The Ford Argentina Case: Corporate Power and Crimes Against Humanity
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Written by Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour
Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books and explores topics including charisma, organisational psychology, and the abuse of power in the workplace through articles, podcasts, and books.
How far can a company’s power over the people who work within it actually go? When we talk about organizational abuse, our thoughts almost automatically turn to toxic leadership, intimidation, retaliation, workplace bullying, or all those environments in which fear gradually becomes part of the corporate culture.
These dynamics can have very serious consequences for people’s lives, but there are historical cases in which the relationship between corporate power and the individual crossed a far more extreme threshold. One of them is the Ford Argentina case.
In December 2018, more than forty years after the beginning of Argentina’s military dictatorship, two former Ford Motor Argentina executives, Pedro Müller and Héctor Francisco Sibilla, were convicted of crimes against humanity for their contribution to the repression of workers at the General Pacheco plant. Yet the case is not only about the responsibility of two men who were already very old by the time they stood trial. It raises a broader and, in some ways, even more disturbing question, "What happens when an organization stops being simply a place where economic power is exercised and becomes part of a system of repression?"
This article is adapted from my forthcoming book, Charismatic Psychopaths: Manipulation, Fascination and Corporate Power, in which I explore the darker side of leadership, organizational power, and the systems that can enable abuse.
A factory inside a dictatorship
On March 24, 1976, a military coup overthrew the Argentine government and marked the beginning of one of the most violent periods in the country’s recent history. During the dictatorship, thousands of people were abducted, tortured, killed, or forcibly disappeared, and the workplace also became one of the arenas in which repression was carried out.
At Ford’s General Pacheco plant, twenty-four workers were abducted and tortured, many of them were union representatives or employees involved in organizing workers inside the factory. This detail matters because these were not people chosen at random. They were visible workers, capable of representing others, negotiating, challenging decisions, and transforming a collection of individuals into a collective voice.
In a democratic context, this function is part of the normal dynamics of working life. Under an authoritarian regime, however, that same role can be reinterpreted as a threat.
When organizational knowledge becomes vulnerability
This is precisely where the Ford case takes on a meaning that goes beyond its historical context. Every organization knows a great deal about the people who work within it, who occupies certain roles, who exerts influence, and who comes into conflict with management. Under ordinary circumstances, this information simply helps the organization function. But when political, legal, and ethical boundaries collapse, that same knowledge can become a source of vulnerability.
According to evidence that emerged during the trial, some workers were held inside the plant itself before being transferred to police stations and detention centers, while some were beaten and tortured in the factory’s recreational area. At that point, General Pacheco was no longer simply a place of production, the space people entered every day to earn a living had also become a place of repression, and this transformation is perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire case.
The gray area between economic and political power
Dictatorships are generally remembered through their most recognizable images, the military, the police, prisons, detention centers, the desaparecidos. But systems of repression do not operate only through institutions officially designed to exercise violence. They need information, people who know whom to identify, and structures capable of making certain individuals visible and placing them within networks of relationships, roles, and responsibilities.
The Ford Argentina case therefore forces us to widen our perspective and look at the gray area where economic power meets political power. Pedro Müller was the plant’s production manager, while Héctor Sibilla was head of security. Outside their historical context, these roles appear entirely ordinary, and perhaps this is precisely what makes the case so unsettling.
Organizational power does not necessarily express itself through dramatic gestures or spectacular orders, very often, it operates through hierarchies, information, and procedures. In other words, the most dangerous side of power is not always the one that shouts. Sometimes it retains the perfectly orderly appearance of a procedure and continues to operate within an apparently normal environment, even while that normality is already producing irreversible consequences.
When dissent becomes a threat
The Ford case also allows us to observe another crucial shift in the dynamics of power, the transformation of dissent into danger. A union representative is not simply an employee, because that person represents other workers. The role involves bringing forward demands, negotiating, and, when necessary, making conflict visible. As long as an organization accepts this function, conflict remains part of normal working life.
