(The following article appeared in the September 28 issue of Avanzada Socialista, weekly newspaper of the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST- Socialist Workers party, a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International in Argentina). Juan Carlos Coral was the presidential candidate of the PST in the March and September 1973 elections; he is a prominent lawyer who has defended and advised labor activists in a number of cases. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Taking the revival of guerrilla actions as a pretext, the Peronist government has just imposed a repressive, antilabor law on the country. This law makes it a punishable of fense to hold certain political opinions and does away with the right to strike.
It is typical of the "state security" laws that oligarchic and repressive governments have issued time and again since the beginning of the century in an attempt to hold back the organization of the labor movement and prevent the spread of socialist ideas.
Argentina became acquainted with such laws when the landholding oligarchy was at the height of its political power: In 1902 the oligarchs had to resort to the residency law in order to deport the immigrant activists who had played a decisive role in organizing the first workers parties, trade unions, strikes, and demonstrations.
Later, during the infamous decade, 1 the traitor government of the conservatives, which held office through fraud, imposed similar legislation.
And in the most recent period, the dictatorship of the commanders in chief used them in broadened and perfected form to counteract the rise of the workers movement.
The law that the Peronist government has just passed combines the most repressive features of all the prior laws, adds some new ones, and in general increases all the penalties, making it beyond doubt the most reactionary and antilabor of all the "security" laws the country has seen. - An old English politician confessed a long time ago that the bourgeoisie prefers "to count heads in elections so as to avoid the bother of breaking them." It was precisely by following that prudent tactic that the Argentine bourgeoisie tried to spare itself the trouble of breaking our heads-by means of the simple device of counting seven million Peronist heads. 3
Now, however, less than a year after General Perón came to office, it would seem that such broad popular support- the famous plebiscite - is no longer enough to enable the bourgeoisie to run the government by peaceful methods. The Peronist government has had to resort to the same legal instruments used by all dictatorships and oligarchies in the attempt to legitimize repression. Now they will have to take the trouble to "legally" break the same heads that they counted by the millions last September 23.
Law 4144, passed in 1902, was the first of a long series of repressive measures leading up to the present State Security Law. The government of that period, a typical representative of landholding and cattle interests, had become alarmed by a series of strikes and labor conflicts over the demand for one day off a week and an eight-hour day. That was subversion! And since a considerable number of the activists and leaders of those mobilizations were socialist and anarchist workers who had immigrated from Europe, Law 4144 — the so-called residency law- authorized the government to deport these "outside agitators" who were trying to change the Argentine "way of doing things." They were deported without any trial or right to defend themselves.
This "way of doing things" consisted of working seven days a week for an unlimited number of hours, with no labor laws, and for whatever wages the boss was willing to pay. The provisions of this law (which has since been repealed and was once declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court) have now been revived in Article 10 of the new Peronist law.
Then came the 1910 law for the "defense of social order" that followed the terrorist attack against President Figueroa Alcorta.
In 1934, the notorious "thoughtcontrol" bill proposed by conservative Senator Matias Sánchez Sorondo was passed, making it a punishable crime merely to hold certain ideas.
Then we can list as direct precedents - Decree 2985 of April 13, 1961, signed by Arturo Frondizi; Decree 4214 of May 24, 1963, passed under the de facto government of Guido; and finally, Law 17401 imposed by Ongania and extended by Law 18234 in 1969, which was the government's repressive response to the May mobilizations in Córdoba.
The law now in force in our contry sets a stiff penalty of three to eight years in prison for a new crime that is defined in the following way: "Any attempt or recommendation, by whatever means, to alter or destroy the institutional order and social peace of the nation by means not sanctioned in the national constitution for the purpose of achieving one's ideological aims." This confused, ambiguous, and dangerous provision has been passed by the same legislators who tolerated and endorsed the "means used" by Colonel Navarro to "destroy the institutional order" in Córdoba, by "means not sanctioned in the national constitution. "4
This provision makes it a crime to hold certain opinions. It not only violates the national constitution, which guarantees the right of all who live in the country to publish their ideas in the press without prior censorship (Article 14), and which forbids the national congress from issuing laws that restrict the freedom of publication (Article 32). It also violates an elementary principle of criminal law that requires a precise definition of punishable acts. Furthermore, it violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which maintains:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
As with the previous "security" laws, ideas are considered subversive acts coming within the scope of the penal code. A thought is punished as if it were an accomplished deed, when in reality the only things that can be punished are acts-never ideas, because in holding certain opinions a person assumes responsibility for their logic and coherence, not for the way they are viewed in the penal code. To establish any other criterion would mean a return to medieval law, incorporating the crime of heresy into the penal codes.
