← New Books Network
New Books Network
Karen Robert, "Driving Terror: Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina" (U New Mexico Press, 2025)
01:04:55
Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:02]
A
Well, I was down on my last dollar Then I started saving Cause the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving. So I put my earnings in a high yield account Let the savings compound and the interest mount. I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check. Now time is my friend and not a pain in the neck. And we've got a little cash to rebuild the old deck. Boring money moves make kinda lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. Brilliantly boring since 1865. And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty. Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Karen Robert about her book titled Driving Labor Violence and Justice in Cold War Argentina, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2025. Now, this book is sort of doing two things intertwined throughout, which I think is going to be what our discussion does too. On the one hand, this is a story about 24 Ford, as in the car company auto workers who were in Argentina working and who were organizing through a union. And that didn't go so well for them. They were tortured, they were disappeared. There was decades of trying to get the truth out about this. Court cases, all sorts of things. But of course this wasn't happening in a vacuum because this was also part of at the same time as all sorts of Cold war economics and politics going on that really intertwine the US Argentina and a whole bunch of things. So this is going to be, I think, a really interesting discussion that kind of uses this one really interesting case in and of itself. We could talk about just that. But also the ways in which these bigger themes that might seem sort of only at the highest level are actually really intertwined too. So we obviously have a lot to talk about. Karen, thank you so much for joining me.
- [02:55]
C
Thank you, Miranda. I'm really happy to be here.
- [02:58]
B
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [03:03]
C
Yes, absolutely. So my name is Karen Robert again. I am a professor of Latin American and World History at St. Thomas University, which is a small liberal arts college in New Brunswick, Canada. I did my PhD at the University of Michigan and I have been researching the history of modern Argentina since my PhD in the 1990s. Now, my original research from my PhD had nothing to do with this topic, but when I was living in Buenos Aires for a couple of years in the early 1990s, like many foreigners, I was quite struck by by the overpowering cultural presence of this one automobile, the Ford Falcon sedan. This was a decade after the end of Argentina's last military dictatorship and you couldn't avoid noticing that this one car seemed to provoke incredibly contradictory responses from people in Argentina who for some, it was a terrifying symbol of the military years that had just ended a decade earlier because the Falcon, especially the green Ford Falcon, unmarked sedan with tinted windows, was the emblematic instrument used in thousands of extrajudicial kidnappings or disappearances which were at the core of the military repression. On the other hand, the Ford Falcon dated back in Argentina to the early 1960s and had been a beloved family automobile and the single highest selling car model in the country. So there was this enormous contradiction between these nostalgic and horrific memories. And there were still thousands and thousands of falcons on the road, police cars, taxis, private automobiles. And it wasn't what I was there to research. But like as I said, you can find many short essays and blog posts about this larger than life automobile. And I was intrigued. So I didn't know I was going to write a book at that point, but that would be the earliest germ of the story.
- [05:24]
B
I find so many books start from being intrigued by something and going, hang on, what's going on here, right? And then you start poking around and go, oh wait, this isn't an 800 word blog post. There's actually way more. So that's a great, I think, introduction to our conversation. And it's very much this idea of kind of the emblematicness of the car that I think is worth dwelling on a bit further because you've just described there how it was still an emblem when you were there and it was kind of at the after all of these disappearances and things were happening. But the Ford Falcon has been kind of a key icon or image, I suppose, for. For it seems like from the book, kind of its whole history. So can you tell us about the origins of the Ford Falcon and the extent to which this was kind of always, from the beginning, a quintessential Cold War artifact?
- [06:13]
C
Yes, absolutely. Thank you. So we'll come back maybe to some of the things that got me into the full book project. But once I got interested in trying to piece together the Falcon's broader history in Argentina, other people have written about the Falcon as an icon of this terror. I mean, it's as I describe in the book, it's come up in film and music and art. But I was curious, because I'm a historian, to go back to its origins, you know, what is its origin story? And now the Ford Falcon is a vehicle that's been kind of forgotten in North American car culture because it came out in 1959, but in 1965, it was immediately overshadowed by the Ford Mustang, which became, you know, the hottest Ford vehicle of the, you know, 1960s and 70s. The Mustang was actually a kind of a souped up Ford Falcon. The Falcon was released in the United States in 1959, and it was intended as a kind of economy model that would rival the growing popularity of the Volkswagen Beetle in the United States. So the Falcon is, compared to the big boats with their fins in the 1950s, a turn towards a more modest, economical, a little bit more austere and pragmatic kind of car design. It was actually very successful in its own day in the United States too. And it helped to pull through Ford Motors out of a terrible slump that almost bankrupted the company at the end of World War II. But like I said, it was quickly kind of overshadowed by the Mustang and forgotten. But when it came out in 1959, US car culture was at its ascendant point. And I rely on other scholars of the United States and US Car culture to understand its place, place within that moment. Particularly the cultural historian Cotton Seiler, who has a wonderful book about American car culture with two or three solid chapters on this era. Seelor argues that the national system of interstate and defense highways, which was the biggest public works project in human history and which began in 1956 just before the launch of the Falcon, is best understood as a massive piece of propaganda, Cold War propaganda, not just as, again, a functional system of transportation, but a massive monumental embodiment of ideals associated with U.S. car culture and consumerism, like individual freedom, consumerism, individuality, and the car makers, including Ford, but not exclusively Ford, the big three automakers in the United States, pumped up the promotions of their vehicles and of their own corporations and really branded themselves as the embodiments of American modernity, industrial power, and as a counterpoint to Soviet communism. And if that sounds overdrawn, well, I describe in the book some of the very heavy handed advertising that accompanied the launch of the Falcon that really spelled out these connections. So in its origins, it was meant to be a kind of emblem of what we often call high modernism. Right. This idea of technology and human ingenuity and efficiency as this sort of great achievement of the 1950s. Later on, of course, when it takes on these ominous and grisly associations in 1970s Argentina, the car of course, becomes emblematic of another face of the Cold War, which in Latin America, as in much of the global south, was a time of extreme political polarization and political violence. And so the Falcon comes to represent the sort of high hopes of the mid century and many of the nightmares of the latter part of that Cold War era.
