From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanisation has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands. ()
David Harvey, 2008

1This chapter summarises the results of doctoral research exploring the history of Buenos Aires’ shantytowns between 1958 and 1983, highlighting the memories and experiences that led to the creation of the three main shantytown social organisations established in these spaces during the period examined. In so doing, we hope to contribute to the corpus of recent studies that emphasise the urban dimension of collective action, focusing especially on the history of informal settlements.1 This topic was formerly a marginal aspect of urban studies, but a number of recent works have started to give shape to an emerging field of new research.

2In this case, the investigation entailed the collection, classification and critical analysis of sources, including political leaflets, resolutions of territorial organisations, local newspapers, the mass media, and official documents. In some cases these sources, collected for over a decade, are taken from public archives, but most are part of the private files of interviewees, such as priests from the shantytowns, lawyers who defended the inhabitants in various circumstances, and slum-dwellers themselves, who were interviewed following the methodological guidelines for oral history analysis.

3Together, these sources allow us to make observations that go beyond the specific political affiliations of each territorial organisation, in order to identify the broader repertory of collective actions carried out by inhabitants in each phase of the period examined. Hence, the proposed perspective is to transcend specific conflicts and to emphasise the daily practices of the anonymous inhabitants who took part in assemblies, chose delegates, searched for communitarian strategies to deal with evictions, and resolved a great number of general problems related to insecure housing and social conditions.

4We also explore the characteristics of the experiences that enabled the creation of shantytown organisations, analysing them on two complementary levels. The first level deals with diachronic transmission, which focuses on the intergenerational transfer of experience. The second level, studies synchronic transmission, identifying the particular ways in which experience acquired in the workplaces was capitalised in the territory in order to obtain improvements for the shantytowns. In this sense the terms adopted in most instances of collective action in the slums are particularly indicative : coordinadoras (coordinators), comisiones (commissions) and cuerpos de delegados (body of delegates). These terms were used to refer to the grassroots organisations in the shantytowns and in the Argentinian working class in general.

5Based on these general considerations, we begin with a brief description of the period that starts in 1958, when the first sectoral organisation representing the inhabitants of Buenos Aires’ shantytowns was established. The Federación de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia (Federation of Shantytowns and Emergency Neighbourhoods), was linked to the Argentinean Communist Party, which allowed Buenos Aires’ shantytown dwellers to put some of their demands on the political agenda, and to establish an active dialogue with the State authorities. This is followed by a brief description of the rise, peak and decline of the Movimiento Villero Peronista (Peronist Shantytown Movement) in the first half of 1970s. In spite of its short lifespan this experience, which was part of the left wing of the Peronist movement, is significant in terms of its national scale and the radical nature of its demands, which broadly transcended the claims for better living conditions in the shantytowns. Finally, the third organisation presented in this framework is the Comisión de Demandantes (Demandants’ Commission), formed in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires during Argentina’s period of dictatorship, 1976-1983. The Comisión de Demandantes, composed of slum-dwellers of different political affiliations, enabled its members to resist the most ambitious and violent attempt at a mass slum eviction in Argentina’s history. Taking all the above into account, our chronological framework starts in 1958, with the creation of the first sectoral organisation in a Buenos Aires shantytown, and ends in 1983, when democracy was restored in Argentina, after which time the shantytowns were repopulated and assumed new characteristics.

6The spatial delimitation was chosen considering the territories where historical contradictions were particularly clear. This is the case for the shantytowns of Buenos Aires located in central areas, such as Villa 31. This informal settlement is located alongside Argentina’s most important port and Buenos Aires’s main railway station, close to the country’s major financial district. Given its strategic location, struggles to occupy Villa 31’s extremely valuable land have always been particularly intense. These struggles were led mainly by workers fighting to remain in their own urban space, and may be understood as an “invisibilised” aspect of the historical tensions for surplus control.

