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Chapter 5

Shots in the Night: Revenge, Revolution, and Insurgency

The execution of eight workers at the garbage dump of José León Suárez in June 1956, after a failed military rebellion against the leaders of the 1955 coup against Perón, remained an enduring social trauma of the Peronist movement. The 1957 account by Rodolfo Walsh nestled itself firmly in the popular sentiment, and inspired militant Peronists for decades. Walsh had initially supported the Liberating Revolution, but the sight of a survivor’s face, “the hole in the cheek, the largest hole in the throat, the injured mouth and the opaque eyes where the shadow of death remained floating,” compelled him to investigate the killings. His discovery of the true circumstances made him embrace Peronism.¹

Walsh narrates that a group of fourteen men were listening to a boxing match on the evening of the 9 June rebellion, when the police burst into the house. The commanding officer asks about the whereabouts of General Tanco and, after receiving no answer, gives the order to take the men to the police station for aiding the rebels. Only the house owner and two visitors are vaguely connected to the rebels, all others are unaware of the conspiracy. Early next morning, after the military rebels have already been defeated, the head of police of Buenos Aires province, Lieutenant-Colonel Fernández Suárez, gives orders to execute the men. They are driven to the garbage dump of José León Suárez and summoned out of the truck. “They make the persons under arrest walk by the edge of the vacant lot,” narrates Rodolfo Walsh. “The guards push them with the barrel of their guns. The pick-up truck enters the street and lights their backs with the headlamps. The moment has arrived.”² A few men realize that they are about to be shot and walk away slowly from the headlights. The others still cannot believe that their end has come. As one man falls on his knees and pleads for his life, the first shot rings out. Three men succeed in fleeing under the cover of darkness, while three others survive by playing dead. The remaining eight are assassinated. “In the glare of the headlights where the acrid smoke of the gun powder boils, a few moans float over the bodies stretched out in the garbage dump. A new crackling of gun shots seems to finish them off.”³

These summary executions became known as the massacre at the garbage dump of José León Suárez. The assassinations symbolized the repression of the Peronist movement during the second half of the 1950s. The narrative talent of Walsh and a general indignation kept this tragedy alive for future Peronist generations. Months after the failed 1956 rebellion Perón remarked about the military rulers: “The hatred and wish for revenge which these despicable persons have awakened among the people will one day burst into the street as a moving force and only then will it be possible to think about the pacification and unity of the Argentine people.”⁴

The assassinations were so traumatizing because they revealed the defenselessness of the Peronists and the regime’s willingness to use excessive violence against political opponents. The massacre became commemorated in the decade thereafter through impromptu street protests and the detonation of homemade pipe bombs reliving the trauma by seeking redress through violence. The proscription of Peronism, worsening labor conditions, mass arrests, and the repression of Peronist sentiments resulted in strike protests, civil disobedience, and sabotage.

The Peronist resistance movement wanted to take revenge and punish the repressive forces for bombing the Plaza de Mayo, executing workers, and overthrowing Perón. Perón shared these feelings because of his call for boundless violence. He suggested the creation of thousands of temporary secret groups which were to kill the principal opponents, harass their families, and incinerate their homes. “We must make them feel the terror themselves…. The more violent and intense the intimidation campaign will be, the more certain and faster will be its effects…. The greatest violence is the general rule.”⁵

Perón also proposed the organization of a cellular structure of permanent, secret cells covering every province, city, village, and labor union in Argentina. The members were the dispossessed, the persecuted, and the relatives and friends of persons killed by the repression. They would pass through an initiation ceremony swearing eternal hatred towards the people’s enemies. Members would wear hoods to hide their identity, and receive a number and pass word. Each sect would have a list with the names and addresses of their enemies, with the coup leaders Aramburu and Rojas at its head. Traitors received the death sentence.⁶ Little came of this popular retaliation and one must seriously consider whether Perón’s proposal was an instance of psychological warfare. Nevertheless, Perón’s call for violence did encourage the emergence of small sabotage groups in the so-called Peronist Resistance, and the first hesitant steps of a Peronist guerrilla insurgency.

This chapter discusses the Peronist Resistance, and the appearance of an incipient guerrilla insurgency under the influence of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Peronism was adopted in the 1960s by a new generation of Peronists trying to achieve through armed struggle what the older generation had tried to accomplish with massive strikes, crowd mobilizations, and economic sabotage. These diverse outcrops of political violence in Argentina, the determination of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to export their revolution to the Latin American continent, and the guerrilla training received by young Argentines in Cuba, made the Argentine military prepare themselves for an impending counterinsurgency war.

The 1956 Peronist Rebellion

On 9 June 1956 Generals Juan José Valle and Raúl Tanco rose in rebellion. They demanded free elections, the restoration of civil and political liberties, and the reincorporation of dismissed officers. Although Valle and Tanco seem to have been driven more by resentment than by Peronist fervor, the belief that the rebellion tried to return Perón to power attracted many militant Peronists.⁷ These civilians were to move into place once the rebellion got under way. However, they never received the weapons that had been promised, and many were arrested without having come into action.