This is made even worse by the increased penalties. The reactionary Sánchez Sorondo bill in the 1930s set penalties of six months to five years. But, at the same time as broadening the definition of the "crime," the Peronist law calls for "three to eight years."
The antilabor essence of the new law appears most clearly in Article 5, which deals with the crime of going out on strike: "After a competent authority has ruled a strike illegal in the case of a labor dispute, anyone who incites persons to fail to comply with the obligations conferred by such a decision will be subject to a prison term of one to three years." Since strikes are invariably declared "illegal" by the union bureaucracy through the intermediary of the Ministry of Labor, the legislators and the Peronist government are trying to make the printers, the teachers, and all other workers who urge strikes into criminals who should be serving sentences of one to three years.
This provision is also unconstitutional. The right to strike is incorporated in Article 14a of the current constitution. And in a debate on the adoption of this document on October 24, 1957, one of the delegates to the constitutional convention gave the following interpretation of this right:
"The right to strike cannot be limited by saying it is a trade-union right. It is a natural right. And more than a right, it is an action that can occur independent of the unions. Strikers naturally can only be punished when they commit a common crime. The penal code deals with this. We cannot limit the right to strike. No distinction can be made between legal and illegal strikes, because this certainly would produce disturbance and unrest in the country."
Nonetheless, Dr. [Jesús] Porto, reporter for the Peronist bill, has put forward the curious theory that the constitution of 1957 has no validity because it was passed when the Peronist movement was proscribed. We think that the convocation of a sovereign and legitimate constituent assembly is urgent. But we do not understand this challenging of a constitution that Dr. Porto accepted when it was a question of the election that put him in parliament.
In short, with this law the government that boasts of having abolished ideological frontiers in the international arena has now erected this kind of wall on the national scene. The penalties and crimes envisaged in the celebrated security law are not directed at fighting the guerrillas. Without any need for changes in the laws, the government is already applying the death penalty in practice against them. "Exterminate the enemies of the fatherland," the commander in chief has just trumpeted.
Nor, of course, is this law directed against the fascist bands like the AAA, 5 which act with the same impunity as the Legión Civica [Civic Legion], the ALN,6 Tacuara, and FAEDAT acted in the past.
This law is specifically directed at slowing down the progress of the labor movement, at interfering with the spread of socialist ideas, and at creating a general climate of uncertainty and intimidation, which the country is already experiencing with growing anxiety.
been responsible for the killings of several leftists and liberals in recent months and has published a list of others it plans to assassinate. No one has been arrested for any of the crimes for which the AAA takes credit.
6. Alianza Libertadora Nacional (Alliance for National Liberation).
7. FAEDA was an arm of the Argentine political police under the dictatorship of the commanders in chief. Dissolved by the Peronists when they took office, it had functioned to root out "subversives."
'Latin American Perspectives'
A new theoretical journal, called Latin American Perspectives, has begun publication in the United States. Its second issue, dated summer 1974, contains ten articles under the general theme "Chile: Blood on the Peaceful Road," and a review of literature on Chile that has been published since the September 1973 military coup.
The editors of the magazine state that its purpose is "to encourage wider and greater theoretical analysis of Latin American reality of the sort which is essential to the formation of viable political strate gies. The objective is not merely to draw a clearer picture of the socioeconomic structure, but rather to help find the means by which Latin Americans can transform that structure."
The journal is soliciting manuscripts from political groups, individuals, and established scholars. The editors state that "top priority will be given to articles which strike directly at the heart of the most important theoretical issues of the present period in Latin America..
The editorial board includes Frank Bonilla, James Cockeroft, Michael Lowy, Jose Nun, James O'Connor, James Petras, and Anibal Quijano.
Latin American Perspectives ispublished three times a year. Subscriptions for individuals cost $10 and can be ordered from P.O. Box 792, Riverside,
California 92502.
Notes
1. The infamous decade from 1930 to 1940, was a period of surrender to British imperialism by the conservatives, who were put in power by a military coup and kept there by proscription of the main opposition party and by electoral fraud. 1350
2. The dictatorship of the commanders in chief began in 1966 with the military coup that brought Ongania to power. It continued until the 1973 elections.
3. The Peronists received seven million votes in the elections of September 1973.
4. The February 1974 coup led by the Cordoba chief of police that ousted the elected Cordoba provincial governor.
5. The Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) has