- [10:33]
B
Yeah, just to second that for any listeners. And the advertisements around this and the Cold War messaging agree. Really not subtle.
- [10:41]
C
No, it's very in your face what.
- [10:44]
B
The goal is here. So we're not reading between the lines when talking about the Ford Falcon in the Cold War.
- [10:50]
C
Yes, exactly. It's not an overstretch. I mean, 1950s car advertisements generally had three solid paragraphs of text at the bottom of them.
- [11:01]
B
Yeah, so not. Not having to do a lot of. Yeah, not having to do a lot of extra investigation here to figure that out. It's really very clear thinking then about how this translates to the Argentinian car market. Obviously, the Ford Falcon was designed, as you've told us, to kind of make a splash anywhere. But Argentina did have a car culture before the Ford Falcon entered the market. So what was that culture that the Ford Falcon then came into?
- [11:29]
C
Right, so I should clarify. This book is really written for non specialists on Argentina. It's being published with University of New Mexico Press as part of their Dialogos series, which is meant for general readers and is meant to be accessible enough to undergraduates. So I include some background that sort of spells out this backstory on Ford. Now, Argentina in the early 20th century was actually one of the wealthiest countries in the world because of the boundless fertility of its agricultural economy. So in the early 20th century, in the 1910s and 1920s, car consumption per capita in Argentina was among the highest in the world. Higher than France, higher than Germany. And so Ford actually opened its second international offices in Buenos aires in the 1910s. Now, of course, that's partly because World War I was on, so it couldn't really open a new office in Europe at that time. And it looked to Argentina as the most promising foothold in South America. So the Model T in particular became wildly successful in the 1920s in Argentina. But Ford was not manufacturing cars at that point in Argentina or in Brazil or anywhere else in Latin America. Sales were high enough, though, that they did build an assembly plant in the industrial district of Buenos Aires called La Boca. And these knockdown models of semi assembled Ford, Ford Model Ts would be sent to the port and assembled there. And so Ford had a beloved sort of big presence in Argentine commercial culture dating all the way back to that era. And Argentines were very proud of how motorized their society was in the 1920s, because globally this was a badge of modernity. Not very many countries had anything like the kind of mass motorization that began in the United states in the 1920s. So any other country where cars became ubiquitous could sort of brag that it was on the same road to industrial modernity. So Ford and General Motors, its main rival, set up offices in this early era. They also invested heavily in rival race car teams. And so the Ford and General Motors brands, but I would say particularly Ford, became hugely popular, even for people. Many people in Argentina who could never afford to buy a car could cheer it on on the racetrack. And it really became embedded within Argentine popular culture. And again, other people have written about the significance of Henry Ford, the first and the Model T as a kind of ambassador of American values right back in that 1910s, 1920s period. So when Ford decided to manufacture in Argentina in the late 50s, it was entering a market where the brand was already absolutely beloved by many fans. Now, one thing that people often assume when I tell them that I'm writing about Ford in Argentina, they will often go, oh, right. Because Ford Motors muscled its way into the Argentine economy to pay its workers badly. And that's not actually how it worked. Ford wasn't particularly interested in manufacturing in Argentina because especially by the 1950s, I mean, Argentina had quite a small internal market that Ford could meet just by importing cars into the Argentine market. But there was a great movement in post war Latin America to try to shake off the continent's agricultural economies and to try to modernize. And in Argentina, following trends laid out earlier in Brazil and then also in Mexico, Argentine president Arturo Frondisi in the late 1950s was convinced that the best way to modernize Argentine Argentina's economy and make it more robust was to build its relatively simple industrial economy into a heavy industrial economy. And the cornerstone of that would be automobile manufacturing, because automobile manufacturing would in turn spur steel production and oil production and retail outlets and road building. And that was quite a common goal of sort of modernizing reformers around the world in that era. So when Ford and other international automakers decided to set up factories in Argentina, it wasn't because they were dying to get into the Argentine market. It's because the Frondisi government put in place incentives and tariffs that kind of forced them to do it.