The Valle-Tanco rebellion was doomed to fail because the military intelligence service had detected the plan weeks in advance.⁸ Lieutenant-General Aramburu had already signed undated decrees to proclaim the state of siege in his absence and establish martial law. Admiral Rojas went to Navy headquarters when the rebellion took place and ordered Lieutenant-General Aramburu to pass from the presidential yacht to a naval vessel for his own safety. Next, Rojas communicated to all commanders not to execute anybody without his written approval.⁹

Lieutenant-Colonel Fernández Suárez, the commanding officer of the operation at José León Suárez, declared later that he had received information about the hiding place of General Tanco. However, arriving too late, he found only fourteen men armed with Colt pistols. In the early hours of 10 June, according to Fernández Suárez, he received an order from the Executive Office to execute the men.¹⁰ Walsh denounced the execution as murder because the men had been arrested on 9 June at 11:30 P.M. more than one hour before martial law was announced publicly by radio on 10 June at 12:32 A.M., so the death penalty for aiding the rebels should not have been applied to them retroactively.

Admiral Isaac Rojas stated thirty-four years later that around midnight on 9 June, he had sent the order that nobody could be executed without his official permission. Unfortunately, Lieutenant-Colonel Fernández Suárez never received this order, and thus acted on his own authority against “a large group of troublemakers with fire arms and abundant means of communication.”¹¹ Walsh, with his usual irony, appraised the actions of Fernández Suárez differently: “Everybody knows the drive with which his troops defeated the enemy; the heroism with which his Mausers triumphed over the clenched fists; the 45 caliber pistols over the moans. Your victory was overwhelming …, Colonel.”¹²

The rebellion was quelled within twelve hours, and its leaders arrested. General Tanco sought refuge in the Haitian embassy, but General Valle surrendered voluntarily to the police.¹³ The death toll of the rebellion was thirty-four. Most deaths were caused by execution, because only seven died in combat. These executions were openly publicized to intimidate any rebels at large, prevent an escalation into a civil war, and discourage future rebellions.¹⁴ General Valle was executed three days after the start of the rebellion. Rojas confesses having been instrumental in the execution. Lieutenant-General Aramburu wanted to give Valle a life sentence, but Rojas disagreed. “‘President,’ I say, ‘I totally disagree…. the first who must be executed is General Valle because he is the leader of the thing.’ And so it went. This decision was taken … and Valle was executed.”¹⁵

The execution of Valle and the summary executions at José León Suárez as well as the hundreds of arrests gave a new impetus to the Peronist Resistance. Perón had strongly condemned the Valle-Tanco rebellion as naive, and suspected them of acting out of personal ambition. On 12 June 1956, he wrote that not a coup but civil resistance was the only road to success. “From now on, we must organize a total struggle at all costs. Every man, every entity, every labor union, every organization must have the struggle as its purpose. But it is necessary that the struggle will basically be a guerrilla struggle. The reactionary force must never know where to hit but must receive the blows of the resistance each and every day…. We have to oppose the arms of the people to the arms of usurpation.”¹⁶

This call to arms resonated well with thousands of militant Peronists already engaged in sabotage on their own account since the Aramburu-Rojas palace coup against Lonardi. Perón’s call for revenge in the January 1956 directive gave an important justification for the use of violence. “We must take revenge for our assassinated brothers in all of Argentina. We must take revenge for the thousands of comrades scoffed at and imprisoned by the reactionary force.”¹⁷ With each new death, and each new wave of arrests, new traumatizing experiences were added to existing ones, and new causes for revenge arose.

Peronist Resistance and Guerrilla Insurgency

The rank-and-file sabotage erupting after Perón’s overthrow increased considerably when the moderate Lonardi government was replaced by the hard-liners Aramburu and Rojas in November 1955. The new government took measures to raise the productivity of Argentine industry, such as the reduction of worker participation in management decisions, less favorable labor conditions, and the introduction of incentive schemes. Some changes cut deep into the everyday working climate. For instance, Alberto Belloni recalls how workers at the Rosario shipyard no longer received protective masks, special clothing, and a free pint of milk when cleaning the engine rooms.¹⁸ Workers felt that such labor measures were tarred with the brush of revanchismo or vindictive retaliation. The policies added more fuel to their resentment about Perón’s ouster and intensified the worker resistance at the shop-floor level. Perón supported the intensification of violence, and proposed in his January 1956 directive three forms of opposition: individual civil resistance, collective civil resistance, and guerrilla warfare.¹⁹

The individual resistance was to consist of civil disobedience, such as leaving the water running at night, withdrawing savings, sending hate mail, making offensive phone calls, creating bomb scares, painting slogans, and spreading rumors about strikes, corruption, political deals, and troop movements. The damage done by a casually dropped cigarette, a piece of wood thrown into a machine, and the wasting of electricity at the work place would be considerable. We have no way to assess whether or not many people followed Perón’s call for individual civil disobedience, but the prevailing mood was certainly conducive to such sabotage.²⁰

Collective civil resistance was to take place in the social, economic, and political domains. The social and political resistance, already described in chapter 2, tried to destabilize public life and question the government’s legitimacy. Strikes were organized, and the streets became the terrain of public protest by young Peronists. Neighborhood-based groups of rabble-rousers would soon disintegrate under the growing repression and their interest in guerrilla warfare would be awakened.

