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On March 25th, 1976, one day after the military coup that brought the bloody Argentine dictatorship of General Videla to power, a director at Ford Motor Company´s main production plant summoned the union representatives to a meeting. Guillhermo Gallaraga, the director of labor relations, together with a military official, read out an official declaration calling on workers to forget any union demands. Gallarago went on to add: “All the problems are over, Ford Motor Company in Argentina has become an objective and priority of the military.” Tomas Quintana, a lawyer now representing the workers, described the scene that unfolded over the next few weeks on the Ford Factory floor: “The majority were kidnapped while they were on the production line. They were taken at gunpoint and made to walk by all the other workers so they could see what happened to their union representatives. This created an environment of terror in the workplace which prevented any demands, over salaries, over working conditions, over anything.” Carlos Propato described how on April 13th he was kidnapped by military officials. Alongside four other workers, he was taken to the recreation center. What had once served as a socializing and organizing space for the workers was transformed into one of the many interrogation and torture centers constructed by the new military dictatorship. Carlos was tortured from eleven in the morning until eleven at night. In addition to beatings, which continued from the moment he was seized, he endured the brutal electrical torture devices that had become a signature of the Argentine police and military. Interrogators would apply the electric prod to victims’ genitals, eyes, lips — anywhere to cause the maximum amount of pain and suffering. Propato described how he was electrocuted to the point of having a stroke. The impact on his health continues to this day. When a worker was kidnapped, Ford would immediately send out a termination notice for their “failure to appear” at work. In Propato´s case, his household received the notice while military officials were torturing him inside the Ford plant. Attempts to contest notices with the argument that workers were being held within the plant were rejected by Ford. From the plant detention center Propato was taken to the local police station, where he endured forty days of “daily torture, hunger, and filth. I lost an eye and they broke one of my vertebrae.” Some were released after a few months; in Propato’s case he faced two more years in prison before he was finally released. The ordeal did not end there, as it was almost impossible to find work and he was now disabled as a consequence of the torture. Yet despite torture, imprisonment, and unemployment, he began a long struggle for justice that is just now starting to see results.

Rank-and-File Insurgency After more than forty years, that patient work is finally moving closer to the prosecution of a few of the company officials responsible. It’s the first time in Argentine history that directors of a multinational company will be judged for crimes against humanity. Two company directors, Pedro Müller and Francisco Sibilla, as well as ex-general Santiago Riveros, stand accused of the kidnapping and torture of twenty-four workers. Francisco Sibilla, the company director of security, actively participated in at least one of the torture sessions, suggesting questions to the interrogators. Pedro Muller was the director of manufacturing and second in command in the Ford plant’s corporate hierarchy. The president of the company and the director of labor relations were also both accused, but died before the case could advance. The history of Ford’s active collaboration with the dictatorship is clear. Indisputably, they hosted a military interrogation center on plant property. They provided military officials with employee identification cards and helped the military draw up lists of union activists and leftists. While the case going forward pertains to the twenty-four workers, the crimes committed by the dictatorship and Ford did not end there. While an exact number is difficult to come by, the forced disappearance — murder — of at least five Ford workers has been documented. Ford, like many of the era’s national and multinational businesses, helped to promote, support, and collaborate with military officials in order to exterminate union activists. What took place on the factory floor was quite literally a form of corporate-sponsored terrorism. Through torture, fear, and the very real threat of death at the hands of the dictatorship, Ford succeeded in decimating worker activism and ensuring its own profitability. Workers at Ford, along with others across the country in the 1970s, were protagonists in a powerful rank-and-file workers’ movement. A new wave of organizing had begun around basic issues of worker safety. Those in the chassis department were dying of lead poisoning and lung cancer from toxic fumes on the production line. When they inevitably became too sick to work, the company would fire them and provide barely enough compensation to the families to pay for the funerals. To build rank-and-file organization and fight for even basic health and safety needs, the workers quickly found themselves struggling on two fronts: against the company, and against the leadership of their own union. As Propato recalled in an interview, “the union bureaucracy was one of the greatest traitors that we had in this era.” The government in the lead-up to the coup, that of Isabel Peron, had its strongest support among the leaders of the union bureaucracy. To suppress the Left and secure governability, there was an ever greater expansion of the “Triple A” — the Argentinian Anti-Communist Alliance — which carried out the kidnapping, torture, and assassination of socialist and trade union activists. Worker militants like Propato succeeded in driving the bureaucracy from the shop floor, and a large rank-and-file movement of activists built itself up across the Buenos Aires industrial zones, staking out a position of class independence. Over the course of 1975, this movement coalesced into “coordinating committees,” which united workers across Buenos Aires factories. In April of that year, one of the largest working-class marches in history was organized. Propato recalled how the right to march was secured by seizing a gas truck and declaring to the police that if they attempted to repress the march everyone would go flying across the province. This militant working-class spirit increasingly clashed with government attempts to implement ever more stringent austerity measures. Later that year, rank-and-file discontent forced the unions to call a general strike against the latest austerity measures, in the so-called “Rodrigazo” — named for the disgraced economic minister who proposed the economic reforms. The strike showed definitively that the government of Isabel Peron and her allies in the union bureaucracy were no longer capable of controlling working-class discontent. At high levels of the business and military elite, plans for a military coup were set in motion.