- [16:33]
B
Okay, yeah, that's definitely some very helpful myth busting there and some very clear kind of actors and incentives about how this happened. Are there any other key actors we want to talk about at this point in terms of making this manufacturing happen, or any further details you want to tell us about the kind of incentives and tariffs that were used to make the Ford puppet do what the government wanted?
- [16:56]
C
Yes. So, again, these policies were actually begun in Brazil, and Brazil by the 1950s, had pulled ahead of Argentina as the most motorized country in Latin America because of quite aggressive modernizing and industrialization policies put through by a series of governments. Most relevant is Jusalina Kubitschek, who put in place the automobile policies that Frondisi was more or less copying. And these were tariffs on the imports of fully manufactured vehicles, so and incentives instead to buy parts locally. And so they each of these governments, and then Mexico's as well, put in place sort of escalating tariffs on imported vehicles and escalating pressures for locally manufactured vehicles to have more and more local national content. The idea there being that by bringing forward, and it was Ford, Mercedes Benz, General Motors, Fiat, Volkswagen, several of these automakers were incentivized to build factories. And the goal was again that that would also spur the growth of smaller industries like auto parts manufacturers locally. What I do argue in the book is that what the. The event that really cemented the response of the American auto workers like Ford Motors, I argue, is the Cuban Revolution. Because the Cuban Revolution turned, you know, overturned American governing and capital views of Latin America. Latin America had been kind of ignored since the end of World War II. Latin American leaders like Frondisi and Kubachek in Brazil were very resentful of the fact that the US Was pouring money into the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and yet invested very little in Latin America and still saw it as a place to extract raw materials. So I argue that Henry Ford ii, who was by then president of Ford Motors and other industrial leaders in the United States. And of course the US Government suddenly were jolted awake by the revolutionary victory in Cuba in 1959, which was immediately turned Cuba from the most Americanized economy in Latin America to the least. And so there's a speech that I quote by Henry Ford II speaking to American investors, saying something to the effect of, well, we might not think it makes much sense to build for the Argentines to try to build their own cars, but they want to do it either way. So if we want to be part of the market, we're going to have to meet them halfway.
- [19:47]
B
Hmm. Okay. This is definitely interesting to understand. We've got such a kind of complex net being woven here. Let's add some workers in then to this picture. What was it actually like to work at a Ford manufacturing plant in Argentina.
- [20:04]
C
In the 19, in the post war era during the government of Juan Peron, which lasted from 1946-55, so a long period in the middle of the century. Peron was overthrown in 1955 and Frondisi, who came to power in 58, was the first civilian after Peron. Both of those governments, Peron's and Frondisis, wanted to promote industry and promised workers a greater standard of living through industrial, modern industrial employment. Now there was an influx of foreign investment, particularly under Frondisi, and especially American investment, which was. Had not really been that common in Argentina, which had historically been more oriented towards European markets. But of all the American industrial investments which involved, there were other companies like General Electric and Sylvania. Ford Motors was by far the biggest and as I said, because of its brand recognition, the most prestigious. So there was a ton of excitement among working class Argentines in the sort of industrial suburbs around Buenos Aires about trying to get a job at a place like the Ford Motor, the new Ford Motor plant, which was built beginning in the late 1950s through the early 60s. And that was because, well, like I said, people were already fans of the brand. Also because it was a truly modern manufacturing facility, bigger than most industrial workplaces in Argentina with modern sort of personnel management and training. There was actually the Henry Ford Technical School was opened on the grounds of the factory a few years after it opened as a place to offer specialized training for people who are going to go work in Ford's different factories because they also owned a couple of parts factories. So there was a lot of excitement. Ford was going to be offering higher wages than you could get almost anywhere else. Lots of overtime hours, benefits. And I have, you know, some Firsthand interviews with former Ford workers and family members who talk about the enormous excitement and competition to get into Ford. Because a job at Ford was seen as a guarantee of job security, of social mobility, of hopes for, you know, classic kind of American dream stuff, homeownership, you know, that sort of thing. So there was a great deal of excitement among young working people to be able to get into Ford. Now, the factory, like any automotive factory, Fordist manufacturing, in other words, the manufacturing system basically developed by Henry Ford, the first at Ford Motors in Michigan, was based on fast paced mechanized work. You know, the famous beginnings of the fully integrated assembly line. So it was hard work and it could be extremely dangerous work because of the pace of the assembly line and because you're moving massive pieces of metal and there are stamping machines and it could be extremely dangerous. But while the plant was in its full flush of growth, particularly for that first decade, there was a lot of opportunity to make money to do overtime shifts. And through the 60s, there wasn't much interest in unionizing at the Ford Motor factory. The auto sector, this modern auto sector in general, kind of avoided a lot of the labor conflicts affecting other parts of Argentina's economy, because in its first instance, I would say workers were really thrilled and felt privileged to get those jobs. It would get much dicier by the end of the 60s, and especially the early 1970s.