Economic resistance aimed at undermining the government’s economic policies through sabotage.²¹ The most militant workers in each plant were to form small groups operating also outside the work place. Trains were to be derailed, grain deposits set on fire, power stations outed, and locales of the political opposition torched. This resistance movement attracted considerable support. There were more than two hundred groups operating in Greater Buenos Aires with an estimated ten thousand participants.²²

Between September 1955 and June 1956, there was a predominance of fire bombings and other forms of arson, while the period from July 1956 to January 1958 was characterized by the use of pipe bombs (caños). Around seven thousand explosive devices were detonated between September 1955 and February 1958.²³ There were periods of greater and lesser intensity, but a general level of political violence continued for years on end. Between 1 May 1958 and 30 June 1961, there were 1,022 incidents with explosive devices, 104 cases of arson, and 440 instances of sabotage. There were 17 deaths and 89 wounded attributed to the violence.²⁴ However, as James observes, the extent of the Peronist Resistance was exaggerated by the Peronists intent on demonstrating their strength and by the authorities eager to justify their repressive measures.²⁵ As was explained in Chapter 2, government repression and the institutional pragmatism of integrationist union leaders ended the Peronist Resistance in the economic sector by 1961.

Perón ordered guerrilla warfare as the third form of opposition once civil resistance had destabilized the dictatorship. The guerrilla insurgency would aim at military installations, public utilities, and human targets.²⁶ In a letter of 3 November 1956, Perón left no mistake about the nature of the violence: “The more violent we are the better: terror can only be beaten by greater terror.”²⁷

Perón had one insurmountable problem. He was too far from the theater of operations to direct the Peronist Resistance. He relied mainly on John William Cooke. Cooke had been a Peronist congressman and had shown his unwavering loyalty to Perón in September 1955. He was imprisoned, tortured, and subjected to mock executions. Despite these abuses, Cooke conducted the Peronist Resistance from his prison cell in Río Gallegos. Perón had so much faith in Cooke that he had even designated him in November 1956 as his successor in case of a premature death. Cooke succeeded in making a spectacular prison escape to Chile in March 1957.²⁸

Perón and Cooke shared the belief that a general insurrection would bring down the Aramburu-Rojas government, but disagreed on how to achieve this objective. Perón stated that a guerrilla war should only be initiated after civil resistance and a paralyzing general strike failed to bring down the military government.²⁹ Cooke, instead, believed that only a combative and devoted vanguard, the “backbone of civil resistance,” could instigate a mass uprising.³⁰

In June 1958, Perón decided that the time had arrived to lash out at the Frondizi government which had failed to keep its promise to protect worker rights. Perón proposed both violent and nonviolent resistance. He founded the CNP or Peronist National Command (Comando Nacional Peronista) to direct the multipronged offensive. This organization functioned as a clandestine general staff to Perón. The CNP was presided over by General Iñíguez and integrated several small guerrilla organizations.³¹ These groups consisted principally of retired military officers who were suspicious of civilian activists and reluctant to provide them with weapons.³² The failed November 1960 coup by General Iñíguez, and the subsequent arrests, ended the organized involvement of these retired Peronist officers in the Peronist Resistance.³³ With the role of the retired Peronist military played out, Perón’s loyal second John William Cooke came to embody the armed resistance, and would become an inspiration for the Peronist guerrilla organizations of the 1970s.

After his escape from Argentina in 1957, Cooke tried in vain to organize the armed resistance from his exile in Chile and Uruguay. The Peronist Resistance remained a rank-and-file affair that never reached the organizational level of a guerrilla organization. Cooke shuttled between Chile and Uruguay from 1957 to 1960, entering Argentina clandestinely several times in attempts to organize the Peronist Resistance, especially during the 1959 Lisandro de la Torre insurrection, until he departed for Cuba in 1960. Before his departure, Cooke gave his approval to a rural guerrilla insurgency in the remote hills of Tucumán.³⁴

In mid-1959, Argentina’s first rural guerrilla force arose, supported by tiny groups of young Peronists assaulting police stations to obtain weapons. The guerrilla group intended to overthrow Frondizi and pave the way for Perón’s return to power. The main force in Tucumán was a poorly armed group of about twenty men, under the command of Manuel Enrique Mena, calling themselves Uturuncos. Uturunco was the Quechua word for a legendary man who transformed himself into a tiger to avenge social injustice. The timing seemed right because the industrial working class continued in a combative mood, even after the military repression of the Lisandro de la Torre insurrection in January 1959.