But when those in power begin to interpret any form of opposition as a threat that must be neutralized, the nature of the relationship changes completely. In the Ford Argentina case, this process naturally reached an extreme level because we are not talking about blocked careers or organizational retaliation. We are talking about workers who were abducted and tortured during a military dictatorship.
For this very reason, it would be wrong to equate this case with ordinary forms of toxic leadership. Its significance lies elsewhere, it represents an extreme case, and extreme cases often have the ability to make visible mechanisms that, under ordinary circumstances, may appear much more blurred.
Obedience, role and responsibility
One of those mechanisms concerns the relationship between obedience and personal responsibility. Companies normally function through hierarchies. People receive instructions, occupy roles, carry out decisions made by others, and operate within structures that may be much larger than themselves. Yet there is always a point at which organizational obedience meets individual responsibility.
Being part of a structure does not automatically remove responsibility for one’s actions, and a professional role cannot become a suspension of individual conscience.
This is also part of the deeper meaning of the judgment delivered in Argentina in December 2018. More than forty years after the events, the Argentine justice system determined that the executives involved could not be regarded simply as passive spectators of a terrible historical period but had contributed to the machinery of repression.
The word “machinery” is particularly important because it describes very well how power can operate within an organization, not necessarily through a single omnipotent individual, but through different people occupying different positions who, by providing information, structures, or decisions, contribute to the functioning of something much larger than themselves.
The weight of time
Time is also a central element in this story. More than forty years passed between the abductions of 1976 and the 2018 judgment. In the meantime, the surviving workers grew old, while some died before they could see the legal process come to an end.
Yet the consequences of violence did not remain confined to the moment in which it was inflicted. They entered people’s biographies, their families, their professional lives, and the fears that can continue to exist even when the system that created them seems to belong to history.
This is one of the deepest characteristics of abuse of power, those who exercise it may regard it as an episode, while those who suffer it may carry its consequences for decades.
Why this case still speaks to organizations today
It would be entirely wrong to draw any equivalence between a contemporary company and a factory operating under a military dictatorship because the historical context is radically different. Nevertheless, the Ford Argentina case continues to raise questions that apply to any organization, who controls information about people, how that information is used, what happens when someone is labelled “problematic,” what happens when dissent stops being regarded as a legitimate part of organizational life and begins to be treated as a threat, and, above all, how far can a person obey a hierarchy before becoming responsible for what that hierarchy is doing?
Organizations possess enormous power because they organize resources, information, roles, and opportunities, and this is precisely why organizational power needs limits, legal limits, of course, but also cultural, professional, and moral ones.
The Ford Argentina case represents one of the most extreme examples of what can happen when those limits disappear. An organization does not possess an autonomous conscience. It is the people occupying its roles who make decisions, use information, obey, resist, or choose not to see and simply carry on as if nothing were happening.
It is through individual decisions, often apparently small and embedded in the normal functioning of a structure, that the boundary between obedience and responsibility is ultimately defined.
The Ford Argentina case stands as a warning of what can happen when that boundary is erased.
Read more from Barbara Suigo
Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour
Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books. Her work explores charisma, organisational psychology, manipulation, and the abuse of power in the workplace, making complex international research accessible through books, articles, interviews, and podcasts.
Sources:
Reuters. “Ex-Ford Argentina Executives Convicted in Torture Case.” December 11, 2018.
The Guardian. “Argentina: Two Ex-Ford Executives Convicted in Torture Case.” December 11, 2018.
Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. “Ford Lawsuit (re Argentina).”
Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS). “Ford.” Case overview, December 19, 2017.
Basualdo, Victoria, Tomás Ojea Quintana and Carolina Varsky. “The Cases of Ford and Mercedes Benz.” In The Economic Accomplices to the Argentine Dictatorship: Outstanding Debts. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