From Isolated Local Affiliation to a Nationwide Organisation

7Argentina underwent significant rural-urban migration starting in the 1930s, but it was towards the mid-twentieth century that the phenomenon became particularly strong. Migration flows had begun with the Great Depression and later intensified due to the consolidation of the industrial process of import-substitution. Against this background, new shantytowns emerged around the workshops and factories in the city of Buenos Aires and its hinterland. As a consequence of the physical proximity of residential and labour spaces, the daily life of shantytown dwellers was closely connected to their work life. For example, in some shantytowns the factory siren, which once indicated the start of working hours, also signalled the start of a new day.2

8Later on, due to the intense growth and increased visibility of Buenos Aires’ shantytowns in the first half of the 1950s, between 1956 and 1957 the government launched its first two mass eviction plans : the Plan de Emergencia and the Plan Integral.3 These plans were created during a dictatorship that called itself the Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution) and which had a deep anti-Peronist bias. Simultaneously, the shantytowns’ inhabitants had created a number of local associations that offered them some form of support, such as recreational clubs, or women’s organisations dealing with childcare issues. In 1958, these isolated associations were unified, giving birth to the first sectoral organisation representing the shantytown dwellers of Buenos Aires : the Federación de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia (FVBE). This was possibly a response to the global identification established by State agents, expressed in the eviction plans of 1956 and 1957, as they treated the dwellers of the different shanty towns as a joint group.

9Although the origins of the FVBE were linked to the Argentinean Communist Party, its structure was based on the cuerpos de delegados and comisiones, grassroots organisations that strongly evoke a radical fraction of the Peronist working class, the so-called Resistencia Peronista.4 There was also a strong connection between the slum-dwellers’ movement and working class organisations, which between 1958 and 1966 was expressed by recurrent joint actions carried out by the FVBE and the main trade union confederation, the Confederación General del Trabajo.

10Besides its links with Communism and being strongly identified with the Peronist working class, the FVBE established a fluent and direct dialogue with the Argentinian President, Arturo Illia, who belonged to another political party, the Unión Cívica Radical del Pueblo (People’s Radical Civic Union). These diverse political affiliations indicate the considerable autonomy that shantytown dwellers were able to achieve throughout the period analysed.

11The dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1966, led by Juan Carlos Onganía, triggered deep structural transformations, such as the mechanization of agriculture and the closure of huge sugar mills in the province of Tucumán. These changes increased the migratory movements of the previous decades and generated intense demographic growth in the shantytowns in the city of Buenos Aires. According to official figures, in 1966 the total population of Buenos Aires’ shantytowns was estimated as 93,554, while in 1976 it had more than doubled to 213,823.5

12Under these circumstances, in 1968 a new eviction plan was launched, the Plan de Erradicación de Villas de Emergencia (PEVE, Plan for the Eradication of Shantytowns), which assumed that precarious housing conditions were a result of the cultural patterns of the shantytowns’ inhabitants. The plan stipulated that the dwellers should be re-educated before they could have access to public social housing. With this aim, small and precarious units called Nucleos Habitacionales Transitorios (Transitory Housing Units) were built by the State. These constructions, with the presence of a permanent military control over the evicted populations, were of such poor quality that shortly after their inauguration they themselves became shantytowns in their own right.

13As a reaction to the PEVE, between 1968 and 1969 shantytown leaders sought support from two new organisations that had emerged during that period. One was the trade union organisation CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA, General Confederation of Labour of the Argentinians), created in 1968 as an offshoot of the Confederación General del Trabajo and which grouped together radical opponents to the military dictatorship. Close to the CGTA, in 1969 the Equipo Pastoral y Obrero de Curas Villeros (Shantytown Priests’ Pastoral Working Team), emerged. This was a group of priests with a strong commitment to the shantytown dwellers movement and its demands for better housing and working conditions. Despite the differences among some of its members, this group had a wide range of ideological influences, such as the Emmaus Movement, Socialism, Radical Peronism, and Liberation Theology.

14By the end of the military period, when the proscription of the Peronist party became less strict, new organisations emerged in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires. On the one hand, the Frente Villero de Liberación Nacional (FVLN, Shantytown National Liberation Front) related to the moderate wing of the Peronist movement. On the other hand, the Movimiento Villero Peronista (MVP, Peronist Shantytown Dwellers’Movement) was associated with the radical political-military organisation, the Montoneros.6

15In 1973, soon after democracy was re-established in Argentina, and during Peron’s third term in government, a new plan to eradicate shantytowns was launched, the Plan Alborada (see the previous chapter). In order to avoid evictions, the Frente Villero de Liberación Nacional joined forces with the Movimiento Villero Peronista (MVP), keeping the latter’s name. Immediately following this unification, the new MVP increased its influence, reaching the national level. Between 1973 and 1974, the members of the MVP held two general congresses in the provinces of Santa Fe and Córdoba respectively. At these national congresses, participants reached a consensus on the general structure of the organisation, establishing its own chain of command, responsibilities, and the duration of terms of office.

