Like the majority of industrial towns surrounding the capital, the township of Quilmes, one prominent site of mobilization located fifteen kilometers south of Buenos Aires, suffered during the dictatorship as factory workers, union organizers, and progressive members of the clergy were disappeared from their homes and factories. The local newspaper El Sol chronicled the effects of military rule on the urban landscape. As early as 1979, a smattering of articles noted a relatively new phenomenon taking hold in the center of the municipality. They reported a growing number of unemployed factory workers, almost always men, who took to the streets day after day, “taking odd day jobs” (haciendo changas) to make ends meet. The articles varied in their level of sensational and salacious detail. Uniting all of the stories, however, was a familiar arc of long careers in local factories, the shock of job loss, and the very real drama of devising new ways to support families. In manufacturing areas around the capital, industries were finding it more difficult to compete with the influx of cheap foreign goods. Factories shut down their machines, fired workers, and bolted their doors. The specific figures for Quilmes and the surrounding municipalities are difficult to come by, but to give one example, in mid-1982 the local Peugeot factory closed its doors, and forty-five hundred workers lost their jobs in one fell swoop.21 Headlines reporting on such events remained mainstays throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, illuminating the human toll of deindustrialization in the southern belt surrounding the city of Buenos Aires.
Against the backdrop of this crisis of labor and the working class, a growing number of protests in Greater Buenos Aires gained national attention. In Quilmes, local church leaders scheduled a day of protest for August 1981.22 Posters announced the event as the Marcha del hambre (Hunger March) and encouraged participants to bring donations of food in a collective call for “bread and work.”23 The goal of the event, according to flyers, was to “[shine a light on] the urgent situation facing the workers of our diocese . . . to come together in solidarity, and to raise hope.”24 The bishop of Quilmes, Jorge Novak, had risen to prominence as one of the few leaders of the Argentine Catholic Church to denounce the human rights abuses of the armed forces.25 In the weeks leading up to the Hunger March, Novak sent a letter to the police commissioner in Quilmes requesting authorization for both the march and a celebratory mass. As with other actions organized by the activist bishop, police documents reveal that security forces suspected the day would attract “agitators and/or union activists, who [would] use the event as a platform for their own aims.”26 Yet according to a memo from before the march, police were not worried that “subversive elements were involved—as of yet.” The real concern of the local police was that the march would be passing by the villas miserias (shantytowns) and the growing population of pauperized residents recently arrived in the municipality.27 Another result of the economic crisis of 1981 was the further growth of the slums and a burgeoning land takeover movement in the municipality, which put local security forces on edge. The police commissioner ultimately sent word that the march was prohibited. As far as the mass was concerned, however, he saw no “reasons why it should prove a problem.”28
The Hunger March was not the first diocese event that the police had prohibited in the municipality. The year before, Bishop Novak had planned a public mass to celebrate the pope’s mediation of the conflict between Chile and Argentina over the Beagle Channel, which had brought the two nations to the brink of conflict. The local police had prohibited that mass for “security reasons.” The Hunger March, Novak claimed, was different, and its prohibition was even more hypocritical given the current social emergency. He wrote of the police ban of the Hunger March: “This is all the more shocking as today we read in La Nación [newspaper] the declarations of the President of the Republic, confirming ‘that the Argentine people and government must denounce all discriminatory racial and religious practices to promote the defense of the rights of all human beings.’ ”29 Novak’s reference to the junta’s notoriously cynical use of the language of rights was a commentary on the gap between the rhetoric of the regime and the reality of state terror and abuse. At the same time, the bishop’s somewhat sly evocation of the simple act of “walking in the streets” for sustenance and jobs was no small matter in the context of a regime that sought to eradicate such rights. In Novak’s estimation, and increasingly for many Argentines, food and work were fundamental human rights that had been systematically violated.
Though the march was banned, the mass went on as scheduled. On the day of the service, police estimated that a crowd of about 1,200 attended, while church officials and the press reported between 2,000 to 4,000 individuals gathered at the San Cayetano parish in Quilmes.30 The choice of venue sent a clear message; San Cayetano holds a special place in the pantheon of popular religious figures as the patron saint of labor, drawing annual pilgrimages for peace, bread, and work. Before the mass, CGT representatives from the neighboring towns of Berazategui and Florencia Varela distributed packages of food and clothing among attendees. Recently unemployed workers, laywomen who coordinated soup kitchens, members of the clergy, and leaders of neighborhood associations linked arms in orations. Those gathered reflected a cross-section of individuals who felt the social emergency firsthand and who simultaneously attempted to keep at bay its more damaging effects.
The mass began in the late afternoon, and it ended with the crowd singing the national anthem.31 Because of the size of the church, which could not hold more than a few hundred, attendees spilled into the street. The visual impact of the gathering made for an impressive sight in the midst of a regime ban on public gatherings. Police presence was strong and intimidating, and clergy later recalled that many more people were afraid to attend. Nonetheless, the mass went on peacefully into the early evening. Although the original plan for the march through the streets had been prohibited, the event accomplished the goal of assembling a crowd to denounce the mounting crisis. The singing of the national anthem also signaled that despite the local focus of the event, participants’ sights were set on a broader protest against the regime.
The Hunger March generated interest and publicity beyond the municipality, drawing national attention to the social situation in Greater Buenos Aires. The newspaper Clarín provided extensive coverage of what it described as Novak’s “dramatic and searing” sermon, which “lash[ed] out against those responsible for the current social situation.”32 During the mass, the bishop placed emphasis on one of the most visible markers of the crisis and the ostensible motivation for the day’s event: hunger. “Is anyone shocked,” he asked, “by the talk of hunger among us? Do we dare speak out against this social scourge which has already entered many homes in this diocese, and which is knocking on the doors of many more? Brothers and sisters, there is hunger. Today many families get by on yerba mate and a bit of bread and crackers.”33
The discovery of hunger in places such as Greater Buenos Aires had already begun to touch a nerve. Though hunger had long existed in rural parts of the national territory and in more informal urban settlements, by the beginning of the 1980s it began to threaten working people in the industrial suburbs of the nation’s major cities. Added to the national headlines about impending recession, troubling rumors of acute hardship accompanied the financial news. In the face of rising unemployment and a constriction of the manufacturing economy, soup kitchens sprang up in urban centers to address the growing food insecurity of large numbers of residents.34 Most disconcerting of all, these realities were edging closer to the capital region. Novak, among many others, expressed dismay that in a food-producing country “as rich as Argentina,” citizens lacked food.35 Hunger, a hard fact of daily life for many Argentines, was a potent symbol of the social breakdown caused by military rule.36 Researchers later found that meat consumption—an emblem of the social progress of the mid-twentieth century—dropped by almost 20 percent over the course of the dictatorship,