Original subtitles

VIOLENCE AND LIBERATION

TO THE NEW MAN WHO WILL BE BORN DURING THIS WAR OF LIBERATION

''A man resurrects from death and begins to love life to the point

of risking that life to be able to live it.'' Che

''The scars of violence

won't be erased by goodwill.

Only violence can destroy them.'' J.P. Sartre

MOTHER: ''I dreamt of a son...

...who closed his mother's eyes.''

REBEL: ''I've decided to open my son's eyes...

...under another sun.'' Aim� C�saire

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

You'll have to excuse my words, my expressions,

because I never went to university

But I have to tell you something very important,

about how I suffered

THE EXECUTIONS AT THE PATAGONIA

I witnessed the first uprising in the Patagonia

We asked for an increase of our wages.

Back then, the English, who were in charge in the south,

asked for back-up to crush the riots.

They let them believe we were

Chilean and Argentine bandits

who were destroying the properties.

They sent colonel Varela 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 took place in 1920.

Terrible, dramatic... I saw

mothers with their children in their arms,

pursued by bullets of the police.

Villa Guillermina, Villa Angela revolted.

I have no words to describe what they have done then!

THE REPRESSIONS OF THE WORKERS

"The Tragic Week" was a really heroic moment.

There were men, workers

behind the barricades,

and also women and youth, fighting the police.

They overtook an army regiment...

...and the police... and even the firemen,

who had never touched a rifle.

THE STORY OF THE BATTLE OF THE MILITANTS

So, compa�eros... All I have told you,

is only a summary of my battle

as a militant worker at the source of a syndicate.

Now I will learn from you.

And I would like you to continue with enthusiasm.

Because the fall of capitalism is only a matter of a few years.

LETTERS OF THE COMBATANTS

During the shooting of this film, we asked,

several comrades their opinion on violence and liberation.

And here is the first one:

THE TRAP OF LEGITIMACY

You've asked me what's missing in order for us to regain power.

I don't know. But I know what we have: naivety.

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 dead.

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 could we ask more of him than what he could do?

How many battles have we fought in the past?

The story you told in the film just gives an approximate idea.

We believed that, after every big mobilization, Per�n would return

and we would regain power.

Today, thinking of that answer,

The image of Suarez was projected on many of us.

I had a new feeling of naivety

which confirmed that the people's will

would be enough to impose a new October 17th.

The same naivety

that moved many of us to believe and

to have confidence in the legal way.

Accept the legal way? Did this mean to accept legalized violence?

Isn't this social peace,

one behind bars,

slavery, and a national humiliation?

Suarez had understood

that his legitimacy, and that of the people, had been defeated...

and he quit the battle.

We continued to see legality as an abstraction and a myth.

We have been the best civil workers...

...and we have 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 do 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 of the ones...

who lived and fought with San Martin, Quiroga, Penalozza and Varela,

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 neocolonialism only help total impunity,

they are the law.

The system becomes the only and absolute beholder of violence.

Violence invades the streets, enters the homes,

and the people's minds.

And if man resists, he will be hit or killed.

If he gives in, he isn't a man anymore.

The System's violence is used for

silencing and terrorizing.

It tries to reduce man into a passive thing,

who doesn't make history.

It tries to make him an object who suffers from history

The violence of the System isn't really the repression itself,

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 can be defeated by revolutionary violence.

Or dictatorship of the privileged or national liberation'' J.W. Cooke

THE EXECUTIONS OF JUNE 16TH 1956

A military faction, of nationalist-catholic tendencies,

revolts against the "gorilla revolution".

Services of repression, alarmed by the , commotion, wait for the rioters and smother them.

That night, in the waste site of Leon Suarez,

they shoot several prisoners, guilty or not.

The comrade Troxler is one of them.

I am Julio Troxler,

one of those who were driven here, at dawn, June 10,

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 take us to prison

because we wanted to march at the Plaza de Mayo,

to cheer for Per�n and the triumph of the revolution.

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 was fired, at the same time as the accident.

So... the desire to survive... and the total chaos...

...that would provoke the death of five comrades and one wounded...

...and the escape of many of us, which wasn't easy.

And what did you do after the executions?

I waited there, very near,

until the truck and the car following it were gone.

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.

Carlos Lizazo and the three others,

...four bodies full of bullets...

...on the road that led to the German Club.

Have you been in prison after the executions?

I was a prisoner in November 1957...

because someone gave me in.

They brought me to the Investigation Brigade of San Martin.

And there... I was tortured just as I was by the Lanus brigade.

Justice members participated at the tortures and orgies,

like Judge Biglione, and militaries like Suarez,

the Secretary General, San Emeterio

and several police officers.

In what way did they torture you?

After being undressed

and blindfolded, so I couldn't see the torturers,

they attached you to the table, from your ankles and wrists

Then the electric shocks began,

real orgies for those men

keeping themselves busy with your genitals.

Mine were covered with blood in the end

my mouth was also covered with blood.

Of course, this is not a pleasant thing to tell,

but living through it is even worse.

What matters to me is to be understood. I was a common citizen...

who, only for defending an ideal and the Constitution,

has been objected to such treatment.

Troxler, do you have anything to add?

Sure, despite the executions, and all the tortures,

I have to say that we, the Peronists,

will continue this battle until the end.

In that way, we solidarize with our Latin American,

Asian, and African friends. These last groups are already seeing the results

of the process of liberation from imperialism.

And we too,

if we persevere, we will succeed.

For this, we must follow the example from Asian and African countries

and apply it, successfully.

Vietnam, for example, where a small group of men...

are fighting against the most powerful army in the world.

we know that we'll succeed,

and we'll leave a better world for our children.

THE DUTY OF THE INTELLECTUAL

My friends...