- [24:05]
B
Yeah, that's a lot of goals for that job to live up to. And kind of. It would make sense that no job is kind of quite that great, but it gets really bad really fast. So how bad are we talking?
- [24:18]
C
So again, an argument that I try to make in the book, because I write this book with a general reader in mind who might not know all the political economy of global automotive manufacturing. I try to explain that, you know, one reason things get so bad in Argentina is because the global automotive Fordist automotive system goes into crisis precisely in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Back basically the. There's so much competition, there's so many automakers churning out so many automobiles since the end of World War II, that by the late 60s and early 70s, they've flooded the markets around the world and they are eating into each other's markets, and it's getting harder and harder for them to keep up their profits. And so there's a couple of places for them to try to. The classic strategies of automakers to try to shore up profits is to lay off workers when sales slump and to get rid of workers permanently by mechanizing. So you get the beginnings of mechanization. And you also get a pattern, and this is not just in Argentina, this is in Europe, this is in North America, of repeated layoffs in the automotive sector as workers are just sent home or whole shifts are cut for a period of time because the factory is. They've just produced too many cars and they're sitting in lots and they're not getting sold. So the whole auto sector around the world. Now you're right that the expectations for that job at Ford were extremely high, but they were high because the promises had been high. Ford executives, political leaders like Frondisi, also the Kennedy administration, through its alliance for Progress, which was a program instituted right after the Cuban Revolution, promising vast investment in Latin America and enormous industrial growth. All of these things had pumped up the expectations around what a job in the auto sector could mean. And so it's not just quixotic that these auto workers at Ford had this kind of overblown expectation. They were brought into the factory in a kind of atmosphere of rhetoric of possibility. But that possibility really started to shrink in the late 60s and early 70s. And what that means on the factory floor in Argentina, or in Turin, Italy, or in Dearborn, Michigan, or. I'm from Canada, Windsor, Ontario, what that means is a collapse of job security, pressures to, you know, get laid off and lose some of that income, or pressures to speed up the assembly line the other way, mechanization, layoffs, or speed up. And that basically means if they speed up the line with the same number of workers, workers are losing out on their per vehicle earnings, the company is driving down real wages trying to produce cars more, more cheaply. And so you find in these auto cities, automotive cities around the. Around. Well, particularly the Americas and Europe at this time, and later we'll see in South Korea as well, there are pitched labor conflicts in the late 60s and early 70s in these automotive cities as workers very tangibly feel their working conditions get a lot worse, faster, more dangerous, less secure. And there's a lot of conflict. And so that plays out in the factories of Argentina's auto sector more broadly, including the Ford factory. But it also plays out, like I said, in France, in Italy, in the United States.
- [28:15]
B
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand the comparative dynamics in terms of the experience of the factory itself. What about what was happening more broadly in Argentina in terms of politics and economics outside the factory?
- [28:29]
C
So this is a. So this is why you can't divorce the economics from the Cold War context. So from, let's say The Cuban Revolution, 1959, through the 60s and early 70s, Latin America, like many parts of the world, again, was engulfed in kind of youth political movements. So there's youth counterculture movements, student activism. There are armed guerrilla movements in different countries of Latin America, many of them inspired by the victory of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. In Cuba, there are also other kinds of nonviolent activism, including a lot of grassroots union organizing, even Catholic organizing, organizing, radicalized priests and nuns, student movements, all kinds of things. So through this late 60s and early 70s, like I said, there's a surge of popular mobilization in country after country. We see it, for instance, in the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 and other movements. There is also a mounting backlash. So I guess the specter of the Cuban Revolution is read in opposite ways by different sectors of Latin American society. Some, particularly young people, see it as inspiring. They see, say, the moral example of someone like Che Guevara as an example of heroic self sacrifice. And they also want to commit themselves to overcoming historic patterns of exploitation and inequality in their societies, sometimes including the take up of weapons. And then there are forces on the right, including the far right, that are horrified by these developments and similarly see violence as the ultimate tool to clamp down on these forces. I don't mean to say that these are equivalent forces of violence, because what happens in the Cold War era is, yes, there are armed guerrilla movements and there are several in Argent. And yes, they commit atrocities. And that's a whole other conversation. What we know, though, on balance, is that the backlash mounted against those movements was massive and largely indiscriminate in that the military backlash, the right wing backlash of violence did not discriminate between people who had taken up arms and, and say, base community Catholic activists, or for instance, people like the workers that I follow at Ford who were not involved in any guerrilla movements at all, who remained sort of legally elected shop stewards within a nationally recognized auto union, but who increasingly got painted as terrorists. I mean, all of this resonates right now with the kind of overheated rhetoric we are seeing around the world. And it was very much the case in early 1970s Argentina. So the kinds of crises that were happening in workplaces, for instance, were not unique to Argentina. They were happening, as I said, in many other countries. But the political culture in Argentina had become so violent, so polarized and so overheated that it just magnified the potential violence associated with these conflicts.