16In this context, the leaders of the MVP were able to establish fluent channels of dialogue with the main State agents of the period, and in January 1974, a MVP delegation was invited to the presidential residence for an interview with Perón. At that meeting, the shantytown dwellers expressed their firm opposition to the evictions, and offered an alternative proposal involving the complete urbanisation of their neighbourhoods, which would remain within the city borders. This would start with the shantytown called Villa 31 and included a complete census of the neighbourhood’s population, blueprints and models of how the projected urbanisation would look, and an estimated budget for the entire plan.7 Perón rejected the proposal out of hand and, soon afterwards, the government carried out a violent repression in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires. It was against this background that two notorious murders took place : Alberto Chejolan, an inhabitant of Villa 31, was killed during a demonstration against the eviction plan ; and the death of the priest, Padre Carlos Mugica, the most well-known member of the Equipo Pastoral y Obrero de CurasVilleros, whose pastoral work was linked with Villa 31.

Mass Evictions and the Right to the City

17The military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 24 March 1976 immediately stepped up the level of repression. Before the military coup, most State violence had been the responsibility of the Minister for Social Welfare, José Lopez Rega, who led a death squad called the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. Once the dictatorship was established, clandestine repression assumed a much broader scale as the government “disappeared” around 30,000 people, who were kidnapped, tortured and murdered in secret detention centres across the country.

18In the shantytowns of Buenos Aires, this violence was particularly intense : for instance, in Villa 21-24 all members of the Local Commission were killed soon after the military coup took place.8 The victims of this State violence were not only Argentinian citizens : a well-known case was that of Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, two French nuns who carried out social work in Argentine shantytowns and poor rural communities. Domon and Duquet were kidnapped and taken to the secret detention centre, Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, where around 5,000 people were tortured and murdered, or sent on “death flights”, which meant being thrown alive from airplanes into the ocean, or rivers.9

19While the clandestine repression was taking place, a number of measures were implemented in the city of Buenos Aires in order to increase urban land values while simultaneously expelling the inhabitants with fewer resources. Some of these measures took place after the international oil crisis and the arrival of ‘petrodollars’ in Argentina. In this context, the urban physiognomy of Buenos Aires changed due to a number of pharaonic infrastructure projects which remained largely unfinished, and which accounted for a considerable share of the huge foreign debt acquired under the period of the dictatorship. As a consequence, the urban divide became deeper and the spatial segregation became more dramatic. Furthermore, Argentina was due to host the 1978 football World Cup, and the government tried to conceal the slum neighbourhoods in the cities hosting the matches. Hence, in 1977 a new Shantytown Eradication Plan for the city of Buenos Aires was launched and expelled more than 200,000 inhabitants from its urban boundaries. According to official documents the first three shantytowns evicted were those situated in the northern area of Buenos Aires, which has very valuable land.10

20During the eviction process, shantytown dwellers who were immigrants from the neighbouring countries of Bolivia and Paraguay were not only expelled from the city borders, but also deported from the country en masse. Bolivian citizens were sent back to their country by train in a series of contingents coordinated between the Argentinean dictatorship, led by Jorge Rafael Videla, and the Bolivian dictatorship of Hugo Banzer Suárez. Immigrants from Paraguay received financial aid to ensure they made their own return to Paraguay.

21As a reaction to the Eradication Plan, shantytown dwellers created a new organisation, the Comisión de Demandantes (Commission of Demandants), whose members had differing political affiliations, ranging from Peronism to Communism and Radicalism.11 In a series of trials, this organisation was able to halt the eviction process in five shantytowns in Buenos Aires.12

22Once again, the initiative was taken in Villa 31, where a group of thirty-two families represented by two young lawyers, initiated legal proceedings against the City Hall of Buenos Aires. To do so, they invoked the same municipal ordinance that authorised the eradication of the shantytowns. This stated that before evictions could take place, the City Hall should provide the shantytown inhabitants with the conditions to gain access to proper housing. Hence, the legal strategy used to stop the evictions was not to deny the eradication ordinance, but to claim for the accurate implementation of the norm. In November 1979 the inhabitants of Villa 31 obtained a sentence in their favor, which ordered a stop to the demolition of houses belonging to families taking part in the trial, until the court reached a decision. Immediately, the same legal strategy was replicated in four other shantytowns, with the same results.

23Taking into account the fact that shantytown dwellers had scarce material resources, and considering the extremely violent repression carried out by the dictatorship (1976-1983) how could their inhabitants limit, through a legal strategy, the most ambitious eviction plan ever undertaken in Buenos Aires ? In presenting a possible answer to this question, I highlight three key factors.

