STU professor explores Cold War Argentina in latest public lecture segment

    Historian, Professor Karen Robert engages the audience on Driving Terror, her new book set to be released on Mar. 4 (Photo By: Gisele Gallibois)

    On Jan. 15 around 40 attendees listened to St. Thomas University history professor Karen Robert’s presentation about the Cold War in Argentina, as part of the university’s public lecture series.

    The lecture was focused on Robert’s upcoming book which explores Ford’s involvement in the mass disappearance and torture of Argentinian workers in the ’70s, which she said was 15 years in the making.

    “My daughter was a preschooler when I started thinking about this book and she’s [now] 22,” said Robert. 

    Her book that finally releases in March now explores global struggles for corporate accountability over four decades leading up to a human rights case that concluded in 2018. 

    She used an example from 1976, where twenty-four autoworkers at Ford’s Argentina plant outside Buenos Aires were brutally abducted, tortured and disappeared due to their union activism.

    “The Argentine generals put the strategy of mass disappearance at the center of their state terrorist tactics,” said Robert. “Human rights organizations cite the number of 30,000 people who didn’t survive.”

    The Ford Falcon Sedan was commonly used in these attacks according to Robert, making it an “emblem of disappearance.”

    “Testimony by a survivor of disappearance; Ford Argentina had contracts with police and military, supplied ‘unmarked’ Falcons long after they were widely associated with death squad attacks.” (Photo credit: Gisele Gallibois)

    She notes the case in 2018, that concluded with two former Ford executives being convicted of crimes against humanity, set a powerful precedent for corporate accountability in human rights.

    Within the book, Robert attempts to understand why the Ford Motor Company openly collaborated with Argentina’s military dictatorship that was responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people. 

    Robert recounts that ordinary people like Pedro Triani, the protagonist of her book, was like  “a dog with a bone” for over 40 years, refusing to give up.

    This is a significant case that sets a “landmark decision, both in Argentina and globally, as setting a rather powerful precedent,” according to Robert.

    Robert said that survivors and their family members “really emerged early on as witnesses to this unknown and enormous story of workplace repression and were remarkably courageous in telling their stories and demanding answers to very tough questions that nobody really wanted to answer.”

    “Any changes to law and the expansion of human rights law don’t come from the top,” she said. They don’t come from legal thinkers sitting in an office at the United Nations.”

    “Ordinary people make history.”