- [32:05]
B
Okay, that's really helpful to understand, I think, the one additional strand we want to bring in here is maybe anything else around kind of wider Cold War politics we want to bring back in to understanding these disputes and what they meant?
- [32:23]
C
Sure. So obviously the United States is not the only, but a major player in these dynamics in Latin America. Now there's been some wonderful recent books and things coming out soon that are challenging a little bit of a US centric narrative. I know Kirsten Weld at Harvard is working on, for instance, Spanish influences on the hard right in Latin America. I also just read a review of a book that looks at Brazil's involvement in the coup in, in Chile. So it's not all the United States, but you cannot subtract US interests, both overt and covert, from these dynamics in Latin America. So as I mentioned, in the early Cold War, in the early aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration suddenly launched this ambitious plans for this alliance for progress and promised Latin Americans, oh, you don't need to think about revolution because we're going to bring you the prosperity of capitalism. But again, those claims were overblown. There wasn't much delivered. It was really quixotic. They claimed, I think Kennedy claimed Latin America was going to experience 100 years of development in a decade. And that obviously didn't pan out. So the US became pretty quickly turned away from the idea of development and more towards the idea of security. And the key doctrine underpinning U.S. cold War policy after the Cuban Revolution is a doctrine called National Security Doctrine. And that meant basically that doctrine stated that in the global Cold War competition, the United States would take the lead in as a nuclear power in holding off Soviet attacks on the Americas. So the Americans told the Latin American countries, including their armed forces, we will handle any external threats through our nuclear arsenal. Your job is to seek out internal threats. And what happened was a huge influx of American training and money into the armed forces of the different Latin American nations, where the armed forces were propped up financially, morally and through training at the School of the Americas, the American military base in Panama, and then later at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the top officers in many countries in Latin America, including Argentina, were trained in counterinsurgency techniques, torture, interrogation, through the School of the Americas. So we know that several of the leading figures in the Argentine dictatorship that took power after 1976 had trained at the School of the Americas. The other force that I mention in the book, because it's directly relevant to the auto sector is the aifld, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which is a funny acronym, you know, funny euphemism. It was created in Mid century as a supposed training institute. It was originally conceived kind of by some policy wonks in Washington as a kind of arm's length institution that would not be a branch of the U.S. government. And they thought, well, what we can do is as the American companies are investing in Latin America, we can try to train Latin American unions in American style business unionism. Very quickly it got taken over by basically the CIA and the afl, CIO and very, very hard anti communist ideologues who took hold of the AIFLD initiative and poured money into the COVID semi covert training of Latin American unionists. The idea was that they would forestall any other kind of revolutionary labor movements by training Latin American activists in, like I said, American business unionism. Basically offering workshops on things like communications and benefits for your workers, but never on how to organize a strike, never on lockdowns, anything like that. In fact, as I quote from some secondary sources in the middle of the book, a lot of the training was how to stamp out any perceived communist influence in the labor movement. The Argentine auto workers union known as SMATAN was infiltrated. The top leadership were trained and closely allied with the aifld. So we have these different ways in which Ford Motor itself and the business community in Buenos Aires was working with the American Embassy, meeting with them regularly to talk about how corporations like Ford could sort of help to foster broad U.S. interests in the country. And then behind the scenes you have the AIFLD training the top leaders of the auto workers union in how to crush dissent from below. I hope that's answers your question.
- [37:58]
B
That definitely answers my question. I mean, we've got the CIA thrown in, so we've definitely, you know, got some bingo on the Cold War elements that we're talking about. What does this then mean for kind of perceptions of everyday people driving Ford Falcons, walking down the street and seeing Ford Falcons? Like all of these threads are clearly coming together kind of in the context of the factory. If we go back to the discussion we were having earlier about the Ford Falcon as an emblem, what did it mean for that?
