VIOLENCE AND LIBERATION
TO THE NEW MAN WHO WILL BE BORN DURING THIS WAR OF LIBERATION
''A man ressurects from death and begins to love life to the point
of risking that life to be able to live it.'' Che
''The marks of violence
won't be erased by goodwill.
Only violence can destroy them.'' J.P. Sartre
MOTHER: ''I dreamed of a son...
...who closed the eyes of his mother.''
REBEL: ''I decided to open the eyes of my son...
...under another sun.'' Aimé Césaire
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
If you would excuse me but my words, my expressions,
because I never went to university, are full of mistakes.
But I have to tell you that it's very important what I saw, suffered.
THE EXECUTIONS OF PATAGONIA
We asked for an increase of our wages.
Back then,the English, who were in command in the south,
asked for back-up to smother the riots.
They let them believe we were
Chilean and Argentine bandits
who were destroying the properties.
They sent coIoneI VareIa to the staff of the army.
We had to give in our arms.
They let us dig trenches,
and when they arrived at the height of our necks,
they started to shoot, killing thousands of peasants,
workers, fathers, real Argentines.
That's what happened in Patagonia.
THE MASSACRES OF THE PEASANTS
The uprising of the Chaco etook place in 1920.
TerribIe, dramatic... I saw
mothers with their children in their arms,
pursued by bullets of the poIice.
ViIIa GuiIIermina, ViIIa AngeIa revolted.
I have no words to describe what they have done then!
THE REPRESSIONS OF THE WORKERS
"La semana trágica" was a really heroic moment.
There were men, workers
behind the barricades,
and also women and youth, fighting the poIice.
They overtook an army regiment...
...and the poIice... and even the firemen,
who had never touched a rifle.
THE STORY OF THE BATTLE OF THE MILITANTS
So, compañeros... All I have told you,
is only a resume of my battle
as a workers militant at the source of a syndicate.
Now I will learn from you.
And I would like you to continue with enthousiasm.
Because the ruin of capitaIism is only a matter of a few years.
LETTERS OF THE COMBATANTS
During the shooting of this film, we asked,
to several comarades their opinion on vioIence and Iiberation.
And here is the first one:
THE TRAP OF LEGITIMACY
You've asked me what we missed to regain power.
I don't know. But I know what we have: ingenuity.
I remember that day, at the beginning of 1956,
when we went looking for Suarez, in his coastal resort...
trying to revive a place that was definitely death.
I remember Suarez, and how he tried to hide his impotence and fear.
We blamed Suarez, but it wasn't entirely his fault.
During 10 years, he had behind him the support of our government.
And suddenly he found himself left with nothing at all.
He had been trained to compromise,
and not for the battle.
How ask more of him than what he could do?
How many battles have we tried?
The story you say in the fiIm just gave you an approximative idea.
We believed that every big mobilisation would have been followed by the return of Perón
and by de regain of power.
Today, thinking of that answer,
The image of Suarez was projected on us.
I had a new feeling of ingenuity
which confirmed that with the people's will
we would impose a new octobre 17th.
The same ingenuity
that moved a lot between us
to have confidence in the legal way.
But did it mean to accept the law, or to accept Iegalised vioIence ?
Isn't the social peace,
one behind the bars,
slavery, and national humiIiation?
Suarez had understood
that his legitimacy, and that of the people, had been defeated...
and he abandoned the battle.
We kept seeing in legality an abstraction and a myth.
We have been the best civil workers...
...and we educated the comrades in that spirit.
At every defeat, we answered with a battle that wasn't
really revolutionary policy.
but resulted in temporary measurements.
The Suarezes of yesterday, hiding their impotence and their fear,
are today, returning in even larger numbers.
Like 10 years ago, you can feel the need for a change.
How to begin a dialogue with the enemy,
knowing that his objective is our destruction?
What does his reasons, his ways matter to us,
if only to know him better
and to destroy his intentions
by destroying him?
Are we ready, the people, the workers, the peronists,
to accept a law that brings us directly to slavery?
I think that we, the descendants them..
who lived and fought with San Martin, Quiroga, PenaIozza and VareIa,
we won't ban them from our memories,
we won't refuse the mandate of so many sacrifices.
your comrade J.M.
IMPUNITY
When the people are excluded of political power,
the crimes of neocoIoniaIism only help total impunity,
they are the law.
The system becomes the only and absolute beholder of vioIence.
The vioIence invades the streets, enters the homes,
and the people's minds.
And if the man resists, he will be hit or killed.
If he gives in, he isn't a man anymore.
The vioIence of the System
is conceived by , muzzle and terror.
It tries to reduce man to a passive thing,
who doesn't make history,
but endures it, like an object.
The vioIence of the System isn't really the repression,
but the fear of it.
The fear of every man of being pursued, marginalized,
the fear of committing those acts
that will permit him to regain his humanity.