24First, alliances with religious and political organisations were, once again, crucial to understanding the success of the strategies adopted by the shantytown inhabitants to remain within the city borders. In particular, most of the priests in the Equipo Pastoral y Obrero de Curas Villeros actively confronted the eviction operators, risking their lives in extremely repressive situations. This confrontation took different forms, such as declarations in the press, collective documents detailing the many kinds of abuse suffered by the population of shantytowns during the eradication process, letters to the military dictators calling on them to stop the violence in the name of Catholic values, and letters to the Vatican, appealing to the Roman Catholic authorities to act on their allegations.

25In most of the trials brought by the Comisión de Demandantes, priests played a vital role as key witnesses, and their churches were used by members of the organisation for their clandestine meetings : in a context of State terrorism in which civilian gatherings were viewed with extreme suspicion, churches were relatively safe places in which to coordinate collective actions. For this purpose, the members of the Comisión would attend the Mass and, immediately afterwards, discuss their strategies with young Communist lawyers, Catholic and atheist inhabitants and, of course, the priests themselves.

26In second place, although State terrorism enabled the City Hall to execute most of its plans to eradicate the shantytowns, the formal implementation of evictions was different from clandestine repression since it was thoroughly regulated and openly publicised. Regarding the regulations, there was an exhaustive body of detailed procedures set out in public documents. There was also an intense press campaign designed to legitimise the evictions, presenting the eradication as one of the most significant achievements of the municipal administration. Against this framework of relative legality and open public status, the shantytowns’ inhabitants found a loophole through which they were able to “leak” their demands in order to avoid being expelled from the city and to maintain the central location of their neighbourhoods. Though this result was only achieved by a small percentage of families, and despite the fact that it did not reach all the affected shantytowns, its qualitative importance lies in the chance of obtaining a legal victory, in an extremely adverse context.

27This victory was possible mainly thanks to the experience of the inhabitants’ previous collective urban actions, and their historical organisations. In particular, the knowledge they gained through the Federación de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia, and Movimiento Villero Peronista was crucial to understanding the outcomes of the trials led by the Comisión de Demandantes. All this experience had been acquired by shantytown dwellers over the previous decades, playing a key role in the daily negotiations and confrontations with State agents in order to upgrade the general living conditions in their neighbourhoods. Relying on this solid experience of negotiation and resistance, forged simultaneously in the shantytowns and in the workplace, they were able to withstand the mass evictions despite an extremely hostile political context, defending their presence within the urban space, in what can be understood as an emblematic struggle to defend the “Right to the City”.

Conclusion

[…] despite the massive repression and physical destruction of thousands of local leaders, the Argentine working class has generated new leaders, organisers and direct action because the neighbourhood, the family and the rank and file in the factories have within themselves the capacity to reproduce themselves. Like Hydra, every time the regime cuts off one head, two take its place. ()
James Petras, 1979

28Towards the mid-twentieth century, the formation of the first instances of collective action in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires coincided with the accelerated growth of informal neighbourhoods within the city. The greater the dimensions of the shantytowns, the greater their perceived threat for the city, giving rise to the State’s first mass eviction plans. As a result, the shantytown dwellers started to self-identify as a specific group with their own demands, and, therefore, created their first sectoral organisation, the Federación de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia.

29The strong leadership of the Federación de Villas during the first half of the 1960s declined after the 1966 coup. From then onwards, the channels of dialogue established between the Federación and the national government were closed and, soon afterwards, a new eviction plan was launched. Although the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1966 and 1973, together with the eviction plan, weakened the Federación, in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires some new instances of representation started to take shape, giving birth to the Movimiento Villero Peronista. This change of leadership meant a marked adjustment in political terms, as it replaced the Communist influence with a Peronist one. However, there was no breakdown in the practice of collective urban action developed by the inhabitants, regarding the ways in which they would negotiate or confront State agents : in spite of the clearly different political affiliation of the two organisations, there was continuity in terms of the experience accumulated by shantytown dwellers.

30For all these reasons, we can suggest that the accumulated experience of shantytown dwellers in terms of collective action from the late 1950s onwards constituted the basis for the subsequent fight for the Right to the City under the 1976-1983 dictatorship. This experience was transmitted diachronically with the intergenerational spread of knowledge, and synchronically when practices originating in the workplace were used to obtain better living conditions in the neighbourhoods. All this gave birth to an organisation that was able to bring Argentina’s last twentieth-century mass shantytown eradication plan to a halt, a plan carried out under the most violent dictatorship in Argentina’s history.