The thoughts of the Uturuncos must certainly have gone out to the revolutionary victory in Cuba earlier that year. The terrain was comparable to the Sierra Maestra, the population consisted also of poor peasants, and Castro’s original group that began operations in December 1956 agreed more on their common opposition to the dictator Batista than on ideology. The Uturuncos were also ideologically divided, and only united in their common opposition to Frondizi. They were mostly former students coming from the left-wing JP or Peronist Youth (Juventud Peronista) and the right-wing ALN or Nationalist Liberating Alliance (Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista), as well as the PSRN or the Socialist Party of the National Revolution (Partido Socialista de la Revolución Nacional). The Peronist participants demanded the return of Perón, the nationalists opposed the drilling concessions made to foreign oil companies, and the socialists wanted more worker rights.

The small guerrilla force established two camps in northeast Tucumán, and hoped eventually to secure a liberated zone, a strategy that had proven successful in the Sierra Maestra. Their only feat of arms was the seizure of a police station in the hamlet of Frías on Christmas Day of 1959. The unexpected action received the public support of the Peronist Organization, but behind closed doors the violence was believed to be too radical and too threatening to the political space being negotiated with Frondizi. Weakened by internal divisions, ideological disagreements, and desertions, the group was finally trapped by a police force of several hundred on 10 January 1960. Three men were caught. The rest escaped to Bolivia and the city of Tucumán.³⁵ Even though the guerrilla insurgency had been a military failure, the die had been cast. The Uturuncos demonstrated that political protest in Argentina was not restricted to strikes, occupations, crowd mobilizations, street violence, and sabotage, but that a small group might engage the state’s security forces in armed combat.

Jorge Rulli and his street fighters were impressed by the Uturuncos. “I believe that we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the armed struggle. What happens is that we were already on the pathway of violence, and it becomes then very difficult not to escalate further.”³⁶ Some of Rulli’s friends entered the Peronist guerrilla groups, but most found a new basis in the unions and joined the resistance in factories.³⁷ Revolutionary dreams were kindled by the contrast between the noncombative institutional pragmatism of the unions in Argentina during the 1960s, and an international context of heightened tension between East and West due to insurgency and national liberation movements in Algeria, Angola, the Congo, Vietnam, and, of course, Cuba.

The Cuban Revolution

The 1959 Cuban Revolution sent political shockwaves through the American continent. Within months after seizing power, Castro implemented radical agrarian reforms, strengthened the ties with the Soviet Union, and trained foreign revolutionaries in guerrilla warfare. The initiative for exporting the revolution was taken by the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His so-called Liberation Department trained combatants for incursions in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.³⁸ Still hesitant to admit openly to the Revolution’s socialist course, Fidel Castro ordered during his April 1959 visit to Washington the rounding up of Nicaraguan trainees in Cuba, while Che Guevara declared that Cuba was exporting the revolutionary idea but not revolutions because revolutions were fought only by the exploited themselves.³⁹ Guevara was of course hiding his real intentions, but he was right that revolutions do not prosper without a local resonance. The failure of the Uturuncos had demonstrated this all too clearly. As we shall see, neither the Argentine revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s nor Guevara himself would heed this advice. Guevara embarked on a fateful and ill-conceived adventure in Bolivia, while Argentine rural guerrillas would time and again fight their losing battles without the support of local peasants.

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was heating up within one year of the Cuban Revolution. The Soviet Union had gained a foothold on the Western hemisphere, less than a day’s sailing from the U.S. coast. To add insult to injury, Cuba expanded its efforts to spread the revolutionary faith in Latin America. Driven by a desire to combat American imperialism and protect the Cuban Revolution, Guevara hoped to duplicate the Cuban scenario all over Latin America. He drew three fundamental lessons about revolutionary warfare from the Cuban experience: “(1) Popular forces can win a war against the army. (2) It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them. (3) In underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.”⁴⁰

Guevara’s second lesson has had the most far-reaching consequences for Latin America. It is known as Guevarism or foquism, and became a license for any small group to grab arms in the hope of creating the conditions for a revolution. Guevara was blind to the unique regional, national, and international circumstances enabling the success of the tiny Castro group. He believed that they had created the conditions for their own victory, downplaying the importance of the Cuban communist party, the urban resistance network, and the assistance from radical sugar workers.⁴¹

Guevara and Castro may have been the first to use the term “foco” to describe their guerrilla strategy, but the Frenchman Régis Debray made it a household word among the Latin American left, and led them to believe that the Cuban Revolution could be repeated in Latin America.⁴² Debray defined the foco as a nucleus of guerrilla insurgency, not a liberated zone but a small group of armed men determined to create a revolutionary front that eventually would engage a professional army in combat. A number of metaphors were used that spoke more to the imagination than to reality: the foco is a detonator, a small engine that jump starts the large engine of mass insurrection, that spreads itself like an oil patch across the nation and, the most famous of all, “For the prairie to catch fire, it is necessary that the spark should be there, present, waiting.”⁴³

Once volition entered the political field, it overshadowed everything else. Not the painstaking building of grass roots support as had been the practice in Peronism or the strengthening of the party apparatus as was the custom among traditional communist groups, but foquism became the most appealing revolutionary practice. Pedro Cazes Camarero reminisces how after years of standing at factory gates in the industrial belt of Buenos Aires, trying to pass out pamphlets which few workers accepted, he was immediately taken by the example of Che Guevara. The idea that the revolution was within reach through sheer will power proved irresistible. “The echoes of the Tragic Week, of the Rebellious Patagonia, of the 17th of October came back to us. We had no longer the sensation that we would have to wait forever, in a curve of history, for this vehicle that would maybe never come.”⁴⁴ The participation of the intellectual left no longer consisted of high-flown discussions in Café La Paz in Buenos Aires but meant a struggle “with vile acts, with blood, with sweat, and with human lives.”⁴⁵ The young revolutionary left in Argentina saw themselves as the authors of history, and the anonymous masses as their subject matter, a reticent and retrograde mass which needed to be awakened by spectacular armed actions.

