Edward Brudney

The 1976 coup d’état that ushered in the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization) marked the onset of the bloodiest period in modern Argentine history. While the dictatorship’s use of extralegal repression has been a frequent object of study, the “legal” mechanisms through which the military attempted to remake the country’s social, political, and economic orders have received far less attention. This paper draws on the considerable legal corpus created during the military regime that aspired to redefine the labor-capital dynamic, and redefine the parameters of citizenship in Argentina. I argue that these laws can be read as more than a mere mask for violence, but instead indicate the vision that some factions of the Armed Forces held for a new and distinct Argentine citizenry. The policies, decrees, and resolutions that limited collective bargaining and workplace organization, set salaries for public- and private-sector workers, and established the number of hours in a standard workweek (among other things) were not simply restrictive, but also productive (or at least aspirationally productive) of a new praxis of citizenship. Labor law proves an especially rich ground for considering these questions because of the particular history of organized labor in Argentina. Work and citizenship have been closely linked for centuries, but following the deliberate imbrication of the labor and new forms of citizenship under Peronism in the 1940s and 1950s, this relationship took on somewhat exceptional characteristics in Argentina. In the wake of the 1976 coup, the military understood the unmaking (or  perhaps remaking) of this relationship as critical to their refoundational objective. By analyzing both the enactment and enforcement of labor law after 1976, we can begin to take that objective seriously, and thus better understand its long-term implications and legacies, many of which have endured largely unexamined into the present day.

In the aftermath of the 1976 coup which installed the brutal military dictatorship self-styled as the Process of National Reorganization (PRN), the new Minister of Economy José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz publicly stated that his aim would be to dramatically reduce Argentina’s public sector. His plan, however, quickly encountered fierce resistance, not only from organized labor, but also from various factions of the Armed Forces. On the one hand, Martínez de Hoz’s free-market liberalism clashed with long-standing traditions of developmentalism which still enjoyed support within the military. On the other hand, having intervened in various state enterprises, officers and officials were also extremely hesitant to surrender their newly acquired positions of power, which could be leveraged for considerable personal gain.

This struggle between the proto-neoliberal “technocracy” and the legacy of developmentalism within the Armed Forces, together with a persistent tendency towards corruption, consistently undermined the objectives of the PRN. Neither Martínez de Hoz, controlling the Ministry of Economy, nor various military authorities who held other high-ranking positions could advance their agendas. Meanwhile, in the middle, military interventors frequently took advantage of this stalemate to grab what they could, while they could. Using this conflict as the background, this paper argues for the necessity of moving past treatments of Argentina’s most recent military regime as a monolithic entity. Instead, I propose that by focusing on these internal dynamics we can promote a (re)consideration of our understandings of how authoritarian governments work, and how we can make sense of their legacies.

On March 24, 1976, the Argentine Armed Forces deposed President Isabel Perón, citing as justification the breakdown of the nation’s social and political structures, and the recent precipitous economic decline. José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, the Minister of Economy during the first five years of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, took office pledging to rationalize the state sector and dramatically reduce the number of public employees, in an effort to curb rampant inflation and make Argentina competitive in the world market. This project assumed many forms, but despite the continual support of the de facto president, General Jorge Rafael Videla, the so-called plan Martínez de Hoz failed to shrink the public sector in the way he intended.

This paper examines the experiences of workers at the Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (ENTel) in the town of General Pico, in the province of La Pampa. Drawing on archival and ethnographic work in the province, I explore the changes in daily work routines brought about by the advent of the military regime. Unlike their counterparts in the urban centers of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Santa Fe, the ENTel employees in Pico maintained a largely collegial relationship with management during the dictatorship. Even Martínez de Hoz’s efforts had little effect on their daily lives. I argue that this case study offers a significant complementary perspective to research that has focused largely on the experiences of urban laborers, and introduces new and critically important dimensions to our understanding of work during the most recent dictatorship.

This study focuses on the enactment and effects of economic and labor policies during the first four years of Argentina's most recent military dictatorship, the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976-1983). Given the historical importance of work as a fundamental criterion for citizenship and political voice, I contend that the regime sough to redraw the ideological boundaries of the nation and redefine what the role of "the worker" would be for this new Argentina. Despite an extensive historiography on violence during the Proceso, the day-to-day operations of the state remain generally uninvestigated. Concentrating on the military government's new labor laws and economic strategies, I argue that the junta attempted to establish a new praxis of citizenship by restructuring the parameters of the practice of work. This research focuses on the labor conflict at the Mercedes-Benz Argentina factory in González-Catán, in the province of Buenos Aires, between 1975 and 1980. Beginning in October 1975, MBA workers engaged in an ongoing struggle with management and the state over the composition of the plant's internal commission. Prior to the advent of the Proceso in March 1976, workers employed a diverse vocabulary that highlighted their social and political voice. After the coup, and the repression that followed, these same workers had to gradually develop a new language of protest, centered on economic concerns. This thesis suggests that the policies of the military government shaped this transformation, which demonstrated the ambitions and consequences associated with redefining citizenship.