Driving Terror
Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina
Driving Terror tells the story of twenty-four Ford autoworkers in Argentina who were tortured and “disappeared” for their union activism in 1976, miraculously survived, and pursued a decades-long quest for truth and justice. In December 2018, more than four decades after their ordeal, the men won a historic human-rights case against a military commander and two retired Ford Argentina executives who were convicted of crimes against humanity.
The book uses this David-and-Goliath story to explore issues of labor repression and corporate complicity with Argentina’s last military dictatorship as well as to shed light on the enormous obstacles facing victims of such crimes. Its emphasis on working-class activism in the arenas of labor and human rights introduces North American readers to a new narrative of contemporary Argentine history.
The Ford survivors’ story intertwines with the symbolic evolution of the car the men helped build at Ford: the Falcon sedan. The political polarization and violence of the Cold War era transformed the Falcon from a popular family car to a tool of state terror after the coup of 1976, when it became associated with the widespread practice of “disappearance.” Its meaning continued to evolve after the return to democracy, when artists and activists used it as a symbol of military impunity during Argentina’s long-term struggles over justice and memory.
Before the darkened-windowed SUV became the preferred vehicle of the world’s death squads, there was the green Ford Falcon. Karen Robert’s extraordinary Driving Terror tells the story of how Argentina’s anticommunist military region of the 1970s turned an object associated with middle-class pleasure and working-class pride into an instrument of terror. A wonderful, creatively and thoroughly researched book that details how the Cold War was, in places like Argentina, a class war.’—Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
Driving Terror is a groundbreaking social and political history of the Ford Falcon, a vehicle that epitomized mid-twentieth-century promises of prosperity and development and became an enduring symbol of state terror in Argentina. Karen Robert’s fine-grained analysis draws on an impressive range of sources and newly declassified records to reconstruct the contradictory meanings of the Falcon, moving from the factory floor to the corporate board room, to the halls of justice. This is an essential book about a notorious chapter in Latin America’s long Cold War and its legacies.’—Jennifer Adair, author of In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina
Few objects can encapsulate the history of twentieth-century Argentina as perfectly as the Ford Falcon, and Robert uses it effectively as a connecting thread to write a multilayered story of the company, the car, the workers, the military repression of labor, and the search for justice after the fall of the last dictatorship.’—Natalia Milanesio, author of Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina
Karen Robert is an associate professor of history at St. Thomas University, where she teaches courses on Latin American history, world history, research methods, and global automobility. She recently translated Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina, a comprehensive guide to hundreds of memory sites relating to Argentina’s last military dictatorship.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. A Cold War Model T
Chapter One. The Falcon Family
Chapter Two. From Aristocracy to Insurgency
Chapter Three. “It Was Like a War”
Chapter Four. Driving Terror
Chapter Five. Survivors and Citizens
Chapter Six. History, Justice, Memory
Conclusion. Endurance
Notes
References
Index