The People’s Guerrilla Army

Castro’s landing on Cuba in December 1956 did not draw much attention in Argentina. Argentina was too occupied with the failed Valle-Tanco rebellion and the Peronist Resistance. It was not until the Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti interviewed Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in March 1958 that Argentina began to take notice.⁴⁶ The Peronists were at first at a loss about what to make of the Cuban insurgency because the Argentine middle class applauded the resistance against Batista, whom they likened to Perón. The Argentine military even sent weapons to Castro because the overthrow of Batista would be one corrupt dictator less in Latin America. This support meant that, in a knee jerk reaction, the Peronists and the working class adhered to Batista.⁴⁷

Masetti returned frequently to Cuba, came under the wings of Guevara, and received military training in Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and Algeria.⁴⁸ Guevara urged Masetti and the Argentine exiles in Cuba to set aside their ideological differences, and start a revolutionary insurgency in Argentina, eventually under the general command of Guevara himself.⁴⁹ Guevara chose the province of Salta in northern Argentina as the first theater of operations.

On 21 June 1963, Masetti and his men, including several Cubans, made their first foray into Argentine territory. The group called itself the People’s Guerrilla Army or EGP (Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo). They had great difficulty scaling the inhospitable terrain, but their largest problem was to secure the support from the local population. Unlike the Sierra Maestra, the remote Salta region did not have the type of peasant brokers who had been of decisive influence for the survival of Castro’s rebels providing local recruits, guides, couriers, and supplies.⁵⁰ Masetti and his group were shocked by the economic deprivation and ideological backwardness of the poverty-stricken peasants. As Ciro Bustos, one of the surviving members, remembers, “You couldn’t even call these people campesinos [peasants]. These were people who lived in little bush clearings, full of fleas and dogs … and snot-nosed kids, with no links to the real world, nothing.”⁵¹

The tiny People’s Guerrilla Army also faced adverse national conditions. The July 1963 presidential election of Arturo Illia undermined the legitimacy of the guerrilla struggle. Even though the Peronists had abstained from voting, Illia was a democratically elected head of state who tried to lessen the political repression in Argentina. The Peronist movement was gaining strength again with street demonstrations on 17 October 1963, and with Perón’s promise that he would return to Argentina in 1964. Nevertheless, Masetti sent a communiqué to President Illia, berating him for accepting the electoral fraud, and vowing to do battle for the liberty of Argentina.⁵² Unlike Cuba during the late 1950s, Argentina had several more plausible roads to power available than an unpredictable guerrilla insurgency in a remote region of the country.

Meanwhile, Masetti and his group were going through some tough times of their own in the forested mountains of Salta. They were continuously short on supplies and faced internal problems. Two young middle class recruits had been executed for lowering morale and not measuring up to the high standards of a guerrilla fighter. Still, Guevara sent his trusted José María Martínez Tamayo in late September 1963 to prepare for his arrival. This Cuban army captain told Masetti that Salta was unsuitable for a guerrilla insurgency, that the group should be more mobile, and that a new front had to be opened in Tucumán.⁵³ By November 1963, local cattle ranchers tipped off the Argentine border patrol to the guerrillas’ presence.

Masetti decided to take the initiative on 18 March 1964 when the CGT union central planned a general strike against the Illia government. Multiple attacks on several rural military posts would express the guerrillas’ solidarity with the workers’ cause, and would deceive the military about the real strength of the tiny group. Masetti hoped to secure enough weapons to arm a second guerrilla group in Tucumán. These Armed Forces of the National Revolution or FARN (Fuerzas Armadas de la Revolución Nacional) would be led by the Cuban-trained Angel Bengochea. However, Bengochea never arrived in Tucumán. He and four comrades, as well as six residents of the building, were killed by a massive explosion in May 1964 while manufacturing bombs in a downtown Buenos Aires apartment.⁵⁴

Masetti went ahead as planned. His group was reinforced with five new recruits from Buenos Aires who had a falling out with the Soviet-leaning Argentine communist party. Unbeknownst to Masetti, two combatants were undercover agents of the Argentine secret service. Around the same time, local gendarmes discovered a meeting point along the Salta-Orán road where the guerrillas came to pick up supplies. Soon, they captured the first guerrillas, among them the two undercover agents. Ricardo Rojo recalled that five captives were tortured with mock executions and by submerging their faces in the intestines of their dead comrades.⁵⁵

