"Corporate responsibility in repression against workers in Argentina: an interdisciplinary study"

BASUALDO, VICTORIA

Göttingen

Conferencia; International Conference "Corporations and authoritarian regimes in Latin America"; 2016

Göttingen University

This paper will present some of the main results of the research developed by four institutions (the Area of Economics and Tecnnology of FLACSO, the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, the Programa de Verdad y Justicia and the Secretaría de Derechos Humanos (both within the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights in Argentina) during 2014 and 2015, which was published in a two volume book called Responsabilidad empresarial en delitos de lesa humanidad: repression a trabajadores durante el Terrorismo de Estado (Infojus, 2015). This study focuses on 25 companies throughout the country, of economic activities such as steel, automobile and ceramics production, sugar mills, graphic ad naval industry, among others and analyzes the available evidence about the different forms of business involvement in labor repression, from the existence of detention camps within the factories, different aspects of militarization of the shop-floor and the direct involvement in the detention of workers though the provision of information, infrastructure or funding. The paper will particularly focus on a key case, the steel mill Acindar in Villa Constitución (Santa Fe province), which had been studied previously in the author´s dissertation, which exemplifies many of the most prominent findings of the recent study. This research was based not only on oral interview and judiciary sources, but also on archival sources, such as those of the Intelligence Direction of the Province of Buenos Aires (DIPBA), the National Archive of Memory (Archivo Nacional de la Memoria), CEDINCI (Centro de Documentación e Información sobre la Cultura de Izquierdas en la Argentina) as well as private collections owned by researchers and militants, leaflets and political publications of different labor and political organizations that were of great use to document labor struggle and organization in the factories.