''There will be reactionary violence
until it will be defeated by revolutionary violence.
or dictature of the privileged or national freedom'' J.W. Cooke
THE EXECUTIONS OF JUNE 16TH 1956
A military sector, of nationaIist-cathoIic tendance,
revolts against the "gorilla revoIution".
Services of repression, alarmed by the , commotion, wait for the rioters and smother them.
That night, in the waste site of Leon Suarez,
they shot several prisoners, impIied or not.
The comrade TroxIer is one of them.
I am JuIio TroxIer,
one of those who were driven here,at dawn, the 10th of june,
to be shot.
I was lucky,
thanks to a truck accident
and in the dark of the night, I left unharmed.
How did you feel about that experience?
Nobody would have imagined what followed.
We thought they would made us prisoners
because we wanted to march at the Plaza de Mayo,
to recIame Perón and the triumph of the revoIution.
We thought, at the worst, to be locked up a couple of days..
But when we arrived here, and they let us get out of the truck
turning the lights to our backs,
I started to understand that things would turn out bad.
And suddenly the first shot sounded, at the same time as the accident.
So... the desire to survive... and the total chaos...
...that would provoke the death of 5 comrades and one wounded...
...and the escape of many of us, which wasn't easy.
And what have you done after the executions?
I waited there, very near,
until the truck and the car that followed it left.
I went back to the place to see if there were some people alive,
or wounded. Nothing of that, they were all dead, assassinated.
The police had left them on the road.
CarIos Lizaro and the 3 others,
...4 bodies full of bullets...
...on the road that led to the German cIub.
Have you been made a prisoner?
I was a prisoner in november 1957...
because someone gave me in.
They brought me to the Investigating Brigade of San Martin.
And there... I was tortured by the Lanus brigade.
Justice funcionaries participated at the tortures and orgies,
like the judge BigIione, and militaries like Suarez,
the Secretary GeneraI San Emeterio
and various police officers.
In what way did they torture you?
After being undressed
and blindfolded, so I couldn't see the executioners,
they attached you to the table.
Then the electric shocks began,
real orgies for those men
keeping themselves busy with your genitals.
Mine were covered with blood in the end 184 and my mouth as well, my whole lips.
Off course, this is not a pleasant thing to tell,
but live through it is even worse.
What matters me to be understood, is that I was just one of the citizens
who, only for defending an ideal and the Constitution,
has been objected to such treatment.
TroxIer, do you have anything to add?
Sure, despite the executions, and all the tortures,
I have to say that we, the peronists,
will continue the battle until the end.
In that way, we are solidary with our Latinamerican and
African friends. Who are already seeing the results
of the process of liberation from imperiaIism.
And we too,
if we persevere, we will succeed.
THE ENGAGEMENT OF THE INTELLECTUAL
My friends...
The revoIution won't begin until
we have killed the old colonised man who still slumbers in us.
Before everything else, it begins with us.
It won't be defined until we take risks, not by words or ideas,
but by accomplished acts.
The worker who strikes, and risks his work and existence.
The student who puts his carreer at stake. The militant they torture.
And many examples that could keep us from something more important
than a vague geste of soIidarity.
Which is commonly understood by solidarity,
is just a form of piteous charity and satisfies more
those who give than those who receive it.
''We shouldn't only desire
the triumph of the agressed'', said Guevara,
''but join it to its destiny in death, and victory''.
In Latin America, there's no room for neither passivity nor innocence.
Our engagement of national inteIIectuaIs
is different from that of other inteIIectuaIs in the big metropolises.
We can't devote ourselves to the universal culture,
until there's a more important problem resolved than
the universal culture: nationaI freedom!
Every action not essential to the Iiberation,
far from criticizing the system, let it to the others.
The Regime involves in its crimes
all who don't fight them directly.
We should work in order to Iiberate this continent,
this country,the Latin American man,
every one of us, or you're on the side of the enemy.
There won't be any choices in between.
your comrade A.M.
If daily vioIence weren't enough,
the System seeks for more expIicite and unforgivable forms
to maintain its peace, its order, its norms.
THE VICTIMS
In their battle of freedom, our people has many martyrs.
During the last years, hundreds of militans died.
The victims of june 16th, 1955...
Those of the executions in 1956...
The fighters from SaIta...
Some, engraved anonymously...
Others, heightened by the people, like flags...
Some names...
FeIipe VaIIesse, the greatest symboI of this vioIence.
'We, above everyone, we have to understand this process of dehumanization.
More than anyone else, we have to be aware of the price
that is necessary to regain our humanity.'' S. CarmichaeI
THE ANONYMOUS MARTYRS
June 16th 1955,
the planes of the gorillas
terrorize the streets of Buenos Aires.
Torture on individuaI level, or mass murder,
are the natureI consequences of vioIence on a daily base.
They don't deny it, on the contrary, they affirm it.
It's its most revealing synthese.
The System maintains its power only by vioIence...
''It is impossibIe understanding the neocoIoniaIism'', Fanon said,
''without the need to rape, to destroy, to kill''.