- [38:29]
C
So as I said, in the 1960s, Ford poured a fortune into advert. I mean by Argentine standards of fortune into advertising the Falcon, Ford outspent all of its rivals in its advertising budget in Argentina, not only running print and television ads, but they actually created a weekly television program called the Falcon Family, which was modeled on shows like the Dick Van Dyke show and Leave it to Beaver, where the car didn't even appear in the show, although it was bookended by long advertisements. But the show sort of associated the car with these squeaky clean, middle class, conservative values, much like those emblematic shows of the 1950s in the United States. So in the 1960s, as I said, it was considered a car associated with respectable families. It was relatively expensive in the Argentine market, even though it had been built as an economy car in the US because purchasing power was a lot less. It was a car that was considered fairly big in Argentina. It was favored by doctors and professionals, but it was also sold as police patrol cars. And that was true in the United States as well. So Ford had a contract with the Argentine government predating the dictatorship for the supply of trucks and sedans. So the car had this kind of apolitical consumerist identity through the 60s, in the early 70s, before the coup. In the lead up to the coup, as I said, there is a great deal of political violence in Argentina. There are two main armed left wing guerrilla groups that really emerge, as in the public eye, especially around 1973, 74. One is called the Montoneros. I'm not going to get into this detail unless you have another question about it. And the other is the arp. Then there are splinter groups. So there are armed terrorist attacks on the left happening in especially the Monteneros tended to be an urban guerrilla movement. The more rural. Then there were right wing paramilitary groups, particularly a group called the Argentine Anti Communist alliance emerged in 1974 and started assassinating people on the left. They actually print published hit lists in a magazine that was sold in ordinary newsstands. And people on the left started to flee the country even two years before the coup. And the AAA death squad started using Ford Falcons in their operations in 1974 and 75. So even before the coup, these dull green Ford Falcons with no markings, so not police cars, not cars with any police insignia on them, became associated with these frightening kidnappings and assassinations. But when the military took power on March 24, 1976, the AAA was kind of folded into the security forces and the Ford Falcon became the most commonly used, not the exclusive, but the most commonly used vehicle in thousands of such kidnapping operations or disappearances. Generally, what would happen is someone who is being targeted as a so called subversive or enemy of the people would be attacked either at home, in their workplace, sometimes on the street, by unidentified assailants. Men without uniforms, driving again unmarked civilian cars would grab them out of their homes or off the street, bundle them into the back of the car, sometimes into the trunk, sometimes the floor of the back seat, hood them and then drive them off to a secret detention facility. After the dictatorship ended, human rights investigations revealed that hundreds of such secret detention centers, people in Argentina call them clandestine detention centers, existed across the country. So the military quickly used some of their own facilities, you know, military bases. Sometimes they seized private properties and these secret detention facilities, sometimes they were in homes, what looked like family homes were across the country, but particularly concentrated in urban areas. And people were taken there, tortured, interrogated, most of them killed in secret. And when their family members tried to get information about what had happened to them by approaching the police, military officials going to hospitals and morgues, they were met with a wall of silence. So there was no habeas corpus. All those kinds of basic constitutional guarantees disappeared. And it left a very frightened and paralyzed civilian population. And so the car very quickly transformed in its meaning for anyone who was touched directly or indirectly by these kinds of attacks. People who may not have suffered directly, but witnessed one of these kidnapping operations. And as I show in the book, it just almost immediately it just became common knowledge that a green Ford Falcon, especially an unmarked green Ford Falcon, could mean, you know, death.
- [44:14]
B
And is this what happened to the 24 workers from the Ford factory itself, this pattern you've described of the kidnapping and the silence around it and the torture and then the families not knowing anything?
- [44:25]
C
Yes. So one thing that's quite striking about what happened at the Ford Motor Company, we now know from research that's been undertaken over the last 25 years that there was actually a broad attack on industrial labor and particularly low level union activists like the men that I follow from Ford, in other words, shop stewards, factory level activists. And there was a sweep across the country. Attacks on the Ford Motor plant, General Motors, Renault, Fiat, different steelworks, different shipyards, the Ledesma shop, sugar refinery, most of the major industrial facilities in the country saw their key union organizers attacked. What was particularly unique at Ford was the attacks began the day of the coup. Now that's quite remarkable because for instance, if you compare Ford with Mercedes Benz, where there was a brutal attack on the key labor organizers that didn't happen till 1978 at Mercedes Benz. And in fact, the Mercedes Benz workers had been far more radical in their organizing than the workers at Ford Motors Mercedes they had actually broken with the national union, had sort of elected more radical left wing delegates. That hadn't happened at the Ford factory. The men that I follow, the 24 men who were disappeared, who were union activists, started being taken away the day of the coup. And the sweep was over within the first Couple of months, six weeks even, I think. Now, what is also somewhat unique is about half of these men were seized outside of the factory from their homes by these unidentified assailants who showed up carrying their Ford personnel files with their photographs, which they had obtained from Ford. And they had their home addresses from their Ford personnel files. So about half of them were kidnapped in from their homes or yes, mostly outside the factory. The other half, including my main protagonist, Pedro Trani, who is the real leader of the group for many years, they were kidnapped right off the assembly line, right on the grounds of the factory, in full view of their foremen and their supervisors. And Pedro and another, I think 12 were actually not only seized in the factory, they were hooded. They were. Their hands were tied with wire. They were paraded up and down the assembly line to frighten their co workers. And they were detained and tortured within the grounds of the factory itself in kind of a barbecue shelter. There was a soccer field on the grounds and there were these kind of picnic shelters. And the military kind of turned one of these into a makeshift jail. And they were detained there and tortured before being transferred in Ford Falcons and Ford trucks provided by the company to two different police stations where they were then held as disappeared for several weeks, in the sense that their family members even got word through rumors that they might be there. And. But the officials would never admit that they were being held there. And that lasted for about two months. And then the men were gradually moved into the sort of. They were recognized as political prisoners and moved into more standard prisons where they were held. In total, they were held for about a year.