The net closed rapidly around Masetti’s group. Several men died on 18 April 1964 in an ambush, including a former Cuban bodyguard of Che Guevara, while a starving Masetti and three companions wandered around aimlessly in the mountains. The group decided to split in two. After their departure, one man fell to his death, and his companion was captured by the gendarmes. By late April, there were eighteen men in custody who would eventually all receive lengthy prison sentences.⁵⁶ Masetti and his companion were never again heard of. His former comrades in arms have provided three possible explanations: suicide, starvation, or their assassination by the gendarmes who stole the twenty thousand dollars in Masetti’s possession.⁵⁷

The feelings of many young Argentines about the demise of Masetti’s military adventure were voiced by Juan Gelman in his poem “Deeds” (“Hechos”).

I would like to know

what am I doing here below this roof safe from

the cold the heat I want to say

what am I doing

while Commandant Segundo other men

are pursued to death are

given back to the wind to the time that will come

and the sadness and pain have names

and there are shots in the night and I can’t sleep⁵⁸

There was an intense soul searching among Argentina’s post-World War II generation about what to do, what life to lead, and how to bring about change. Young, politically conscious Argentines perceived an analogy between the American semi-colonization of Cuba with its brothels, casinos, and impoverished peasantry and Argentina with its landed gentry and conservative ruling class. The presence of Che Guevara added a special flavor to their state of mind. They romanticized Fidel’s Cuba, its Revolution, its deliverance from exploitation and injustice, its stimulation of the arts, its Caribbean exuberance, and its promise of a New and morally superior Man. The 1966 coup in Argentina and its crackdown on the freedom of thought, together with the death of Guevara in 1967 and the murky involvement of the U.S.A. in Vietnam, turned self-reflection into action.

The gauntlet had been thrown in Argentina’s political arena. Guevara’s dream of liberating his native Argentina ended in 1967, but his ideas about revolutionary violence would outlive him for at least a decade.⁵⁹ The Uturuncos and the People’s Guerrilla Army might have failed but an urban guerrilla insurgency, which was much more appropriate for an industrializing nation, was already brewing at the time of Guevara’s death. This guerrilla insurgency emerged within the Peronist movement, and bore the ideological stamp of John William Cooke, an early admirer of the Cuban Revolution. Cooke’s militant past and proximity to Perón allowed him to draw upon the Peronist following for the grass roots support which Masetti and Guevara had lacked. Cooke’s revolutionary Peronism became firmly implanted among young Peronists, and his works would be the second most sold Peronist books in 1973, only those of Perón ahead of him.⁶⁰ Cooke’s enduring contribution to the revolutionary Peronism of the 1970s was his strategic shift from crowd mobilization to vanguardism, and his ideological development from Peronism to socialism.

Cooke’s Provocation

John William Cooke arrived in Havana in mid-1960 to share in its revolutionary vigor. He learned that a truly national liberation, traditionally desired by Peronism, could not be accomplished without a social revolution. Peronism and Castrism were national expressions of the same anti-imperialism, and he even invited Perón to move from Madrid to Havana.⁶¹ Perón never responded, and the two grew apart ideologically.

Cooke’s awareness went hand in hand with his interpretation of Peronism as a movement of social emancipation arisen in response to a crisis of the Argentine bourgeois system. He emphasized that the Peronist movement was a heterogeneous, multiclass movement which contained within itself a struggle between opposed class interests. The orthodox segment, represented by the pragmatic union leaders, held back the revolutionary potential of the Peronist masses. The struggle between reformists and revolutionaries would eventually be resolved in a dialectic fashion, and be won by the revolutionary Peronists.⁶² The development of a revolutionary Peronism without Perón was only a matter of time. Just as Peronism became wed to socialism, and Perón became replaced by the revolutionary vanguard, so the Cuban Revolution became a model of inspiration for Cooke. Guerrilla insurgency was to replace the Peronist crowd mobilizations as the principal political instrument of change.

In 1964, Cooke founded the Peronist Revolutionary Action or ARP (Acción Revolucionaria Peronista). Cooke justified the use of violence by arguing that the bourgeois state was founded on the structural violence hidden in its institutions and crystallized in its laws. The guiding principle behind the words of vanguardists, such as Cooke, was the belief in a political Verelendung, the conviction that a violent deterioration of the political process would persuade the armed forces to militarize the conflict and respond with excessive violence.⁶³ This escalation would reveal the true repressive nature of the Argentine regime and provoke an insurrection. In more Peronist terms, the structural violence from above would provoke the armed violence from below which, in turn, would result in more repressive violence from above. This dialectical process would raise the political consciousness of the working class, undermine the legitimacy of the State, and end with a revolutionary insurrection.

Despite Cooke’s call for a guerrilla insurgency, his group never came into action, this to the chagrin of several members who decided to split off in late 1966. The dissidents included future Montoneros such as Fernando Abal Medina and Norma Arrostito. They converted Cooke’s ideas into practice.⁶⁴ John William Cooke was not to witness the revolutionary surge of the 1970s of which he had been one of the intellectual fathers. He died of cancer in September 1968, at the age of forty-seven, in Buenos Aires.

