Book Reviews

A Review of Driving Terror: Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina

by Marguerite Feitlowitz | Aug 11, 2025

Driving Terror: Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina by Karen Robert (University of New Mexico Press, Diágolos Series, 2025)

In the early winter of 1990, one year into the presidency of Carlos Menem, the Buenos Aires police held a public auction of a small fleet of cars that had long been in their service. Immersed as I was in primary research for the book I was writing on the legacies of repression and torture in Argentina, I was horrified. On offer were Ford Falcons, the vehicles used during the last dictatorship (1976-83) for kidnappings, torture, and transit to clandestine detention centers, a few of which were basically death camps for so-called “subversives.”

A conservative neo-liberal Peronist (member of a complex contradictory political movement named after Juan Domingo Perón, president of Argentina, 1946-1955) Menem kept urging the country to “turn the page,” “move on,” and to underscore the point, in late 1989, he issued pardons (and official praise) to the ex-commanders, officers and civilians convicted of human rights abuses during the dictatorship. He’d promised, with much fanfare, that “[these heroes] would be home for Christmas,” and the highest-ranking were; the rest were released in time to ring in the New Year. In Argentina, the 1990s were known as The Age of Impunity. Suicides spiked among survivors and in the human rights community.

Who, I wondered, was attending this auction of Ford Falcons, and why would anyone wish to own such a car? The answer, as to so many questions about Argentina, is riven by contradictions.

Karen Robert does a very effective job of tracing the role of Ford Motor Company in the socio-political life of Argentina, while she analyzes the competing images of its signature vehicle. She also introduces valuable labor history, and recent landmark rulings that, finally, conferred justice on a group of workers tortured on the grounds of their factory, a joint arrangement between Ford and the dictatorship.

Ford built its first assembly plant in South America in the working-class neighborhood of Barracas of Buenos Aires in 1913, turning out Model T’s from parts kits manufactured in the United States. By 1916, Ford had opened in La Boca, a traditionally working-class neighborhood on the south side of Buenos Aires, famous for its brightly-colored houses, with 20% of the parts manufactured there. The Model T had immediate and resounding success. The cars were at once modern and relatively economically accessible, and Ford offered higher salaries, training in technical innovations, material progress and prestige. The rapid development of auto manufacturing in Argentina also contributed to the establishment of a strong labor movement, with national unions and factory-based organizing.

Worldwide, over the next decades, Ford had its ups and downs (owing to competition from other car makers, recessions, the Depression) and a near collapse after the end of World War II. By 1949, the company was back in the black and wanted to create a new car for middle-class consumers around the world. This would be the Falcon, overseen in Detroit by a technocrat named Robert McNamara, who would go on to mastermind the U.S. Cold War policy of the 1960s and ‘70s. As Robert documents, advertising for the Falcon “was barely distinguishable from official Cold War propaganda materials,” extolling the virtues of prosperity, technical progress, material comfort for the whole nuclear family (the car seated six) and freedom. The Falcon was touted as a kind of “revolution,” “giving the lie to Karl Marx,” with “enlightened capitalism” and its “aristocracy of labor.” Burston-Marstellar, Ford’s PR company (it later served the dictatorship) cleverly tailored its ads: here was the Falcon on the beach at Mar del Plata; here it was in the high and rugged mountains of the Northwest; in the tropics of the Northeast and in ice-covered Patagonia. It was the centerpiece of gaucho barbecues. In fact, one ad called the car itself a gaucho. The Falcon loved the open road (didn’t all right-thinking people?) but it was also nimble in towns and in cities. Taxi companies and the police loved its durability. The Falcon was for everyone and everywhere. It was the best-selling car in Argentina. It even had a decade-defining TV show named in its honor—La Familia Falcón—about a multi-generational middle-class family that, you guessed it, drove the eponymous car.

The 1960s and early 1970s were turbulent in Argentina—with a succession of short-lived elected governments, urban guerrilla groups and military coups backed by civilian corporations, media and financial institutions. By 1975, the Ford Falcon (without license plates) was being used by the Triple A—Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance—to kidnap a broad swath of left-wing politicians, activists, intellectuals and cultural figures (many of whom were then murdered).

By March 24, 1976, the day of the long-awaited “Dirty War” coup, Ford had a blacklist of shop stewards that it had turned over to the regime, which immediately started kidnapping workers, some directly from the assembly line. After being beaten and tortured in a part of the factory converted for this purpose, the men were sent to clandestine detention centers and jails.

