for Latin America at the X th congress of February 1974. (See: Maitan 299-300 et Coggiola 263) 11 The PRT-LV had taken the time to analyse the tendencies that had manifested themselves on a global level, the year before. In their articles devoted to the international situation of May 1968, the PRT-EC placed a lot more focus on the German student movement than on the events unfolding in Paris. When few lines were devoted to France, the columns of El Combatiente, reiterated near the end of May 1968, the declarations made by Jrg Schlotterer of the SDS underlining the fact that if we want to obtain something, we only dispose of the weapon of brutal and violent, and sometimes even bloody, confrontation, with the forces of order (El

conclusions the PRT-LV drew from the events in Cordoba, radically differed from those of the PRT-EC, and the whole of the armed Argentinean left, which was to deepen the divide between Santuchos organization, and that of Moreno. A number of months before the Cordobazo, the PRT-LV underlined the weakening of the guerrilla process on the Latin-American level, in an article titled The new revolutionary push. The weakening would nevertheless be accompanied by a return of the global workers movement (...) that offers a perspective and methods of struggle that are more comprehensive and rich for the revolutionary movement than the peasant guerrilla (Aguirre 360). The outbreak of the Cordobazo nationalised this definition. Immediately after the events Moreno emphasized, in June 1969, that the semi-insurrection of Cordoba challenged the guerrilla tendencies. Contradicting all that they had prepared, in check with their strategy of popular prolonged struggle, be it rural or urban, the working masses were capable to confront the police and curb, and undermine the army. In fact the people of Cordoba effectively managed to control the city during a number of hours. During these hours (the workers and the students) advanced a great deal more than during the years of guerrilla experience. What occurred was actually quite similar to the general strike of the meatprocessing industry (huelga de la carne), or to the Uruguayan student mobilisations which destabilized the (Uruguayan) regime a considerable amount more than all of the Tupamaro actions put together (Moreno 47). In defining the Cordobazo as a semi-insurrection, Moreno did not only underscore the military limits of the uprising, but also its political limits. In counter-current to the guerrillero tendencies, the PRT-LV stated the necessity, not to create noyaux/nucleus of armed struggle, but two, three, many Crdobas (Aguirre 374). In doing this, the PRT-LV posed itself two questions. On the one hand, the need to structure an alternative control within the workers movement, in order to surpass the manifest political limits of the Cordobazo and of other provincial semi-insurrections that would oscillate the country during the coming years. In correspondence with the combative unions that made their appearance during this period, the PRT-LV concentrated its orientation in the direction of the construction of a Movement of Trade-unionist Class struggle (Movimiento Sindical Clasista). On the more political level, while fighting the prohibition of Peronism by the dictatorship, the
Combatiente n8, sl (clandestine edition), 20/05/1968. Original consulted at CSLM). The year 1968 hence comes to confirm the military hypothesis of the PRT-EC, with the French, German and Italian events illustrating only the geographical extension of the necessary violence, is no longer limited to Latin America. As Rolo Diez, responsible for the intelligence in the PRT-EC, discerns, based on his student recollections, in 1968 the Tupamaros managed to get on the first page of all the newspapers, with the events May (68) in France, functioning as a stimulating experience. (Diez 31). In analysing the French events, the PRT-LV, on the other hand talked of revolution in the developed countries that were not linked to the reveries of the feverish gauchistes, but was instead logically linked to the accumulation of contradictions (...). In the French mirror, the students and the (Argentinean) workers can see their own future (...). The battle is a long way from being won (...) but the revolution in the developed countries has begun. (La Verdad n137, sl (clandestine edition), 03/06/1968. Original consulted at CSLM).

PRT-LV, posed the question of an alternative to Justicialism. Pern effectively constituted a candidate for the channelling of the workers push, in case of a military decision to appeal to democratic elections, in the hope of defusing the crisis, something which would finally take place in March 1973. After a long Castro-Guevarist detour, the return of Morenism to the classic norms of 20th century revolutions, under the influence of the French events of 1968 and the Cordobazo one year later, did not exempt from this a certain number of contradictions, in particular after 1973 and the return to power of Pern. (Aguirre 370-371). Class or People? The Cordobazo developed the template sequence of generalised workers conflicts, marking the opening of revolutionary cycles, or inscribing itself in the process: generalised political strike/complete overspill of the objectives focused on by the leaders at the origin of the movement/spontaneous semi-insurrection. These three stages closely overlapped each other in Cordoba and ventilated themselves around an essentially autonomous development of the workers action (Aguirre 63-68). This was confirmed during the ensuing month with a number of comparable movements in the rest of the country, indicating that Argentina had arrived forthrightly at the cycle of popular workers mobilisations which were to shake, with different rhythms and intensities, the rest of the planet, from the West, to the South, as well as the Eastern Bloc between 1968 and 1981. The strongman of the Argentinean military regime, General Alejandro Lanusse, was not mistaken when he wrote in his Memoirs that: I rapidly understood, during this difficult 29th of May 1969, that something was happening in Argentina, of which I tried to point out the singularity (...) the immediate and underlying causes. But I also started to understand that other elements, previously unheard of, were trying to install themselves on the national political scene (Lanusse 157). These new elements would consist of an extremely vigorous push by the workers activity, over the next several years, that would be translated mostly through the emergence of what would become to be known as clasismo, or trade-unionist class struggle, the workers conflict at Villa Constitucin and the general strike of June-July 1975. The far left organisations, up until then, relatively marginal, were to develop a rapid expansion of their militant influence. As the Argentinean liberal historian, Luis Alberto Romero underlines, the experience of the Cordobazo gave a certain impulse to the currents that, starting from a more classic perspective, had faith in the possibility of mass action, and preferred class over people (Romero 181). The PRT-LV would thus re-interpret its strongly Castro-Guevarist strategic hypotheses of the 1960s. Other organizations, on the other hand, would continue in their strategic hypothesis of PPW, convinced that, by totally or partly

following Pern faced with such an anachronism (Onganas government and the dictatorship), it was impossible to find an other solution, but to prepare oneself in the best way possible, to overturn such a situation, even if this implicated the use of extreme violence (Anguita 574). Without following leftwing Peronism politically, the PRT-EC was to share the same logic, comforted in its practice by the majority orientation of the USEC for Latin America. Nevertheless, confronted with the rise of worker- and mass-conflict, in Bolivia between 1969 and 1971, in Chile between 1970 and 1973 and in Argentina between 1969 and 1976, bourgeoisie and imperialism started to react violently. The Peoples Assembly of Bolivia, the Chilean Industrial Cordones, and the Argentinean Inter-Factory Coordinations of 1975, testify to the increasing loss of control of the traditional political and trade-unionist organisations, faced with phenomena of insubordination and the underlying development of a certain form of workers autonomy. It is this movement that would eventually incite the bourgeoisie and Washington to opt for the coup. In the sprint that would accentuate the two tendencies, uncontrolled insubordination and reaction, the degree of preparation of the political organisations intervening in these processes would come to play a central role. It is in this context that the elaboration of strategic hypotheses in tune with the development of the situation so as to anticipate the tendencies and to develop potentialities became important. In the same frame of reference, the importance as an historian and a militant to draw lessons, surfaces, after the long winter of consciousness (De Michele), in which we found ourselves during the 1980s and 1990s, and from which we have only recenlty found started to detach ourselves. In Argentina, the workers of Zanon, whose factory was expropriated after eight years of struggle and occupation, but also those of Kraft-Foods, who succeeded in forcing the management of the multinational to back down and stop the redundancies at General Pacheco, bear witness to this reality. This article is dedicated to them. Paris, 15/11/2009.