Despite Castro’s threat to turn the Andes into the hemisphere’s Sierra Maestra, Cuba’s assistance to Argentine revolutionaries consisted only of the basic training of a hundred or so Argentines and limited support for Masetti’s People’s Guerrilla Army.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, this Cuban connection troubled the Argentine military. Analyzing national threats in geopolitical terms, they perceived an international conspiracy of a magnitude that vastly surpassed reality. Nuclear deterrence between East and West had moved the battlefield from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so they argued. World War III would start there as the communists tried to achieve world hegemony.

The fear of an Argentine social revolution was not new. As I explained in Chapter 1, similar fears had been voiced since the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially after the Russian Revolution. The Cuban Revolution resuscitated these worries. Many Latin American officers doubted whether the United States had the political capacity and military capability to protect the world from communism. Cuba, the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, and the unstoppable decolonization of the Third World were all signs that the West was losing ground. Democracy and Christianity were on the retreat, and the Latin American nations had to unite their efforts in combating the communist aggression.⁶⁶

The Latin American military rejected the professionalism of the American armed forces and harked back to a nineteenth century Hispanic tradition in which the military were the nation’s moral guardians. They emphasized tradition, authority, spirituality, honor, abnegation, and austerity, all values which the Argentine armed forces had upheld in a more glorious past. They deplored the materialism, individualism, sexual permissiveness, and moral corruption of the Western world. Crucial was their belief in the gift of leadership (don de mando), an inbred, near-mystical, charismatic quality, which obliged them to lead the nation through turbulent times. A national security policy emerged which integrated national defense with economic development, political consolidation, and ideological combativeness.⁶⁷

The military’s belief in their historical protagonism became cause for action when democratic Latin American governments began to suffer from guerrilla insurgency, labor unrest, economic recession, and legitimacy crises. The 1964 military coup in Brazil was the first stance made in Latin America to halt the process of deterioration and implement a national security plan. Brazil’s example would soon inspire similar takeovers in many other Latin American countries.⁶⁸

The concern with national security in Argentina was voiced by General Osiris Villegas, one of the principal experts on revolutionary war. He wrote already in June 1961 that this new type of warfare was invading all domains of society by making people their battleground, seeking the destruction of their personalities and trying to convert them into a depersonalized mass under the guardianship of a socialist State.⁶⁹ These same ideas were expressed by General Juan Carlos Onganía on 6 August 1964 at the Fifth Conference of the American Armies at West Point Military Academy. The speech was largely written by General Villegas. Onganía declared that the armed forces had the constitutional mission to secure the country’s internal peace when domestic enemies, under the influence of foreign ideologies, threatened its republican institutions.⁷⁰ The armed forces could not become the obedient instruments of an illegitimate authority which violated the democracy they were supposed to protect. In the end, the Argentine military owed a loyalty to the Constitution, but not to the ruling parties and elected politicians.⁷¹

The sting of the West Point address was in the self-adjudicated obligation to “defend the spiritual and moral values of Christian and Western civilization.”⁷² This clause gave the military a safe-conduct to grab power whenever they believed that Argentine culture was under threat of “foreign ideologies.” The West Point address tied the defense of civilization to domestic military intervention, and labeled political opponents as enemies of Western culture.

Two years later, retired General Onganía succeeded President Illia after a military coup. The new regime was called the Argentine Revolution, and the Marxist infiltration in Argentine society figured prominently among its justifications.⁷³ General Villegas explained to me twenty-four years later how the decision about the military takeover was reached. “There is a national atmosphere that cries out for a solution, involving a group of men, the general staffs of the forces, the academies, and certain important clubs such as the Jockey Club. As these men who know each other are talking—they are friends—they begin to arrive at a certain conclusion.”⁷⁴ In other words, a small group of civilians and officers at high levels decided in 1966 whether or not the elected government still had the confidence of the Argentine people.

The government’s acid test of legitimacy was the presence or absence of crowd mobilizations in support of the embattled head of state. Villegas mentioned the overthrow of President Illia as a case in point. “The people went on with their daily activities as if nothing had happened…. The question is then: was this man really representative for the people? Was he the governor of these people who didn’t bat an eyelid?”⁷⁵ The 1966 Argentine Revolution promised to put Argentina again on the tracks of progress. The subordination of the unruly labor unions, the disenfranchisement of the Peronist movement, and the building of a national defense against foreign ideologies and guerrilla insurgents were high on the agenda.

