Ford's Past in Argentina

Buenos Aires

Over café cortado in his working-class living room, Pedro Troiani recounts how, thirty years ago, at 9 in the morning, his number came up.

It was April 13, 1976, some three weeks into a bloody dictatorship that would eventually kill an estimated 30,000 Argentines branded as leftist subversives. Troiani, now 64, showed up for work as usual at Ford Motor Company's General Pacheco factory, a 5,000-employee facility near Buenos Aires. Troiani, a labor delegate who often pressed managers for better working conditions, took his place on the factory floor and started painting a new Ford F-100 pickup, the same model his problems drove up in. "I even remember the color of the truck I was painting," he says. "It was white. I looked up and saw the soldiers drive up in a Ford 100. Some others walked along beside it. One of them said to me, 'You are detained.' I asked him to let me get my documents, and he said, 'You won't need them where you are going.'"

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