- [48:12]
B
Okay, that's a very extreme year for them to experience.
- [48:17]
C
Yes, they were completely taken aback. It did not. Even within the context of the violence and chaos in Argentina, it never occurred to them that they would be targeted because again, they saw themselves as mainstream union organizers within a legally recognized system of national labor unions.
- [48:38]
B
And was this how the public saw this as well, when it eventually came to public attention?
- [48:44]
C
Well, the public doesn't seem to have been aware really, that this was happening. Now, first of all, you have to understand there was widespread censorship, so the newspapers were not allowed to cover any of this. The only paper that broke those rules for a while was the English language Buenos Aires Herald, because its editor was British born and felt he had a bit more safety. His name was Robert Cox. He eventually left Argentina, though, so it was very hard to get news of what was happening. But also, these factories are in the outskirts of Buenos Aires and the outskirts of other industrial Cities like Cordoba and Rosario pretty far from middle class people. And the experience as word started to spread among people about these kidnappings, about the kinds of disappearances that were happening more broadly, there was a climate of fear and blame, which has been well documented. So there was a. There were people who just accepted that this was a necessary evil. And there's common phrase in Argentina por algo serra, like, oh well, if the neighbor's teenage daughter was taken away, well, there must have been a reason. There must have been a reason. So there was a certain significant sector of Argentine society that just didn't want to know what was happening. But even for those who were attentive and were trying to figure out what was happening, many middle class people in the downtown of Buenos Aires assumed that the people being targeted were mostly students, university students, middle class people. And they, the stories they heard tended to be about individual attacks, people being isolated and taken off the street or taken out of their homes. What was happening in industrial neighborhoods and workplaces like Ford were mass roundups. And that was also happening, I should say, in some working class neighborhoods. A colleague and friend of mine, Lindsay Dubois, has published a book a number of years ago with the University of Toronto Press about working. She's an anthropologist, about a working class neighborhood in Matanzas where she did field work. And again, whole swaths of local community organizers were taken away. But there was not much understanding that this about the scale of working class victims. Later on, reports and investigations suggested that roughly a third of the victims of disappearance were probably people like my, my, the auto workers that I write about in this book. So grassroots labor organizers in one of these industrial workplaces. But there was not much understanding of that.
- [51:32]
B
Eventually there is though, right? This becomes a big court case eventually.
- [51:37]
C
It takes a heck of a long time. So if we go back to the question you first asked about, like where did I come up with this idea? I told you about my. The intrigue, the curiosity about the falcon. But it was all, it all felt very abstract in the 90s to me. And even the early 2000s, I could see that the falcon still resonated because there were artworks as I mentioned coming out. But I was like, well, how do you tell. It's still not much for a book. It's quite abstract. And then In, I think 2004, a colleague sent me a BBC story to tell me about these 24 auto workers who ultimately survived their year in detention and who after the transition to democracy in 1983, started asking tough questions and demanding some kind of judicial redress for what they'd gone through in 1976. Now, by 2004, they were trying to launch a case against Ford Motor, not just against military authorities, but against Ford Motors Argentina, for the company's role in and collaboration in their disappearances and torture. And that started to make international news. Now, it took them until 2018. So from 2004 to 2018, they tried multiple avenues, legal avenues, to try to get their case heard. But In December of 2018, they won a globally significant case, not just significant in Argentina, but globally significant, when a federal criminal court, the Federal Criminal Court of San Martin in Argentina, found two of their former bosses, two former executives at Fort Argentina and one military commander guilty of crimes against humanity for their detentions and torture. This was a landmark decision against representatives of this major multinational corporation. But it took years, years of dogged work to achieve.
- [54:00]
B
And, of course, this brings all of this history sort of out of the shadows and allows sort of all of these meanings that you mentioned right at the beginning to be attached kind of in layers to the Ford Falcon. So, coming sort of full circle to where we started, is there anything further we should understand about how this particular piece of repressive technology, piece of modernity, piece of Cold War politics, has been discussed and depicted in more recent Argentinian culture?