Guerrilla Resurgence in Argentina

Two international conferences held in Cuba in 1966 and 1967 were clear proof to the Argentine military that a guerrilla insurgency was becoming likely.⁷⁶ These conferences aimed at coordinating the guerrilla insurgencies in the developing world. The January 1966 conference was attended by nearly five hundred official delegates and six hundred observers and invited guests. John William Cooke was there, representing various factions of revolutionary Peronism, while Héctor Villalón acted as Perón’s representative.⁷⁷ More important than the resolutions and speeches were the behind the scenes contacts among radical groups. Surprisingly, Che Guevara did not attend the conference. He was bogged down in a hopeless effort to unite the rebel forces in the former Belgian Congo.⁷⁸ However, Guevara had prepared a message to the conference containing a chilling threat: “How close we could look into a bright future should two, three, or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!”⁷⁹

The August 1967 conference was again attended by Cooke and other Argentines and was mainly concerned with creating focos in Latin America. Che Guevara was once more absent, but was elected its honorary president. Guevara was of course in Bolivia, fighting his way to a new dawn whatever his immediate success on the battlefield. One month later, Guevara was dead, but his spirit was very much alive. As Castro said in his eulogy one week later, “Che has become a model of what men should be, not only for our people but also for people everywhere in Latin America. Che carried to its highest expression revolutionary stoicism, the revolutionary spirit of sacrifice, revolutionary combativeness, the revolutionary’s spirit of work.”⁸⁰

Castro was right. Within less than a decade of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the political landscape of Latin America had undergone a cataclysmic change. This situation was in large part due to the socioeconomic and political conditions of the Latin American countries themselves and to the military response to the Cuban Revolution, and only to a lesser degree to the active Cuban assistance in training and arming would-be insurgents.

Castro’s eulogy to Guevara had not gone unnoticed in Argentina but, to the dismay of the Argentine military, the resurgence of a rural guerrilla foco in Argentina did not come from Cuban-backed Marxists. At dawn, on 19 September 1968, a large police force overpowered fourteen guerrillas. The group was caught by surprise as they were returning to base camp after a long march. The secret encampment was situated twenty kms. east of the small town of Taco Ralo, in the extreme south of Tucumán province. Most guerrillas were between twenty-five and thirty years of age. The setting closely resembled Guevara’s encampment in Bolivia: the remote ranch was bought by one of the guerrillas; it functioned as a training ground, had a shooting range for target practice, a storage place for arms, communications equipment, two years of canned food supplies, surgical instruments, and even some cages with carrier pigeons. Most disconcerting was that the thirteen men and one woman did not identify themselves as communists but as Peronists, and called themselves the Peronist Armed Forces or FAP (Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas). They were planning to come into action within one month, on historic 17 October.⁸¹

This tiny foquist insurgency by militant Peronists troubled the Argentine military. If there was a rapprochement of Peronism and Guevarism, then this would have tremendous consequences because these guerrillas might much more easily receive the help of rank-and-file Peronists than a Marxist insurgency. The connection between Marxism and Peronism had already been made ideologically by Cooke, Hernández Arregui, and other revolutionary Peronist thinkers, but the FAP guerrillas were the first proof that those ideas were being acted upon.

Several small Peronist groups had tried since 1964 to organize a guerrilla insurgency but none of them ever came into action. Still, these groups did more than just go through the motions of insurgency. Valuable relations were forged among would-be combatants of very diverse political backgrounds, ideological discussions strengthened their resolve, tactical disagreements sharpened their knowledge of guerrilla warfare, and occasional military training prepared them for action. The FAP members captured at Taco Ralo exemplified this process of maturation. The fourteen members came from Cooke’s ARP (Peronist Revolutionary Action), the Uturuncos, the MJP (Peronist Youth Movement), and Palabra Obrero.⁸²

In a November 1968 communiqué from their prison cells in Buenos Aires, the guerrillas stated: “We belong to a new Peronist generation born of the struggle amidst the thundering noise of the murderous bombs of the 16th of June 1955 at the Plaza de Mayo and the executions of the 9th of June 1956 of General Valle and his brave comrades.”⁸³ They declared having taken up arms to fight for the happiness of the Argentine people and the greatness of the nation. There was no option left but the armed struggle to overthrow Onganía, and achieve economic independence, political sovereignty, and social justice.⁸⁴

Reading about the factionalism of the early years of the armed struggle, one comes to the conclusion that personal sympathies and petty politics played a much greater role in the internal divisiveness of the many small guerrilla organizations than any real strategic differences. They all desired the overthrow of the Onganía dictatorship, all rejected crowd mobilizations as ineffective, and all were convinced that armed violence was the only means to achieve their objectives. They were inspired by the Cuban revolution, most groups regarded themselves as the vanguard of the Peronist movement, and these same groups all demanded social justice and the return of Perón to power. Finally, they were all moved by anger.

The capture of the fourteen FAP guerrillas at Taco Ralo showed for the third time that a rural insurgency was not possible in a highly urbanized Argentina. Soon, the strategy changed to urban guerrilla warfare. But the Argentine military were lying in wait. Even before one shot had been fired, they were convinced that Argentina was the next target of a global revolutionary war. At the beginning of 1969, both the urban guerrillas and the military counterinsurgency were poised for action. About three thousand Argentines had received at least some guerrilla training during the 1960s, while Argentine military commanders had received counterinsurgency instruction in the United States.⁸⁵ The Cordobazo and Rosariazos of May 1969 were the starting signal. These crowd mobilizations were read by guerrillas and military as a popular surge of revolutionary consciousness that would now justify a call to arms.