By Maxine Lowy
With hope or with sorrow,
In the fields of Acheral,
I have seen the gentle moon
Kissing the cane fields.
— Atahualpa Yupanqui
Sixty years ago, the “lunita tucumana” —the little moon of Tucumán—entered a long twilight, as though it already knew of the long journey through poverty, sorrow, and
uncertainty that would cast much of Argentina’s northwestern province into shadow. But this week, beginning on August 22, thousands of torches illuminated the sky above the capital, San Miguel de Tucumán, and above many of the province’s small towns.
The events of that August 22, 1966, have never been forgotten. The generations that followed have continued to feel their impact.
Army Commander-in-Chief Juan Carlos Onganía had just installed himself as de facto ruler after overthrowing the constitutional president Arturo Illia—who had cancelled foreign oil contracts—when he decreed the closure of 11 of Tucumán’s 27 sugar mills, in the heart of Argentina’s national sugar industry. Two years earlier, at the Fifth Conference of Chiefs of Staff of the American Armies, Onganía had publicly declared his adherence to the National Security Doctrine. Now, having seized power in a military coup, he became the first Argentine dictator to put that doctrine into practice.
The trucks were loaded with sugar cane. The mills’ crushing machines were full.
Hundreds of sacks of granulated sugar were being filled. Yet the order delivered to the workers was unequivocal: “Stop the machines! We’re closing today.”
From one day to the next, 50,000 workers were thrown out of work, leaving their families without a livelihood. Some 300,000 people saw no alternative but to migrate to Córdoba, Buenos Aires, and other places farther south. With every house left empty, towns that had once teemed with life gradually became ghost towns.
The military regime was not content simply to decree the closures. It sent Federal Police troops to force the sugar complexes to shut down, securing them with padlocks and chains. The workers who had once operated the factories were summoned to dismantle the huge machines that had been their source of employment.
The word ingenio refers to the industrial complexes that process sugar cane, but also to the towns that grew up around them and supplied cheap labor for every stage of sugar production process, from cultivation and harvesting to transforming cane into sugar.
During the harvest season, the populations of these communities would swell with the arrival of migrant laborers, sometimes entire families from other provinces, who had to live in precarious housing for the duration of the harvest.
Almost every aspect of community and human life depended on the company that operated the ingenio: the houses and streets built alongside the tall cane fields, the schools, medical services, sports clubs, shops, post office, and church. All of these were affected when the sugar towns were emptied.
From a Chilean perspective, Tucumán’s ingenios, with their chimneys rising more than thirty meters into the sky, can be compared with the old nitrate camps such as
Humberstone, the mining towns such as Coronel, and the timber complex of Panguipulli. At that time, as in these Chilean production centers, the ingenios were
places of ruthless exploitation: grueling working hours, low wages, exposure to the intense heat of the boilers, and air thick with soot that coated the workers and
penetrated their lungs.
The ingenios were capital-intensive enterprises, and the sugar market rose and fell according to prices established within the international capitalist economy. Known as agro-industrial complexes, they represented some of Argentina’s earliest industrial enterprises, dating back to the nineteenth century. The sugar industry had benefited from federal government subsidies and intervention, and its unions were predominantly Peronist. During Juan Domingo Perón’s first term in office, the owners secured better returns, while sugar workers obtained higher wages and improved living conditions.
Photo Maxine Lowy
To a large extent, the gains achieved by both factory workers and field workers were the result of a powerful union organization: the Federación Obrera Tucumana de la
Industria Azucarera (FOTIA), or Tucumán Federation of Sugar Industry Workers.
Founded in 1944 under the auspices of the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare during Perón’s first term, and in a political climate favorable to its demands, FOTIA
gradually acquired greater independence, although a large proportion of its members remained aligned with Peronism.
After the coup against Perón in 1955, its workers became protagonists of the resistance. Only months after its establishment as a union organization, FOTIA called
the first general strike of workers at 11 sugar mills. In the years that followed, further strikes and labor actions demonstrated FOTIA’s determination and consolidated its organizational strength in the struggle for better working conditions and higher wages.
Overproduction, the decline in international sugar prices, falling corporate profits, and the need to diversify Tucumán’s economy were the official arguments used to justify the closure of the mills. The unstated objective was to break FOTIA. With 100,000 members, it was the fourth-largest union in the country.
The closure of the sugar mills did not stop FOTIA. On the contrary, it propelled the union into closer coordination with militant movements throughout the province: strikes, occupations of sugar mills, attempts to reopen the factories that had been shut down, road barricades, demonstrations alongside students, and communal soup kitchens.
In January 1967, a police bullet killed Hilda Guerrero, who coordinated a community soup kitchen for the families of laid-off workers, further inflaming popular outrage. Then, between November 10 and 13, 1970, field workers and university students—estimated to number between 15,000 and 20,000 people—took over the capital in what became known as the Tucumanazo. It was a social uprising marked by clashes between police forces and demonstrators that spread across a large part of the capital.
The movement against the closure of the sugar mills became a breeding ground for political leaders and other social movements. From the late 1960s onward, guerrilla
detachments even established themselves in the wooded hills above the towns, believing that the desperate conditions and extreme contradictions there were fertile
ground for profound political transformation. [i]
Many FOTIA members and leaders became victims of repression beginning in 1975.
Two FOTIA leaders, Leandro Fote and Benito Romano, had been elected provincial deputies in the 1965 elections. Both became victims of the dictatorship: Romano was
murdered in April 1976; Fote was abducted and forcibly disappeared forever in December 1976.
The closure of the sugar mills was the prelude to what would come in 1975, when Operation Independence brought to Tucumán the state terror that, beginning in March
1976, would spread across the entire territory of Argentina. In 1975, several sugar mill towns along Route 38 south of San Miguel were occupied by the military, and the
facilities of former sugar mills were converted into the first clandestine detention centers. In the thirteen months before the coup, nearly 200 people were abducted and
disappeared permanently in Tucumán, Argentina’s smallest province.
Historians, human rights advocates, and Tucumán’s memory sites maintain that, in order to understand what happened afterward, it is necessary to look back to the
closure of the sugar mills. 1966 was a turning point for FOTIA, for the sugar industry, and for Tucumán.
A few years ago, Bernardo Alonso, a retired neonatologist, returned to Lastenia, the town where he grew up and whose sugar mill was closed in 1966. It was another
August 22, now known as the National Day of Reparation to the People of Tucumán. As this week, a torchlight march was taking place.
Suddenly, a siren began to sound—the same siren that, in the past, had announced an accident at the sugar mill. “All of a sudden, it brought tears to my eyes. It was the same siren I used to hear when I was five years old,” he told this journalist.
Sixty years later, those sirens continue to sound in the memory of Tucumán. And the torches that wind through its towns seem to signal that, although many of the chimneys have long since stopped smoking, the history of those who lived, worked, and fought there is still burning.
CONICET
[i] As early as 1959, the first guerrilla group, the Uturuncos (Peronist Liberation Movement), emerged in Tucumán. In 1967, the Peronist Armed Forces (FAP) established themselves in Taco Ralo, Tucumán, and in 1974, the Compañía de Monte Ramón Rosa Jiménez of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party–People’s Revolutionary Army (PRT-ERP) was established there.