But the vioIence of the System coïncides with its self destruction.
To dehumanize the people, the System first of all dehumanizes itself.
To check the vioIence Iimit,
the System is the first one to agonize.
''The only one who has the right to use vioIence,
is the people who wants to free itself.
This vioIence, in the peoples hands, is no violence, but justice.'' Perón.
ACTION AND REVOLUTION
Prepare yourself to fight Prepare your rifle
Prepare your body for the battle.
A comrade of the Urugayan movement Tupamaro
tells in a documentary:
We start from the principle that revoIutionary action itself,
the act to arm yourself, to be prepared,
to accept to act
against the bourgeois order,
implies conscience, organisation and revolutionary conditions.
In countries like Cuba, the principles at the base
of a socialist revoIution are present, confirmed,
without discussion.
It takes little,
to show the way to revolt
and to apply it.
It is the armed battle that accelerates mass movement.
In Cuba and in China, the mass party was born during combat.
Create many Vietnams!
A former Peruvian metal worker told us that the only way
to free ourselves from imperiaIism, is, like Che thought,
to diminish your weak spots and the order them to divise in different forces.
In the order of ''create two, three many Vietnams''
implies the last hope for humanity today.
The Pentagon and its footmen will face an aIternative tragic:
or they observe without doing anything the Latin American revolution,
or they intervene by military force.
Like it was the case in Cuba or the Dominic Republic.
We have to unite and to prepare for the colonial war.
The gueriIIas of VenezueIa, of CoIombia and GuatemaIa;
the mobiIisation of the workers, peasants and students
are the beginning of the big epic that this continent will go through.
Latin America, like Che said , will be the Vietnam of the next decade.
PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE?
The RevoIutionary Peronist Front is shows it solidarity
with the vietnamese people and declares:
The peaceful coexistence is just opium that permits impriaIism
to expIoit humanity with impunity.
There can't be peaceful coexistence with the
deadly aggressiveness of the monopoIy Yankee system,
whose primary cause is the support of war and crime.
For us, the people of the Third World, who hope to finish the under-
deveIopement, poverty and the expIoitation,
There only rests us the revoIutionary war.
The battle to death against the imperiaIist oppressor
and the fight for eternal peace in the world.
But we have to underline that the enemy ran away from several crimescenes,
not because he was on the winning hand,
but on the contrary, because he lost against many people in combat.
They have been defeated at the Bay of the Pigs and they will be in Vietnam.
If 500.000 Marines, the eIite of the american army,
couldn't overcome the small heroic people of Vietnam,
how many miIIions will they need
to face and fight against more than two third of humanity,
700 miIIion Chinese,
the Cubans, the Koreans, the Latin Americans, the sociaIist countries,
the Africans, Ies Arabs, the black Americans
and the progressive forces of the industriaIised countries?
ImperiaIism has no chance at all.
They only have the the nucIeair blackmail.
Iike Mao said: ''It's a tiger of paper.''
"MILLITANT INTERNATIONALISM"
FideI Castro said it clearly:
''The theorem that says that if this generation doesn't win the war,
the next one will,
is a defeatist, inhumane and cowardly theorem.
The marxist-Ieninist and internationaIist principle
wants us to fight not until the last citizen,
of the oppressed country, but until the last citizen of the sociaIist camp.
The miIitant soIidarity of the Latin American people was shown
in the epic révoIutions of BoIivar, San Martin and Sucre.''
HYPOTHESES FOR THE LIBERATION
FinaIIy, we could say
that the Iiberation of every country stays a unique deed, an invention.
Cuba is the best example for us, Argentines and Latin Americans.
The Cuban revolution has proved
that a people can liberate itself if its revolutionary chiefs,
its elite, take part in the history of the people.
Cuba, Vietnam and other people of the third world showed
that no nationaI revoIution would be possibIe
if not accompanied by a social revoIution.
Otherwise said, today more than ever,
the nationaIism of the first independence
integrates the sociaIism of the second one
and the quest to an internationaIism
that permits the total destruction of impériaIism.
ARGENTINA TODAY
As the authors of this notes,
we repeat what we showed in the first part.
Argentina and most of the countries of this continent
are living in a war that hides itself behind
a pseudo-normaIity and pseudo-peace.
A war that reveals itself in daily vioIence:
indeed,four persons die every minute In Latin America,
or 2 miIIion each year.
The essential is to notice this state of war and
to get on each path to test all hypotheses,
with revolutionary energy and deeds.
In short: invent our own revoIution.
The protagonists of this quest, are we. But, even more, it's you.
You, who have the possibility to discuss this images, 366 starting right now, and above all in daily actions.
The only possibility to deveIop this unachieved issue.
The fiIm and its content stays open
for other remarks, testimonies and letters on violence and Iiberation.
who collaborated at the realisation of this film
peasants, workers,
students, inteIIectuaIs and revolutionary militants.
To all of them, we express our gratefulness.