The revolution won't begin until

we have killed the old colonized 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 career at stake. The militant they torture.

And many examples that could keep us from something more important

than a vague gesture of solidarity.

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 aggressed'', 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 duty as national intellectuals

is different from that of other intellectuals in the big cities.

We can't devote ourselves to the universal culture,

until there's a more important problem to be solved:

national liberation!

Every action not essential to the liberation,

far from criticizing the system, let it to the others.

The Regime involves in its crimes

all those who don't fight them directly.

We should work in order to liberate this continent,

this country, the Latin American man,

every one of us, or else you're on the enemy's side.

There won't be any choices in between.

your comrade, A.M.

If daily violence weren't enough,

the System seeks for more explicit and unforgivable forms

to maintain its peace, its order, its norms.

THE VICTIMS

In their battle for liberation, our people have had many martyrs.

During the last years, hundreds of militants have been killed.

The victims of June 16th, 1955...

Those of the executions in 1956...

The fighters from Salta...

the ones from massive protests

Some, engraved anonymously...

Others, heightened by the people, like flags...

Some names...

Musy, Retamar, Mendoza

Isla de Molina, Santiago Pontillon

Felipe Vallesse, the greatest symbol of this violence.

'We, above everyone else, have to understand this dehumanization process.

More than anyone else, we have to know the costs

involved in regaining our humanity.'' S. Carmichael

THE ANONYMOUS MARTYRS

June 16th 1955,

the planes of the gorillas

terrorize the streets of Buenos Aires.

Torture at the individual level, or mass murder,

are the natural consequences of violence on a daily basis.

They don't deny it, on the contrary, they affirm it.

It's its most revealing synthesis.

The System maintains its power only by violence...

''It is impossible understanding the neocolonialism'', Fanon said,

''without the need to rape, to destroy, to kill''.

But the violence of the System is also its self destruction.

To dehumanize the people, the System dehumanizes itself first.

By using extreme violence,

the System is the first one to agonize.

''The only ones that have the right to use violence,

are the people who want to free themselves.

This violence, in the people's hands, is not violence, it's justice.'' Per�n.

ACTION AND REVOLUTION

"Prepare yourself to fight... Prepare your rifle

...Prepare your body for the battle".

A comrade of the Uruguayan movement Tupamaro

tells in a documentary:

We start from the principle that revolutionary action itself,

the act to arm yourself, to be prepared,

to accept to act

against the bourgeois order,

implies conscience, organization and revolutionary conditions.

In countries like Cuba, the principles at the base

of a socialist revolution are present, confirmed,

without discussion.

It takes little,

to show the way to revolt

and to apply it.

It's 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 imperialism, is, like Che thought, to attack their

colonial territories and force them to diversify their armed forces.

The order of ''creating two, three many Vietnams''

summarizes the last hope for humanity today.

The Pentagon and its footmen will face a serious dilemma:

either they observe and don't interfere with the Latin American revolution,

or they intervene by military force.

as it happened in Cuba or the Dominican Republic.

We have to unite and to prepare for the colonial war.

The guerillas of Venezuela, of Colombia and Guatemala,

the mobilization 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 Revolutionary Peronist Front is showing its solidarity

with the Vietnamese people and declares:

The peaceful coexistence is just opium that permits imperialism

to exploit humanity with impunity.

There can't be peaceful coexistence with the

deadly aggressiveness of the Yankee system's monopoly,

whose most characteristic trait is the support for war and crime.

For us, the people of the Third World, who hope to finish

the underdevelopment, poverty and the exploitation,

the only way is revolutionary war.

The fight to death against the imperialist oppressor

and the fight for eternal peace in the world.

But we have to underline that the enemy ran away from several crime scenes,

not because he was on the winning hand,

but on the contrary, because he lost against popular movements.

They've been defeated at the Bay of the Pigs and they'll be defeated in Vietnam.

If 500.000 Marines, the elite of the American army,

couldn't defeat the small heroic people of Vietnam,

how many millions will they need

to face and fight against more than two thirds of humanity,

700 million Chinese,

the Cubans, the Koreans, the Latin Americans, the socialist countries,

the Africans, the Arabs, the African-Americans

and the progressive forces of the industrialized countries?

Imperialism has no chance at all.

They only have the the nuclear blackmail.

As Mao said: ''It's a paper tiger.''

"MILITANT INTERNATIONALISM"

Fidel Castro said it clearly:

''The theory that says that if this generation doesn't win the war,

the next one will,

is a defeatist, inhumane and cowardly theory.

The Marxist-Leninist and internationalist principle

wants us to fight not until the last citizen...

of the oppressed country, but until the last citizen of the socialist camp.

The militant solidarity of the Latin American people was shown

in the epic revolutions of Bolivar, San Martin and Sucre.''

HYPOTHESIS FOR THE LIBERATION

Finally, we could say

that the liberation of every country is always a unique event, an invention.

Cuba is probably 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 national revolution would be possible

if not accompanied by a social revolution.

In other words, today more than ever,

the nationalism of the first independence

integrates the socialism of the second one

and the quest to an internationalism

that allows for the total destruction of imperialism.

ARGENTINA TODAY

As the authors of these comments,

we repeat what we showed in the film's first part.

Argentina and most of the countries of this continent

are living in a war that hides itself behind

a pseudo-normality and pseudo-peace.

A war that reveals itself in daily violence,

indeed, four persons die every minute in Latin America,

or two million every 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 revolution.

The protagonists of this quest, are all of us. But, even more, it's you.

You, who have the possibility to discuss these images

but also through your daily actions,

it is the only way to develop this unsolved problem.

The film and its content stay open

for other comments, testimonies and letters on violence and liberation.

To all who collaborated in the realization of this film,

peasants, workers,

students, intellectuals and revolutionary militants,

we express our gratefulness.