- [54:31]
C
Yeah, well, I wonder how long people are going to manage to trot these out, because. So Ford Argentina continued to manufacture The Falcon until 1991, so much longer than in the US where it ended in 1970, because it was just superseded by the Mustang. So in the aftermath. So in Argentina, and I don't think we have time to go into all the details here, but I encourage people to look into it with my book and other books. Argentina set amazing standards globally in human rights prosecutions in the period after the fall of the military. Now, the military fell from power in disgrace in 1983, not only because of the human rights violations, but also because they'd wildly mismanaged the economy, and then they had foolishly gone to war against Britain in the Falkland malvinas war of 1982. And those three things basically took away any legitimacy they had claimed, and they were swept from power. And because they had so fully lost their authority, they were the first and virtually only military dictatorship in Latin America to face prosecution, investigations and prosecution. So I won't go into all the details about those prosecutions. Maybe we can talk a little bit about how Ford fits in the broader picture. But as the dictatorship retreated from power and Argentina held democratic elections in late 1980, 3 tons of exiles came back to the country. People threw off censorship and there was an enormous flourishing of activism, of art, dance, film, theater, just a flourishing of culture, as often happens in these moments, sort of post transition. And very quickly, the Ford Falcon came out as a kind of classic trope within these broader cultural debates over memory and justice. And so I analyze various examples of photo essays, songs, sculptures and so on that are produced from 83 through the 90s and into the early 2000s. So artists who are preoccupied with issues of memory and justice often use the falcon as, you know, a symbol of terror, of military impunity, of police impunity. But there are counter memories and counter representations that also emerge. And there's two kinds on, I guess a more benign. A more benign example would be a flourishing of falcon Fan clubs after 1991, when the car was no longer produced. So in the 1990s, as Falcon Manufacturing ended, falcon fans, and they're not necessarily fascists or fans of the way the falcon was used by the military, but fans of the car as an embodiment of Argentine manufacturing of the 1960s, they started to form car clubs like you can find around the world. And so there was this counter memory of a nostalgic falcon. Now I had at one point dreamed of doing an extensive oral history component to this project. And I wanted to interview not just the Ford workers and human rights survivors and activists who, but also members of these falcon clubs. And it just became untenable. I live at the wrong end of the planet. It wasn't possible because I would love to delve into more detail about the associations these people still have to those cars. Some of them are sinister, I'm sure of it, but lots of them aren't. So there's that counter memory, not sort of harkening back to a pre dictatorship falcon. And then there is the hard right wing association with the falcon. And the falcon has continued right until today to old, dull, unmarked falcons. Somebody's keeping them going somewhere. And they are regularly trotted out both physically and as digital tropes, as death threats. And that's been happening even right now under the current government of Javier Milei. I was collecting for a while some examples of people sending me memes that they'd received death threat memes with little cartoonish falcons. Falcons have old broken down falcons have been trotted out in right wing parades and demonstrations. So there's these three kind of swirling associations and they, like I said, they still, I mean, there are fewer and fewer falcons on the road at this point. But the image retains its significance. Hmm.
- [59:37]
B
And definitely, I mean, there's. It sounds like there's still aspects of this story that are relevant today and kind of listeners now sort of know to pay attention to, which is really interesting. So is this something you're going to keep working on, or do you have a next project or anything else about your upcoming work that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [59:57]
C
I am not going to work on this anymore. This book took me many, many, many years, partly because of, you know, as I said, I live at the wrong end of the planet for my sources, partly family and financial limitations. So I got it to the point that I was happy with it. I hope people in Argentina will pick up from here. Certainly there's a lot of work being done on the case of the foreign workers. I, in fact, rely partly on research that's already been published in Argentina, more specifically about the labor case itself and about the workers. Now, the next generation of family members has been active in keeping the story alive. There's a series, There's a short documentary film series that's available on YouTube, again focused on the experiences of the workers. What I tried to do with this book was to bring. Bring together the two threads, you know, the falcon, symbolic and political history, and the history of these workers. And the way I try to bring them together at the end is to argue that the workers were violently expunged from Ford's history in Argentina. And over those decades, they fought to get back into the story of Ford and. And to be recognized by Argentine society for. And what they. What they went through and what they achieved. I am not going to work on this more, although I am dedicating myself this year to book promotion and other interviews. Frankly, I'm in the last decade of my career, and I think that my last focus for writing is going to be more related to teaching. I've been teaching undergraduates for 30 years. I teach at a liberal arts college, and I put a lot of passion into my teaching. And I think it's so hard to undertake an archival project at such a distance that I think I can be more realistic and offer more contribution by reflecting on some of what I've learned about teaching and trying to develop some publications around that.
- [61:59]
B
Well, that certainly sounds like a very worthy project, so best of luck.
- [62:03]
C
Thank you. I appreciate the chance to talk about the book.
- [62:06]
B
Well, if anyone wants to learn more about this book, they can, of course. It's titled Driving Terror, Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2025. Karen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [62:21]
C
Thank you. And also if anybody wants to find me, I am on LinkedIn. Thank you very much.
- [62:41]
A
And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music.
- [62:49]
C
Limu Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save.
- [62:57]
B
We save.
- [62:59]
A
That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.