The Falcon became a reigning symbol—even a metonym—of the regime that would “disappear” some thirty-thousand citizens. Robert quotes the heroic Robert Cox, editor of the Buenos Aires Herald and one of the only media figures to publicly denounce the regime: “Is there any possible situation that would justify the use by police of unmarked cars without number plates?” As she reports, several days later a journalist from Cox’s newsroom (the courageous Andrew Graham-Yooll) was hauled off by a heavily armed commando and charged with terrorism. Cox insisted on accompanying him and they were driven to the police station in a caravan of Ford Falcons. Miraculously, they both survived, but both would eventually be forced into exile.

Ford embraced the dictatorship not just privately, but publicly as well. U.S. executives had been evacuated in 1973 (the violent year of Perón’s return), and the company was now headed by a Chilean regime-booster named Juan Courard. As Robert reports, in January 1977, Ford took out a full-page ad in Clarín, Argentina’s biggest daily:

1976. Argentina finds it way once again. 1977. A new year of trust and hope for all Argentines of good will. Ford Argentina and its personnel commit themselves to the effort to bring about the Nation’s great destiny. Once again, Ford gives you more.

In August 1978, Courard placed the following in the pages of La Nación:

Our own employees suffered persecution at the hands of guerrilla subversives, as did soldiers, union leaders, judges, etc… We stood by as helpless victims in the face of union excesses…Thanks to the Process of National Organization …we live in a state of order and improved discipline.

It’s essential to note, as Robert does, that there was no violence caused by labor at Ford; and that the leaders of National Autoworkers Union were politically right-wing and did nothing to help the kidnapped Ford shop stewards. Upon their release, the national union kept the Ford workers on the blacklist, imposing sustained unemployment and hardship.

When U.S. President Jimmy Carter cut off arms trade with Argentina in protest of its human rights record, Ford, as Robert quotes, made it clear:

The company’s intention to remain in the country and expand demonstrates that the decisions of the American automobile industry have no connection to Washington’s human rights policies.

In 1981, Courard presided over a ground-breaking ceremony for a new truck plant attended by the regime’s Finance and Industrial Development Ministers, as well as top-level generals, including Juan Bautista Sasiaiñ, who had overseen all the clandestine detention centers in the province of Córdoba, not least La Perla, which left very few survivors.

Ford’s ad campaigns became palpably threatening:

Because [the Falcon] is solid, durable, gaucho…because it does whatever it takes [emphasis added] to defend what we have invested in it.

Even after the dictatorship ended, with the catastrophic Malvinas/Falklands war, the Falcon was used by the police for intimidation. I was told by numerous witnesses that during the 1985 trial of the ex-commanders, they felt terrorized merely by the sight of these cars prowling the streets.

With Alfonsín’s election in 1983 and the formation of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared, it became clear that trade unionists accounted for about three out of every ten of the missing. The 24 kidnapped and tortured shop stewards sued Ford, but unsuccessfully, because there was no legal precedent in Argentina for lodging a human rights case against a private corporation and having it heard in criminal court. Wrongful dismissal was the only charge available, but even that—absent company documentation (destroyed or hidden by Ford)—faltered. Not until 2018 (twelve years after the impunity laws passed under Menem were nullified) would 22 of these workers (two had died in the meantime) get justice when several Ford executives, and one complicit general, were finally convicted of crimes against humanity.

Toward the very end of her book, Robert gives us a deeply moving courtroom image: Pablo Troiani (the worker who spearheaded the case) and his wife, holding a white kerchief emblazoned with the images of two Ford Falcons, one bearing the company logo and the date 1976; the other encircled in red with the words “Justicia y castigo” (Justice and Punishment), and the date 2018.

The strongest parts of Robert’s book come at the beginning, when she elucidates automobility theory and establishes it as a persuasive frame; and at the end, when she delves into the ordeals of the 24 former shop stewards who brought suit against Ford. That she was able to interview several of these men and their family members is a boon, lending immediacy, nuance and drama. I need also say that the intervening chapters—while full of accurate information—suffer in contrast from a tendency to repeat historical and contextual content. The tone in these chapters is impersonal and even dull—which, given the subject matter—is puzzling. But I don’t wish to quibble over style and a dissertation-like presentation. This is a valuable book that delves into important, but understudied, labor history. It provides an excellent point of departure for further scholarship and analysis.

The testimonies of these 24 plaintiffs and some of their family members are held by Memoria Abierta. One hopes that copies of these testimonies are held in a safe place outside of Argentina, because the current president, Javier Millei, an ardent booster for the last dictatorship, has shuttered major memory sites and archives, and daily undermines labor laws and human rights.

This book goes a long way in preserving these valuable testimonies.

Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture.