Montoneros
Montoneros was an Argentine Peronist guerrilla organization that emerged in the 1970s during the dictatorship that called itself the Argentine Revolution. When it was created, all political parties had been banned, Juan D. Perón himself remained in exile, and other guerrilla organizations and "liberation movements" were emerging, both in Argentina and in other Latin American countries, under the influence of the Cuban Revolution. national", in an insurrectionary context characterized by dozens of towns, among which the Cordobazo of 1969 was the most paradigmatic. Montoneros declared that his objective was to fight against the ruling dictatorship, achieve the return of Perón to the country, the call for free elections without proscriptions, the establishment of a national socialism, which he considered a natural evolution of Peronism, combining a socialist State with the characteristics of Argentine and Latin American culture.
His first public action took place on May 29, 1970, with the kidnapping, subsequent revolutionary trial, and assassination of former anti-Peronist dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, one of the leaders of the coup that in 1955 had overthrown the constitutional government led by President Juan Domingo Peron. Montoneros kidnapped the former dictator to submit him to a "revolutionary trial" for being a traitor to the country, having shot 27 people to suppress the Valle uprising in 1956, and to recover the body of Eva Perón that Aramburu had kidnapped and made disappear.
Montoneros was the armed nucleus of a group of non-military social organizations ("mass fronts") known as the Revolutionary Tendency of Peronism, or simply "La Tendencia", which included the Juventud Peronista Regionales (JP), the Peronist University Youth (JUP), the Peronist Working Youth (JTP), the Union of Secondary Students (UES), the Evita Group and the Peronist Villero Movement.
In 1972 it merged with Descamisados and in 1973 with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR), with which it had been working together. His actions contributed to the military dictatorship calling free elections in 1973, in which the multi-party electoral front he was a member of (Frejuli) won, with the presidential candidacy of the Peronist Héctor José Cámpora, a man close to Montoneros, as well as several governors, parliamentarians, ministers and senior government officials. The Cámpora government and its relationship with Montoneros was subjected to strong pressure from the beginning, from right-wing sectors and the Italian anti-communist lodge Propaganda Due, and just 49 days later he had to resign, after the Ezeiza massacre. After the resignation of Héctor J. Cámpora from the presidency on July 12, 1973,
Montoneros began to lose power and see themselves progressively isolated, a situation that worsened after the assassination of union leader José Ignacio Rucci on September 25, 1973 -attributed to the organization- and especially after the death of Perón, on September 1 July 1974, when a policy of State terrorism was unleashed carried out by the right-wing parapolice organization called Triple A commanded by López Rega, Perón's right-hand man. Two months later, Montoneros decided to go back into hiding and restart the armed struggle. On September 8, 1975, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued Decree No. 2452/75 prohibiting their activity and describing it as a "subversive group"..
On March 24, 1976, the constitutional government was overthrown, establishing an anti-Peronist civic-military dictatorship, which imposed a systematic regime of State terrorism and annihilation of opponents. Montoneros established his leadership in Mexico and fought the dictatorship, causing serious casualties to the civic-military government and also suffering heavy losses, including a large number of militants and missing combatants. In 1979 and 1980 he attempted two counteroffensives that failed militarily and politically. From that moment on, his organization gradually fell apart. When democracy was restored in December 1983, the Montoneros organization no longer existed as a political-military structure and sought to insert itself into democratic political life, within Peronism, under the name of Peronist Youth, under the leadership of Patricia Bullrich and Pablo Unamuno, without to form an autonomous political organization. In the following years, various adherents to Montoneros held important political positions in democratic governments.
History
Background
In 1955, a coup d'état overthrew the constitutional government headed by Juan Domingo Perón and began a long period of almost two decades of illegalization and persecution of Peronism and the trade union movement, during which dictatorships and governments originating from elections alternated not free and with the main candidates proscribed.
The early roots of Montoneros can be found in the Peronist Resistance, which emerged to combat the dictatorship that overthrew Perón's government in 1955, as well as the Cuban Revolution of 1958, which promoted "armed struggle" throughout the continent, as the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla commanded by Che Guevara in Bolivia, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in Chile, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) in Guatemala, the Armed Forces Popular Party of Liberation Farabundo Martí (FPL) in El Salvador, Vanguardia Armada Revolucionaria Palmares in Brazil, etc. At that time, former Peronist congressman John William Cooke played an important role in ideologically promoting the armed response against the dictatorships in Argentina.
International context
The persecution and exclusion of Peronism from Argentine political life between 1955 and 1973 occurred simultaneously with other international historical processes, which converged in this conflict. First the Cold War. The Cold War led the United States to establish in Latin America what was called the doctrine of national security, hand in hand with which permanent military dictatorships were established since 1964 and repressive methods based on State terrorism, in order to annihilate nationalist movements and left-wing groups, accused of being agents of "Marxist infiltration" -a concept that will occupy a central place in the political conflicts that occurred during the third Peronism-. The irradiation center of the National Security Doctrine was the School of the Americas, installed at the US base of the Panama Canal. The Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet repression of the movement strengthened the positions of non-alignment in the Cold War, which Peronism maintained from the beginning under the policy of the third position.
Between 1958 and 1959, the Cuban Revolution also took place, which had a strong influence on Latin American social and popular movements, especially by spreading the idea that the guerrilla could be a successful strategy to defeat dictatorships dominated by oligarchies local and foreign companies, with support from the United States. In 1968, the Peruvian Revolution led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado and the Panamanian Revolution led by General Omar Torrijos Herrera took place, while the electoral triumph of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 initiated a novel attempt to carry out a "democratic path to socialism". These movements adopted nationalist identities, defining themselves as "anti-imperialist" and were expressed generically in the 1960s and 1970s by the political category of "liberation" or more specifically, "national liberation".
In the 1960s and 1970s, great transformations took place in Christianity and especially in Catholicism, which had their highest expression in the Second Vatican Council and in the appearance in Latin America of liberation theology, calling Christians to opt for the poor. In Argentina, the branch of liberation theology that predominated was the Theology of the people, more related to the Peronist experience.
Finally, in the 1960s and 1970s, youth emerged as an autonomous social category hand in hand with notable youth and student activism, which generated strong cultural and political changes, from the ethical confrontation with the values of the &# 34;older" questioned for their hypocrisy, even the sexual revolution, the protest song and rock, the movement against the Vietnam War in the United States, the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico, or the French May.
The insurrectional response to the Argentine Revolution
On June 28, 1966, a dictatorship calling itself the "Argentine Revolution" took power, which would generate a generalized insurrectional state, expressed in massive towns and the actions of several stable guerrilla organizations.
The Argentine Revolution was part of a series of permanent dictatorships promoted by the United States in Latin America as part of its National Security Doctrine during the Cold War. This type of government –which Guillermo O'Donnell defined as a bureaucratic-authoritarian state– had the suppression of political activity as its characteristic. The Argentine Revolution was initially led by General Juan Carlos Onganía and his first order was to dissolve the parties politicians, in order to install a corporatist-type regime.
With the rule of law annulled and political activity blocked, social conflicts could only be expressed in a subversive and insurrectionary manner. The word "subversion", precisely, became a commonplace to justify the repression against those who resisted the dictatorship. Under these conditions and with political activity abolished, the concepts of "revolution" -which was also used by dictatorships- and "liberation" advanced strongly among the youth, even among the middle classes.
Prior to 1966 and after the 1955 coup, some fleeting or sporadic acting guerrilla organizations had been created, such as the Uturuncos, the Argentine Liberation Front or the People's Guerrilla Army. But it would be after the Onganía dictatorship that the guerrillas would reach a stable and sustained organization, carrying out major attacks, as well as "executions" and kidnappings of people accused of collaborating with the dictatorship. In 1968, the Peronist Armed Forces (FAP) appeared under the leadership of Envar "Cacho" El Kadri, installing a rural guerrilla in the Taco Ralo area of Tucumán.
1969 was the year of the insurrectionary outbreak in Argentina. Seven large towns took place throughout the country, with the active participation of the student movement and trade unionism: the "Ocampazo" (January-April), the "Correntinazo" (May), the first Rosariazo (May), the Salteñazo (May), the first Cordobazo (May), the first Tucumanazo (May) and the second Rosariazo (September). That same year, the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) began to act, setting fire to thirteen supermarkets of the Rockefeller family's Minimax chain on June 26, as a protest against the visit of Nelson Rockefeller. Four days later, he was assassinated by the National Army Revolutionary, the highest Argentine union leader at the time, Augusto Timoteo Vandor, accused of negotiating with the military dictatorship and of being a traitor for promoting a "Peronism without Perón"; the members of the ENR would later join the Montoneros. That year the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) also began to act, commanded by Mario Santucho, although its actions only increased the following year.
The year 1970 began with the "Choconazo" (February-March) and on May 29 the impressive appearance of the Montoneros took place.
Origins and founders
Montoneros finished forming in the first months of 1970, as a consequence of the confluence of several Peronist armed groups of Catholic roots:
- Commands Camilo Torres. They had two commands, one in Buenos Aires and one in Córdoba. The Camilo Torres Commands were constituted in 1967 by Juan García Elorrio, director of the magazine Christianity and Revolution, but by the end of 1969 his leadership had been questioned, remaining outside the organization.
- Comando Camilo Torres de Buenos Aires. This group was known by Montoneros' own militants as the Founder Group. By the end of 1969, he recognized the leadership of Fernando Abal Medina and had the participation of Carlos Ramus, Norma Arrostito, Mario Firmenich, Carlos Alberto Maguid, Graciela Daleo, among others.
- Command Camilo Torres de Córdoba. Emilio Maza, Ignacio Vélez, Héctor Araujo, priest Alberto Fulgencio Rojas, Liprandi, Susana Lesgart, Alejandro José Yofre, Carlos Capuano Martínez and José Fierro, among others.
- Sabino Group. José Sabino Navarro was a trade unionist of the Smata (automotive industry), delegate of the plant of the company Deutz in the Buenos Aires conurban, and leader of the Catholic Youth Workers, who related to Juan García Elorrio and the magazine Christianity and Revolution. He formed a guerrilla group in January 1969, which also included José Amorín, Hilda Rosenberg, Gustavo Lafleur, Carlos Hobert, Graciela Maliandi, Tito Veitzman and Carlos Falaschi, among others.
- Reconquest Group. It had its base in the city of Reconquista and acted mainly in the north of the province of Santa Fe, and to a lesser extent in Tucumán and Salta. He was represented by Roberto Perdía and also included Hugo Medina, Ricardo Nadalich and Juan Belaustegui, among others.
- Santa Fe Group. Based on the Ateneo de Santa Fe, he was led by Mario Ernst, and included René Oberlín, Roberto Rufino Pirles, Osvaldo Agustín Cambiasso, Raúl Clemente Yagger, Raúl Bracco, Juan Carlos Menesses, Marcelo Nívoli, Carlos Legaz, Fernando Vaca Narvaja, among others. Al Ateneo had also belonged to Sara Susana Medina, who was killed on September 20, 1968 by accidentally exploiting a bomb.
- Grupo Córdoba. He had as the main references to Alberto Molina, Luis Rodeiro and the priest Elvio Alberione.
For an authoritarian regime like the Onganía dictatorship, which claimed to be nationalist and Catholic, the new positions of the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council constituted a challenge; "when the Church recognized the pluralistic options of the faith in social and political questions and abandoned some of the conservative ideological formulations."
Female presence
Since its origins, Montoneros had a considerable number of female guerrillas, a fact that was new and not present in previous guerrilla experiences. In this regard, researcher Ana Noguera says:
In general, it was highlighted in the news - whether in the title or in the development of the note - about the participation of women in the operations, expressing a certain "surprising" tone regarding this participation. The socially admitted attributes according to the feminine nature involve attitudes and behaviors that are in keeping with such characteristics. Changes in stereotypes about femininity cause difficulties in being socially accepted, mainly because they are conceived as immutable. While some women had participated in the various guerrilla groups that had acted during the 1960s, it was still seen as "new" not only for the press but also for the rest of society, that is, "the female presence in male-minded actions" was called to the beginning of the 1970s. In a context of growing political radicalization, many women entered political and social militancy. Its incorporation was gradually promoted during the years 1971 and 1972, increasing, as did the whole of political militancy both Peronist and non- Peronist, by 1973.
During the dictatorship that called itself the Argentine Revolution
First actions
Between 1968 and 1969, according to Ignacio Vélez Carreras, «we carried out numerous operations to recover weapons and uniforms. Actually we only thought about assembling the device. From a federal shot, police officers on the loose, various police detachments, a military guard and others. […] The awareness of the manifest destiny of the group was so strong, the decision so clear, that the Cordobazo passed us by. […] At that time we had no relationship with the Justicialista Party, to which we were never affiliated or participated in its local structures. In reality we felt a deep contempt for the PJ".
Political-Military Organization (OPM)
Montoneros was established as a political-military organization (OPM). This meant rejecting the dual model, which had traditionally been adopted by other insurrectional experiences (Leninism, Maoism, Castroism, Sandinismo, Vietnam, Ireland, etc.), which had separated the military organization from the political organization, creating a purely military structure for the first case (army or militias), and a political party of cadres under the regime of democratic centralism, for the second, being that one considered as the "armed wing" of the party.
Montoneros adopted the form of an OPM, because its intention was to be considered as one of the existing organizations within the Peronist Movement, led by Juan Domingo Perón, accepting its heterogeneity. This conformation would change after Perón's death, with the creation first of the Authentic Peronist Party (or simply Authentic Party) in 1975 and then with the founding of the Montonero Party in 1976.
Kidnapping and murder of Aramburu
The first action of the Montoneros, called Operation Pindapoy, occurred on May 29, 1970, when a commando group kidnapped former dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu from his home. The action moved public opinion and triggered the fall of the dictator Juan Carlos Onganía, who suffered an internal coup ten days later.
Aramburu had been the leader of the hardest wing of the dictatorship calling itself the Liberating Revolution that in 1955 had overthrown the constitutional government of Perón. Specifically, Aramburu was the dictator who ordered the executions of 1956, the kidnapping and disappearance of the corpse of Eva Perón and Decree Law 4161 of 1956 that made Peronism illegal and justified the imprisonment of thousands of citizens.
The kidnapping of Aramburu was carried out by at least ten guerrillas from the Camilo Torres Command of Buenos Aires: Fernando Abal Medina, Esther Norma Arrostito, Raúl Capuano Martínez, Mario Eduardo Firmenich, Carlos Alberto Maguid, Emilio Maza, Carlos Ramus and Ignacio Vélez. Abal Medina, Arrostito and Maza had had military training in Cuba. Montoneros had been taking shape in recent months as a unitary organization, from the confluence of the founding groups with a presence in Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Córdoba.
That same day, the Montoneros released their first statement:
Perón comes back. Command Number 1. To the people of the Nation. Today, 29 May, at 9.30 a.m., our Command proceeded to the arrest of PEDRO EUGENIO ARAMBURU, in compliance with an order emanating from our driving, in order to submit it to REVOLUTIONARY JUICIO. About Pedro Eugenio Aramburu weighs 108 counts of TRAIDOR to the PATRIA and to the PEOPLE and ASESINO of 27 ARTINIANS. Alternatives of the trial and the judgement handed down will be reported. Perón or Muerte! Montoneros.
The name Juan José Valle referred to General Valle, one of the leaders in 1956 of a failed civic-military uprising against the Aramburu dictatorship and who was shot by him along with other civilians and soldiers, in an act of violence institutional without antecedents in Argentine history.
Aramburu was transferred to the La Celma ranch in the town of Timote in the province of Buenos Aires, where he was subjected to a "revolutionary trial" for the next two days. The trial consisted of an interpellation by Aramburu on nine charges:
- To have signed decrees 10 362/56 establishing the Martial Law and 10 363/56 establishing the death penalty, which enabled the summary and clandestine executions in 1956.
- To have signed Decree 10 364/56, ordering eight soldiers to be shot in contravention of the sentence of innocence issued by the War Council.
- To have ordered the prohibition and suppression of Peronism, and the intervention of the unions.
- To have kidnapped and made Eva Perón's body disappear.
- To have defamed the Peronist leaders, especially Juan D. Perón, Eva Perón and Juan José Valle.
- Ending the social conquests of Peronism.
- To have initiated the surrender of national heritage to foreign interests.
- Be at that time orchestrating a coup operation to install a "false democracy".
- To have been the vehicle of the “oligarchy” to stop “the change of social order towards a sense of strict Christian justice”.
According to Communiqué No. 3 of the Montoneros, dated May 31, 1970, Aramburu admitted having carried out the first four acts he was accused of, but denied having carried out the last five.
The "revolutionary court" resolved to sentence Aramburu to death by firearm, give her body a Christian burial, and hand it over to her relatives once the body of Eva Perón was returned to the Argentine people. On June 1, the The sentence was carried out by Fernando Abal Medina, who proceeded to kill Aramburu by firing a pistol.
The kidnapping and assassination of Aramburu produced the fall of Onganía a week later and General Roberto Marcelo Levingston was appointed in his place, who modified the objectives of the dictatorship, abandoning the intention of establishing a permanent dictatorial regime, to make way for to an "electoral exit" that could be "controlled" by the military, although it finally materialized three years later, with the triumph of Peronism in the presidential elections of March 11, 1973. Shortly after the new dictator took office, the corpse de Aramburu was found buried in a field in the town of Timote, owned by the Ramus family.
A minority sector, close to Aramburu, has maintained that the assassination of Aramburu was ordered by the dictator Onganía and was executed or had the support of sectors of the Army or intelligence services.
Seam of La Calera
After the kidnapping and "execution" of Aramburu, which made the Montoneros known throughout the country, the organization carried out some armed actions, such as the assault on the Villa Carlos Paz police station, the theft of weapons from the Cordoba Federal Shooting, a minor attack on the Military Hospital, explosion of bombs in places that were considered symbols of "imperialism" and "gorilism", as well as the disarmament of police officers. These actions were intended to carry out a modality of "armed propaganda", while providing weapons, money, vehicles, and other logistical elements (wigs, mimeographs, documents). For this reason, the operations were accompanied by statements sent to the press awarding them, as a way of showing an effective presence and "generating awareness" among the population that opposed the military dictatorship.
On July 1, 1970, at 7:30 a.m., four Montoneros commandos (Eva Perón, Comandante Uturunco, General San Martín and 29 de Mayo), with light blue and white armbands with a legend that read "Montoneros", under the command of Emilio Maza, took control of the Cordoba town of La Calera, in a similar way to what the Tupamaros guerrilla organization of Uruguay had carried out in Pando the previous year. The operation fell mainly on the members of the Camilo Command Towers of Cordoba.
In an interview carried out the following year by the magazine Cristianismo y Revolución, Montoneros said that the objectives were: 1) Obtain arms and money; 2) Show that they had operational capacity throughout the country; 3) Show that it was possible to carry out major military operations and that the dictatorship was vulnerable; 4) Show solidarity with the Cordovan workers; 5) Take a test of capacity, discipline and responsibility in major operations.
La Calera is a small mountain town located 10 km from the city of Córdoba which, symbolically, was the last point in the country to be taken over by the coup leaders who had overthrown Peronism in 1955. The montoneros simultaneously took over the police station, reducing The police, without encountering resistance, the municipality and the telephone exchange, and assaulted the branch of the Banco de la Provincia de Córdoba, taking four million pesos (equivalent to one million dollars at that time). On the corner of the bank they left a box to be confused with a bomb and delay the reaction of the Army, which when disarming it found a recorder with the Peronist March.
The takeover lasted less than an hour, without major inconveniences, and then the guerrillas withdrew in the four vehicles in which they had arrived, but one of them had a malfunction that forced its occupants to get out and steal a car to go to the prearranged safe house. The robbery was quickly associated with guerrilla action and allowed the police and the Army to detain José Fierro and Luis Losada, after a shootout in which the latter was wounded. An interrogation under torture and a deficient compartmentalization of information among the guerrillas, allowed the Army to obtain the address of the main safe house, located in the Los Naranjos neighborhood of the city of Córdoba where the group's commander, Emilio Maza, was located. and three other guerrillas. After a shootout in which Vélez and Maza were seriously injured - Maza died a week later - the Army took control of the house, finding a large amount of crucial documentation on all the members of Córdoba, as well as information on the group from Buenos Aires. and the kidnapping of Aramburu. Thus, the Córdoba group was left with its commander dead, several important members arrested (Ignacio Vélez, Luis Losada, José Fierro, Carlos Soratti Martínez, Liprandi, Raúl Guzzo Conte Grand, José María Breganti, Guillermo Martorell Juárez, Felipe Nicolás Defrancesco and Heber Albornoz), while the rest of the members had to move to other provinces, in a clandestine situation.
Despite this, the taking of La Calera strengthened the national image of Montoneros and increased support among the population. Maza's funeral brought together 10,000 people who accompanied the coffin to the cemetery, where they sang the Peronist March and the National Anthem in an act of open defiance of the dictatorship. Likewise, the takeover of La Calera gave rise to the Movimiento of Priests for the Third World (MSTM) pronounced themselves on the armed struggle and issued a statement in which, without promoting the armed struggle, they maintained that "The Movement respects those who, judging that they have exhausted all instances, consider the only way out of arms". At the same time, a group of seminarians from Córdoba described Maza's death as "the greatest act of Christian love".
Garín taken. The FAR emerges
On July 30, 1970, forty guerrillas took over the city of Garín, in the Buenos Aires suburbs, very close to Campo de Mayo, the country's main military base, for one hour. It meant the appearance of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR). The FAR had an origin that came mainly from the Communist Party and the Communist Youth Federation, under the leadership of Carlos Olmedo and Roberto Quieto, with an ideology very different from the Christian Peronism where the Montoneros came from. Other smaller groups were led by Arturo Lewinger, Élida Aída D'Ippolito (the fat Amalia), Marcos Osantinsky and Carlos Herllman, and Julio Roqué, a leader of the Santiago Pampillón Popular Commandos (CPSP), based in Córdoba. Other leaders of the organization were Paco Urondo and Juan Pablo Maestre. Progressively FAR and Montoneros were getting closer positions and acting jointly, until in 1973 they merged.
One of the peculiarities of the organization was its transition from a Marxist-Gervarist origin, since a large number of its founding members came from the youth hues of the Communist Party (PC), to a position that led them to realize a rereading of national history and Peronism in Marxist key.
On August 27, the Emilio Maza Montonero Command of the National Revolutionary Army "executed" trade unionist José Alonso, one of the leaders of the "participationist" sector of Argentine trade unionism, who set aside the objective of fighting for the return of Perón and promoted the participation of the labor movement in the military government, following the corporatist guidelines proposed by Onganía.
William C. Morris Combat
On September 7, 1970, the police surprised a part of the leadership of the Montoneros when they were preparing to hold a meeting at the La Rueda bar, on the corner of Potosí and Villegas in the Buenos Aires town of William C. Morris, generating a fight in which Fernando Abal Medina and Carlos Gustavo Ramus died, resulting in Luis Rodeiro being arrested. Sabino Navarro, for his part, managed to break the fence despite being injured in one leg, while Capuano Martínez withdrew unharmed.
Abal Medina and Ramus were veiled in the San Francisco Solano parish, located in the Villa Luro neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires, authorized by the priests Rodolfo Ricciardelli and Jorge Vernazza. During the mass, the priest Carlos Mugica, In the same place where he would be assassinated four years later, he uttered the following words:
I can only say a few words of farewell for those who were my brothers Carlos Gustavo and Fernando Luis, who chose the hardest and most difficult way for the cause of man's dignity. We cannot continue with indefinition and fear, without compromising. I remember when with Carlos Gustavo we made a trip to the north of the country and there I saw him cry dissatisfied by seeing the misery and sad fate of the hacheros. He was faithful to Christ, he had a real and concrete love for those who suffer; he committed to the cause of justice, which is that of God, because he understood that Jesus Christ points us the way of service. It is an example for youth, because we have to fight to achieve just society and overcome the mechanism that wants to become automatons. May this holocaust serve as an example.Father Carlos Mugica
In memory of this fact, September 7 was chosen as the Day of the Montonero Militant.
The bid for the “electoral exit”
The fall of Onganía on June 8, 1970, caused the collapse of the project to establish a permanent dictatorship, in the form of a bureaucratic-authoritarian State, within the framework of the national security doctrine that the United States applied to maintain control of Latin America in the Cold War against the Soviet bloc, granting the armed forces the function of internally controlling the populations and guaranteeing the political-economic orientation of the State.
With the rule of law annulled and political parties cancelled, social conflicts could only be expressed in an insurrectionary manner. The word "subversion" it became commonplace to justify the repression against those who resisted the dictatorship. Under these conditions and with political activity abolished, the concepts of "revolution" —which dictatorships also used— and "liberation" caught on with force in sectors of the youth, even in the middle classes. in the three years between 1969 and 1972 there were at least 21 populated attacks), of which the Cordobazo was the best known) and urban and rural guerrilla activity was installed, simultaneously with an extraordinary increase in the political mobilization of youth in unions and universities.
The dictatorship responded to the youth, populated, and guerrilla mobilizations with extreme repression, using torture in a generalized way, detaining hundreds of political prisoners and committing dozens of murders, mostly young protesters (Santiago Pampillón, Juan José Cabral, Máximo Mena, Adolfo Ramón Bello, Luis Norberto Blanco, Hilda Guerrero de Molina, etc.) denying that it was a situation of right to resist oppression.
Under these conditions, General Roberto Marcelo Levingston assumed power in June 1970, with the aim of achieving an "electoral exit" controlled by the military and allied civilian sectors. A political rapprochement between Juan Domingo Perón and Ricardo Balbín began immediately. Then Arturo Frondizi, the third of the great political references of the time, will also be included. Perón and Balbín were, at that time, the maximum expressions of the Peronist and non-Peronist sectors, into which the country had been divided since 1945. Balbín, then leader of the Radical Civic Union of the People, made contact with Jorge Daniel Paladino, personal delegate of Perón, who remained in exile in Spain and proscribed in Argentina. Balbín conveyed to Paladino his proposal to bring together the political parties in order to agree on a series of common democratic lines and collectively undertake negotiations with the dictatorship for the "political exit" of the regime towards a government elected by the population. Perón, in turn, supported Balbín's proposal and wrote him a personal letter, dated September 25, 1970, in which the founder of Peronism told the president of the UCRP:
Dear compatriot: (...) Both the Radical Civic Union of the People and the National Justice Movement are popular forces in political action. Their ideologies and doctrines are similar and should have acted in solidarity in their common objectives. We, the leaders, are probably the culprits that it has not been so. We do not make the mistake of making an unjustified outcome persist. (...) Separated we could be instruments, together and in solidarity, there will be no political force in the country that can with us and, since the others do not seem inclined to give solutions, let us look for them among us, as this would be a solution for the Homeland and the Argentine People. It is our duty of Argentines and, in the face of it, nothing can be superior to the greatness that we must put into play to fulfill it.Letter from Juan Domingo Perón to Ricardo Balbín, September 25, 1970
On November 11, 1970, representatives of the Unión Cívica Radical del Pueblo (UCRP), Peronista, Socialista Argentino, Conservador Popular and Bloquista parties formed the group called La Hora del Pueblo, demanding immediate elections, without exclusions and respecting to minorities.
Thus began a complex struggle, conditioned by multiple tensions and interests, around an "electoral exit" that would be an effective alternative to the insurrectionary state that was growing in Argentina, and that at the same time addressed the question of the legalization of Peronism and the return of Perón to the country, which constituted an unacceptable limit for the most anti-Peronist sectors of the Armed Forces and the conservative power groups, but which at the same time constituted an indispensable condition for Perón himself and the sector of Peronism that rejected the possibility of a "Peronism without Perón".
Insurrectionary activity continued after the fall of Onganía. In November 1970 the second Tucumanazo and the Catamarqueñazo took place; In March 1971, the Viborazo happened, which caused the fall of the dictator Levingston and his replacement by General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse. Lanusse was the undisputed leader of the Army and of the "blue" side (moderate anti-Peronist) that defeated the "red" side (radical anti-Peronist, led by the Navy) during the military conflict that took place between 1962 and 1963. He assumed power with a plan to the "electoral exit" that he called the Great National Agreement (GAN), which consisted of a political-social agreement between the military and the power groups active in Argentina, including Peronism and trade unionism, to enable an "electoral exit" whose result was acceptable to all. The objective of the GAN was to consecrate a republican civic-military government electorally, with Lanusse himself as consensus president, accepting the fact that it was not convenient for Peronism to return to power immediately and above all that Perón could present himself as a candidate. The next two years would be a game of chess between Lanusse and Perón.
In this situation, Montoneros had the options of adopting a strategy called "prolonged people's war", rejecting any possible "electoral exit", or promoting a strategy of weakening the dictatorship that would force it to accept an "electoral exit". », without conditions, with the full participation of Peronism and the possibility that Perón could present himself as a candidate. Both possibilities were expressed at the time with two opposing slogans: the first was «Neither coup nor election, revolution» and the second, «Free elections without proscriptions». Both the Montoneros and the FAR, although with internal dissidents, chose to press for an "electoral exit" without restrictions of any kind, for which they opened the so-called "mass fronts" to channel youth, female, union, student, and political militancy. neighborhood, which formed the Revolutionary Tendency of Peronism.
The "Federation"
The disasters of June 1970 in La Calera and of September in William C. Morris left the Montoneros without their leaders and with most of their members exposed, so those who had not been arrested or killed had to take refuge in their respective regional groups and limit their contacts. The organization was left without a true national leadership and took the form of a "federation", with few contacts between the groups, which postponed the political discussion on the strategy to be adopted.
During that period there were four autonomous "regionals": Buenos Aires, Córdoba, the Northwest, and Santa Fe. Each one had between fifteen and thirty combatants, organized into cells of four or five members called "basic units of combat", with a person in charge and a territory of operations. The guerrillas used noms de guerre, organized their lives without attracting attention and kept the information "compartmentalized" in each group, to minimize suspicions from neighbors and the damages of an arrest.
The regional Buenos Aires was the one with the largest number of combatants and the one that achieved the greatest mass development with the growth of the JP in 1971. The size and population density of the territory of operation facilitated anonymity and provided better conditions of security than the so-called "interior" from the country. After the falls of Abal Medina and Ramus, the leadership was left in the hands of José Sabino Navarro, because his group had been less hit and much less exposed than the "Fundador group"; and when he traveled to the other regionals, he was replaced by Carlos Hobert or Mario Firmenich.
After the fall of Mario Ernst, the regional Santa Fe was left under the command of Ricardo René Haidar; It had its main base in the city of Santa Fe, established in previous years by the Santa Fe Group, resorting above all to the Ateneo Santa Fe, a student group that operated at the Universidad del Litoral.
The regional Córdoba, virtually dismantled after La Calera, was left under the command of Alejandro Yofre with the support of some cadres from Río Cuarto and was reorganized, and even extended to San Luis, San Juan and Mendoza, under the responsibility of Alberto Molinas.
The Northwest regional, organized by the Reconquista Group, received a significant number of guerrillas transferred for safety from other parts of the country and remained under the command of Roberto Cirilo Perdía and Fernando Vaca Narvaja, in Tucumán and Salta, respectively.
The basic principle of the guerrilla activity of the Montoneros, like that of all guerrillas, was the surprise factor. The operatives had to be quick, following the slogans of "concentration and dispersal" and "hit and disappear", avoiding confrontation open with the police or the Army. At that time they gave priority to taking over police stations or police posts, to seize weapons, ammunition and uniforms, or banks and companies, to obtain money, using groups of seven or eight guerrillas, in operations that lasted a few minutes. Each operation was recognized by means of a statement or graffiti in the place, in order for it to also act as "armed propaganda", as it is called. During this period, Montoneros carried out two or three operations per month, relatively minor and mainly in Buenos Aires. Some of the actions included the assault on the Bella Vista Civil Registry in December 1970, to obtain material to falsify identity documents, the seizure of the Tucumán Historic House in February 1971, the attack on the Santa Fe Jockey Club in March 1971, the assault on the Boulogne Bank of Villa Ballester in June 1971, where they obtained 88,000 dollars, etc. The most important operation of 1971 was the capture, in June, of San Jerónimo Norte, a small city of five thousand inhabitants located 45 km from the city of Santa Fe, where they assaulted the bank and took over the police station, taking their weapons. The national press covered the event and considered it a "reappearance" of the Montoneros, after the fall of Abal Medina and Remus.
In the first months of 1971, José Sabino Navarro began to travel frequently around the country to make contact with the regional ones, in order to reconstitute a national leadership. On June 25, he was about to be captured and killed the Buenos Aires police officers Domingo Moreno and Fernando Cidraque. A month later he was intercepted in the province of Córdoba, on National Route 36 and was injured; He spent a week trying to escape through the countryside, but finally the wound prevented him from continuing and he committed suicide before being caught.On that occasion, Juan Antonio Díaz also died and Jorge Cottone was arrested.
The death of Sabino Navarro was one of several serious blows suffered by the organization before it began to spread in mid-1972. In the northwest region, Fernando Vaca Narvaja, Edmundo Candiotti, Susana Lesgart, Mariano Pujadas, Carlos Figueroa were arrested, Rosa del Carmen Quinteros and Jorge Raúl Mendé, in addition to several members of the FAR, practically paralyzing the regional FAR. In Santa Fe, fourteen guerrillas and many collaborators were arrested and Oscar Alfredo Aguirre was killed; while in Rosario René Oberlín and Juan Ernest were wounded and detained. In Córdoba two guerrillas died and three others were detained. In Buenos Aires Jorge Guillermo Rossi died in a shootout with the leader of Nueva Fuerza Roberto Uzal, who also died at try to defend yourself from your kidnapping; as a consequence of this, four montoneros were arrested.
At that moment the organization was reduced to its minimum expression, with only thirteen members, Carlos Hobart being the only one who was not wanted by the police. For that reason, Hobart was in charge of establishing political contacts, which would allow Montoneros to get out of confinement. Hobart connected with trade unionists and militants who had been linked to the experience of the CGT de los Argentinos, in which he had participated, and with JAEN, a university group led by Rodolfo Galimberti.
The Peronist Youth
The "political opening" it placed Montoneros in a contradictory political place: on the one hand they had acquired a very high profile within the Peronist Resistance, but on the other hand they were a group of young people with few political relations. Under these conditions Rodolfo Galimberti, leader of a Peronist university group called JAEN (Argentine Youth for National Emancipation), managed to connect with Carlos Hobart and offered to take a letter from the guerrilla organization to Perón, explaining the causes of the "executions" de Aramburu and the trade unionist José Alonso and their intentions to continue acting as the armed wing of the Peronist movement. The letter is dated February 9, 1971.
Galimberti managed to get Perón to receive him a few days later in Madrid, where he was in exile, and to write a reply letter and record an audio message addressed to "the youth companions", which it was transcribed and published by the magazine Cristianismo y Revolución in June under the title "Perón speaks to the youth".
Perón's letter to Montoneros is dated February 20, 1971. There he states "completely in agreement and I commend everything that has been done" with respect to Aramburu and, regarding the "execution" of José Alonso, he categorically denies "that he has disturbed any tactical plan". Regarding the evolution of the political situation, he answers that he does not believe that the military is willing to hold elections without proscriptions, but clarifies that " the opportunity to also force this factor cannot be neglected”, anticipating his support for an electoral exit if it could be "forced" that it be carried out in conditions of freedom. Finally, Perón refers to the link that Montoneros could have with the Peronist movement in these terms:
As the companion [by Galimberti] explains to them, while the surface organizations obey a centralized leadership, the organizations that take care of the “revolutionary war” have absolute independence in their leadership and coordinated nothing more than by the objectives.Juan Domingo Perón.
In the recording addressed to "the compañeros de la juventud", Perón characterizes the situation by saying that "the Homeland lives uncertain and dramatic days, subjected to the vassalage of its occupying forces... [in which] fighting is a duty, denying all legality to the military dictatorship. -an expression that from then on will acquire an allegorical weight for the Peronist Youth- and extends into considerations about the role of the armed struggle at that time, he calls the guerrilla organizations "special formations";:
The Peronist Movement must be organized appropriately for this purpose, in a way that allows the organic struggle of the surface, and can also face the crude forms that are often imposed by dictatorships such as the one that strikes the country today. The special formations in charge of the last, must have special and original features, such as special and original are the functions to be performed. They act both within our device, as self-defense, and outside it, in the direct struggle of every day within the forms imposed by the revolutionary war.Juan D. Perón (Perón speaks to youth)
"Based on Perón's explicit support and the sympathy that Aramburu's death had aroused, Montoneros enjoyed not inconsiderable popularity among the Peronist base," says researcher Lucas Lanusse.
On July 26, 1971, the Montoneros carried out their first joint action with the FAR, taking over the Villa Mariano Moreno police station in Tucumán, seizing the weapons without shedding blood. 34;executed" Major Julio Ricardo Sanmartino, former Córdoba police chief and organizer of paramilitary groups. During this period, an ephemeral tripartite/quadipartite coordination between Montoneros, the FAR, the FAP and Descamisados came into operation, under the acronym OAP: Peronist Armed Organizations. Arrostito attributes the failure to establish the OAPs to "the internal controversy of FAP", "the leftism of FAR" and "the incoherence of Descamisados".
On June 30, the Political Parties Law had been sanctioned, restoring its legality and enabling affiliation, thus beginning the tense path that would culminate in the March 1973 elections.
Meanwhile, Galimberti had become the link between Perón and Montoneros and on November 27, 1971, Héctor J. Cámpora, recently appointed Perón's personal delegate in Argentina, announced that Perón had appointed Galimberti as representative of the Youth in the Superior Council of the Peronist Movement. From that position, Galimberti created the Provisional Council of Peronist Youth (JP or Jotapé), which in turn gave itself a regional organization, replicating the structure of Montoneros, to unify the various youth groups that had been acting separately up to that moment. In six months it already had more than 80,000 militants. This structure began to function at the beginning of 1972 and would be known since then as JP Regionales, which although formally included various Peronist youth groups, in fact it gradually became the main "mass front" of the Montoneros, until culminating in mid-1973 when the Montoneros "already went on to obtain absolute organic control of the JP".
In November 1971, a survey carried out by the International Political Science Association (IPSA) indicated that a large part of Argentine society approved of guerrilla violence, reaching 53% in Córdoba, 51% in Rosario and 45% in Buenos Aires.
Neighborhood work
Montoneros gave priority to political and social action in the popular neighborhoods and shantytowns, installing basic units organized by the Peronist Youth, linking middle-class youth, who were high school or university students, with the working population that lived in the peripheral neighborhoods of the cities. This type of militancy meant concentrating on resolving the problems of housing, urban planning and living conditions of the popular sectors. In 1973 the Movimiento Villero Peronista and the Frente de Inquilinos would be created, as "mass fronts" specific.
"Fight and come back": the massification
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Due to casualties and difficulties recruiting new members, by early 1972, the size of the Montoneros "was not much larger than it had been at the beginning of 1971". A year and a half after its appearance, it had been able to hold its first National Congress, with the participation of six regional ones (Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Litoral, Northwest, Northeast and Cuyo), largely thanks to the work carried out by Sabino Navarro. Congress had resolved that each regional choose its own leadership, while the National Leadership would be made up of the heads of each regional. And they had to wait until December 1971 to hold the first meeting of the National Leadership, where they appeared to discuss the first political-military document prepared by Montoneros. Firmenich then assumed first place in the National Leadership and would maintain it from then on. Other national leaders were Roberto Perdía (Northwest), Carlos Hobert (Buenos Aires), Raúl Yager (Litoral) and Paco Urondo (Cuyo). The organization had established a structure of military grades: one entered the base as a militiaman and the first promotion was as an aspirant; from there the combatant became an officer (low, second, first, major and superior). As a security measure, each one was referred to by his nom de guerre.
Montoneros was still internally divided between the sectors that proposed as their primary objective pressure for the dictatorship to call free elections, in order to win them and form part of a "popular government" and those who distrusted the "electoral exit", proposing to stay apart from the political process, persisting in the armed struggle until they achieved "the revolution", with the slogan "Neither votes, nor boots, guns and balls.
There was a political controversy that had been dragging since Montoneros had made the decision to participate in the electoral process: "Claim the Government, Perón al Poder". Decision that was not shared by the entire Organization. In fact, at the different levels of driving, we were few partners who enthusiastically promoted our participation in the elections, which meant shifting our priority from political-military actions to political actions. Many had doubts and a few were against.José Amorín
At the end of 1971, the Montoneros Leadership debated and drew up the first document of the organization, of an internal nature, titled "Political-Military Line". In said document, Montoneros insists on emphasizing the centrality of the struggle Navy and "war" which he characterizes as "the highest form of political struggle", recognizing the validity of "the electoral struggle" -defined as "the popular mobilization for its demands, its program and its Leader"-, but as a secondary method, subordinated to the armed struggle and the construction of a "popular army", which has as its objective "national liberation and the national construction of socialism". free elections, but that once a popular government had been established, the Montoneros had to reconvert themselves, assuming a central role in social policy towards the most dispossessed sectors, playing a role equivalent to that played by the Eva Perón Foundation in their government. Both visions would begin to bifurcate after the elections.
The head of the Buenos Aires regional office, Carlos Hobert, put an end to doubts by making public his position for "elections without proscription." The decision to actively participate in the elections meant that a sector of Montoneros separated from the organization under the name of Columna Sabino Navarro ("los Sabinos"), but simultaneously other Peronist guerrilla organizations joined, such as a sector of the Peronist Armed Forces (FAP) and the Descamisados group. For their part, the FAR distrusted the "electoral outcome" and they proposed to use it as a platform for a great armed insurrection, with the slogan "With the ballot box to the government, with the arms to power".
Since the beginning of 1972 and hand in hand with the call for elections carried out by the dictatorship, Montoneros began to become massive, especially its incipient "mass fronts" (neighborhood, student, union, female). The moment is known as the stage of "the fattening". The first mass front that became a mass was the "juvenile branch" organized by the JP Regionales led by Rodolfo Galimberti. In just twelve months, the JP became the organization with the greatest capacity for convocation and mobilization within Peronism, going from mobilizing five thousand people in February 1972, to mobilizing one hundred thousand people at the beginning of 1973. The university front had little development before 1973, with the exception of the National University of La Plata, where it acted the University Federation for the National Revolution (FURN) -the Peronist University Youth (JUP) had not yet been formed as the national university expression of the Tendency-.
A series of events organized by the JP were promoting and unifying the youth mobilization around Montoneros and the Tendency. In January there was an act in Ensenada and in May another in Merlo, both in the working-class suburb of Buenos Aires. On June 9, the electoral campaign was launched in the Argentine Boxing Federation and on July 28 a crowd filled the Nueva Chicago stadium, a club that was very active in the Peronist Resistance, where the Tendency launched the slogan "Fight and Come Back."
The fundamental vehicle for the massive orientation towards mass movements was the Peronist Youth, from which, after several years of disunity and anarchy, great efforts were made - from the middle of 71 - to achieve unity, creating a mobilizing, agitating and organizational force full of dynamism.Richard Gillespie
Facing the "electoral exit" Perón pursued a strategy of wide-ranging alliances, with a political dimension that included all political parties and leaders, including those who had been anti-Peronists in 1955, and a socio-economic dimension based on a " pact" union-business, promoting for this purpose, for the leadership of the CGT José Ignacio Rucci, one of the few important union leaders who at that time adhered to the objective of putting the fight for the return of Perón in the foreground.
To organize the Peronist Movement, Perón conceived a structure in four branches (political, union, feminine and youth). The previous year he had appointed Héctor J. Cámpora, a historic leader who had good relations with the Montoneros and La Tendencia. On the other hand, Montoneros controlled the youth branch of the movement through Galimberti and the JP, and began to organize the other youth branches (university, secondary, worker, village and women's), which began to be structured. Finally, the fact that most of the most powerful unions believed that the return of Perón would not happen, made the syndicalism, with the exception of Rucci and a sector of less decisive unions, inactive during the year and a half before the elections of March 1973, thus allowing Montoneros and the JP, mainly, to occupy a prominent place, both in the mass mobilizations and in the new leaderships that were taking shape in the face of an eventual electoral victory. The magazine "El Peronista", a "dissemination organ" group official.
Advance of Peronism in middle-class youth
Montoneros channeled a singular phenomenon of Argentine politics in the 1970s, which was the advance of Peronism in a considerable sector of the middle class, especially the youth, who had traditionally rejected Peronism. This middle-class youth sector adhered to the so-called generically "revolutionary Peronism" or "peronist left" and massively entered the Montoneros and their mass fronts, especially student ones, carrying out a practice of solidarity work in popular neighborhoods and shanty towns, and to a lesser extent in the unions. The ideological origins of these sectors of the middle class were very heterogeneous, from Catholic militancy and liberation theology, through nationalism, to Marxist, socialist and Guevarist currents, manifesting itself in the "worker-student unity" 3. 4; that linked the student movement with the union movement in the large towns held between 1969 and 1972, which had the Cordobazo as its emblem.
This youthful composition of the Montoneros middle class has been pointed out repeatedly and was considered important by Norma Arrostito, in the document written at ESMA shortly before she was assassinated in 1976:
The OPM is made up of elements that have emerged from the most diverse political sectors: nationalists, Peronists, Catholics, Christian Democrats and Marxists of all kinds; among them, the majority middle class by very wide margin.Norma Arrostito
For Arrostito, the massification of Montoneros and the consequent linkage of the youthful sectors of the middle class with "the popular majorities", was the main cause of its "heyday", in the same way that the loss of that link with "the masses" generated by the confrontation with Perón in 1973 and 1974, was the main cause of his & # 34; decadence & # 34;. At this time, the group also brought together more sympathizers to his armed wing.
The Peronist youth channel this commitment and it is becoming a political phenomenon after a cause and a goal. The Peronist guerrillas invoking Perón, through armed propaganda, emerges as an expectation for the Peronist masses...Norma Arrostito
Escape from the Rawson Prison and the Trelew Massacre
In 1972, various guerrilla organizations (Montoneros, FAR, ERP) agreed on a joint action to organize a massive escape of guerrillas and militants detained in the Rawson Prison, in Patagonia. The escape was partially successful, since six senior leaders of the Montoneros, the FAR and the ERP managed to escape by plane to Chile, and it had spectacular characteristics because the media broadcast live the negotiations between the guerrillas and the military, to agree on the terms of surrender for those who had not managed to escape, but remained in control of the jail and the airport.
The six guerrilla leaders who managed to escape were Fernando Vaca Narvaja (Montoneros), Marcos Osatinsky (FAR), Roberto Quieto (FAR), Mario Roberto Santucho (ERP), Enrique Gorriarán Merlo (ERP) and Domingo Menna (ERP).
After the surrender, the 19 guerrillas who had arrived at the airport and taken control of it were not taken back to jail, but were instead transferred to the Almirante Zar Naval Air Base. A week later they were machine-gunned, 16 of them being killed and three surviving. The deceased were: Alejandro Ulla (ERP), Alfredo Kohan (FAR), Ana María Villarreal de Santucho (PRT-ERP), Carlos Alberto del Rey (PRT-ERP), Carlos Astudillo (FAR), Clarisa Lea Place (PRT-ERP), Eduardo Capello (PRT-ERP), Humberto Suárez (PRT-ERP), Humberto Toschi (PRT-ERP), José Ricardo Mena (PRT-ERP), María Angélica Sabelli (FAR), Mariano Pujadas (Montoneros), Mario Emilio Delfino (PRT-ERP), Miguel Ángel Polti (PRT-ERP), Rubén Pedro Bonnet (PRT-ERP) and Susana Lesgart (Montoneros). Alberto Miguel Camps (FAR), María Antonia Berger (FAR) and Ricardo René Haidar (Montoneros) managed to survive.
The Trelew Massacre, committed by the Navy -where a radicalized anti-Peronist position predominated- occurred just six months before the presidential elections of March 11, 1973, called by Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, admitting for the first time since 1955 the participation of Peronism. Lanusse promoted an "electoral exit" called the Great National Agreement (GAN) consisting of an agreement with Perón that would make possible a peaceful and stable democratic institutionality. The most radicalized conservative and military sectors opposed the elections being held with the participation of Peronism, which is why they tightened the pressure on the political forces and Lanusse himself. In this context, the Trelew Massacre took place, weakening Lanusse's negotiating position and moving Peronism away from the possibility of reaching agreements that would guarantee political stability, including the situation of the guerrilla organizations.
Two days after the Trelew Massacre, the Military Junta reformed the Constitution, imposing, among other changes, the obligation that the president be elected by absolute majority, which led to the establishment of a ballot system, in order to reduce the chances of triumph of Peronism and promote the victory of a broad anti-Peronist coalition. The Trelew massacre generated a wave of popular indignation that was expressed in the generalization of the slogan "Blood spilled will not be negotiated", which accentuated the insurrectional climate and weakened the conditions to move towards a democratic and peaceful institutional framework.
Forty years later, on October 15, 2012, the Federal Court of Comodoro Rivadavia resolved to sentence Emilio Del Real, Luis Sosa and Carlos Marandino to life imprisonment as perpetrators of the massacre, classifying it as a "crime against humanity" ».
Perón returns
Perón's exile and the fight for his return had been one of the central political issues of Argentine politics since 1955. The media had made the expression "the fugitive tyrant" familiar.;, when saying his name was punishable by imprisonment and closure. The failure of his attempts to return to the country in 1957 and 1964 had weakened Perón's leadership and prompted the formation of a broad neo-Peronist current that supported the possibility of a "Peronism without Perón".
Perón's return to the country and his eventual presidential candidacy was a hot coal in the negotiations for the "electoral exit". In July 1972, the dictator Lanusse said on television that there was no prohibition for Perón to return to Argentina and that if he did not return it was "because he does not give him the skin." Montoneros then decides in August, through the Peronist Youth, ask Cámpora to analyze with Perón the possibility of returning to the country and definitively failing the Great National Agreement (elections controlled by the military, without allowing Perón's candidacy) promoted by General Lanusse. At the end of September Perón appointed Juan Manuel Abal Medina as general secretary of the National Justicialista Movement, with the mission of directing the Return Operation. Abal Medina was 27 years old at the time; He was a lawyer with a nationalist Catholic militancy, founder of the Círculo del Plata, with solid contacts in the Armed Forces, and was also the brother of Fernando Abal Medina, one of the founders of Montoneros, who had been killed in combat two years earlier.
With the appointment of Abal Medina as general secretary and the presence of Héctor Cámpora as Perón's personal delegate in Argentina, the Superior Council of the Peronist Movement was organized, with representatives of all branches. There the Peronist Youth launched the slogan "Fight and come back", which would achieve enormous popular support.
The operations center was installed in the CGT building, but except for Rucci, most of the orthodox Peronist trade unionism did not participate in Operation Return, falling mainly on the Peronist Youth and the FAR, Montoneros and FAP guerrilla organizations. The campaign for the return of Perón allowed the youth generation that had been resisting the dictatorship through mobilizations and towns such as the Cordobazo, to organize themselves as one of the main political actors, a few months before the elections to restore the democratic system..
Abal Medina made contact with various sectors of the Armed Forces in order to negotiate that the plane would not be shot down, or that Perón himself would not be arrested or assassinated upon returning. At that time, considerable sectors of the Armed Forces already accepted that Perón's return was essential to get out of the situation of instability and political deadlock that had paralyzed the country since his overthrow. He also agreed with the guerrilla and political organizations opposed to the dictatorship, that they would not take advantage of Perón's return to organize an uprising to overthrow Lanusse.
On November 7, Perón published a requested letter announcing that, taking into account that the dictatorship had publicly acknowledged that there were no causes against him, he had decided to return to Argentina on November 17. Perón's return took place in a Alitalia company charter plane that departed from Rome, with 153 Peronist personalities from all sectors of political, social, cultural and religious life. The "montonera delegation" It was made up of Horacio "Chacho" Pietragalla for the Montoneros, Rodolfo Vittar for the FAR, while René E. Bustos and Jorge Waisman traveled for the JP.
On the appointed day, November 17, 1972, the dictatorship prohibited the public from coming to receive Perón and ordered a huge operation to block access to the Ezeiza airport. Despite this, a crowd estimated to be between one hundred thousand and half a million people tried to reach the airport, confronting the security forces, without resulting in any deaths. About a thousand people managed to arrive. In commemoration of that mobilization, in Peronist culture November 17 is considered Militancy Day. That day there was an uprising of Navy officers and NCOs assigned to the ESMA in support of Perón, led by midshipman Julio César Urien, which was quickly controlled. Urien was in command of 20 officers and 40 corporals, who after being discharged joined the Montoneros and the JP.
The plane landed at Ezeiza airport at 11:15 in the morning. Perón came down accompanied by Cámpora and was received on the track by Juan Manuel Abal Medina and José Ignacio Rucci. Immediately afterwards, he was temporarily installed in the Ezeiza Airport hotel and during the following hours the dictatorship did not authorize his departure from it, imposing a de facto detention on the grounds that they could not guarantee his safety. More than twelve hours of strong confrontations with the military took place, in a climate of extreme tension, in which even Perón himself was armed. Finally, already at dawn on the 18th, the dictatorship authorized Perón's transfer to the house that the CGT had bought, located at Gaspar Campos 1075, in Vicente López.
Descamisados joins Montoneros
Towards the end of 1972, the armed organization Descamisados joined the Montoneros. The group had its militant base in the neighborhood JPs of the Buenos Aires suburbs and was made up of Norberto Habegger, Horacio Mendizábal, Dardo Cabo, Oscar di Gregorio, Fernando Saavedra Lamas, Osvaldo Sicardi, Fernando Galmarini, among others. Descamisados had originated in an evolution of a sector of the Youth of the Christian Democratic Party - which recognized the influence that Jacques Maritain brought to Argentina on his 1936 visit -, which in 1966 had entered Peronism. Descamisados appeared in public on October 17, 1970, taking over a cinema in La Tablada to project La hora de los hornos, by Pino Solanas and Octavio Getino. On July 11, 1972, they blew up the "Biguá" yacht belonging to the Army Commander in Chief and on September 6, they set fire to the Tigre Naval Center, in retaliation for the Trelew Massacre. Before joining Montoneros, Descamisados released the following statement dated October 17, 1972:
DESCAMISADOS, coinciding with the line of total confrontation to the enemy on all fronts of struggle, we raised the slogan of PERON CANDIDATO A PRESIDENT AND IN THE ARGENTINA. Thus, in the course of this process the real incompatibility of Peronism with the system will be demonstrated, highlighting the tricky manoeuvre of Lanusse and his military clique.
Election campaign
Finally, the elections were established for March 11, 1973, with the participation of Peronism, but without allowing Perón's candidacy. To this was added the introduction of the second ballot, a modification of the rules of the game proposed by the radical minister Arturo Mor Roig, who thought that in this way Peronism could be prevented from winning the elections, promoting the confluence of the anti-Peronist vote in the second round..
Perón took advantage of his trip to Argentina to tie together a wide network of political forces, trade union, business and social organizations, which formed a pole of civil power capable of neutralizing military interference in the return to constitutional order. The maximum expression of that policy was the historic embrace between Perón and Balbín on November 19, considered one of the most significant acts in Argentine history and a symbol of national unity, after decades of clashes between Peronists and anti-Peronists.
The possibility of a Perón-Balbín formula was analyzed, but found strong resistance both within Peronism and from radicalism. Perón then adopted a frontist strategy -departing from the one he adopted during his government-, allying himself with the majority of the main forces that had been anti-Peronists in 1955: Frondism, Conservatism, Christian Democracy, and Socialism. The coalition adopted the name of the Justicialista National Liberation Front (Frejuli), thus explicitly including the objective of national liberation that characterized to the Latin American protest movements of the time, including the Montoneros.
Perón's new ban forced Peronism to look for a candidate capable of replacing the most important political figure in Argentina in the century XX. This fact would be very negative for the democratic institutionality that was opened on May 25, 1973, since it left out of formal political power, the person who at that time had the greatest real political power and the only one who could manage to de-escalate the scenario left by the dictatorship, of serious and violent conflicts, in an international context of the Cold War that also tended to exacerbate them.
The chosen one was Héctor J. Cámpora, his personal delegate. Cámpora had a position close to the Montoneros and the JP, who were at that time the political force with the greatest capacity for mobilization for Peronism, in the face of the relative passivity of unionism. This would allow Montoneros and the JP to considerably influence the lists of candidates, especially deputies, senators, governors, and vice-presidents and provincial and municipal representatives. Cámpora's presidential campaign and the Frejuli program were designed almost entirely by Montoneros.
The electoral campaign and the successful slogan "Fight and return", allowed Montoneros and the JP to channel the need for political participation, mainly of a new generation, incorporating hundreds of thousands of militants. Without abandoning the armed struggle and hiding, through the JP Montoneros enabled legal militancy, mass acts and mobilizations, protest music shows, as well as an incipient action in schools and universities, which would show exponential growth a year next.
The growing popularity of Montoneros among adherents of Peronism and youth, was expressed in a large number of artists who sympathized with the organization. The filmmakers Pino Solanas and Octavio Getino made a notable documentary report entitled Perón: Political and Doctrinal Update for the Seizure of Power, in which Perón expresses his support for the armed struggle against the dictatorship and a political project of "Christian Socialism", which was widely disseminated in universities, as well as political and union venues. The choral group Huerque Mapu expressly adhered to the Montoneros and composed a work known as the Cantata Montoneros, premiered two years later. Even the famous Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat composed a praise entitled " La montonera", about a guerrilla woman he himself knew and loved:
With those hands of loving you so much
You painted on the walls ‘Lucha and return’
staining of hopes and songs
The paths of that 69.Joan Manuel Serrat
El Frejuli launched his electoral campaign on January 21 with an act in the municipal park of San Andrés de Giles, where Cámpora was born, with the slogan "Cámpora to the government, Perón to power". During the campaign it became clear that support for Peronism far exceeded the estimates of the dictatorship. Mor Roig had maintained that Peronism would not exceed 37% and that the radical candidate would triumph in the second round. Pressure from the military and from conservative sectors grew to not hold the elections and at the end of January Lanusse himself seriously thought about postponing the general elections, to replace them with a staggered system that began at the municipal level. On January 28, Attorney General Gervasio Colombres asked the Electoral Tribunal to dissolve Frejuli, causing an almost unanimous condemnation of the political parties. February the dictatorship further tensed the climate by once again prohibiting the presence of Perón in Argentina, until the democratic government assumed. On February 7, the Army generals signed a public commitment "until May 25, 1977 to guarantee the continuity of the institutionalization process and the stability of the next government", but the Navy and the Aviation refused to assume that commitment. A scholar of the Argentine guerrilla movement, Colonel Eusebio González Breard, who would act as one of the chiefs of Operation Independence from 1975, he maintained in 1984 that the military's strategy was to let the guerrilla organizations increase their attacks against Perón in democracy, to facilitate a new coup d'état. César Urien recounts that at that time, a captain from the Navy told him they were "willing to kill a million people" to prevent Peronism from making a revolution. The groups that were to install the terrorist dictatorship in 1976, from that moment on put General Lanusse on the list of enemies. On Friday, March 8, the electoral campaign ended.
Result and transition
The electoral result ended up collapsing both the plans of the dictatorship and those of the non-Peronist sectors. Peronism, which won in all the provinces except one, obtained 49.56% of the votes in the first round and Radicalism, which barely obtained 21%, gave up running in the second. For the military who had controlled political power in the last eighteen years, the electoral result and the resounding triumph of Peronism meant a historic failure and generated great confusion about the steps to follow. Lanusse offered to resign and the most recalcitrant sectors of the Armed Forces, proposed forcing Cámpora to avoid all contact with Perón and submit to the control of the Armed Forces, or even annul the elections and negotiate a new electoral exit without the participation of Peronism. The Board of Commanders rejected those options but tried negotiate conditions with Cámpora for the exercise of power, opposing an amnesty that would reach the guerrillas who had fought the dictatorship and a civilian command over the armed forces in which they lost autonomy. The Junta also put pressure on Cámpora, launching the 18 of April an operation of national scope against the guerrilla groups.
Montoneros and the other Peronist armed organizations decided to suspend the armed struggle after the assumption of the democratic government, but remaining organized, in the event that armed organizations arose to attack them. The ERP, for its part, announced that it would continue to "militarily combat the companies and the counterrevolutionary armed forces," but at the same time recognized that the Cámpora government represented the popular will and made the decision not to attack it, in as long as and as long as the government did not order repressive measures against the ERP. In the transition until the handover of power, the guerrilla groups maintained the siege on the dictatorship, especially on the sectors that sought to prevent the democratic government from taking over and wanted to establish a new dictatorship.
On April 20, Rodolfo Galimberti announced that he was in favor of creating "popular militias," a fact to which Perón himself responded by expelling him from the Superior Council of the Peronist Movement, where he represented the youth, being appointed at that time. charge Dante Gullo.
On April 30, the ERP assassinated Admiral Hermes Quijada, author of the official version that covered up the Trelew Massacre a few months before. The dictatorship declared martial law and the Navy was close to preventing the democratic government from taking over.;the law of the jungle". That same day Cámpora and Solano Lima met, in the former's house, with the Junta de Comandantes, managing to neutralize the toughest sectors, but without reaching a formula that would allow them to stand up. agreement on amnesty as well as solving the dilemma of the circularity of political violence in order to de-escalate it. The military demanded that the guerrillas who had committed murders and kidnappings not be amnestied, while the Popular Revolutionary Alliance demanded that the military not be amnestied that they had committed crimes against humanity; the elected government instead proposed a "broad and generous" amnesty, which would include everyone, as it had promised in its electoral program. He points out to Lanusse that "it is about there being no more wakes, let us end this story that you go to one and we go to another".
Perón and Cámpora assumed that once the democratic authorities were installed, guerrilla actions would have no reason to exist and would gradually diminish. limited amnesty, but it did not materialize and although two days earlier 96 detainees were released when the state of siege ceased, power was transferred with almost four hundred political prisoners.
On April 23, the formation of the Peronist University Youth (JUP) was announced, which would have its first National Congress on September 7, 1973. Almost simultaneously, the Union of Secondary Students (UES) was also organized. On May 8, two weeks before the constitutional government took office, the first issue of the magazine El Descamisado was published, which would act as the organ of the Montoneros and the Peronist Youth. It was directed by Ricardo Grassi, had Dardo Cabo as political manager and among the collaborators of the magazine was incorporated from No. 10 the cartoonist Héctor Germán Oesterheld, drawing a historical series entitled "450 years of struggle against imperialism&# 3. 4;. It had an average circulation of 100,000 copies and the notes were not signed. Due to censorship problems, as of April 9, 1974, it changed its name to El Peronista and after May 1974 to La Causa Peronista.
During the governments of Cámpora and Perón (1973-1974)
Suspension of the armed struggle
Once the electoral triumph was obtained, Perón attached great importance to defining the role that Montoneros was going to play within the democratic institutional framework. In April, before the new constitutional government assumed power on May 25, 1973, Perón held a series of meetings in Rome and Madrid, with Firmenich, Perdía and Quieto, the first two for the Montoneros and the third for the FAR.
Both Perdía and Amorín have detailed those meetings. Perón, who had seen the overcrowding that the Montoneros had been experiencing, especially among the youth, imagined a "transvasamiento" gradual removal of power, with an initial period of four years during which Montoneros "learned to govern" and consolidate its social representativeness and its capacity for popular organization, taking charge of social policies and progressively assuming government responsibilities. He personally interceded with Oscar Bidegain, recently elected governor of the province of Buenos Aires, where 40% of the population was concentrated, to incorporate several Montonero leaders into his government team so that they could learn the art of public administration.
Perón's plan was for Montoneros to stop being an armed organization, to assume the management of the Ministry of Social Welfare:
[Perón] offered us, as an Organization, to take over the social work (read, the Ministry of Social Welfare, which, in the face of our rejection, remained in the hands of López Rega) to build a popular organization which, without any difficulty, is interpreted as a political organization. Social work: building popular neighborhoods, building cooperatives, from below promoting culture, reaching the last corner of the country and organizing its people. This, which constitutes the greatest ambition of any political current within a politically heterogeneous government management, meant, nothing more or less, to strengthen the growth of our Organization in the Peronist bases and, therefore, to give us a real chance to achieve, in four years, the political hegemony of the Peronist movement. We inherited the movement, offered us the future because, let us say it at once, the present was him, the Perón himself.José Amorín
The leadership of the Montoneros and FAR did not accept the institutional role that Perón offered them and, given the refusal, the Ministry was left in the hands of José López Rega. Montoneros decided to suspend the armed struggle from the moment he assumed a democratic government, but he did not disarm, because he considered that the risk of a new coup d'état and the installation of a new dictatorship was highly probable.
Montoneros would restart the armed struggle two months after the death of General Perón, in September 1974, as a response to the actions of the Triple A parapolice group, led by Minister López Rega, which implemented a policy of State terrorism oriented centrally to assassinate the members of Montoneros and other organizations of the Tendency, encompassed under the generic and disqualifying nickname of "la zurda", "los zurdos", "el zurdaje", or "el marxismo", which in Argentina acquired a quasi-connotation. extremely serious crime.
Cámpora's presidency
On May 25, 1973, the Peronist Héctor J. Cámpora assumed the Presidency, after 18 years of banning Peronism and having tried to "de-peronize" to citizenship. For Montoneros the main and urgent issue was the release of political prisoners who had fought against the dictatorship. In second place appeared the places of power in the national cabinet and the provincial governments close to Montoneros and the JP.
Some ministries, universities and the provinces would be an important field of conflict between internal sectors of Peronism, throughout the entire period. The conflicts will be especially acute in seven provinces (Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Formosa, Mendoza, Misiones, Santa Cruz and Salta), in which the governors belonged to or were close to the Revolutionary Tendency. Three other governors (Catamarca, La Rioja and San Luis) initially identified with the Tendency, but later modified their political alignment. But the conflicts arose in all the provinces, according to the political alignments of the various political, union, and business sectors., religious and social, in particular those that responded to the opposition between the Tendency or the combative sectors of Peronism, and those that responded to the generic denomination of "Peronist orthodoxy". At that time, Peronism was made up of four branches (political, trade union, women's and youth), among which the charges were to be distributed equally. The Tendency controlled the majority of the youth, while the "orthodox" they controlled the majority of the union branch.
May 25: recovery of democracy and release of prisoners
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The day of the transfer of command from the military to a democratically elected Peronist government, 18 years after the military overthrew Perón, was dubbed by various media outlets as "The longest day of the century for the Argentines".
A huge crowd estimated between 200,000 and 700,000 people, occupied the area between the Congress and the Casa Rosada, to celebrate the end of 18 years of dictatorships and proscriptions, "In the Plaza de Mayo, the the flags of the Montoneros and the other armed groups occupy the best places." The crowd attacked the three dictators who made up the Military Junta, insulting them and destroying the windows of the car that brought the chief of the Aeronautics Brigadier Carlos Rey and physically attacking Admiral Carlos Coda, accusing him of the Trelew Massacre, who repelled the attack by firing shots from his custody, seriously injuring twelve people. The presidents of Chile Salvador Allende, Cuba Osvaldo Dorticós and Uruguay Juan María Bordaberry were present.
With the people in the streets, the democratic government had to face its first conflict that same day, as a result of the massive demand for the release of the political prisoners of the dictatorship. By the time Cámpora was sworn in as president, shortly after noon, there was already unanimity in Congress that the amnesty should be broad and include all political prisoners. Esteban Righi, even before being sworn in as Minister of the Interior, had spent the entire night before agreeing with all the blocks on a common project, which had to be approved -and it was- on the 27th.
But the political groups that had their militants imprisoned immediately began to pressure the Cámpora government to release the prisoners that same day, without delay. After the assumption ceremony, a huge demonstration estimated at 50,000 people, known as the "Liberation March," went to the Devoto prison in Buenos Aires, to free the prisoners who were there. unleashing a crowd that has become known as the Devotazo, although the same thing happened in other prisons in the country, headed by a gigantic Montoneros cartel.
The government tried to negotiate with the political prisoners to wait two days, until Congress approved the amnesty law. But the political prisoners and their organizations demanded their immediate release. By then the crowd had begun to storm the prisons to free the prisoners without waiting for any official order and two protesters had already been killed by the forces guarding the Devoto prison. Decree 11/1973 pardoning and ordering the immediate release of 372 political prisoners, to avoid a massacre, in a very disorderly process. The fact would be highly criticized by right-wing sectors and would remain in the future as a recurring theme of the questions to the Cámpora government.
In her document drafted clandestinely at ESMA, Norma Arrostito considered that the Montoneros pressure on Cámpora to release the political prisoners without waiting for Congress to sanction the amnesty law was a serious mistake, which was unnecessarily irritating for the Armed Forces.
The "camper spring"
Cámpora's government lasted just 49 days. His brief government was characterized by a series of policies based on values and principles known as "seventies", with a marked egalitarian and social content, as well as broad political and cultural freedom and a strong youth leadership, which in politics abroad was guided by non-alignment in the Cold War and Latin American unity, which is why it has been called the "camporista spring". Montoneros and the JP actively supported the political orientation that Cámpora gave to his government and in some areas participated in the management. They affectionately called him "El Tío":
The years pass and Cámpora becomes the delegate of Perón, who is in Madrid, exiled. And here's something weird going on. He starts to meet the pyramids on the Peronist left. He gets along with them. Pibes tell him “Uncle.” And Cámpora likes: to be the uncle of all those noisy boys, chilomberos and, some of them, friends of the fierce!José Pablo Feinmann
Montoneros and the Armed Forces
One of the crucial issues of the constitutional Peronist government was to resolve the contradiction between the permanence of an Armed Forces that were actively anti-Peronist, had systematically violated the constitutional order, and had a large number of members whose objective was to once again overthrow the constitutional government, and at the same time the persistence of guerrilla organizations, several of them Peronists, as was the case of Montoneros, who had fought against the military dictatorship, weakening it so that a return to a democratic regime would be possible, without military tutelage.
Cámpora appointed General Jorge Raúl Carcagno to lead the Army, a soldier proposed by Montoneros, who had had good relations with the guerrilla organization for some time and had commanded the V Army Corps since the end of 1972. General Carcagno was accompanied in the leadership of the Army by two colonels in favor of the convergence between the guerrilla organizations and the Armed Forces: Juan Jaime Cesio and Carlos Dalla Tea. Since their appointment both were in charge of secret relations between the Army and Montoneros. The maximum expression of this policy of integration of the guerrilla organizations with the Armed Forces was Operation Dorrego, which began in October 1973, when there were a few days left before Perón took office as president.
Education, culture and university
When it became evident that Peronism could win the elections, Montoneros made the decision to take the risk of going to the surface to bring the youth representation that he had achieved to the management of the State. For this, before the elections he had created the "political-technical teams of the JP", to elaborate public policies in each area of government. These teams had a considerable impact in the area of educational, cultural and university policies, managed by Minister Jorge Alberto Taiana. Taiana was a historical Peronist, Perón's personal doctor and a man of his full confidence, who was even considered to be candidate for president in 1973. He had an excellent relationship with the Montoneros and even a son of his, Jorge Taiana (junior), was a member of the Descamisados organization, later integrated into the Montoneros. Miguel Bonasso, who was one of the important figures of the Tendency, recounts in his book The President Who Wasn't, that «Apart from the uncle, [Taiana] was the only leader we paid attention to and with whom we liked to talk". Cámpora also named other ministers who had a close relationship with Montoneros and the Tendency, such as the Minister of the Interior, Esteban Righi, or the Minister of Foreign Relations, Juan Carlos Puig, but his duration in said charges lasted just a few days. Taiana, on the other hand, due to his personal relationship with Perón, remained Minister of Education until his death in July 1974.
In the educational sphere, Montoneros and La Tendencia were prominent protagonists of the educational campaign for adults (CREAR) and university management.
CREATE
One of the most outstanding works of the third Peronist government was the Adult Educational Reactivation Campaign for Reconstruction (CREAR), designed and managed by members of the Tendency, with the massive and voluntary mobilization of tens of thousands of militants of the Peronist Youth. To carry out the campaign, Minister Taiana appointed Carlos Grosso and Cayetano De Lella in charge of the National Directorate of Adult Education (DINEA). Grosso had been a member of the Peronist Armed Forces (FAP) and had been a founder of JAEN (Argentine Youth for National Emancipation), the group led by Rodolfo Galimberti, who by then had already joined the Montoneros. De Lella was a psychologist who He was active in Montoneros.
Adriana Puiggrós, who at that time was a member of the technical teams of the Ministry of Education, explains that the campaign was designed from the conjunction of three pedagogical currents: "the Peronist pedagogy developed between 1945 and 1955, some influence of secular liberalism and great weight of the pedagogy of liberation", postulated by the Brazilian Paulo Freire. CREAR was thought of as a policy that not only sought to carry out a literacy campaign, but to install a whole new education system of adults, linking education to liberation, that is, to the removal of social, political and economic conditions that influence the educational deficiencies of the neglected social sectors.
The way of understanding and practising Adult Education within the framework of the CREAR is inscribed in a critical perspective of Education associating itself with a “Liberating Education” approach as it seeks critical reflection on the living conditions of the participants themselves as a basis for the transformation of such conditions.
CREATE started from a pedagogical concept based on the initiative and freedom of students and teachers, summoning their sense of responsibility and commitment, not only in execution but also in planning, based on the Freirian postulate of understanding & #34;education as a practice of freedom". In addition, in the case of adults, the campaign sought to "unschool" the literacy task, in order to take education out of schools and take it to the places where adults work: factories, offices, rural establishments, unions, neighborhood organizations, parishes, etc., as well as their spaces own cultural
The campaign had the active support of youth and neighborhood organizations, especially Juventud Peronista, connecting the literacy teachers with the communities in which they would act. A CREAR literacy teacher recounts that participation in the following terms:
In addition to this area coordinator, there were the support groups... they were people who were generally linked to the basic units, to the organizations that were in the villas, and there were mostly people from the Peronist Youth on the Montoneros side, who were not in the armed part, but in the political part of the JP. Those people were the ones who contacted us in the places, with whom we had to talk, “the young lady, the girl such.” So they were the ones who opened us a little bit, because in general, in the case of us there were few of us who were literators, or co-ordinates of the center that we were militants, the majority had entered like me, that is, people who had some interest in the task and of social commitment say, but not a political commitment, we were not militants... The militants were our support groups, they contacted us, looked for us the place after they got us the tables, the chairs, the chalks, collaborated with us in organizing events for each center to get, but they... they don't participate directly. They didn't lit up.
The University
Towards the 1970s, almost all investment in university education was made by the national State and some provincial states, and to a much lesser extent by the Catholic Church. The private sector had only invested in a few small universities and higher education establishments. At that time, the National State had twenty-two universities (Buenos Aires, Catamarca, Comahue, Cuyo, Entre Ríos, Jujuy, Lomas de Zamora, Luján, Misiones, Northeast, La Pampa, La Plata, del Litoral, Río Cuarto, Rosario, Salta, San Juan, San Luis, Santiago del Estero, del Sur, Tucumán and the National Technological University (UTN), which had several regional offices throughout the country), although some of them had not yet begun to operate. The dictatorship had annulled university autonomy and designated authorities that responded to de facto power. Because of this, one of Minister Taiana's first measures was to intervene in the universities and designate supervisory rectors.
A central aspect of Taiana's educational policy was the role played by the national universities, linked to the phenomenon of the emergence of youth as a social force that characterized the time and the student movement. In these, rectors were appointed who took many of the democratizing principles of the university formulated by the University Reform movement initiated in 1918, and oriented them towards the objective of "liberation", a political category opposed to the de "dependencia", which was central in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s and had massive popular support.
Due to the influence of Montoneros in the Ministry of Education, as well as the importance that their youth organizations had acquired, many of these rectors, deans, and university authorities were militants of revolutionary Peronism, if not active members of Montoneros, such as These were the cases of Rodolfo Puiggrós and Ernesto Villanueva, respectively appointed rector and general secretary of the University of Buenos Aires, the largest in the country and one of the largest in the world. The technical team of the Tendency on university politics included Adriana Puiggrós, Pedro Krotsch and Augusto Pérez Lindo, among others.
At the National University of La Plata (UNLP), Rodolfo Agoglia was appointed, with the support of student groups (FURN and FAEP) and non-teaching groups (ATULP) linked to Montoneros, occupying strategic positions such as the Secretariat of Administrative Supervision, a position Rodolfo Achem and the Central Planning Department, directed by Carlos Miguel; both would be assassinated a few weeks after Perón's death. In the UNLP, the FURN documents "Bases for the new university" and "The participation of workers in the conduct of the University" were of great importance.
At the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, the influence of the Peronist Youth Regional II, led by Jorge Obeid, which in 1973 organized the Center for Peronist Professionals, from which emerged the rector, Roberto Ceretto, several deans and secretaries, was decisive..
In Córdoba, Francisco Luperi held the Rectorate, and the deaneries were divided, almost in half, between the currents related to the Peronist left and the orthodox sectors. Among the deans belonging to the Tendency, was Osvaldo Bontempo, appointed dean of Architecture. The result was a heterogeneous matrix that prevented a deepening of a transformative process, as occurred in other universities.
Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS) was appointed rector Víctor Benamo, a member of the Peronist Youth. His management was oriented to link the university with the environment, promoting projects of interest to the mayors of the area, such as the of a gypsum deposit in the town of Coronel Dorrego. Everardo Facchini, a historic member of the Peronist Resistance, a member of the Tendency, also served on his team, who held the position of Secretary of University Welfare and also Legal Secretary at the Regional Faculty " Felipe Vallese” from the National Technological University (UTN) in Bahía Blanca.
Public universities established free admission and unrestricted admission, academic freedom, free teaching and university extension; studies were linked to the productive apparatus and "popular aspirations"; institutes were created to study the reality of Latin America and the Third World; Work teams were formed with the aim of participating in projects of interest to the popular classes, such as the one carried out by the Faculty of Architecture of the UBA to reorganize the slums, and the participation of several universities in the national literacy campaign of adults. Within this framework, the student movement experienced a process of boom and mobilization and the universities became centers for questioning social injustices.
The university policy promoted by the Cámpora government would be institutionalized in March 1974, already with Perón as president, with the enactment of the National Universities Law 20654, known as the Taiana Law, which established a regime of university autonomy with tripartite government (students, teachers and non-teachers).
The massification of the JUP and the UES
In 1973 large numbers of university and high school youth joined the two "mass fronts" students from Montoneros: the Peronist University Youth (JUP) and the Union of Secondary Students (UES). A large proportion of these youth belonged to middle-class homes, which had traditionally been anti-Peronist. The high adherence of the student body to the Peronism of Montoneros, led the JUP and the UES to modify the traditional position of the Peronist student organizations of staying away from student centers and student union tasks, to assume a strategy of massive representation of the movement The strategy was successful, because the JUP became the main student force in the country, while the UES generalized the creation of student centers in thousands of secondary education establishments and linked secondary student militancy with the popular sectors, mainly in the working-class neighborhoods and shantytowns. The JUP was led by José Pablo Ventura and the UES by Claudio Slemenson and Eduardo Beckerman; all three would be killed.
In the student elections at the end of 1973, the JUP ran for the first time and surprised by winning the University Federation of Buenos Aires, corresponding to the most populous university in the country and one of the most populous in the world, which was renamed University Federation for the National Liberation of Buenos Aires (FULNBA), resulting in Miguel Talento being elected president of the same. The JUP triumphed in eight of the eleven student centers (Law, Economic Sciences, Medicine, Architecture and Philosophy and Letters, Dentistry, Veterinary Sciences and Agronomy), obtaining a total of 20,719 votes, surpassing Franja Morada (UCR) with 18,824 votes it triumphed in Engineering and the MOR (communists) with 9,459 votes, which triumphed in Exact Sciences and Pharmacy.
Nearby provincial governments
Due to his leading role in the fight against the dictatorship and the return of Perón, Montoneros had the possibility of influencing the assembly of the lists of national and provincial candidates. This meant that several provinces were led by governors close to or with good relations with Montoneros, especially in seven provinces: Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Formosa, Mendoza, Misiones, Santa Cruz and Salta.
JP deputies
In the 1973 elections, Frejuli obtained 147 national deputies, out of a total of 243. About twenty of them identified with the Revolutionary Tendency and were recognized as "the deputies of the JP". Among them were Armando Croatto (assassinated in 1979) and Carlos Kunkel, for the province of Buenos Aires), Roberto Vidaña and Rodolfo Vittar for Córdoba, Santiago Díaz Ortiz and Diego Muniz Barreto (assassinated in 1977), for the Federal Capital, Jorge Glellel for San Luis and Aníbal Iturrieta for Misiones, who would resign in February 1974, in disagreement with the approval of a series of reforms to the Penal Code, by the Frejuli bloc. Other deputies belonging to the JP were Julio Mera Figueroa, Nicolás Giménez (Buenos Aires), Enrique Svrsek (Mendoza), Roberto Tomás Bustos, Nilda Garré, Juana Narcisa Romero (La Rioja), Juan Manuel Ramírez (Chaco), Virginia Sanguinetti, Santiago Diaz Ortiz (Cordoba).
The Villero Peronist Movement
On May 5, 1973, the Movimiento Villero Peronista was formally established as the mass front of Montoneros in charge of organizing the militancy in the shantytowns. It achieved broad representation, combining the militancy of the people who lived in the villas, the movement of village priests, and the solidarity of young middle-class Peronists. The date of formal constitution of the MVP is May 5, 1973. By mid-1973 the MVP was the largest mass organization in the country, with a presence in some 450 shantytowns throughout the country.
The MVP organized two Villeros National Congresses, the first in the city of Rosario, on October 20 and 21, 1973, and the second in the city of Córdoba, in January 1974. It established as the main points of its agenda protest, the organization of cooperatives for the construction of houses, the establishment of villas on public lands or subject to expropriation, support for the Peronist government and adherence to Montoneros. In the first congress, village priests also had an important participation, such as the father Carlos Mugica and father Jorge Goñi.
Immediately after the Second Congress of the MVP, Perón intervened to place the MVP under the direction of the Minister of Social Welfare, José López Rega. Concerned about the inaction of the Ministry of Social Welfare, an assembly of the MVP in Villa 31 (called Eva Perón at that time) decided to mobilize to Plaza de Mayo on March 25, 1974, being supported by all the villas of the Federal Coordination of the MVP. When the mobilization from Villas was heading towards the square, the Federal Police repressed the march and assassinated one of the protesters, Alberto Chejolán, with an Itaka bullet to the chest. At that time, the Federal Police was headed by Commissioner Alberto Villar, who was also the operational chief of Triple A.
As the Montoneros sharpened their confrontation with Perón, many members of the MVP broke away from the Revolutionary Tendency to join the JP Lealtad. The break between Montoneros and Perón on May 1, 1974, and the assassination of Father Mugica two weeks later, they were decisive turning points for the MVP, producing a rapid loss of adherents that led to its de facto dissolution. Many of its leaders and militants were assassinated or disappeared by State terrorism, by Triple A between 1974 and March 1976, and by the civic-military dictatorship that would come into power between March 1976 and 1983.
Confrontation with n#34;the right and#34; Peronist: "left-handedness"
Since before Montoneros was established as such, its members and the organizations that comprised it exhibited a political line of confrontation with other sectors of Peronism considered "traitors," especially within the Peronist trade unionism. The "executions" de Vandor in 1969 and José Alonso in 1970, found themselves in that line of confrontation, which has traditionally been categorized as a confrontation between "the Peronist right" and "peronism of the left," although the use of the left-right spectrum is imprecise in this case.
The so-called "Peronist right" It included three large sectors:
- The majority sector of Peronist trade unionism, which did not adhere to the socialist project of Montoneros, nor to its links with the Cuban project of expansion of the guerrilla pathway in Latin America;
- The sector that depended on José López Rega, private secretary of Perón and Isabel Peron. López Rega belonged to the secret anti-communist organization Propaganda Due, led from Italy by Licio Gelli, in coordination with the US CIA, the Italian mafia and a Vatican sector. This sector would, since 1973, adopt a form of State terrorism through the actions of the terrorist organization Triple A and other related organizations.
- A heterogeneous group of "orthodox" Peronist groups and leaders, who considered that Montoneros and JP constituted a "Marxist infiltration" in Peronism.
Due to the active role played by Montoneros in the weakening of the military dictatorship, which opened the doors to the return of Perón and the holding of free elections, as well as the notable popular and youth support he obtained during the electoral campaign, Montoneros achieved considerable influence in the national and provincial governments, which the groups of the so-called "Peronist right" they could not neutralize, due to their lower participation in the electoral campaign.
But once the national government and the provincial governments that resulted from the 1973 elections were installed, a struggle immediately broke out in which sectors of the "Peronist right" they sought to displace "peronism of the left," expressed mainly by Montoneros, the JP and other groups organized in the Revolutionary Tendency.
This confrontation became increasingly unfavorable for Montoneros, after two major events: Cámpora's resignation on July 13, 1973, and Perón's death on July 1, 1974.
In the framework of this confrontation, the right-wing groups, both Peronists and non-Peronists, installed the nicknames "zurdo" and "zurdaje", which acquired a strong pejorative meaning, stereotyping an ideological profile that was used to consider it as "the enemy" and justify the violation of the human rights of the people to whom the nickname was applied. The term and its derivatives, with the same disqualifying meaning, have remained present in the language of some sectors.
Montoneros and the LGBT movement
During the "camper spring" An exceptional development of the LGBT movement took place, through the Homosexual Liberation Front (FLH). The FLH had emerged in 1971, as a federation of LGBT organizations, including Grupo Nuestro Mundo, founded in 1967, two years before the Stonewall Riots, when there was almost no LGBT organization in the world and none in Latin America. The FLH was led by Néstor Perlongher and included among its members figures such as the writers Manuel Puig and Blas Matamoro, and the essayist Juan José Sebreli. During Cámpora's government, the FLH launched the magazine Somos, the first of its kind in Latin America and participated in the great popular youth demonstrations of the time, getting close to Montoneros., the FLH integrated the column of the Tendency with a poster that quoted a phrase from the Peronist March: "so that love and equality reign in the town". For this reason, the groups of the Peronist right, "accused" to the Tendency, of being "putos and faloperos (arg. for drug addict)", a fact that in turn caused the militants of the Tendency to they adopted a homophobic slogan ("We are not putos, we are not faloperos, we are soldiers of the FAR and Montoneros"), which limited the insertion of the incipient Argentine LGBT movement, in the process of change that opened the Cámpora presidency.
The Ezeiza massacre
On June 20, 1973, less than a month after the inauguration of the new democratic government led by President Héctor J. Cámpora, Perón finally returned to Argentina. Perón had already returned for a few days in November 1972, but then the dictatorship again prohibited his presence in Argentina, which is why he could not be present in the electoral campaign, nor in the act of inauguration of the authorities. constitutional.
It was planned that the plane that brought Perón back would land at the Ezeiza airport, located in the Buenos Aires suburbs, which is why a huge crowd estimated at between one and a half million and three million gathered in the area. people -the largest concentration in the country so far-, waiting to see the leader of Peronism, who was going to speak to the crowd from a raised box at the intersection of the Ricchieri Highway with Route 205.
By Perón's express directives, the security of the entire return operation was delegated to Colonel (RE) Jorge Osinde, from the right wing of Peronism, excluding the Federal Police under the command of Esteban Righi, an official close to Montoneros, who as Minister of the Interior was naturally responsible for the country's security. Osinde was part of a force of some 300 armed men, several of them with long weapons, recruited from former Peronist soldiers, as well as from the CNU of Mar del Plata and the Organization Command of Norma Kennedy, all of them with a vocation for hunting. left-handed", as described by the former Montonero militant and journalist Aldo Duzdevich.
Shortly after noon, as a column of some 60,000 people from the JP from the south approached the stage, via Route 205, there was a shootout between those in charge of the event's security under the orders of Osinde who They were in the box and militants armed with short weapons from Montoneros, who were guarding the column. As a result, 13 people died, 365 were injured, and 8 Peronist militants were tortured at the Ezeiza airport by one of Osinde's groups, made up of ex-military officers led by Ciro Ahumada.
Of the 13 dead in the cold, four belonged to the JP: Horacio "Beto" Simona de Montoneros, Antonio Quispe de las FAR, Hugo Oscar Lanvers de la UES and Raúl Obregozo de la JP La Plata. Among the guards of the palco the victims were three: the captain RE of the Maximum Chavarri army, and the militants of the CdO: Rogelio Cuesta and Carlos Domínguez. The other 6 deceased were not claimed as militants of any sector indicating that they would be simple assistants to the act.Aldo Duzdevich
At dusk and before the news of the clashes that took place in the vicinity of the box, the aircraft that brought Perón was diverted to the Morón Airport, the act was suspended and the crowd withdrew with a general feeling of great frustration, but without new incidents.
The Montoneros immediately maintained that it was a "massarn" intentional, the result of an "ambush" forged by the Osinde group, with Ciro Ahumada as lieutenant and the collaboration of the CNU of Mar del Plata and the Organization Command, with the intention of persecuting "left-handers", derogatory terminology that became general in the time to justify the genocide of leftist militants, both Peronists and non-Peronists. The hypothesis of a "massacre" planned by the "Peronist right" was supported by Horacio Verbitsky in a detailed investigation published in his book Ezeiza (1985). con Perón (2015), where he maintains that it was not a "massacre" planned, but a chaotic and tragic confrontation, as a result of the encounter between two armed groups, strongly opposed politically and ideologically.
The research team led by Inés Izaguirre, based on her own research work and the data recorded by Juan Carlos Marín in The Armed Facts. Argentina 1973-76 (1979), a classic work of Argentine sociology, considers that in this period Argentina entered a "situation of open civil war", which began with the Ezeiza Massacre In the same sense, the historian Luis Fernando Beraza maintains that the "Peronist civil war" began in Ezeiza.
Cámpora's resignation
When the military dictatorship established the restriction to present themselves as presidential candidate to those who did not have their residence in Argentina after August 25, 1972, in order to prevent Perón from doing so, Perón himself warned about the danger that It meant forming a government that left the most representative person in the country on the sidelines:
If the next elections are not called to general elections, offering all constitutional guarantees, it will be difficult to avoid civil war... I replied (to the Lanusse envoys) that there was no deal and that they should only call for elections. And if you want Lanusse, who comes to the presidential elections, for me I have more chances of leaving prime minister or king of England than Lanusse president of the Argentines. I will be president, I cannot deny myself despite my 76 years.Juan D. Perón
Perón's alert was not addressed and the dictatorship prohibited him from presenting his candidacy, thus giving rise to a political situation of high instability, due to the fact that the institutional framework did not correspond to real power. The famous Frejuli electoral slogan "Cámpora to the government, Perón to power", gave an account of this institutional irregularity. On June 29, Jacobo Timermann's newspaper La Opinión published for the first time the news that Cámpora and Solano Lima would resign. The decision was made at the meeting of the cabinet of ministers held on July 4, where the proposal of José López Rega - leader of the most extremist sector of the "Peronist right" - to prevent the command from passed to the provisional president of the Senate Alejandro Díaz Bialet, as appropriate by the law of acephaly, sending him on a mission outside the country, so that it would fall to his son-in-law Raúl Lastiri, president of the Chamber of Deputies. On July 12, Vice President Solano Lima publicly announced that he and President Cámpora would sign their resignations the next day and that there would be new elections. and he took the constitutional oath as president of the Nation to Raúl Lastiri.
The event was a blow to Montoneros who tried to pressure the Legislative Assembly to elect Perón -instead of Lastiri- and that the presidential formula be Perón-Cámpora. By then, a few days before, the coup d'état had taken place in Uruguay on June 27, 1973, with the open support of the United States and the indifference of Europe, aggravating the conditions for the viability of a democratic government in Argentina.
Lastiri's internship and the encirclement theory
Raúl Lastiri was interim president of the Nation for 91 days, from July 13 to October 12, when General Perón assumed the presidency. Like his father-in-law, José López Rega, Lastiri belonged to and had his power base in the anti-communist Propaganda Due lodge led from Italy by Licio Gelli. As Minister of Foreign Relations, he appointed Alberto Vignes (replacing Juan Carlos Puig), a member of the P2 lodge, along with López Rega and Lastiri. Vignes was personally recommended to Perón by Licio Gelli himself.
During his government, the situation in the region worsened considerably, when on September 11, the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown and killed by a civil-military coup, openly supported by the United States and several multinational companies. Argentina remained the only country in the region that preserved the democratic system.
During this period Montoneros developed the "theory of the fence", attributing to the "brujo" López Rega and his extreme right-wing anti-communist group, having surrounded Perón, in order to isolate him from Montoneros and the rest of the forces that are members of the Tendency, to prevent him from knowing the high popular representation that he enjoyed.
In order to "break the siege," the Montoneros organized a mobilization on July 21, 1973 at Peróns house, located at 1065 Gaspar Campos street, in the city of Vicente López, in the Buenos Aires suburbs. Some 60,000 young people, perfectly lined up along several blocks, testified that the Tendency was the most representative force of the Peronist youth, equivalent in its capacity for mobilization to the union branch. When the demonstration reached the In the vicinity of his house, Perón summoned the leaders of the JP, Dante Gullo, Juan Carlos Añón, Miguel Lizaso and Roberto Ahumada, to meet with him at the Olivos Presidential Residence, located a few blocks away. Perón received the leaders of the JP accompanied by President Lastiri and his father-in-law and political chief, Minister López Rega, the main target of the Tendency's slogans, pointing him out as a traitor and responsible for the Ezeiza Massacre, together with his subordinate, Colonel Osinde. Despite because Montoneros presented the meeting as the "rupture of the siege" and the establishment from that moment of a "permanent contact and without intermediaries", the real result was that, from that moment, Perón arranged for López Rega to act as an intermediary with the Tendency and that the Peronist Youth be reorganized. For this last purpose, a few days later López Rega formed the Peronist Youth of the Argentine Republic (JPRA), which would be known in political jargon as "jota perra", without participation of the Tendency and under the leadership of Julio Yessi, designated as one of the leaders of the Triple A parapolice organization, who would make his first public appearance three months later.
Three months later, in an internal document titled "Talk by the National Leadership of Montoneros before the groups of the fronts," Montoneros acknowledges that the theory of the siege was wrong and that it constituted "thought magical", product of "political infantilism".
Peron President
As a consequence of the resignation of Cámpora and Solano Lima, new presidential elections had to be called, this time without the prohibition of Perón's candidacy ordered by the dictatorship, which had led to the constitutional anomaly that the person with the greatest support country's politician could not be elected president.
No one doubted that Perón would win the elections handily, but his health was so deteriorated that it was common knowledge in the political arena, that he would probably die during his term. Therefore the definition of the vice-presidential candidacy was of the utmost importance. Perón was aware of his state of health and did not want a Peronist formula. Until the last moment, he tried to specify the Perón-Balbín formula, of Peronist-radical unity, which could achieve "national reconciliation". Montoneros supported Balbín's candidacy, but the rejection of the union branch and the López Rega/Lastiri group, led the nomination to Perón's wife, María Estela Martínez de Perón.
During the electoral campaign, on August 22, the Tendency held a massive act at the Club Atlético Atlanta stadium in which, for the first time, a member of the Montoneros leadership spoke publicly, in this case Mario Firmenich, first in the national leadership of the organization. The magazine El Descamisado covered the event with the cover title of "Perón President. August 22nd. Full speech of Firmenich" and an image of the United States flag being burned. Firmenich was critical of the government, especially against the candidacy of Isabel Perón and the Social Pact, due to Rucci's leadership:
The social pact, we can say that it is an agreement, or should be, an agreement that forms the class alliance, but governed by the working class... it should be. But today the social pact does not reflect that, and it does not reflect that because in the constitution of that alliance workers do not have representatives... Because they have there, in the CGT, a bureaucracy with four bureaucrats who don't even represent their grandmother...(The present crowd chants the slogans “the union bureaucracy is going to end” and “Rucci traitor to you will pass what happened to Vandor”).
Companions: That slogan... truly reflects what we're saying... there's no slightest possibility.Mario Firmenich, fragment of speech published by The Deamise.
Finally, the elections were held on September 23, with an overwhelming victory for Perón, who obtained 61.85% of the votes, surpassing the radicalismo, headed by Balbín, by more than 35 percentage points. The inauguration date was set for October 12, but two days after the elections an event occurred that had serious political consequences, especially for the position of the Montoneros in Argentine politics: the assassination of Rucci.
The murder of Rucci and the eventual authorship of Montoneros
Two days after the elections, the general secretary of the CGT José Ignacio Rucci was assassinated by a commando, in a confusing incident that an insufficient judicial investigation could not resolve. Rucci played an essential role in Perón's strategy. No organization claimed responsibility for the murder at that time and Montoneros, promptly, kept silent about the event. However, two years later, Montoneros explicitly claimed responsibility for the crime on page 18 of its official press organ, the magazine Evita Montonera No. 5, where in an article referring to the Ezeiza Massacre and titled "Popular Justice", it includes a list of people "executed". The first of them, textually says:
JOSE RUCCI, adjusted by Montoneros on 25-09-73."People's justice," Evita Montonera No. 5, p. 18.
Most of the investigators and protagonists of the time maintain that the murder was probably committed by the FAR, at that time in the process of merging with the Montoneros, although there are also indications that it could have been committed by the Triple A, under orders from Lopez Rega. The possibility that Montoneros had given his explicit or implicit approval to the attack is the subject of strong debate, even among people who held positions of great responsibility in the organization.
The analyzes of the crime agree that it was a decisive historical event, which harmed both Perón -who lost his trusted man within a union movement with which he did not have a good relationship-, as well as Montoneros and the Tendency, confronting it with Perón and isolating it from the rest of Peronism. Montoneros publicly maintained that Rucci had been one of the intellectual authors of the Ezeiza Massacre, considered him a traitor and had been promoting the slogan anticipating his death ("Rucci traitor, what happened to Vandor is going to happen to you"). Just a month earlier, at the Atlanta event, Firmenich had responded to the militancy chanting the slogan, saying that "That slogan... truly reflects what we are saying."
The assassination caused a political upheaval. Orthodox trade unionism and the CGT interpreted this attack as an open declaration of war. In the analysis of the journalist Ricardo Grassi, who was director of El Descamisado, "Montoneros and the Peronist left did not have the flexibility to create a situation that would allow them to negotiate. Everything was 'maximum'. After killing Rucci, all possibility of negotiation was lost".
Two days later and in response, Enrique Grynberg, director of investigations at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the Tendencia, was murdered in his home, in front of his wife and children. In those days, the journalist Edgardo Sajón, former Press Secretary of the Lanusse dictatorship, wrote a letter to his boss conveying his concern about the direction that political violence was beginning to take:
And I wonder what is this, where are we, where are we going? Or are we going to fight the guerrillas with fascism?"Edgardo Sajón
Four years later, Sajón was detained-disappeared by the dictatorship that overthrew the Peronist government.
Reserved Order of the High Council
On October 1, the Peronist Superior Council, chaired by Perón, unanimously approved a Reserved Order declaring war against Marxism. He considered Rucci's murder part of a "war" against him. unleashed "by terrorist and subversive Marxist groups" and he maintained that the war against Marxism could not be avoided, placing it from that moment on as the central task to which all Peronists should address themselves. It established "directives" necessary to combat "infiltration" ideology of Marxism in Peronism, which ranged from actions of "doctrinal reaffirmation", to a system of "intelligence" internal in order to detect the Marxists and expel them. The Document ordered that the propaganda of Marxist groups be prevented and clarified that this activity should be maximized when "they present themselves as if they were Peronists, to confuse". Marxist groups had to be excluded from party events and venues, "by all means". The document also prohibited chants, publications and critical demonstrations between Peronist groups, as well as public questioning of Peronist officials. The Order contains a final directive dedicated to the leaders who held functions in the "national or provincial or municipal" governments, to "immediately promote" the necessary measures for the "development of this struggle".
The Reserved Order of October 1 formalized the decision of the leadership of the Peronist Movement to exclude Montoneros from it, as a current alien to Peronism. The document includes the idea that Montoneros was part of a "Marxist infiltration" in Peronism, which in the context of the time, meant bringing the internal differences of Peronism to the terms of the Cold War and the National Security Doctrine.
Operative Dorrego
On October 4, the governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Oscar Bidegain, one of the governors close to Montoneros, began Operation Dorrego, which would last until October 25. The Operative was a humanitarian mobilization that included soldiers, Peronist Youth militants and youth organizations from other parties, in order to collaborate with the population and rebuild a large area of the Province of Buenos Aires, catastrophically affected by large floods that caused hunger, destruction of homes, roads and facilities. It had as a peculiarity that the Army and Montoneros jointly coordinated the operation. The person in charge of the Army on the ground was General Albano Harguindeguy -later Minister of the Interior of the dictatorship installed in 1976-, while the person in charge of Montoneros was Norberto Habegger -who would disappear in 1978- and the person in charge of the JP was Dante Gullo. At the end of the operation, soldiers and youth militants paraded together, before the civil and military authorities.
Operation Dorrego was part of a policy of coexistence and rapprochement between the Armed Forces and the Montoneros, carried out by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Jorge Raúl Carcagno, accompanied by Colonels Juan Jaime Cesio and Carlos Dalla Tea. It indicated a political trend that was going in the opposite direction to the confrontation between left and right that had exacerbated the Ezeiza Massacre and the murder of Rucci.
Fusion with the FAR. Separation from JP Loyalty
The same day that Perón assumed the Presidency, on October 12, the Montoneros definitively merged with the FAR, keeping the unique name of Montoneros. Around 1971 the four Peronist guerrilla organizations (Montoneros, FAP, FAR and Descamisados) they had tried to unite in the OAP (Peronist Armed Organizations), but the differences around the possibility of Perón returning to Argentina (“Fight and return”) and the role of the guerrilla organizations in an eventual "popular government& #34;, distanced the FAR from the Montoneros, while bringing the Montoneros and Descamisados closer together, which ended up merging at the end of 1972.
The National Leadership was in the hands of Mario Firmenich, Roberto Perdía and Roberto Quieto, in that order. In a second line of command was the National Secretariat, with secretariats such as Military, Finance, Logistics, Press, Organization, Propaganda and Indoctrination, etc. The organizational structure was completed with the provincial regional ones, while in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires five columns were formed: Capital, North, West, South and La Plata.
The FAR had a strictly Marxist ideology, considerably different from the Peronism and militant Catholicism on which Montoneros was built. Amorín highlights the fact that «beyond valuing the popular Peronist struggle, they lacked experience regarding real Peronism, Peronism as a heterogeneous group (contradictory and fragmented, multi-class and multi-generational), Peronism as a movement (it moves forward, it goes back, it deviates, it changes), with common myths, some common interests and a consensus: delegate the movement's strategy to its leader." The success of the montonera tactic in organizing Perón's return to the country in November 1972 and Obtaining massive support, mainly among young people, prompted the FAR to move towards the Montonera positions until it culminated in the merger, after months of debates and discussions.
In the act of unity, both forces declare that the immediate objective of the merger was to actively intervene in the reorganization of the Peronist Movement that Perón had called:
The unity of our organizations is aimed at contributing to the process of reorganization and democratization of the Peronist Movement to which General Perón has called us to achieve the organic participation of the working class in its leadership, the only guarantee that the unity of the Argentine people in the Liberation Front under the leadership of the Peronist Movement, will realize the objectives of National Liberation and Social Justice, towards the construction of National Socialism and Latin American unity.
But simultaneously, Rucci's assassination isolated the Montoneros and the Revolutionary Tendency from the rest of Peronism, and began to reduce popular and youth support that had reached very high peaks in the previous year. There is no full certainty that Montoneros killed Rucci -decades later the discussion continues-, but his silence in the face of an act condemned by all social sectors, the public treatment of "traitor"; and the warning through the songs in the demonstrations that "the same thing would happen to him as Vandor" meant that, in any case, the political and moral responsibility fell on Montoneros.
The truth is that Rucci's murder led to the departure of many militants and sympathizers of Montoneros. The most evident manifestation of this fact was the separation that produced the birth of the organization Montoneros Soldados de Perón, better known as JP Lealtad - which recognized Perón as the only leadership and which began to take shape at that time, although it would be formalized in March. of 1974. Maintaining the organizational scheme of Montoneros, the JP Lealtad (Montoneros Soldados de Perón) also created the Union of Lealtad Secondary Students, the Lealtad University Youth and the Lealtad Peronist Working Youth, with nuclei in the Federal Capital, province of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Corrientes, Neuquén and some other cities in the south. Among its leaders were Eduardo Moreno, Alejandro Peyrou, Enrique Padilla, Nicolás Giménez, Norberto Ivancich, Ernesto Villanueva, Jorge Obeid, Patricio Jeanmaire, the priests Jorge Galli and Jorge Goñi, Horacio González, Edmundo González, José R. Canalls, Ricardo Gómez, Mario Maidovani, Norberto Ivancich, Mario Cisneros, Enrique H. Vallejos, Roberto Hyon and Víctor Espinosa.
JP Lealtad was unable to channel the overcrowding that Montoneros had achieved in 1972/1973, but expressed the desire of many young revolutionaries to go through a process of transformation in peace and democracy, avoiding taking the path of increasing political violence that had open the murder of Rucci. Aldo Duzdevich, one of the montoneros who founded JP Lealtad and author of one of the few works that have studied that schism, points out in an interview that the separation "saved his life". Duzdevich even compares to the conduction of Montoneros of that moment with the Pied Piper of Hamelin:
Indeed many of us who at that time could have followed the path behind the Hamelin Flautist, who was called Mario Firmenich, did not follow him; we followed other colleagues and that allowed us to be here today. At that time saving lives represented not something that was associated with merit, but rather was condemned as an act of cowardice. It seemed that the revolution required as much blood as possible.Aldo Duzdevich
"The Peronist government against the “montonera provinces”"
The Peronist government against the “montoneros provinces” is the title of a book by Alicia Servetto, which gives an account of the progress made on the positions that Montoneros had in the provinces, once Perón took office the Presidency on October 12, 1973. In this way, the Reserved Order of the Peronist Superior Council issued on October 1 was carried out, to combat the "infiltration" ideology of Marxism in Peronism and expel its agents "by all means". The Order contained a final directive dedicated to the leaders who held functions in the "national or provincial or municipal" governments, to "immediately promote" the necessary measures for the "development of this struggle". The classic novel There will be no more sorrows or forgetfulness (1987), by Osvaldo Soriano, and the film made about it, fictionalizes in a small town, in the form of a tragedy, that confrontation between Peronists, often lifelong friends, which was repeated in all spheres.
On November 17, 1973, acceding to Perón's request, the National Congress intervened the three powers of the province of Formosa, led by the governor and trade unionist Antenor Gauna, close to the JP. On November 30, 1973, they died in a plane crash the governor of Misiones, Juan Manuel Irrazábal, and his lieutenant governor, César Ayrault, suspecting an attack committed by Triple A.
In the Province of Buenos Aires, Oscar Bidegain governed, a member of the Tendencia and future president of the Authentic Peronist Party with whom Montoneros tried to dispute the representation of Peronism to the Justicialista Party. The situation in Bidegain was destabilized as a result of the attack on the Azul military garrison carried out by the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), on January 19, 1974. A few hours later Perón spoke on television blaming the government of the province, headed by Oscar Bidegain, attributing a "culpable tolerance" before the actions of the guerrilla:
It is not by chance that these actions take place in certain jurisdictions. It is undoubted that they are due to impunity in which detachment and incapacity make it possible, or what would be even worse, if they mediate, as is suspected, a culposal tolerance.Juan D. Perón
Four days later, the political pressure on Bidegain would force him to resign the governorship, assuming his replacement the lieutenant governor Victorio Calabró, an orthodox trade unionist and sworn enemy of Bidegain and the Revolutionary Tendency.
In Córdoba, on February 27, 1974, there was a coup known as the Navarrazo, which overthrew the governor Ricardo Obregón Cano and the lieutenant governor Atilio López. The coup was carried out by the provincial police, with the active support of the Peronist Union Youth and the participation of the business community and local conservative sectors. The coup plotters stormed the government headquarters, arresting the governor and lieutenant governor, and more than seventy officials. Three days later, Perón sent to Congress the project to intervene in the province, which was approved that same day, and appointed an inspector with the instruction not to reinstate the constitutional authorities in their positions, thus validating the coup d'état.
In the province of Mendoza, on June 6, 1974, governor Alberto Martínez Baca was removed, through impeachment by the local legislature. The maneuvers to remove the Mendoza governor had begun the previous year, arguing that Martínez Baca was "left-handed." of the governor. At the beginning of February 1974, the controller of the PJ, José Eleuterio Cardozo called a party assembly, under the slogan "Perón, Mazorca, the left-handers to the gallows!", in which the separation of all the officials questioned or indicated as Marxist infiltrators was demanded. The following month a commission of the Chamber of Senators recommended starting the political trial of Martínez Baca. On June 5, 1974, the governor's impeachment trial began and his suspension was ordered as of the following day.
The other two governors close to Montoneros, Jorge Cepernic in Santa Cruz and Miguel Ragone in Salta, would be displaced in October and November 1974 by Isabel Perón, already in the presidency due to Perón's death.
The Triple A
Parallel to the displacement of the governors close to Montoneros, the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) began to act, a terrorist organization directed from the Ministry of Social Welfare, by Minister López Rega, using the network and resources of the Propaganda Due lodge in the framework of the Gladio and Gianoglio operations, and the CIA, which became internationally coordinated through the Condor Plan and was linked to the military sectors that were preparing to carry out a coup, in case of death Perón. During this period, Henry Kissinger (September 23, 1973) took office in the United States Department of State, who would play a central role in the systematic use of State terrorism. On December 19, 1973, US President Richard Nixon appointed Robert C. Hill as ambassador to Argentina; Hill, who had played a strategic role in the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, had established close relations with José López Rega in Spain, where he was ambassador until his transfer to Buenos Aires; one of Hill's first efforts was to obtain a loan from the United States for the Ministry of Social Welfare to combat drug trafficking, which was used to finance Triple A. Gelli himself said that "We put Cámpora and decided to throw out the Montoneros », in a report for Channel 13 of Argentina; historian Jorge Zicolillo explains that the P2 plan was to create "a task force capable of adapting to the anti-communist strategy of Operation Gladio that, without hiding its intentions and with the flag of Peronist orthodoxy ahead, would prepare the ground for a totalitarian, neo-fascist and profoundly anti-communist government", headed by another member of the lodge, Admiral Eduardo Massera.
On May 13, 1974, Perón appointed Commissioner Alberto Villar as head of the Federal Police. Villar, who had received training for counterrevolutionary warfare in France and was later the first Latin American police officer to receive training in interrogation techniques at the School of the Americas, would become one of the heads of Triple A in those months.
Some of the press and the conservative anti-Peronist business sectors also explicitly promoted State terrorism. On March 17, 1974, the economist and businessman Juan Alemann -who would be a senior official of the dictatorship installed in 1976-, recommended in an editorial note of the Argentinisches Tageblatt, to apply in Argentina the Directives of Night and Fog that Hitler had imparted to make opponents of Nazism disappear:
If one sees this dirty war from a purely military point of view, he concludes that the government can considerably accelerate and facilitate his victory, acting against the manifest domes - if possible in "night and fog" - and without this transcending too much. If Firmenich, Quiet, Ortega Peña, etc., disappeared from the scene, this would mean an extremely hard blow to terrorism.Juan Alemann
The Triple A recruited and coordinated right-wing terrorist groups that had been operating previously, such as the CNU, as well as police, military, and spies. Triple A had eight "executive groups," in charge of materially committing the crimes, an area of psychological action led by the journalist Carlos Villone, in charge of acting on the media and especially Channel 11, and a area in charge of organizing the shock support groups, in charge of Julio Yessi, general secretary of the Peronist Youth of the Argentine Republic (JPRA).
On November 23, 1973, Triple A carried out the first attack for which it claimed responsibility, exploding a bomb in the car of Senator Hipólito Solari Yrigoyen, a member of the left-wing Unión Cívica Radical, who was seriously injured. It would be the first of a series of hundreds of acts of State terrorism, until the dictatorship established on March 24, 1976 ordered its dismantling. One of the main targets of the Triple A was the Montoneros, especially a large number of intermediate cadres and grassroots militants on the mass fronts. But Triple A and its press organ El Caudillo, installed a speech of extermination or "annihilation" widespread of an entire sector of the population, identified as "los zurdos" or "the left handed". Shortly after Perón's death, El Caudillo published an issue with the cover title "Quién le fear a la AAA", vindicating his actions under the slogan "El The best enemy is the dead enemy". This extermination acquired the nature of genocide as it was projected onto people who had "leftist ideas", regardless of whether they had committed any crime or not, including their relatives and descendants. Artists, writers, journalists, religious, human rights activists, political activists, trade unionists, lawyers, and even soldiers like Colonel Manuel Rico, were persecuted and assassinated. The phrase "make a homeland, kill a left-handed man" dates from that time. The culture of extermination of left-wing people, especially revolutionary Peronism, would remain over time in extreme right-wing thought in Argentina.
Appearance of the newspaper Noticias
On Monday, November 19, 1973, the first issue of the daily Noticias, a new publication by Montoneros, was published. El Descamisado was a publication aimed at militants, while with Noticias, Montoneros sought to reach a much broader audience on a daily basis. Directed by Miguel Bonasso, the newspaper Noticias adopted a very popular format, giving an important space to soccer and politics, with covers that always had a half-page photo and catastrophe titles.
Among the directors of the newspaper, in addition to Bonasso, there were five other prominent intellectuals: Juan Gelman, editor-in-chief, Rodolfo Walsh, in charge of the Police section, Horacio Verbitsky, head of Politics; Paco Urondo, Editorial Secretary, a place reserved for the political commissioner of Montoneros, until he was replaced by Norberto Habegger. It had an average circulation of 100,000 copies, reaching 180,000 copies in the days after Perón's death. The newspaper's policy of hiring well-known intellectuals to take charge of the newsroom gave it an autonomous dynamic about the facts that should be covered and how they should be treated, that it did not always coincide with the political leadership of the Montoneros and that made it attractive as a newspaper aimed at a broader audience than that of the militants. Years later Firmenich expressed his complaints about the autonomy that the journalists from Noticias. The journalistic autonomy of Noticias entered a crisis on May 1, 1974, as a result of the abandonment of the Plaza de Mayo, when Perón treated the Tendency of "imberbes" and "estúpidos". After the death of Perón, on July 1, 1974, the newspaper was closed on August 27, 1974 by decision of Isabel Perón, already president, who based the closure arguing that developed "an intense campaign to exalt criminal activities in the field of subversion",
1974: worsening of the international context
By the end of 1973, the international context had changed radically, especially in the Southern Cone. The installation of a military dictatorship in Uruguay, considered the Switzerland of South America, and especially Pinochet's bloody military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, which put an end to the project of opening a "democratic and peaceful path to socialism"; and inaugurated the systematic practice of the disappearance of people, with the active support of the United States and its National Security Doctrine. The other countries bordering Argentina -Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay- were already governed by dictatorial regimes supported by the United States. The weak Argentine democracy was thus isolated in the continental context and surrounded by dictatorships, in the middle of the Cold War.
Resignation of JP deputies. Institutional apartment.
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In October 1973, as soon as he took office, Perón sent to the National Congress a bill to reform the Criminal Code, which expanded the definition (criminal type) of "illicit association" in order to include as a crime belonging to a guerrilla organization that acted in democracy. Three months later, on January 19, 1974, some 80 guerrillas from the People's Revolutionary Army (non-Peronist) tried to take over the Blue Regiment that the Argentine Army has, in the center of the province of Buenos Aires, seriously escalating the level of violence and political instability, when attacking a military unit. In the attack, the head of the Regiment, Camilo Arturo Gay, his wife and a soldier died, and Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Igarzábal was kidnapped, who would appear dead ten days later. In June of the same year, the Peronismo de Base-17 de Octubre group he joined the ranks of Montoneros.
Perón then found that the deputies linked to the Montoneros and the JP, which made up a fifth of the official bloc, opposed the bill that he had sent since, potentially, it could be applied in the future to the members of the Montoneros and the rest of the organizations of the Tendency. The event triggered Perón's first open confrontation with the Montoneros.
On January 22, 1974, barely two days after the guerrilla attack, Perón summoned the "deputies of the JP" to his office in Olivos, and without notifying them, he received them accompanied by the highest authorities in the country and broadcast the meeting live and direct on national television, throughout the country. Perón allowed the deputies to express their complaints and then responded bluntly and directly, that the attitude they were showing was inadmissible, that it hindered the possibility of the constitutional government responding to the political assassinations and guerrilla attacks that the organizations were carrying out. armed forces belonging to the Fourth International, concluding with the warning that, if they did not abide by the bloc's majority decision, they should leave ("if the majority decides, they must accept or leave. Those who are not happy... leave.")..
Two days later, on January 24, 1974, eight legislators linked to the Montoneros resigned from their seats (Armando Croatto, Santiago Díaz Ortiz, Jorge Glellel, Aníbal Iturrieta, Carlos Kunkel, Diego Muniz Barreto, Roberto Vidaña and Rodolfo Vittar).. On January 25, Congress approved the reform of the Criminal Code and that same day the Peronist Superior Council expelled the eight resigning deputies.
Montoneros responded with impotence and disorientation before the unfavorable course that the successive series of events took. Dardo Cabo, from the editorial of El Descamisado, asked Perón how they should act to comply with his request to "defend him:
...the deputies went to speak with the General as the Conductor of the Peronist Movement, and found themselves with an act of state, televised and a set-up of all rags. And then, these same deputies resign so that they don't have to disobey Perón and Martiarena expels them and the slain Camus reads the statement. And the General commands to defend him and everyone stayed in his house, except the bullies that flew Basic Units supported by the information services. What milonga is this that the ultra-left assaults in Blue and the ultra-right then as an answer comes to fly the J.P. premises?... That's why General, who and how do we defend him?Dardo Cabo
Two weeks later, on February 7th, the youth organizations of Montoneros (JP, JUP, JTP and UES) decided not to attend the meeting of the Superior Council of Peronist Youth (JP), thus being excluded from the structure of the movement. On that occasion, Perón spoke extensively to the young people who represented some 47 youth groups, dedicating the speech almost entirely to talking about the "Revolutionary Tendency", which he mentioned verbatim ("Todos que talk about the revolutionary trend, what do you want to do with the revolutionary trend?").
In his speech, Perón recognized the heroism of the youth in the fight against the dictatorship but maintained that the "bloody fight" had finished and that it was necessary to "demobilize" to armed organizations:
To the youth, finally, we want all and all. We know the merit they have in the work and in the struggle they have made. No, That's not denied by anyone or deny it. That's already in history. There are heroes and there are martyrs, which is what is usually needed in this kind of struggle. But that has been in the bloody struggle, which has already happened. Why are we gonna be killing each other? To keep saying we're brave? This is one thing that is not hard to understand.Juan Domingo Perón
He then maintained that the Revolutionary Tendency was not truly justicialist, but an operation of "political infiltration" that he took advantage of the "useful idiots", and that they should be excluded from Justicialismo, even if they were a majority:
That's why, boys, before we finish this talk today, I ask you to think for the next meeting - and so we discuss the issue of the executive horizon that is what we are interested in, because it is the real problem that exists at this time-, in whom is who. That's what we need to know, thinking that a good man is better at the front of five than a bad one at the front of five thousand. I'll stay with him who's five and not with him who's five thousand.Juan Domingo Perón
May 1, 1974: "stupid beardless"
The growing confrontation that had been taking place between the Montoneros and Perón reached its point of maximum tension on May 1, 1974, in the mobilization to Plaza de Mayo for Labor Day. Montoneros, with their mass fronts, was located in the northwest quadrant of the plaza (on the right of the image) with a notably diminished militant presence compared to the mobilization capacity exhibited six months earlier. Perón had called for a "Labor and National Unity Festival", and asked that only Argentine and union flags be taken. A photo from the newspaper Noticias de la Tendencia highlighted how that recommendation was disobeyed using aerosol sprays and large fabric letters that were sewn to the flags to form the word "Montoneros".
As he explained in a request published after the event, Montoneros attended the event in order to express his "dissatisfaction" by the political direction that the Perón government had taken and the presence of "gorillas" (anti-Peronists) in his cabinet. The Montonera columns shouted slogans to that effect and did not stop when the speech began. Perón's speech was relatively short (17 minutes) and was aimed at recognizing the importance of the labor movement and unions, as the "backbone" of the Peronist Movement, but was constantly interrupted by the opposition slogans of Montoneros: "What's up, what's up, what's up, general, the popular government is full of gorillas!", "¡¡ Agree, agree, agree, general, the gorillas agree, the people will fight!", 'Rucci traitor, greetings to Vandor!". In the midst of these chants, Perón responded several times, disqualifying the position of the Montoneros, impacting above all with the use of two qualifying adjectives that he directed at them, & # 34;stupid & # 34; and "imberbes". The following fragment of the act conveys the tension and climate of confrontation that was experienced:
Perón: 'Compañeros:...
Arctics of the Montoneros sector: "What's going on, what's going on, General, that the popular government is full of gorillas!"
Perón: "Today twenty years ago that on this same balcony, and with a bright day like this, I last spoke to the Argentine workers. It was then when I recommended that they adjust their organizations, because there were difficult times. I was not mistaken in the appreciation of the days that came or in the quality of the trade union organization, which was held for twenty years, despite these stupid screaming..."
Trade unionists: "Perón, Evita, the Peronist Homeland!"
Perón: "He said that through these twenty years the union organizations have remained unmovable, and today it turns out that some imberbes pretend to have more merit than those they fought for twenty years. (...) Now it turns out that, after twenty years, there are some who are not yet satisfied with everything we have done..."
Arctics of the Montoneros sector: "Conformes, conformes, general, according to the gorillas, the people will fight!"
Trade unionists: "No Yanquis or Marxists, Peronists!"
(At this time the columns of Montoneros and Peronist Youth begin to be withdrawn)
Perón: "I repeat, comrades, that it will be for the reconstruction of the country and in that task is committed the government in depth, that it will also be for liberation, liberation not only from colonialism that comes whipping the republic through so many years, but also from these infiltrates that work inside... and that treacherously they are more dangerous than those who work outside, not to mention that most of them are mercenaries at the service of foreign money..."
Arctics of the Montoneros sector: "Aserrin, they will witness, it is the people who leave!"
(The columns continue to be removed)
After the event, Perón held a public dialogue with the representatives of the political parties, who had been impressed by the confrontation, and affirmed that "a good head wash is good for the youth."
Before, it is the same day 1, in the inaugural speech of the sessions of the Congress, Perón had affirmed:
We do not ignore that violence also reaches us from outside our borders [...]. We will overcome subversion: we will isolate the violent and the unfit. We will fight them with our forces, and defeat them within the Constitution and the Law. No victory, which is not also political, is valid on this front.Juan Domingo Perón
Two weeks later, Montoneros released at a press conference an extensive analysis "about the political consequences of the act of May 1," making explicit his criticism of the government, specifically the members of the cabinet, the Social Pact between unions and employers, and the "Vandorista" union leadership:
...we came to the square and there we showed what was the feeling of the whole town: to ask Perón what is happening, that the people do not understand how the traitors of yesterday are the heroes of the homeland now and the gorillas of yesterday are the fervent Peronists that we must today follow. We went to the act to express in that assembly what the vast majority of the people feel. We understand that the answer Perón gave to the people gathered in the square was wrong... The biggest mistake is that on May 1st, where the General has the possibility of responding directly to the criticisms of the people that fall on some officials and the leadership of government policy, he does so by insulting not only to those present, but to all those Peronists who had not gone to the square felt the same as the thousands who were representing them asking the leader what happened... We didn't go looking for an insult, which naturally can only be listed as a mistake. We look forward to rectifying this error and also—which is more important—from the march of the process, because for that we are Peronists and for that we vote for liberation and against dependence.Requested by Montoneros of 15/05/1974
The break between Perón and the Montoneros that day in the Plaza de Mayo, classified as "expulsion" or "retiro", is widely regarded as a pivotal event in Argentine history. Exactly two months later, Perón died and political violence would escalate geometrically, stressed by State terrorism implemented through Triple A, the return to the armed struggle of Montoneros, adding to that maintained by the ERP and the coup operations that would lead to in the coup d'état of March 24, 1976 and the resulting dictatorship, during which human rights violations would reach the category of genocide.
On May 11, 1974, Father Mugica was assassinated by Triple A, close though critical of the Montoneros, founder of the Movement of Priests for the Third World and of the current of village priests and expression of the Theology of the people. On May 13, 1974, Perón appointed Commissioner Alberto Villar as head of the Federal Police. Villar, who had received counterrevolutionary warfare training in France and was later the first Latin American police officer to receive training in interrogation techniques at the School of the Americas, became one of the heads of Triple A.
During the government of Isabel Perón (1974-1976)
Death of Perón and outbreak of political violence
On July 1, 1974, General Juan D. Perón died at the age of 78, when he had not yet completed his first year in office. The cause of his death was cardiac arrest, as a consequence of the aggravation of the chronic coronary disease that he suffered. Perón's death shocked the country, partly due to the high popularity he enjoyed at the time of his death, and partly due to the widespread awareness that he was the only figure capable of mitigating the high level of political conflict on his own. of multiple cross forces and preserve democracy. The United States had considered months before that if Perón died, the most convenient path for its interests was a military dictatorship.
The assumption of the Presidency of María Estela Martínez de Perón (Isabel) meant the seizure of power by the group of the Italian anti-communist lodge Propaganda Due, led by José López Rega, minister and head of the Triple A parapolice organization, which also included among its prominent members, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, future leader of the civic-military dictatorship installed on March 24, 1976.
Montoneros decided to react to the death of Perón with a high-impact attack, although without publicly claiming responsibility for the action, assassinating on July 15 the radical political leader and former Minister of the Interior of the last dictatorship under the command of Lanusse, Arturo Mor Roig. Despite the unusual lack of self-attribution of the murder and unlike the murder of Rucci, regarding which its authorship is disputed, in the case of Mor Roig the authorship of the attack is not disputed. It is even known that the operation was commanded by Eduardo Molinete, head of the Córdoba Regional and as such, a member of the National Leadership. Montoneros let it be known that the reasons for the "execution" were due to the fact that Mor Roig had been the mastermind of the failed Lanusse operation so that Peronism could not return to power, known as the Great National Agreement (GAN) and had collaborated with the dictatorship by denying the crimes committed in the Trelew Massacre, also seeking to send him a message to the UCR, so that it would not collaborate with the government of Isabel Perón and López Rega. Two days later, Montoneros was involved in a new bloody event, when the police accidentally discovered a house where they were being held hostage while they were negotiating their ransom, to David Kraiselburd, director of the newspaper El Día of La Plata, which triggered the decision to assassinate him. Simultaneously, the magazine El Caudillo, an unofficial organ of Triple A, he communicated to Montoneros and his mass fronts that they had declared war on him: "Exclusive warning for Peronists: We are at war!" Two weeks later, the Triple A murdered Peronist deputy Rodolfo Ortega Peña, close to Montoneros.
If in the thirteen months that Cámpora and Perón held the presidencies, 79 people had been assassinated for political reasons, from all sectors, in the following twenty-one months of the presidency of María Estela Martínez de Perón they would die assassinated for political reasons. politicians, at least 905 people, from all sectors.
Go underground and "prolonged war"
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Two months after the death of Perón and the assassination of Mor Roig, on September 7, 1974, the Montoneros decided to go into hiding together with their mass fronts (JP, JUP, UES, JTP, AE, MVP and MIP).
It was prepared for a "passage to clandestineity" which, as it was logical, would be conflictive for the Organization as long as it would isolate and expose the militants of the mass fronts. In particular to the companions of the Jotapé who acted on the territorial level, as it happened: the bulk of the blood shed after the pass to the clandestine, came out of the veins of the pyramids that formed the Jotapé... [The leadership of Montoneros] prepared the original military-political organization to be transformed, definitively, into a revolutionary army that would confront, tete a tete, with the whole of the armed and security forces of the State.José Amorín
The move to the clandestine was announced by Montoneros in September 1974 through a secret press conference offered by Mario Firmenich, Adriana Lesgart (Evita Group), José Pablo Ventura (JUP), Enrique Juárez (JTP) and Juan Carlos Dante Gullo (JP).
According to Fernando Vaca Narvaja: «Ultimately we ended up stepping on the stick and playing the game of the enemy. By clandestinizing the political-social structures, in fact our ability to mobilize was restricted and that was notorious". Rodolfo Galimberti—demanding greater autonomy from the national leadership, as the only way of survival. Norma Arrostito, in the clandestinely typed document at ESMA, forcefully states that "Perón's death will deal the final blow to the Montonero phenomenon », by alienating him from the masses and the Argentine reality, leading him to adopt the decision to resume the armed struggle:
Perón's death is going to give the definitive blow to the massive phenomenon and thus to the stage of the advance of the masses, this fact was never taken into account, in its exact dimension by the OPM in later developing its policy... In this way, the OPM rises to a slide that increasingly removes it from the masses and compels it to an internist and theoretical practice. This, by not verifying practical-theory-practice, leads to the ideology, the adoption of historical and dialectical materialism as a political identity and the ignorance of the laws imposed by the socio-economic formation called Argentina.Norma Arrostito
Similarly, in 1995, Firmenich maintained that going into hiding and returning to the armed struggle was the “maternal mistake” that led to the annihilation of the Montoneros:
When we were cornered, politically and policely, when Triple A massacred us after the death of General Perón, we made the mistake of passing to the clandestine and retaking the armed struggle, despite the fact that there was not the legitimacy that the consensus of the majority was giving. Politically the error was of an ideological and militaristic nature.Mario Firmenich
With the move into hiding, the notion of “prolonged war” came to the fore in the Montoneros documents, which was already present from its origins, in the tension between politics (negotiation and agreements) and the military (violence). Montoneros had been defined from the beginning as a political-military organization, an OPM, unifying in a single command, the political leadership and the military and discarding other organizational forms that separated both practices and placed the military leadership under the direction of the leadership politics.
The decision to go into hiding made it impossible to continue publishing the two press outlets that Montoneros had, the magazine La Causa Peronista (successor to El Descamisado) and the newspaper Noticias. The last issue of La Causa Peronista was published on September 3, 1974, with an impressive front-page title: "Mario Firmenich and Norma Arrostito tell how Aramburu died." The article sought to convey the message of the return of Montoneros to the armed struggle. In the future it would become an important historical document.
Kidnapping of the Born brothers and murder of Villar
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Just two weeks after going into hiding, on September 19, 1974, the Northern Column of Montoneros carried out the "most expensive kidnapping in history", by capturing the brothers Juan and Jorge Born III (39 and 40 years old), from the multinational company Bunge & Born.
The operation was in charge of the Northern Column of Montoneros and was commanded on the ground by Roberto Quieto (third in the organization's highest leadership) and Rodolfo Galimberti —military chief of the Northern Column. The Born brothers were moving in a convoy along Avenida del Libertador, in the back seat of the front car, escorted by another in which two armed men were coming. At 8:22 in the morning, a group of guerrillas pretending to be road workers, they cut the avenue at the height of Olivos and force the convoy to turn into a side street, where both cars were immediately rammed by two trucks, each with five uniformed men. The guerrillas got out of them pretending to be a police task force that was kidnapping two "subversives" (by the Born brothers), and proceeded to machine-gun the car in which the brothers were riding shouting "Stop, communists!", killing the driver Juan Carlos Pérez and Alberto Cayetano Bosch Luro, Patricia Bullrich Luro's third uncle. -future Minister of Labor during the presidency of De la Rúa and of Security during the presidency of Macri- and her sister Julieta, who had been part of the logistical support team for the kidnapping.
The police appearance of the operation paralyzed the neighbors and the two bodyguards who were quickly disarmed and handcuffed. The Born brothers were also handcuffed and hooded, before being put into one of the three cars that were at the scene, in which they fled. Still and the three men disguised as road workers escape in a fourth car driven by a woman. Two other guerrillas in police uniform control the railway barrier located in the place, to guarantee that the escape has a free way. The entire operation lasted 1 minute, 45 seconds. At 8:30 a.m., one of the bodyguards manages to call the police and ask for help, but the Born family and the company did not file a complaint, nor did they allow the police to interview them.
The originally demanded ransom was 100 million dollars, but Jorge Born II, father of the kidnapped executives and president of the company, refused to negotiate and pay any amount, due to his opposition to having his money used to finance to Montoneros. After six months of confinement in a "people's jail", Juan Born began to have serious mental problems and Jorge Born III, from his place of confinement, took over the negotiation, managing to lower the ransom to 60 million euros. dollars (equivalent to 260 million 2015 dollars) and convince his father to relent. When the first part was paid, six months after the kidnapping, Juan Born was released; Three months later, when the balance was paid, Jorge Born III was released. Jorge Born II (father) died shortly after embittered for having paid the ransom. In the 1990s, Galimberti, the Montonero chief who commanded the operation, became a friend and partner of Jorge Born III, whom he kidnapped twenty years earlier. That friendship caused both brothers to fight.
A part of the money was diverted to Cuba in order to put it temporarily in safekeeping, while the final payment of some 17 million dollars was collected and managed by the banker David Graiver, who had his offices in the city of New York and died in a dubious plane crash.
On November 1, 1974, in the Tigre delta, again the Columna Norte de Montoneros, carried out a coup of enormous magnitude by killing the operational chief of Triple A and simultaneously chief of the Federal Police, commissioner Alberto Villar, by dynamiting the boat in which he was. His wife, Elsa Marina Pérez de Villar, also died in the attack.The perpetrator was Carlos Andrés Goldenberg, an experienced guerrilla who had participated in the attacks on Minimax in 1969 and in the escape from Rawson prison in 1972, as support external. Goldemberg had received training as a tactical diver in Cuba and was part of the leadership of the Northern Column. He also participated in the kidnapping of the Born brothers and the attack on the 29th Infantry Regiment of Monte in Formosa in 1975, dying in individual combat. in August 1976. Rodolfo Walsh and Roberto Quieto were the designer and supervisor, respectively, of the operation.
In December 1974, the magazine Evita Montonera appeared as the new press organ of the Montoneros, with clandestine distribution, after the forced closure of the newspaper Noticias and the magazine La Causa Peronista (successor to The Undershirt).
The rural front in Tucumán. Decrees of annihilation and Operative Independence
On February 5, 1975, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued the first of the so-called «annihilation decrees», which carried the number 261/75, by which she ordered the Argentine Army to "neutralize and/ or annihilate the actions of the subversive elements that were operating in the Province of Tucumán", starting Operation Independence.
Tucumán is a province located in the northwest of the country, which has an extensive rural area covered by a wild and difficult to penetrate "mountain", with abundant water. There, the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) had opened a rural guerrilla front a year earlier, with the Compañía del Monte Ramón Rosa Jiménez. The chosen area was located in the southwest of the province, between the Sierra del Aconquija -with heights of up to 5,000 meters- and the plain where the sugar mills were located, connected by National Route 38, with a high density of overexploited and impoverished population due to a policy that prompted the closure of sugar mills.
Montoneros, which had some urban centers in the provincial capital, sent several observers to the rural front opened by the ERP and established a logistical support unit, but had not yet installed permanent forces on the "mount" in order to establish a "focus" released (he would do so at the beginning of 1976 with the Monte Force of the recently created Montonero Army).
Operation Independence militarized the province of Tucumán and imposed a state terrorism regime executed by the Army and parapolice groups linked to Triple A.
At the same time, on February 27, Montoneros kidnapped and "ajustició" to the United States consul in Córdoba, John Patrick Egan. The assassination of the American consul generated a crisis between the governments of Argentina and the United States, at the time that the Secretary of State was Henry Kissinger, who around the same time was organizing the Condor Plan, through which State terrorism was coordinated. in South America.
Y#34;The guerrilla struggle at the factory base"
On February 12, the US embassy in Argentina sent a cable entitled "Industrial terrorism: the guerrilla struggle at the factory base," in which it reports on the actions of guerrilla organizations in large factories located in the industrial cordons of Buenos Aires and Córdoba. The cable reports that the guerrilla organizations put pressure on the managers, supporting the labor demands of the workers:
Managers of Industrial and Personnel Relations appear as the biggest targets of murder when companies do not access workers' demands. Almost invariably, the affected companies fully meet the terrorist demands, which normally consist of the granting of economic demands, the payment of wages lost by strikes and the reinstatement of dismissed workers. Managers probably have few alternatives.
One of the areas in which Montoneros had a greater presence among factory workers was the one that corresponded to the North Column, which operated in the entire northern strip that went from the Federal Capital to Zárate and Campana.
Foundation of the Authentic Peronist Party
On March 11, 1975, the foundation of the Authentic Peronist Party (PPA) was publicly announced at the historic Nino restaurant, located in Vicente López, as legal political cover for Montoneros. Shortly after the name had to be changed to Partido Auténtico, before the opposition of the Justicialista Party to the use of the word "peronista", accepted by the electoral justice. The promoting board included prominent political figures of Peronism, such as the historic trade unionists Andrés Framini and Dante Viel, the displaced governors Oscar Bidegain (elected party president), Jorge Cepernic and Alberto Martínez Baca, as well as the Montoneros commanders Norberto Habegger, Armando Cabo, Arnaldo Lizazo and Ismael Salame. Other party leaders were Rodolfo Puiggrós, Raúl Laguzzi, Miguel Bonasso and Juan Gelman.
On April 13, 1975, the Authentic Party, with the name of the Descamisado Party, ran for elections in the province of Misiones, forming an electoral alliance with the Third Position party, obtaining a meager 5% of the votes, much less than expected.
On May 25, 1975, one of the founders of the FAR, Arturo Lewinger, died in combat in Mar del Plata, during an attack on a police station with the intention of freeing several imprisoned militants.
First Montoneros offensive
Meanwhile, in the first quarter of 1975, Montoneros launched its first offensive after having resumed the armed struggle in September 1974. It carried out one hundred and fifty operations, including acts of propaganda, executions, and various attacks. On March 15, a bomb exploded in the Plaza Colón in Buenos Aires, next to the General Command of the Army, where General Jorge Rafael Videla, the future dictator of Argentina and at that time one of the coup leaders, had his seat. In the attack, the truck driver Alberto Blas García died and 29 were injured, including four colonels. On April 23, three combat squads of Montoneros assassinated the inspector Telémaco Ojeda, who was a member of the Rosario Anti-subversive Service. "This action is in response to the outrage committed by the security forces in all the towns of the industrial cordon," said the Montoneros war report.
The organization established a series of rules and guidelines to carry out the armed struggle. Special importance was attached to the "executions" of torturers and perpetrators of extrajudicial executions -generally policemen- and of company managers who collaborated with the kidnapping of staff delegates. On the other hand, the criterion of avoiding as much as possible shooting at soldiers who were fulfilling their compulsory military service was adopted.. Great importance was also given to the recommendations to avoid being arrested and in the event that it happened, how to protect yourself and other militants, as well as how to act in the face of interrogations and torture.
... general rules can be given to neutralize and even curb the work of torturers. In general torture ceases when they consider the detainee to give no more. That is why it should be shown that it has already reached the limit, always exaggerating the manifestations of pain, with skill. There is the example of a companion who tried to contain himself when he was applied to the picana where he was hurting most and shouting a lot when he was given in the most bearable areas; he managed to deceive them and substantially reduced the pain. It is useful to maintain firmness and security, but without being violent or responding with more energy when making false accusations. Heroic stances are not only useless in that situation, but also negative because they leave without effect the image of innocence that we must represent.
On March 21, Triple A produced two large massacres against Tendencia militants, the Pasco Massacre in Lomas de Zamora and the Five for One Massacre in Mar del Plata.
The Montonero Army Emerges
In the second half of 1975, Montoneros made what he considered a "quantum leap" in its organization, forming the Montonero Army, for large operations, also maintaining the popular militias, for operations of lesser magnitude. According to Perdía told Guillespie, by then Montoneros had 12,000 combatants, of whom 2,300 were officers. The organization was completed with "some 120,000 more or less organized people who adhered to it.
On August 22, the anniversary of the Trelew massacre, Montoneros detonated more than a hundred bombs throughout the country.
Notable among the operations was the sinking of the missile destroyer ARA Santísima Trinidad, a jewel of the Argentine Navy, while the Río Santiago Shipyard, a state company administered by the Navy, was under construction. The attack was carried out by the Arturo Lewinger platoon -who he himself had commanded until his death in May 1975-, made up of six combatants under the command of Rolando Hugo Jeckel, including three tactical divers. The group was preparing the operation for ten months. Three explosive charges of 85 kg of gelamon were prepared, with delayed ignition systems, which were taken by car to a point on the Río de la Plata located upstream of the shipyard, where four members loaded them into a camouflaged boat that arrived from the Delta of the Santiago River up to 700 m from the shipyard where the destroyer was located, guarded by Navy guards in an area strongly illuminated by searchlights. From there, three divers crossed the channel carrying the loads, kept afloat by floats with regulating valves, although one of them sank on the way, delaying operations for more than an hour. Some noises alerted the military guards who searched the area with flashlights, without results. The two remaining charges were roped to the pilings on which the ship rested. After more than three hours in the water, the divers returned to the boat and withdrew. The explosion produced a 1-meter-diameter hole and a 30-meter crack in the hull, which would render the ship useless for five years. There were no personal victims. One of the tactical divers who planted the bomb would be captured two years later and recruited for the intelligence services of the Navy. The Río Santiago Shipyard would be the company in which there would be the most repression of its workers, with 44 delegates missing, another 12 murdered and almost seventy survivors who suffered clandestine detention and torture, during which they were interrogated about the attack.
On August 28, the Marcos Osatinsky Montonero platoon carried out "Operation Gardel" by exploding an interconnected system of bombs, placed under the runway of the San Miguel de Tucumán airport, shooting down a Lockheed C-130 Hercules plane (patent TC-62) of the Air Force at the moment it took off, transporting 114 members of special forces of the National Gendarmerie, with a result of six dead and 29 injured. The placement of the explosives took four months of work, in a province that was militarized due to Operation Independence, like the airport. The commando took advantage of an informal pedestrian path and drainage channel that crossed the runway below, which the Army had neglected. To install the explosives, the guerrillas had to enter the tunnel ten times and open a conical hole using explosives, taking advantage of the takeoff of planes to cover the noise. The cone was designed to direct the explosion upwards, placing a hemisphere of 5k of dynamite at the vertex, covered by a layer of 60k of an explosive identified as "dietamon" and 95k ammonite. The detonation was carried out from an electrical source connected to the detonators by means of a 250m cable. After two failed attempts, the commando installed the bomb every day for 28 days, until they identified the target. After the explosion, all the guerrillas who participated in the operation withdrew without being detected. The operation was commanded by officer Juan Carlos Alsogaray (Paco), son of the former head of the Argentine Army, General Julio Rodolfo Alsogaray.
On September 3, in an assault by Montoneros on an Army truck to supply weapons, on Camino General Belgrano, they assassinated assistant sergeant Anselmo Ríos. The following day, the Montonero militant Arturo Ovejero Soria was assassinated in Tucumán by the paramilitary group Comando José Rucci. On September 15, the retired police officer Simeón Alejandro Douglas was murdered in Córdoba, and on November 3, police commissioner José Robles; both murders were attributed to Montoneros, but more recent investigations determined that they had been murdered by the Cordoba police themselves, to prevent them from denouncing the torture that was carried out in the Department of Investigations (D2). The investigation determined that the Cordoba police murdered the man. less than 12 police officers and planted a large number of bombs, attributing said crimes to Montoneros.
On September 8, 1975, by Decree of the National Executive Power No. 2452/75, signed by President María Estela Martínez de Perón and her ministers, it was prohibited
...proselytism, indoctrination, diffusion, need for help for your support and any other activity that takes place to achieve its purposes the self-denominated subversive group "Montoneros", either acting under that denomination or under any other that replaces it.
In the foundations of the decree it was indicated that the country suffered "...the scourge of a terrorist and subversive activity that was not an exclusively Argentine phenomenon", that "such internationalization greatly hindered measure the total repression of terrorism and the Argentine pacification process", which required extreme measures aimed at that objective, specifying that "that subversive attitude constitutionally configured the crime of sedition", adding that the measure adopted was not about prescriptions or ideological discrimination, because "nothing justifies the illicit association created for violence and the facts that produce or promote it", finally pointing out that in this situation found the subversive group calling itself "Montoneros", whether they acted under that name or under any other.
On September 15 and 16, in memory of the military coup that overthrew President Perón in 1955, there was a new barrage of bombs and operations throughout the country.
On October 5, 1975, the Montonero Army's baptism of fire took place, with uniforms and military ranks. Some 40 combatants, most of whom were transported by plane (another 20 combatants acted in Buenos Aires), seized the airport in the city of Formosa, in the extreme north of the country, attacked the Monte 29 Infantry Regiment -one of the military regiments with the greatest fire capacity - in order to seize weapons and left the place in three planes. The result of the operation was uncertain: on the one hand, the Montoneros showed a military capacity that surprised the government and the armed forces, they managed to seize 50 FAL rifles and withdraw without being caught, preserving the majority of their combatants; on the other hand, it failed to capture the regiment and encountered unexpected resistance from the citizens who were doing compulsory military service, ten of whom died in combat defending the garrison. The casualties were judicially established at 16 deaths in the ranks of the Army and 19 in the montonero camp, although the number varies according to the sources. Years later it would be established that nine of the fallen montoneros had been assassinated after being detained. In the province of Formosa since 2002, from the enactment of provincial law No. 1395, on October 5 of each year the "Day of the Formoseño Soldier" is commemorated.
The Montoneros attack on the Formosa military headquarters caused such a commotion throughout the country that it led, the next day, to Ítalo Argentino Luder, at that time constitutional interim president because President Martínez had requested a license for disease, issue three other "decrees of annihilation" expanding the fight against the guerrillas to the entire country, creating an Internal Security Council, commanded by the president himself, granting the Armed Forces the power to militarize the country and resort to military forces. of security and police to "annihilate subversive actions".
On October 24, 1975, members of the Montoneros kidnapped the Mercedes Benz production manager, Franz Metz, and demanded $7 million to ransom the German citizen. On October 26, five police officers in Buenos Aires they were killed inside their vehicles after they were shot in an ambush, meters from the San Isidro Cathedral. On December 3, 1975, Montoneros assassinated retired Major General Jorge Esteban Cáceres Monié, former chief of the Federal Police during the dictatorship of Alejandro Agustín Lanusse. They took her wife, also injured, and left her dead in a ditch 15 kilometers away. That same month, Montoneros assaulted the Halcón de Banfield arms factory. They took 250 new weapons, 150 7.62mm caliber rifles and 100 9mm machine pistols.
By the end of 1975, the Montoneros had completed 745 armed interventions, the highest annual peak of their entire existence. That average would be maintained in the first five months of 1976, in which he carried out 351 actions, beginning to decline since then. Despite the secrecy and repression, Montoneros managed to maintain a considerable presence on the mass fronts, especially in the factory-union front, where the militancy of the neighborhood and student fronts turned.
Relations with ERP
Starting in 1975, talks were held for a rapprochement between the leadership of the Montoneros and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), the other guerrilla organization that was operating in Argentina at the time. The ERP had a Marxist-Trosquista ideology, was the armed wing of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT) and was led by Mario Roberto Santucho. Unlike the Montoneros, the ERP had not at any time suspended the armed struggle during the constitutional period that began in May 1973, and had already been declared illegal by the government in September of that year.
With the return to arms decided by the Montoneros in September 1974, the possibility of a rapprochement between the two guerrilla organizations arose. Montoneros posted observers to the ERP rural front and created a Basic Logistics Combat Unit (UBCL) with which it supported the ERP's Monte Ramón Rosa Jiménez Company that was operating in the impenetrable Tucumán hill, providing weapons, medicines and shelter to the "erpian" guerrillas.
In an ERP bulletin, analyzing the relationship between both organizations, it was recognized that:
Just over six months ago, relations were resumed at the leadership of our party and Montoneros and there have been positive progress in the discussions. There were broad prospects for unitary work and even for the formation of a single “partite” and a single guerrilla army in our homeland.
The US Embassy estimated that, at the beginning of 1975, the Montoneros had 2,000 armed combatants, while the ERP had between 400 and 800 combatants.
At the beginning of 1976, the Montoneros would create the Montonero Army Mountain Force to also operate in the jungle area of Tucumán, where the ERP had already been practically defeated, but the experience lasted a few months. Some sources estimated that the Montoneros troops that operated in Tucumán were between 150 and 200 militants and 2,500 sympathizers.
Arrest and disappearance of Roberto Quieto
On December 28, 1975, Roberto Quieto, number three of the Montoneros behind Firmenich and Perdía, and leader of the FAR until the merger in October 1973, was arrested by the police on a beach in the north of Greater Buenos Aires. The news was released by the press at the same time that radical legislators denounced the fact in Congress, but the government of President Isabel Perón kept him in a detained-disappeared condition, confined in a clandestine detention center -probably Campo de Mayo -, where he was tortured and interrogated.
In January Habegger and Perdía met with General Harguindeguy to try to negotiate the release of Quieto, but shortly after Montoneros reported internally that some important places known to Quieto had fallen, attributing the fact to data that Quieto had provided under torture. Immediately, the Conduction decided to cease all efforts for his release and take him to a revolutionary trial in absentia. On February 14, 1976, the Revolutionary Court found Quieto guilty of the crimes of desertion in operation and denunciation, being sentenced to death and degradation.
Quieto's death sentence sparked a debate about the proper behavior of militants under torture and the ability to resist it, which spanned many years.
Monte Force of the Montonero Army
In mid-1975, the task of recruiting and training within the Montoneros had begun to form the “Compañía Montoneros de Monte” that would operate in the northwest of Tucumán. Reconnaissance was carried out and 40 deposits were prepared, which would be future bases of operations. To minimize its detection among the civilian population, the unit had been formed mainly with forty single volunteers from the province. The planned area of operations was the northwest of the Sierra de Medina de Tucumán. At that time, the Army estimated that the PRT-ERP guerrillas had between 300 and 500 combatants in Tucumán.
On August 28, 1975, the Operation Gardel attack took place in San Miguel de Tucumán, in which they completely detonated a Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft, dependent on Group 1 of Air Transport of the I Air Brigade, while it was taking off from the old Teniente Benjamín Matienzo International Airport transporting 114 gendarmes plus six crew members to San Juan.
1976: the three months before the coup
At the beginning of 1976, Montoneros analyzed the prevailing situation in the American metallurgical factory Bendix, located in the Vicente López district, in the Buenos Aires suburbs, where around a thousand workers worked. the company designated certain union representatives as "dangerous types" and they handed over their personal data to the repressive forces, so that they proceeded to kidnap them, torture them and in some cases assassinate them or make them disappear clandestinely. As a result, Montoneros proceeded to carry out a "revolutionary trial" where four company executives were sentenced to death: General Manager Roca, Assistant Manager Rosas, Industrial Relations Manager Alberto Olavarrieta, and Personnel Chief Jorge Sarlenga. The action was carried out in the North Column on January 29, 1976., by three militiamen and two armed women, who entered the factory, while five other soldiers remained outside as support. Two of them found Olavarrieta and Sarlenga in their offices and killed them. The third soldier went to the general office, but Roca had not yet arrived, which is why he destroyed the office with a grenade, without causing any injuries. Upon leaving, one of the commandos ran into a neighbor of his, the policeman. Juan Carlos Garavaglio, from Buenos Aires, and proceeded to kill him, because he recognized him, receiving recrimination from the head of the command. The purpose of the operation was to serve as an example for those company managers who collaborated with the repressive forces to kidnap union representatives.
On February 23, 1976, Juan Carlos Alsogaray, who was in command of the Montoneros de Monte Column in Tucumán, disappeared. Immediately, his partner, Adriana Barcia, notified his father, General Julio Rodolfo Alsogaray, who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Army, of the disappearance. Taking advantage of his position, General Alsogaray and his wife, the mother of Juan Carlos, went to Tucumán to meet with the commander of Operation Independence, General Antonio Bussi. There Bussi showed them a photo of his disfigured son and when his mother cried, he forbade her to cry. "They were able to recover the body and perform skills. The photo showed Juan Carlos in a blue uniform, the one used by the montoneros in operations. The report from the V Brigade was that he had died in combat. The expert reports did not give rise to doubts: he had been captured alive and killed with blows, shots and bayonets." Three decades later, General Bussi would be sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Montonero Party
In the first issue of the magazine Evita Montonera published after the coup d'état on March 24, 1976, Montoneros announced that he had formed the Montonero Party, with the intention of thus assuming the leadership of the entire Peronist movement.
The transition from OPM to Party is not a mere change of name or organizational structures, or of a number of members. It is a qualitative change that is indispensable to legitimize ourselves as the leadership of the Peronist Movement that will lead, from its most advanced sectors, all workers and the people in a powerful National and Social Liberation Movement and guarantee the interests of the working class in the future FLN.
The decision had already been taken in October 1975, taking into account the general strike and the large worker demonstrations against the Peronist government of Isabel Perón, which made the Rodrigazo, the first "adjustment plan, fail.; of Argentine history, in line with the new visions of the economy promoted by the Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman. It was the first time that the Argentine trade union movement organized in the CGT had declared a general strike against a Peronist government. Montoneros interpreted these events, which occurred after Perón's death, as a symptom of the "exhaustion of Peronism".
The Montonero Party was led at that time by a National Leadership of four members, all male, in the following order of priority: Mario Firmenich, Roberto Perdía, Carlos Hobert and Raúl Yager.
During the dictatorship installed in 1976
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The leadership of Montoneros knew since October 1975, like the whole country, that a civic-military coup d'état was approaching and even had, thanks to their informants —among them the son of General Numa Laplane—, details and details of it. Montoneros maintained that the constitutional government of Isabel Perón was "traitorous" to the people and did not constitute a democracy. the unification of the popular sectors in the fight against the dictatorship. Pilar Calveiro opined that "Under this idea, the Montoneros organization, like the ERP, considered that the 1976 coup was beneficial for its objectives since it would sharpen the contradictions and clarify a confrontation that was diffuse, given the practices of illegal repression coming from a democratically elected government; it was hoped that all this would speed up the moment of triumph.
Firmenich said about it: "we did nothing to prevent it because, in short, the coup was also part of the internal struggle in the Peronist movement".;The bet that the coup was going to push the masses to our side did not come true".
In the months prior to the coup and due to their clandestinity, Montoneros had notably reduced their activity on the mass fronts, especially in the neighborhoods, universities and colleges and somewhat less in the factories:
This meant losing a vital infrastructure to carry out its clandestine functioning. They depended on their own apparatus and the money they needed to finance it. This was compounded by numerous casualties among their military cadres, which significantly reduced their offensive capacity. The war against the armed forces that they intended to win was about to culminate in their defeat even before they began.Fernando Almiron, Campo Santo
The dictatorship implemented a regime of systematic State terrorism (torture, intelligence, disappearances and extermination), executed by the military and police, coordinated with the other South American dictatorships (Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Peru) through the Condor Plan and strengthened by the support of the United States, which was withering for Montoneros and the ERP.
Partial Order No. 405/76 of May 21 of the Army General Staff, signed by General Roberto Viola, says that "the Army has documentation captured from the enemy that says verbatim this war led by the F.F.A.A. began to develop a few months ago (September 1975), launching a campaign of encirclement and annihilation. The campaign was raised combining the political siege with the military annihilation. The F.F. A.A. They have achieved important victories in the interior of the country. Córdoba, Mendoza, Noroeste and Litoral are obvious examples".
1976: systematization of state terrorism
Montoneros continued with his tactic of combining assassinations of soldiers, police officers and businessmen, generally related to acts of torture or informing him, with large military operations. Among the major operations, the assassination of the head of the Federal Police, the bomb at the Federal Police Superintendency (23 deaths), the attack against a police bus in Rosario (11 deaths), a failed attack against the dictator Videla, stood out. the bomb in the Military Circle, the attack against the clandestine detention center known as Pozo de Arana, the bomb in the Ministry of Defense (14 deaths). The dictatorship also attributed to Montoneros the assassination of General Omar Actis, who was probably assassinated by the dictatorship itself due to internal disputes related to the 1978 Soccer World Cup.
On June 18, the "Carlos Caride" of the Montonero Army, commanded by Horacio Mendizábal, detonated a bomb that killed the head of the Federal Police, Brigadier General Cesáreo Cardozo, accused of ordering the murder and disappearance of 20 people per day. The bomb was planted under his bed by the soldier Ana María González who established a friendship with Cardozo's daughter, taking advantage of the fact that they both attended the teacher training college together. González had been detained and tortured fifteen days before the attack, despite which she continued with her mission. He died in combat on January 4 of the following year, without knowing who he was, until two months later. In an interview with Mendizábal and González, published on August 16 of that year by the magazine Cambio 16, González recounted:
For a month and a half I had to frequent Cardozo's house, as a student colleague of the daughter, while he himself led the kidnapping, torture and murder of dozens of companions. I should have shared his table and endured with a smile his comments, every time a man of the people was killed.Ana María González
On July 2, they planted a bomb in the Federal Security Superintendency (Federal Coordination) of the Argentine Federal Police, which operated as a clandestine detention and torture center and headquarters of Task Force No. 2, causing the death of 23 policemen and injuring 66 people. The attack was carried out with a "Vietnamese" built with nine kilos of trotyl and five kilos of steel balls. The bomb was brought into the dining room by José María Salgado, a militant Montoneros police officer who had managed to relax security measures for several days, entering with an identical package. In retaliation for the murder of Police Chief Cardozo and the attack on the Superintendency, on August 20 the Federal Police took thirty detainees (ten women and twenty men), mostly Montoneros militants, murdering them in what became known as the Massacre. of Fatima. Only sixteen victims could be identified. Thirty years later, two responsible for the massacre, commissioners Carlos Gallone and Juan Carlos Lapuyole, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Gallone, also sentenced in 2019 for repeated rapes and sexual abuse at the CCD of the Superintendency, became internationally known as a result of a photo by photographer Marcelo Ranea, published on the cover of the Clarín newspaper in October 1982, in which he gives the impression who is hugged by a mother from Plaza de Mayo, when in reality it was a struggle.
On September 12, the Montoneros destroyed a police bus in Rosario with a car bomb, killing eleven people (nine police officers and two civilians) and injuring twenty. The attack was carried out when a contingent of about forty police officers were returning from work in the security of a soccer game at the Club Rosario Central stadium, by means of a Citroën brand car that had inside a "Vietnamese" type bomb, which was detonated when the bus passed by next to him. The explosion hit a Renault 12 car, killing two of its occupants, and injuring their daughter.
On October 2, the Tito Molina Superior Official Platoon was about to kill the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, after planting a bomb in the box he occupied in Campo de Mayo, during a military parade. Videla escaped unharmed due to a faulty timer on the bomb, which caused it to detonate five minutes after he had come down from the box. The US embassy described the attack as "extremely serious" and concluded that it indicated "an increase in the ability of terrorists to penetrate military security." The Argentine press made no mention of the event. On October 8, the offices of the Fiat, Mercedes Benz and Chevrolet companies were attacked with bombs.
On October 16, another bomb detonated in the Círculo Militar film club, which did not cause deaths but injured 60 people, mostly family members and retired soldiers. On November 16, some 40 guerrillas attacked a police post in Arana, province of Buenos Aires. According to data collected by the Victoria Advocate , several of the attackers died.
On December 16, the Norma Esther Arrostito Platoon blew up a bomb in the Ministry of Defense microcinema, during a meeting of high command, killing nine soldiers and five civil servants, wounding 30 officers. The bomb was planted by the officer José Luis Dios, advisor to the Ministry of Planning, head of the Peronist Working Youth (JTP) of Lomas de Zamora and later press secretary of the North Column; he was killed in combat the following year.
During the first months of the military government, more than 70 policemen were killed in clashes with the urban guerrillas. frigate José Guillermo Burgos. On April 21, 1976, he was "executed" the agent of the State Information Services (SIDE) Carlos Alberto Farinatti, resulting in his wife slightly injured. On April 26, 1976, ex-colonel Abel Héctor Elías Cavagnaro was killed. On June 27, three Santa Fe policemen died. On July 1, 1976, Sergeant Raúl Godofredo Favale was assassinated. On August 11, Corporal Jorge Antonio Bulacio was killed with two bullets to the head and set fire to a military truck belonging to the 141 Commando Communications Battalion. In October, the director of the Renault company, Domingo Lozano, is killed. On October 18, 1976, Montoneros killed the engineer Enrique Luis Arrossagaray, Production Manager of the Borgward Argentina diesel engine factory when leaving his home located in Pasaje Las Cuevas and Baltar de Ciudadela street. The event was widely covered by the media at the time. In November, Carlos Roberto Souto, a Chrysler executive, was assassinated. On November 9, a firefighter died in the attack directed against the police command of La Plata.
Among the casualties of the Montoneros in 1976, is the Massacre of Azcuénaga street 1816, in Tucumán, on May 20, where María Niklison, Fernando Saavedra Luque (founder of Descamisados), Juan Carlos Meneses, Atilio Brandsen were assassinated and Eduardo González Paz, the latter members of the last montonera leadership in Tucumán; in 2011 General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez and policeman Roberto Albornoz were sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime. On May 27, in the town of Haedo, the first officer Carlos Caride, from the FAP, of which he was one of its founders, died in combat. On June 17, the poet Paco Urondo, author of the book La patria fusilada (1973), which revealed what happened in the Trelew Massacre, died in combat in Mendoza. On September 29, the Corro Street Massacre took place, in the house where the Montoneros National Press Office operated, killing in combat the senior officers Alberto Molinas and Carlos Coronel, the first officer Ignacio Bertran and the second officers Ismael Salame and María Victoria Walsh, daughter of the writer Rodolfo Walsh. The brothers Maricel and Juan Cristóbal Mainer and their mother Luci Mailde Gómez, children and wife of the owners of the house, survived, were detained and spent several years in jail. That same day Santa Fe policemen murdered Daniel Barjacoba, María Márquez, Costanzo, Ana Lía Murguiondo, Sergio Jalil, Eduardo Laus, and José Antonio Oyarzabal, who were missing in the Pozo de Rosario, in what has become known as the Los Surgentes Massacre; In 2012, General Ramón Díaz Bessone, Commissioner José Rubén Lo Fiego and police officers Mario Marcote, Ramón Vergara and Carlos Scorteccini were sentenced. And in 2020, another thirteen Santa Fe police officers accused of sexual abuse, torture and homicide against the victims were sentenced. On December 18, the Rosario Santa Fe police were responsible for the Ibarlucea Massacre, murdering Carlos Aguirre, Alberto Azam, Nora Larrosa, Horacio Melilli, Segundo Núñez and Rodolfo Segarra; twelve police officers were indicted for the crimes.On December 2, Norma Arrostito was captured by a Navy task force, which simulated her death in combat, in order to interrogate her under torture at ESMA, where she was murdered for two years after. While she was held captive, she Arrostito wrote a document that was smuggled out of the clandestine detention center.
Among the combats, the one that took place on November 24, in the house on Calle 30, number 1136 of the City of La Plata, also stands out. There was the clandestine printing press with which the 5,000 copies per issue of the Evita Montonera magazine were printed. In the house were the owner, Diana Teruggi and her three-month-old daughter Clara Anahí Mariani, Roberto Porfidio, Daniel Mendiburu Eliçabe, Juan Carlos Peiris and Alberto Bossio. The house was surrounded shortly after noon by more than one hundred troops from the Army, the Bonarense Police, the National Gendarmerie and task forces, directed from the other block by the head of the First Army Corps, General Guillermo Suárez Mason, the head of the Buenos Aires Police, Colonel Ramón Camps and his right hand commissioner Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, the head of the 10th Infantry Brigade Adolfo Sigwald, the head of the 7th Regiment Alberto Presti and the head of the Quinta de La Plata Police Station, Osvaldo Sertorio. The Montonero group did not abide by the surrender call and the dictatorship forces launched an attack with light artillery, armored vehicles, short and long arms, helicopters, and incendiary grenades. After three and a half hours of combat and with the house semi-destroyed, the attackers took over the house. Four montoneros, including Diana Teruggi, died in combat, while the baby was kidnapped by the attackers. The fifth occupant was taken prisoner wounded and later executed in a clandestine detention center. The house was preserved in the state that it was, by the mothers and fathers of Diana Teruggi and her husband Daniel Mariani. When Diana Teruggi's mother, Chicha Mariani, went to ask about her newborn granddaughter, Clara Anahí, the authorities denied that there had been a girl there, which is why she founded Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, being its first president.. Every year the Anahí Association performs a tribute to the fallen in front of the house and reaffirms the decision to find Clara Anahí.
On December 17, Carlos Hobert, National Conduction of Montoneros, died fighting. The fact decided the organization to transfer the Conduction outside the country. In the following years, the dictatorship would plan the assassination of the Conduction of Montoneros abroad, even requesting authorization from France, Italy and Spain, to commit said murders in their territories, which were denied. Hobert was replaced in the quartet of Hosted by Julio Roque (Firmenich, Perdía, Yager and Roque).
Also in 1976, Roberto Santucho, top figure of the ERP, died in combat on July 19. The coup irreversibly damaged the ERP, because the names of 395 members were found in the house, who were murdered between 1976 and 1977, but mainly because Santucho expressed a symbolic leadership whose fall dragged down the organization as such.
A special aspect of State terrorism was the treatment given to detained women and particularly to the guerrillas. Journalists and ex-guerrillas from Montoneros, Miriam Lewin and Olga Wornat, wrote the book Whores and Guerrillas, about the sexual, emotional and psychological violence to which the detained-disappeared were subjected, who came to serve the role of lovers, girlfriends and even wives of their torturers, suffering the silence and contempt imposed by macho prejudices:
He (the Tiger Acosta, head of the ESMA) was clear of the symbolic weight that they had to appropriate our bodies. As Rita Segato says: for the victims, those who then became survivors and at that time were disappeared, for their peers or boyfriends or husbands who were witnesses and also for that fratria, that brotherhood of male rapists. That's why there's so much rape in pack, as it's said wrongly because animals don't act like that. Because the message was for the direct victim, for the rape, but also for the men of that repressive brotherhood and for those who were part of that group of the disappeared militants.Miriam Lewin
Most of them have been able to report for many years because there was a double stigmatization and a double suspicion that it costs to banish: the consent in sexual relations (which was not such) and that of possible delusion.
Towards the end of 1976, State terrorism applied systematically to annihilate all "subversive" manifestations was overwhelming Montoneros. Years later Firmenich would admit that "the degree of criminality" that the repression carried out by the dictatorship reached, exceeded the forecasts that Montoneros had made about the coup:
We couldn't foresee the degree of criminality that the disappeared person's tactics would have. We imagined that this was going to be a tougher dictatorship, more repressive than all known, but in a quantitative, non-qualitative difference.Mario Firmenich
The Walsh Papers and his Open Letter
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Between November 1976 and January 1977 Rodolfo Walsh, who had first officer rank under the nom de guerre “Esteban" or "Neurus”, he wrote five internal documents criticizing point by point several self-critical documents issued by the Conduction of Montoneros in those days. These internal documents known as the Walsh Papers, are part of the simultaneous drafting of the famous "Open letter from a writer to the Military Junta", dated one day before he disappeared, on March 25, 1977.
Walsh's criticism is blunt. He clarifies in the papers that it was his opinion and those of & # 34; his subordinates & # 34;. Walsh argues that the Leadership's self-criticism is apparent and that his documents "sidestep the real gravity of our military situation", criticizing the "triumphalist" approach; and "militarist" -he uses those terms-, that he had adopted the Leadership, which on the one hand underestimated the dictatorship and on the other adopted methods of struggle that also violated human rights, referring to the murders of people:
One of the great successes of the enemy was to be at war with us and not with the whole of the people. And this to a great extent by our mistakes, that we self-insulated with ideologism and our lack of political proposals for real people. Our weapons are also in violation of international conventions. They self-sacrifice, but we too, and in that thunder they win, because we had to stop it and they didn't.Rodolfo Walsh in "Observations on the Council document of 11/11/76"
Walsh argued that the root of the problem was political: the mistaken assumption by the Montoneros that the Peronist movement had exhausted itself and that its place was being taken by the "montonero movement. He denies that there exists within the people and specifically in the working class, a feeling of adherence to a supposed "montonero movement". On the contrary, state terrorism, Walsh maintains, led the people to take refuge even more in their own political culture, Peronism, and to move away from Montoneros, losing "popular representation" that he knew he had two years before. In this way, Montoneros and his militants, instead of taking refuge in the wide coverage that Peronism offered them, separated from it, leaving them without refuge in the face of a repression that reached unknown levels.
We deny the Peronist Movement and the Montonero Movement does not exist. So where are we going to take refuge when the enemy squeezes?Rodolfo Walsh in "Observations on the Council document of 11/11/76"
Walsh proposed and considered that there was still time to do so, "fall back towards Peronism," dissolve the Montonero Army, abandon the "task of inventing the Montonero Movement, which will have no real existence&# 3. 4; and give broad autonomy to the militant groups, "to resist the dictatorship together with the people." Walsh's five internal documents were published by Roberto Baschetti and can be consulted online, in a special edition of the Sudestada magazine.
On March 24, 1977, while Montoneros was debating the criticisms formulated in the Papers, Walsh sent his famous Open letter from a writer to the Military Junta, described by Gabriel García Márquez as a "masterpiece of journalism". Walsh's text is a terrifying text. He speaks to the Board members in the first person. He tells them about his daughter & # 34; died fighting them & # 34;, a few months before. He talks to them about "the cadre of extermination," about the "deepest terror that Argentine society has ever known," about the "disappearances", about the "camps of concentration", of the thousands of habeas corpus rejected, of "absolute, timeless, metaphysical torture", the massacres, the coordination of repression with other South American countries and United States, the illegitimacy of the government, of the anti-popular policy that they were executing:
These facts, which shake the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, those that have brought the Argentine people more suffering or the worst violations of the human rights in which you incur. The economic policy of that government must seek not only the explanation of its crimes but a greater atrocity that punishes millions of human beings with planned misery.Rodolfo Walsh, Open letter...
Walsh concludes his letter with a request to the Board and an advance warning, although he makes it clear that he knows he will not be heard:
...give to the Commanders in Chief of the 3 Weapons who will meditate on the abyss to which they lead the country after the illusion of winning a war that, even if they killed the last guerrilla, would only begin under new forms, because the causes that more than twenty years ago move the resistance of the Argentine people will not be disappeared but aggravated by the memory of the rage caused and the revelation of the atrocities committed.Rodolfo Walsh, Open letter...
The next day a task force of about 30 men tried to kidnap Rodolfo Walsh at the corner of San Juan and Entre Ríos, in the San Cristóbal neighborhood of Buenos Aires, but Walsh confronted them with his weapon and was wounded. death. His body was taken to ESMA and is missing. The subway station located in the place where he was shot bears his name, while in the gardens of the former ESMA, converted into a Space for Memory and Human Rights, there is a work by the artist León Ferrari, called " Open letter", in which the text of the letter is reproduced, on transparent acrylic panels.
1977: between Argentina and exile
In 1977 Montoneros suffered the deepening of the disarticulation caused by the application of State terrorism. In the first quarter of the year, the JUP ceased to exist as such, as a consequence of successive waves of repression, disappearances, and massacres. "The vast majority of the kidnapped JUP militants were sent to the El Atlético clandestine center.&# 34;
The great disarticulation of the university front of Montoneros begins in early 1977 and reaches its peak in quantitative terms of casualties in March and April of that year. Exceptions were Architecture and Philosophy and Letters, where repression hit early. Exception was also Right, which while the other fronts were undone to pieces continued with an unusual number of members given the time. There the comrades banking organized resistance and alone -more alone because also Law worked for more than a year loose, totally unnoticed from the Orga. And so they arrived until June of '78, when in the other faculties nothing remained. Corno said, Philosophy and Letters, a front composed of a multiplicity of careers, developed a normal operation until the middle of 76, in which the first of the four sweeps suffered.Marisa Sadi
One year after the installation of the dictatorship in Argentina, the low montoneras totaled two thousand militants, a third more than what the Leadership had anticipated. In May the dictatorship managed to kill another member of the National Leadership, al die in combat Julio Roque. His place was taken by Horacio Mendizábal, who had been the Military Secretary since April 1976. The Leadership was thus made up of Firmenich, Perdía, Yager and Mendizábal.
Simultaneously with the dismantling of the Montoneros in the interior of Argentina, in 1977 their actions in exile were consolidated. The departure for exile of the Montoneros militants had begun in 1974, through what was known as "the optioned ones". The Argentine constitutional system of the state of siege establishes that the President of the Nation can detain people without a court order, but on the condition that these people have the option of "going outside Argentine territory", if so. they prefer it (art. 23, CN). This clause of the Argentine Constitution allowed that, when a detainee was "legalized", and there were no charges to bring him to justice, they opted to go into exile. This meant that a large number of militants, intellectuals, artists and scientists, including a considerable number of Montoneros, had individually gone into exile, mainly to Mexico, where the National Leadership was installed, and to a lesser extent France, Spain and other countries of Europe, complying with the "strategic withdrawal" decided at the end of 1976.
On April 21, the National Montoneros Leadership, headed by Firmenich, gave a press conference in Rome announcing the creation of the Montonero Peronist Movement (MPM), with Firmenich as general secretary, adding this structure to the two already existing groups, the Montonero Army and the Montonero Party. The former governors Oscar Bidegain and Ricardo Obregón Cano were also present at the conference, as well as the second Montonero chief, Fernando Vaca Narvaja, among other leaders. Since the end of 1976 the Montoneros had made the decision to send their main cadres out of Argentina of conduction. In 1977 the Casa Montonera was opened, at Calle Alabama 17, in Colonia Nápoles, in Mexico City. Also in Mexico, Montoneros was active through the Committee of Solidarity with the Argentine People (COSPA), led by Rodolfo Puiggrós, which began operating in August 1976 and revealed from the outset the structure of State terrorism in Argentina and the systematic use of the disappearance of persons, identifying the clandestine detention centers that operated in the ESMA.
The installation of the National Leadership in Mexico and the organization of militant activity in exile led Montoneros to prioritize the international relations of the organization, before governments, political parties and foreign non-governmental organizations. For this purpose, the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the MPM was created, in charge of Fernando Vaca Narvaja.
Towards the middle of 1977 there was still an organic operation, with regular meetings and communications with the organization, but from that moment the groups of militants began to be completely disconnected. The person in charge of the JUP at the Law School of the UBA, recounts that at the end of 1977 he had decided to leave Argentina, because "everything that was done from then on was suicidal." The following year the Soccer World Cup would be held in Argentina and Montoneros from Mexico had already ordered to take advantage of the international event, to publicize the situation of growing poverty and violation of human rights. When meeting with the militants, he told them that the state of the Montoneros was desperate: "We don't have leadership, we don't have politics, we don't have anything." Despite this, a group of 15 to 20 militants decided to stay and continue militating, although the situation of the Law group was exceptional, because in the other places, there were almost no surface militants left, towards the end of 1977.
1978: the year of the World Cup
In January 1978, the dictatorship sent a commando to Mexico, with coverage of the Brazilian dictatorship using the Condor Plan channels, in order to assassinate the Montoneros Conduction, using detained-disappeared broken by torture, the threats against their relatives and a program for the modification of political identities led by Admiral Emilio Massera. The "Operation Mexico" It failed miserably, because Tulio Valenzuela escaped from his captors once in Mexico and revealed the situation to the Montoneros Conduction, which immediately held a press conference disclosing the facts and generating an international scandal. Two Argentine secret agents, Lieutenant Manuel Augusto Pablo Funes and Miguel Vila Adelaida, were detained by the Mexican authorities and expelled from the country. In retaliation, Valenzuela's wife, Raquel Negro, was murdered after giving birth to twins, who also disappeared; one of them was found 30 years later; as part of the reprisal, all the people who were detained and disappeared in the clandestine detention center known as Quinta de Funes were also murdered. The incident was recounted in the novel Operation Mexico, Tucho or the irrevocable of the Passion written by Rafael Bielsa in 2014 and the film Operación México, a pact of love, made on the book, by director Leonardo Bechini, in 2016. After the assassination attempt, the Montoneros Conduction moved to Cuba where they established their base.
During the World Cup (June and July), Montoneros took a line of supporting the World Cup as an "aspiration" popular, but at the same time use it to carry out propaganda actions and expose the dictatorial regime. A brochure of the time said:
The World ‘78 is a aspiration of the people and the Montoneros want it to be done. The dictatorship intends to use it to tell the world “here’s nothing,” but there are intervened guilds, the union conquests were overturned, there are thousands of prisoners and kidnapped, the dictatorship represses fiercely and murders mercilessly.
On August 1, 1978, a powerful explosion rocked the Barrio Norte of the city of Buenos Aires, causing 3 deaths and 10 injuries. Two apartment buildings affected were later demolished. The operation was carried out by the “Eva Perón” Special Combat Squad, in an attempt on the life of the dictator Armando Lambruschini (member of the Military Junta) in which his daughter Paula Lambruschini died.
In October 1978, the National Council of the Montonero Party made the decision to eliminate the secretariat and expand the National Leadership, from four to six members. In this way, the National Leadership was hierarchically integrated by Mario Firmenich, Roberto Perdía, Raúl Yäger, Horacio Mendizábal, Fernando Vaca Narvaja and Horacio Campiglia. The first four with the rank of commanders and the last two with the rank of second commanders.
Separation of the Galimberti group
In March 1977, the group led by Rodolfo Galimberti, who served as captain within the Northern Column, decided to go into exile in Mexico. There he joined the structure that the Montoneros were putting together in Mexico, carrying out a self-criticism of the critical position that his group had raised the previous year, proposing a more decentralized structure. Finally, in February 1979, Galimberti, along with Juan Gelman, Patricia Bullrich, Pablo and Miguel Fernández Long, among other leaders, broke with the Montoneros.
The National Leadership, which was based in Cuba at the time, accused them of treason and subjected them to "revolutionary trial." The court sentenced Galimberti to death, ordering his execution in the place where he was found.
Counteroffensives of 1979 and 1980
In 1979, four squads of combatants arrived in Argentina and carried out several attacks: they dynamited the building where Walter Klein, Secretary of Economic Coordination, lived, but he and his entire family survived. The Secretary of the Treasury of the national government, Juan Alemann, was machine-gunned but he survived the attack. The businessman Francisco Soldati and his driver were murdered by the montoneros dressed as policemen on Avenida 9 de Julio. But the result for Montoneros was catastrophic: many guerrillas were discovered by the military intelligence services, and others were turned in by their comrades who had been broken by the torture and abuse they suffered. In 1980, the Montonera leadership, which was taking refuge in Cuba, continued the counteroffensive plan, but a new platoon was kidnapped and disappeared in March when it arrived in the country. Several of them, such as the Special Infantry Troops (TEI), had taken courses in Lebanon. There were almost a hundred Montoneros guerrillas who clandestinely returned to the country between 1979 and 1980. After a stay in Havana, the leadership of the Montoneros moved to Europe. Meanwhile, the surviving Montoneros of the west column from Greater Buenos Aires formed the "Batallón Héroes Montoneros", including Graciela Estela Alberti and Ricardo Soria, who were kidnapped in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1980. In Mexico, the Montoneros formed a Sanitary Brigade "Adriana Haidar" headed by Silvia Berman who fulfilled an important mission during the war against Somoza in Nicaragua.
The repression was also coordinated with the Uruguayan military: in 1977-1978, in the framework of the operations against the GAU and other extreme left groups, Montonero elements present in Uruguay were systematically persecuted.
During the course of the "Proceso", most of the active cadres of the Montoneros organization were killed or kidnapped, remaining at the disposal of the Armed Forces or security as "detained/disappeared" 3. 4;.
Only three members of the leadership of the Montoneros (Firmenich, Perdía and Vaca Narvaja) survived. Some, like Firmenich, were accused of having acted as counterintelligence agents and handouts for their own colleagues.
Falklands War
Shortly after April 2, 1982, when the military government recovered the Malvinas Islands, Firmenich, on behalf of the Montoneros, urged support for the government in this “historic act”: “We are not fooled by this sudden outburst of patriotism from the government. [...] By itself and regardless of who does it and why, we must support the recovery of the islands and go to war with England if necessary”. In the end, he asked the government to release the political prisoners so that they "take their place in their combat posts in defense of sovereignty."
On April 28, 1982, Firmenich published a document calling for resistance to the British attack. For this, he requested the release of political prisoners and the free entry to the country of exiles in order to form popular militias to garrison the Malvinas and continental territories threatened by the United Kingdom.
Also former members of Montoneros, who had participated in the attack on the ship Santísima Trinidad —and considered themselves the initial nucleus of a "montonero navy"—, became involved during the conflict in the frustrated Operation Algeciras.
From the recovery of democracy to the present day
The defeat in the Malvinas War caused the collapse of the dictatorship and opened an electoral exit, without conditions. Political and union life returned with considerable freedom, even though the dictatorship continued in power until December 10, 1983. In this context, Montoneros had to rethink his strategy.
When democracy returned in 1983, the Montoneros organization no longer existed as a political-military structure. Very few of its organic militants had survived the process of repression begun by the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón and continued by the military dictatorship that began in 1976. It was one of the guerrilla organizations with the highest loss of life, with 5,000 dead or missing according to Mario Firmenich. Among the survivors, there are those who harshly criticize what was their national leadership, some who try to minimize or deny their participation at that time and others who, even acknowledging many serious errors, vindicate their belonging and their practice in the guerrilla organization framing it in a historical and geopolitical context. In March 1982, Mario Firmenich proposed the formation of a front that would bring together all Argentine sectors with the exception of the oligarchy in order to make way for a pluralist regime.
In May 1983, after the national elections had been called for October 30, the Cambiaso-Pereyra Rossi Case had a strong social repercussion, the murder of two Montoneros leaders, which was seen by public opinion as an attack by the military —still in power—, to Peronism as a whole.
Some of the surviving Montoneros, who still responded to Firmenich's leadership and had strong economic resources in Cuba, allied with a sector of Peronism and participated in the 1983 Peronist internship promoting Vicente Saadi's candidacy for president with the sublemma of "Intransigence and mobilization", demanding trial and punishment of those guilty of the dictatorship. Among the leaders were Susana Valle, Miguel Unamuno and as a youth representative, Patricia Bullrich. In turn, they reissued their own newspaper, La Voz, and some JUP activists began to reappear in the universities.
However, their attempts to capture popular support failed and in the Peronist internship the Lúder-Bittel center formula won, who were in favor of a "law of oblivion" for the military. The reaction of the Argentines oscillated between rejection and indifference, evidencing that the Montonero political movement had no capacity for revitalization.
Decree promoting the criminal prosecution of Montoneros leaders
On December 10, 1983, the democratic government headed by President Raúl Alfonsín took office, who three days later signed Decree 157/83, which declared the need to promote criminal prosecution against members of violent groups, among them several belonging to Montoneros, for the crimes of homicide, illicit association, public instigation to commit crimes, apology for crime and other attacks against public order.
In the foundations of this measure, it was highlighted that despite the amnesty of May 1973, these groups of people, ignoring the call for reconstruction, "established violent forms of political action in order to gain power through use of force", which seriously affected the normal conditions of coexistence "to the extent that these are impossible to exist in the face of daily homicides, often in situations of treachery, kidnappings, attacks on common security, assaults on military units of security forces and civilian establishments and damage; all these crimes that culminated in the attempt to militarily occupy a part of the territory of the Republic". And there they also recognized the "existence of external interests that selected our country to measure their forces", noting that although the military repression "led to the physical elimination of a large part of the followers of the terrorist leadership and of some members of it", prevented the trial of the rest, a task that democracy had to complete, to comply with the constitutional postulate of strengthening justice.
Dissolution of Montoneros and arrest of Obregón Cano
On December 20, 1983, former governors Ricardo Obregón Cano and Oscar Bidegain returned to the country. Following the issuance of decree 157/83, the first arrest of a Montonero leader took place on December 20, 1983 at the Ezeiza International Airport, when the former governor of Córdoba Ricardo Obregón Cano, a member of the Council, was returning to the country. Superior of the organization. Previously, the Superior Council of the Montonero Peronist Movement had informed its militants to continue with political activity, warning that the Argentine government could continue to persecute any other political actor, regardless of the changes that could follow in the future.
Bidegain held a press conference and read a statement signed Mario Firmenich, Roberto Perdía, Ricardo Obregón Cano, Fernando Vaca Narvaja and himself, announcing the dissolution of the Montonero Movement, the recreation of the Authentic Party and the ignorance of Isabel Perón as Peronist leader. Also present were the former governor of Mendoza, Alberto Martínez Baca and Dante Gullo as a reference for the Peronist Youth.
Arrest and extradition of Firmenich
At the request of the Argentine authorities, on February 13, 1984, the top leader of the organization, Mario Eduardo Firmenich, was arrested in Rio de Janeiro. Despite opposing his extradition process, he was sent to Argentina without complying with the legal proceedings, on October 20, 1984 and imprisoned in the Villa Devoto prison. President Carlos Menem.
The complaint that Firmenich's defense made for the duration of the preventive detention to which he was subjected while those processes were being carried out, was rejected by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Ideology
Montoneros adopted a Peronist and Catholic ideology. For many young people, the fight against the Onganía dictatorship implied assuming a "Peronist" identity, as the highest opposition expression. It also meant a generational criticism of his own parents, from traditionally conservative and anti-Peronist families (the Peronists contemptuously labeled them "gorillas").
Towards the end of the 1960s they were aligning themselves with revolutionary Peronism, which defined itself as national, popular and anti-imperialist, and sought to merge elements of Peronist doctrine with the revolutionary Latin American Marxism of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.
They also received strong influences from the Third World Movement of Priests. Several founders of what would later become an armed organization met when they were followers of the Third World priest Carlos Mugica. One of the maxims that united these young people corresponded to the priest Camilo Torres Restrepo, precursor of the union between Catholics and Marxists: "the duty of every Christian is to be a revolutionary, and the duty of every revolutionary is to do the revolution".
Self-defined as an armed vanguard (inspired by the “foquismo”, with the belief that they could take the general situation to a “revolutionary stage”) and using slogans such as “Perón or death”, Montoneros It was assumed as a political-military organization and was headed by Fernando Abal Medina, Carlos Gustavo Ramus, José Sabino Navarro, Emilio Maza, Carlos Capuano Martínez, Mario Firmenich and Carlos Hobert, among others.
Origin of name
The name “Montoneros” was taken from the federal gaucho montoneras that in the XIX century fought in the Argentine civil wars, against the unitary forces of Buenos Aires centralism, which were led by the caudillos of the interior such as "Chacho" Penaloza and Felipe Varela.
In this way, it sought to establish a nationalist, anti-imperialist and federal political line that made it start from José de San Martín and the wars of independence, go through the caudillos and Juan Manuel de Rosas and end at Perón. In the early days of the guerrilla organization, several of its operational commands (Combat Units) circumstantially adopted the name of those caudillos to sign their "parties de guerra." This practice was abandoned when its militants began to fall in combat and the commandos then signed the names of their dead comrades.
Norma Arrostito, in a work written before she died when she was a captive at ESMA and which was smuggled out, reveals that the initiative to call the organization "Montoneros" came from from the Reconquista group from Santa Fe, led by Roberto Perdía (Pelado Carlos).
Interpretation of the story
The Montoneros' interpretation of the story can be seen in the publication that appeared in El Descamisado. From number 10 of the magazine (07/24/1973) the comic strip Latin America 450 years of war is presented, which states: "We are going to tell the story of how Imperialism robbed us" and It is affirmed: “We are not underdeveloped peoples. We are stolen peoples.”
In that same number they asked Perón to expel López Rega, a spokesman for the extreme right. With a large mobilization of young people, they proposed to "break the fence", differentiating Perón from his surroundings.
Years later, Firmenich participated in the film Resistir (1978), directed by Jorge Cedrón with texts by Juan Gelman, denouncing cases of aberrational torture of Montonero militants during the Military process.
Estimate of the number of guerrilla troops
In 1983, the government of General Reynaldo Bignone stated that the total number of pro-guerrilla militants throughout the country reached 25,000, of which 15,000 would be armed combatants. This last estimate contained in its so-called "Final Document" contradicted previous intelligence that counted a total of 1,300 ERP combatants at its peak in the mid-1970s, and 300 to 400 Montoneros combatants in 1977. The conclusions of the Final Document are rejected by several authors, in particular by Prudencio García, who places the combat capacity of the guerrilla at 1,000 to 1,300 permanent armed combatants. Other English-speaking authors maintain that there were more than 5,000 combatants in the Montoneros guerrilla organization, while the Embassy For the year 1975, the US government estimated that this figure was approximately 2,000 for Montoneros and 400 to 800 combatants for the ERP. What is certain is that Montoneros was one of the most punished organizations, admitting the loss of 5,000 members.
Participation of members of the security forces in Montoneros
Participation of members of the Army
The leader Roberto Perdía, in his book Montoneros. El peronismo combatiente en primera persona (Buenos Aires, Planeta, 2013) affirms: "It is true that some sons of soldiers were part of our ranks." He also recounts that Montoneros held meetings at the general's home Eduardo Labanca and who had ties to other soldiers with a nationalist tendency who rose up —unsuccessfully— in the Azul and Olavarría garrisons in October 1971 against the then president, General Lanusse.
The point of closest proximity between the montoneros and the army would take place two years later, in October 1973, with the joint participation in Operation Dorrego, General Jorge Carcagno being head of the Army.
On Sunday, October 5, 1975, Montoneros carried out an attack on the Monte 29 Infantry Regiment, in Formosa, known as Operation Primicia, in which twelve conscript soldiers and fifteen guerrillas were killed.
After that attack, Perdía admits: "Obviously, the sympathies that we could have counted on within the Army disappeared, and the old contacts and friends disappeared."
Police participation
Héctor Ricardo Leis, a former Montonero, in his Testament of the 70s points out how the deputy chief of police Julio Troxler —a survivor of the executions of José León Suárez and also a Montonero— made “the disappearance of ” a police investigation into a confrontation involving members of the organization.
On July 2, 1976, the Montoneros carried out an attack against the Argentine Federal Police in the dining room of the Federal Security Superintendence, in which 23 people were assassinated and 60 injured. The criminal act —similar, in part, to the Rolando cafeteria attack perpetrated earlier by ETA— caused not only the replacement of Arturo Corbetta, head of the Federal Police who opposed the illegal repression, but also the rejection of members of the own organization. On the other hand, shortly after and as a probable response to this attack, sectors of the police participate in the so-called Fatima Massacre.
Participation of members of the Navy
Roberto Perdía recounts in his book Montoneros. Combatant Peronism in the first person (Buenos Aires, Planeta, 2013, p. 260) that the "Military Manual" de Montoneros was prepared with the collaboration of former officers of the Armed Forces who belonged to the organization; among which stands out the lieutenant Carlos Lebrón (later assassinated in Tucumán) and the Navy officer Julio César Urien (who was later imprisoned for several years during the military government). Urien was a relative —on his mother's side— of General Ernesto Trotz, whose intervention saved him from being shot.
Assassination of leaders
Part of the Montoneros action was to kill or "execute" certain people considered enemies or traitors. To do this, he carried out "revolutionary trials", in which the sentence was established. Once the murder was executed, Montoneros claimed responsibility for it. Participation in such actions was considered for promotion in the organization.
Trade unionist José Alonso was assassinated on August 27, 1970. On September 10, a statement from the "Comando Montonero Emilio Maza of the National Revolutionary Army" the fact was adjudicated. Four years later, in October 1974, in an article that appeared in the magazine La Causa Peronista, the authors recounted the details and listed the alleged motives for the murder. The reason that Montoneros gave for murdering Alonso was that "he had been one of the main people responsible for the lifting of the strike of October 1 and 2, 1969, he had openly surrendered to the Onganía regime and now he tried to give union and political support to the national delusions- Levingston populists and their brood of late-nighters. He was one of the bureaucrats most closely linked to the international trade union organizations of imperialism. He was also in an attitude of frank rebellion against the directives of General Perón & # 34;.
Trade unionist Rogelio Coria, murdered on March 22, 1974. Montoneros publicly reported in the magazine El Descamisado on March 26, 1974, that the murder was committed by two young men " parsley" belonging to the organization, who only had to do intelligence tasks, but when they recognized the trade unionist they decided to kill him, without express orders. Due to the action, Montoneros decorated the authors, because Coria was considered one of the corrupt unionists who betrayed Perón.
Arturo Mor Roig, a leader of the Radical Civic Union who had been Minister of the Interior during the Lanusse dictatorship and who had retired from politics, was assassinated by Montoneros —accused of being one of those responsible for the Trelew Massacre—, on July 15, 1974 while having lunch in a restaurant in San Justo. The journalist Pablo Giussani, in his book Montoneros. La Soberbia Armada affirms that Montoneros presented the murder of Mor Roig as a "squeeze" to the radical leader Ricardo Balbín, to obtain political concessions in a negotiation.
José Ignacio Rucci, general secretary of the General Confederation of Labor, assassinated on September 13, 1973. The judicial investigation never established who the perpetrators were. Montoneros claimed responsibility for the murder two years later, in issue 5 of the Evita Montonera magazine.
As a means of obtaining financing, Montoneros admitted to committing crimes such as bank robberies and kidnappings for extortion, as well as the theft of weapons from police and military headquarters ("weapons recovery", it was called).
Some sectors have also attributed crimes to Montoneros that were not attributed, including the following:
- the unionist Augusto Timoteo Vandor, killed before the constitution of Montoneros; some observers attribute it to a group of people who then entered Montoneros. Vandor led a sector of Peronism that negotiated with the military dictatorship the possibility of legalizing a "peronism without Perón".
- Hippolyte Acuña and Teodoro Ponce.
- On March 18, 1972, three men and a woman who claimed to belong to Montoneros entered the house of political leader Roberto Mario Uzal, of the Promotora Provincial Board of the right-wing New Force party. When he tried to kidnap him, Uzal resisted and the shooting was wounded: he died two days later, on March 20. The guerrillas retired after painting the house with slogans.
Revolutionary Code of Justice
Montoneros had a Revolutionary Criminal Justice Code approved on October 4, 1975 that was applicable to all members (art. 1). It was based on the "Provisions" previously approved at the end of 1972, making them even stricter in particular with regard to resistance to torture.
The penalties included death for certain behaviors of its members (art. 21) that had to be issued by the National Council (art. 28). On August 26, 1975, before that code was put into effect, Fernando Haymal, belonging to Montoneros, was accused of treason and denunciation, tried by a "revolutionary court" without legal support, convicted and murdered by the organization on September 2.
Women and their participation
The role of women in guerrilla and revolutionary groups finds precedents throughout Latin America. Most of them are women from the middle and upper classes, including: Rogelia Cruz Martínez, in Guatemala; Lucía Topolansky, in Uruguay; Tamara Bunke, born in Argentina, who fought in Bolivia alongside Che Guevara; Vera Grabe, in Colombia, and Amanda Peralta, the only woman in the Taco Ralo group.
In the case of the Montoneros, although there were mostly men on the military front, some testimonies state: “Female participation was large and, in general, the numbers of men and women were quite balanced. [...] It is true that the women did not go beyond middle managers.”
Caring for children implied a disadvantage for women in their promotion in the organization, since they did not have so much time. Two lines were formed, those that privileged the attention of their children and those that privileged the militancy. “Either we lost as militants, or we lost as mothers. [...] The terror both of me and of the other militants was what would happen to the children if they caught us. Either because they killed us or because they blackmailed us by threatening them".
As it was intended that the militants would only trust other members of the organization to care for their children, during their exile in Cuba a Currería was established in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, near the house where the Montoneros conduction worked.
Among the Montonera women who had an important participation, we can mention Norma Arrostito; Maria Victoria Walsh, Maria Antonia Berger; Adriana Lesgart; Lili Massaferro, Pirí Lugones, Patricia Bullrich, among others.
The young student Ana María González, belonging to Montoneros, was in charge of placing an explosive charge under the bed of the Federal Police Chief, Brigadier General Cesario Cardozo, causing his death. The young woman would die a few months later in a confrontation.
Montonera press
In 1973, the organization launched the weekly El Descamisado, of great importance at the time, under the direction of Dardo Cabo, which published 47 issues and reached a circulation of 100,000 copies. In 1974, it was closed and immediately replaced with another magazine with the same characteristics: El Peronista para la Liberación Nacional, directed by Miguel Lizaso, which barely survived six issues before being closed. Shortly after, La Causa Peronista appeared under the direction of Galimberti; In September 1974, after publishing a report on how Aramburu was assassinated, it was closed.
The most serious attempt by the Montoneros was the launching of the newspaper Noticias, directed by Miguel Bonasso and which had a staff of journalists considered first class, such as the poet and writer Juan Gelman, Rodolfo Walsh, Francisco Urondo, Horacio Verbitsky, Pablo Giussani, the Uruguayan congressman and journalist Zelmar Michelini among many others. It was closed around August 1974 after 8 months and 267 issues.
In 1975, already in hiding, Montoneros launched the magazine Evita Montonera, which had 25 issues between 1975 and 1979, initially directed by Enrique Walker until his kidnapping in July 1976 and supervised by the leadership national of the organization.
They edited other clandestine magazines, such as Estrella Federal, belonging to the "Ejército Montonero" or El Montonero. Also from exile, they produced El Descamisado, Central America edition and Noticias de la Resistencia. The magazines Ya! It's time for the People or Peronist Militancy, although they did not respond to Montoneros, they were related to his conceptual universe.
In 1975, the Authentic Party, linked to the Montoneros, launched a fortnightly tabloid, El Auténtico, which only published 8 issues. It was the last legal publication of Montoneros.
Already under the dictatorship, Walsh, who was active in the intelligence sector as a second officer, organized the clandestine news agency ANCLA, which had great relevance in the first year and a half of the "Process".
The context of the Cold War
In the context of the Cold War, already in the 1960s the intelligence services of the Argentine Armed Forces considered the hypothesis that Peronism would become the spearhead of Marxism: “a more or less socialist nationalism and profidelista can offer a "Trojan horse" to communist penetration in Argentina". Some Peronist sectors, especially those grouped generically in what was called "the Peronist right" as the Organization Command led by Alberto Brito Lima, a similar position against Montoneros, qualifying them as "left-handed":
Because they belonged to a social class that wasn't ours. And they were meant to change bonds. They were on one side and on the other. They ended up left-handed. (...) They vindicate Perón nothing more than tactically.Alberto Brito Lima
This last group also included Triple A, which carried out a State terrorism plan between 1973 and 1976.
Other authors considered that Montoneros lacked relations with Cuba, the Soviet Union and the communist bloc in general, attributing its origin to internal sectors of the Armed Forces:
The hard core of Montoneros nested in the Ministry of the Interior of Onganía, in charge of General Francisco Imaz, but whose secretary of the Interior (virtually a deputy minister) was Darío Sáchaga, a member of the masonry to whom the wealthy reported.
Ernesto Salas, for his part, affirms that during the Onganía government, Diego Muñiz Barreto —later a National Deputy for Frejuli— together with the army major, Hugo Miori Pereyra, communicated with Firmenich, who regularly attended the Ministry of the Interior.
Isolation and defeat
Neither the guerrilla action, nor the repressive system implemented by the armed forces to defeat it (which was based on the criteria of the French army in the Algerian War), can be understood without taking into account the international context, which favored the armed insurrection of the youth for the seizure of power.
For the armed forces, it was a confrontation promoted by forces outside the country, within the framework of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. For Perón, the origin was the French May: “It is an organized movement in the world, with a Marxist tendency, but that is not systematized in anything: it is a fight to seize power, exclusively and directly; an active and armed struggle”.
Starting in 1974, the isolation of the Montoneros from the Peronist popular base and from the rest of society accelerated, due to the predominance of their violent and "militarist stance," which would lead them to be totally defeated by the dictatorship, which called itself the National Reorganization Process.
In the week prior to the military coup of March 24, 1976, 25 guerrillas were killed in various operations and 63 militants of revolutionary Peronism in Triple A attacks, while 13 policemen were killed during the offensive called "Third Montonera National Military Campaign".
According to Pilar Calveiro's analysis, "the political defeat of the left, in general, and of the Peronist left, in particular, preceded the military defeat and made it possible". Regarding the causes of the Montonera defeat, the author points out that "they tried to build an alternative and to a certain extent they succeeded, but they ended up reproducing logic and authoritarian mechanisms".
The journalist Pablo Giussani, who worked for the newspaper Noticias, pronounces himself in a similar vein, considering that the Montoneros became a fascist movement, due to their cult of violence and their rigid hierarchical structure.
For his part, Ignacio Vélez summarizes the causes of failure: "If the armed struggle marginalized us from social and political struggles, it did not matter, because the people already had their vanguard. The main actor had been born and everything had to be subordinated to him. This led us to consider ourselves chosen, predestined, delivered to a central and essential action. [...] They ended up imposing themselves (in general terms) concepts brought from the bourgeois army such as that "orders are first fulfilled and then discussed." [...] And this evaluative conception of 'the military' conditioned the merits and punishments. The most daring, the most played, the most courageous in combat, were the best cadres, the most reliable. In general terms, it can be said that the most daring, the most fierrero", ascended.
Many well-known montoneros died in clashes with the so-called task forces of the armed forces, such as Carlos Caride, Carlos Hobert, a founding member of the montoneros, Sergio Puiggrós, Miguel Zavala Rodríguez, Rodolfo Walsh and Paco Urondo.
Montoneros and their relationship with other organizations
Montoneros maintained relations with other political-military organizations, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (OLP). It is pointed out, however, "that the link between both OPMs was rather of a circumstantial nature, especially if one considers the ideological matrix, circumstances, procedures and environment of each one; very different in both cases. It is likely that the PLO has done well use of technical advice provided by Montoneros, when at the time a member of the latter went to Lebanon and installed an explosives factory there".
There are also versions that there were relations with the Politico-military ETA, for example the writer and diplomat Abel Posse, who defines himself as a chronicler of events that he has had to know or witness, relates "a important meeting of the Montonera leadership in the Basque Country with ETA commanders to deepen knowledge of the handling of explosives”.
In Latin America, the activity of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua attracted the participation of the Montonera structures framed in the counteroffensive. "In this regard, the report prepared as a conclusion to the experience of the Adriana Haidar Sanitary Brigade, whose members came mostly from Mexican exile, pointed out that participation in the Nicaraguan process was oriented "to clear up a rarefied atmosphere." for what is described as “pathology of exile”. Thus, the formation of the various montonera brigades in Nicaragua it was oriented in organic terms to break with the inertia of "personal survival" of exile and "revitalize old militant experiences".
Judicial rulings on Montoneros
After the return of democracy in 1983, two trials were held against members of the Montoneros: the first for the kidnapping of the Born brothers in 1974 and the second for the murder of Francisco Soldati and Ricardo Durán and for the attempted murder of Juan Alemann. The two judgments were condemnatory and confirmed by the recursive instances. The judges argued that Montoneros was an illegal terrorist association whose goal was to seize power and ruled out the defense of the right to resist oppression contemplated in art. 21 of the National Constitution, supported by the defendants.
In the sentence handed down on the occasion of the trial of the Juntas, the court also expressed an opinion condemning the Montoneros organization, despite the fact that neither said organization, nor any of its members, had been accused in said trial, and that therefore neither the organization nor any of its members had the opportunity to exercise their right to defense or provide evidence to the contrary.
Trial of the Boards
Among the rulings issued with reference to Montoneros is the one dated December 9, 1985 of the Federal Criminal and Correctional Appeals Chamber of the Federal Capital, made up of judges Jorge Torlasco, Ricardo Gil Lavedra, León Carlos Arslanián, Jorge Valerga Araoz, Guillermo Ledesma and Andrés J. D'Alessio dictated in the so-called Trial of the Juntas. Since no member of the Montoneros was accused in this trial, it was not appropriate to present exculpatory evidence, or carry out acts of defense regarding the statements made by the judges.
When discussing the defenses articulated by the accused soldiers and analyzing the context in which the military repression had to take place, referring among others to the Montoneros organization, the judges unanimously said:
The terrorist phenomenon had various manifestations with different ideological signs at the national level prior to the 1970s, but it is this year that marks the beginning of a period that was characterized by the generalization and gravity of the terrorist aggression evidenced, not only by the plurality of bands that appeared on the scene, but also by the large number of criminal actions that began and even by the spectacularity of many of them.As inherent in the form of a military organization, terrorist gangs dictated their own disciplinary and punitive rules and constituted their own bodies with the aim of sanctioning certain behaviors that they considered criminal. In this sense they work together publications in "Evita Montonera", Nros.8 and 13. Another distinctive feature was that the members of these organizations covered their terrorist activity by adopting a way of life that did not make it suspicious. The propaganda material of the terrorist gangs states that open action must be passed to covert and clandestine actions.
The ultimate objective of this activity was to take political power from terrorist organizations.
This sentence was confirmed on December 30, 1986 by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Argentine Nation made up of judges José Severo Caballero, Augusto César Belluscio, Carlos Santiago Fayt, Enrique Santiago Petracchi and Jorge Antonio Bacqué .
Trial against Obregón Cano
On May 29, 1986, Chamber II of the Federal Criminal and Correctional Appeals Chamber of the Federal Capital made up of judges Jorge Valerga Araoz, Andrés J. D'Alessio and Guillermo Ledesma confirmed the sentence which sentenced Ricardo Obregón Cano for the commission of the crime of illicit association due to his belonging to Montoneros, imposing a sentence of 6 years in prison. Obregón Cano had been democratically elected on March 11, 1973 as governor of the Province of Córdoba and overthrown by a police coup on February 27, 1974 known as the Navarrazo, during the government of Juan Domingo Perón. A few months later, Obregón Cano went into exile in Mexico, after the Triple A parapolice group, directed from the government, assassinated his former lieutenant governor, the trade unionist Atilio López. Obregón Cano returned to Argentina in 1984 and was part of the foundation of the Montonero Peronist Movement (MPM). Shortly before, President Raúl Alfonsín had sanctioned Decree 157/83, equating the guerrilla groups with the dictatorship. The leader was then imprisoned, according to a ruling by federal judge Miguel Pons, in case no. 4894, titled "Obregón Cano p.s.a. illicit association". The Mexican press described Obregón as "Alfonsín's personal prisoner".
Obregón Cano's defense relied mainly on the right to resist oppression, which was rejected by the judges. The judgment, among other considerations, stated:
...the Montonero Peronist Movement and the illegal organisation "Montoneros" were part of the same association...with...the same unity of purpose: to impose in the country a climate of terror with the purpose of facilitating the taking of power. when article 21 of the National Constitution places in the head of each citizen the obligation to arm itself in defense of the Nation and of the Constitution itself, it does not depart, in any way, from its general rule that it must be functioning Another blatant contradiction is the fact that in order to defend the National Constitution the recipients of their declarations, rights and guarantees are indiscriminately attacked....It is evident that the terrifying activity carried out by the "Montoneros" organization is not related to this right of resistance to oppression, since in all cases it was the people who largely suffered the hard actions of the group mentioned... the artistic attacks of the group Montoneros were directed, without any attention, to the Argentine society as a whole. Under the fire of their weapons they fell, in an indistinct manner, both members of the armed forces and citizens who had nothing to do with them or with those who had illegitimate power; both, of course, were extremely unfortunate. It was already said that the criminal activity carried out by the "Montoneros" group was developed, also during the existence of a democratic government, in which the guarantees enshrined in our Constitution were in force....The Montoneros Organization was an illicit association that was dedicated to the commission of acts of barbarism both during the validity of the constitutional government and the military regime attacking citizens in general... it was not the restoration of the National Constitution or the legitimate exercise of resistance to oppression the purpose pursued by the Montoneros terrorist group with its violent actions. ”
The sentence was finalized on September 9, 1986, when by unanimous vote of the judges of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Argentine Nation the complaint articulated by the defense was dismissed.
Trial for the Born case
On May 19, 1987, the Federal Judge of San Martín Carlos Enrique Luft sentenced the Montonero chief Mario Eduardo Firmenich in first instance for the kidnappings of the brothers Jorge Born and Juan Cristian Born and the homicides of Alberto Luis Cayetano Bosch and the driver Juan Carlos Pérez perpetrated on September 19, 1974 in the town of Olivos, Province of Buenos Aires. The sentence was confirmed on September 4, 1988 by the Federal Court of Appeals of San Martín by unanimous vote of its judges Hugo Rodolfo Fossati, Marta Herrera and Jorge Eduardo Barral, who sentenced Firmenich to life imprisonment, limiting his compliance to 30 years of the same kind of sentence according to the terms of the extradition granted by Brazil, considering him a co-author of the crimes of double homicide aggravated for the purpose of committing another crime, in an ideal contest with double kidnapping for extortion. When analyzing the defense arguments on the reasons for having committed these violent acts, among other things the court pointed out that:
The defendant Firmenich has not even claimed that he tried, before taking such an extreme decision, to put into operation legal mechanisms—and peaceful—to neutralize the corruption that he warned in the ruling sector, beyond the vocinglera reference panfletarian or poured into deeds. It has not mentioned that political trials have been promoted to judges, legislators or venal administrators, who have tried formal complaints or taken over so many other forms of control provided for in the current regulations that are not the case to enumerate.[...] On the contrary, arms were resorted to—resources that surely felt faster and more compelling than trying to convey ideals to a people educated in disdain for violence—as outlined by the grade judge, rather than a defense of the institutions of a free homeland is shown in my view as the desire to dominate the particular political optics of the defendant and its driving environment on which he had developed his former ally. In order to justify such spurious group purpose, he appealed to the alleged interpretation of the popular will, as is often the case in similar cases, and a war without barracks was launched in which the kidnapping—of the characteristics of which are judged here—was imposed—the indiscriminate murder and terror of the population—doubtless not represented by it—as valid forms of subsistence. And I reiterate that in the midst of all this almost a whole generation of Argentines disappeared and there were devastating effects in the spirit of the authentic people, of which surely has not yet managed to recover.
On August 9, 1989, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, when confirming the sentence by the unanimous vote of all its judges, among other concepts, described as "ridiculous" Firmenich's argument invoking a constitutional clause as a justification to attack constitutionally elected institutions, for appearing as a claim to "make revolutions with life insurance".
Trial for the Soldati and Alemann cases
On November 7, 1979, the Montoneros tried unsuccessfully in the city of Buenos Aires to murder Juan Ernesto Alemann, then Secretary of the Treasury, accompanied by his guards Francisco Cancilieri and Ventura Delfor Miño. And on the 13th of the same month and year, in a similar action carried out in the heart of that city, they managed to assassinate the businessman Francisco Pío Soldati and his driver Ricardo Manuel Durán. For both facts, on October 25, 1989, Chamber I of the Federal Criminal and Correctional Appeals Chamber of the Federal Capital, by unanimous vote of its judges Mario Gustavo Costa, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Basavilbaso and Juan Pedro Cortelezzi, confirmed the Sentence of Mario Firmenich to life imprisonment (limited to 30 years of imprisonment due to the extradition granted from Brazil), for considering him a co-perpetrator of the crimes of homicide qualified by the premeditated competition of two or more people in real competition with the attempt to similar crime, opportunity in which, among other things, it was said:
It is fully demonstrated, without notice of relevant controversy, that the material commission of the two terrorist attacks that motivate this legajo and whose description is contained in the appealed judgment was perpetrated by subjects belonging to the "Special Infantry Troops" (T.E.I.) of which it was called "Army Montonero" [...] The connection of the T.E.I. alludes with the subversive organization "Montoneros" is also outside the debate. [...] With the same strength of conviction I find accredited that Mario Eduardo Firmenich led the terrorist activities carried out within the framework of the so-called "strategic counter-offensive" of 1979, within which the two episodes that motivate this decision [...] it is remarkable that the attribution of responsibility in each terrorist act reveals the purpose of discriminating those in which they participated so disciplined effective of others that respond to a diverse origin [...] was the hierarchy of the terrorist system.
On September 11, 1990, this sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Argentine Nation by unanimous vote of its judges Mariano Augusto Cavagna Martínez, Carlos Santiago Fayt, Augusto César Belluscio, Rodolfo Carlos Barra, Julio Salvador Nazareno, Julio César Oyhanarte and Eduardo José Antonio Moliné 0'Connor.
Complementary bibliography
- Amorín, José (2005). Montoneros: the good story. Buenos Aires: Catalogues. ISBN 9508951990. Archived from the original on August 12, 2011. Consultation on 15 November 2017.
- Anguita E. and Caparrós M. The Will. 5 Tomos, Editorial Booket. ISBN 987-58-0067-8
- Beraza, Luis Fernando (2007). José Ignacio Rucci. Buenos Aires: B de Bolsillo. ISBN 978-987-627-360-2.
- Bonasso, Miguel. Memory of Death. Buenos Aires: Planet. ISBN 950-742-437-7
- Bonasso, Miguel (1997). The president who wasn't. Buenos Aires: Planet. ISBN 950-742-796-1.
- Carranza, Octavio (2007). X-ray of the Argentine Populisms. Buenos Aires: Liber Liberat. ISBN 978-987-05-3074-9.
- Chávez, Gonzalo and Lewinger, Jorge. The '73.. Editora De la Campana. ISBN 987-9125-13-4
- Skied, Gabriela, News of the Loudsmen: The History of the Journal That Could Not Announce Revolution, Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 2009, ISBN 9789500731539.
- Falcone, Jorge. Long war memorial. A pipe between hundreds of thousands. Editorial De la Campana. ISBN 978-987-9125-33-5
- Fraga, Rosendo and Pandolfi, Rodolfo (2005). "Aramburu." Buenos Aires: Vergara.
- Gasparini, Juan. Montoneros, end of accounts. Buenos Aires, Editora De la Campana. ISBN 987-9125-12-6
- Gillespie, Richard. (1987) Montoneros: Soldiers of Perón". Grijalbo. ISBN 950-28-0235-7
- Giussani, Paul. Montoneros, The Sovereign Navy. Editorial: Sudamericana, 2011. ISBN 9789500736206
- Lanusse, Lucas (2005). Montoneros - The Myth of its 12 Founders. Buenos Aires: Vergara. ISBN 950-15-2359-4
- Larraquy, Marcelo and Caballero, Roberto (2000). Galimberti, from Perón to Susana, from Montoneros to the CIA. Buenos Aires. ISBN 987-9334-93-0
- Marquez, Nicholas The other part of Truth. Mar del Plata: Author's Edition, 2004. ISBN 987-43-8267-8
- Nadra, Giselle and Yamilé (2011). "Montoneros: Ideology and Politics in El Descamisado." Buenos Aires. Corrective Editions. ISBN 978-950-05-1955-7
- I lost, Roberto Cirilo. Another story. Editorial Agora. ISBN 987-96235-0-9
- Potash, Robert. A. (1994). The army and politics in Argentina 1962-1973. Part two 1966-1973. Buenos Aires: South American. pp. 407-408. ISBN 950-07-0973-2.
- Ramus, Susana. Surviving dreams of a lot. Editorial Colihue. ISBN 950-581-599-9
- Reato Ceferino, Operation Primicia: The Attack of Montoneros that caused the 1976 coup, Editorial Sudamericana, 2010, ISBN 9789500732543.
- Recalde, Aritz; Recalde, Iciar (2007). University and national liberation. A study by the University of Buenos Aires during the three Peronist talks: 1946-1952, 1952-1955 and 1973-1975. Buenos Aires: New times.
- Robles, Adriana, Perejiles: the other Montoneros, Buenos Aires, Editions Colihue, ISBN 950-581-790-8.
- Sadi, Marisa. Montoneros, the resistance after the end." Buenos Aires, New Times, 2004.
- Sánchez Sorondo, Marcelo (2001). "Memories." Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana.
- Seminara, Luciana (16 September 2018). "Stentist experience." Capital. Rosario.
- Servetto, Alicia (second semester 2012). «The Peronist intern with a woman? About the book of Karin Grammatic. Montoneras women. A story of the Evita Group, 1973-1974. Buenos Aires Luxembourg, 2011». Polish 5 (10). ISSN 1853-7723.
- Villarruel, Victoria (2018). They call them... idealistic young men. (3rd expanded edition). Buenos Aires: Editorial Edivérn. ISBN 978-987-1084-41-8.
|fechaacceso=requires|url=(help) - Yofre, John the Baptist (2010). The Escarmiento: Perón's offensive against Cámpora and the Alms, 1973-1974. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. ISBN 9789500732246. Consultation on 10 November 2015.