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Chapter 6

The Long Arm of Popular Justice: Punishment, Rebellion, and Sacrifice

On the morning of 29 May 1970, at the first anniversary of the Cordobazo, Fernando Abal Medina and Emilio Maza ascend to the eighth floor of 1053 Montevideo Street and ring the bell of former President Aramburu’s apartment. His wife opens the door and beckons the two young men posing as army officers to enter. An impeccably dressed Aramburu enters the room, drinks coffee with the two officers, while the men offer to improve the general’s security situation. At 9:30 A.M., the two men rise to their feet and ask Aramburu to accompany them outside. Aramburu is neither surprised nor alarmed. Possibly, he thinks that a coup against Onganía is finally occurring, and that he will be invited to become Argentina’s new president. Aramburu is taken to a white Peugeot, and later transferred to a van. After another vehicle change, he is driven to a small ranch near the hamlet of Timote in Buenos Aires province. The ranch belongs to the family of Carlos Ramus.

On the evening of 29 May, Aramburu is led before a revolutionary court composed of three guerrillas. “The first charge we made against him was the execution of General Valle and the other patriots who rose with him on the 9th of June 1956,” recalled Norma Arrostito and Mario Firmenich in their chilling 1974 account. “In the beginning he tried to deny everything. He said that he was in Rosario when that happened.” They read the death sentences signed by Aramburu and describe the executions at José León Suárez. “He was without an answer. Finally, he admitted: ‘All right, we were making a revolution, and every revolution executes the counter-revolutionaries.’”¹ Aramburu is asked about his involvement in a possible coup against Onganía, and he admits to the need for a transitional government. When the guerrillas ask about the fate of Evita’s embalmed body, he responds that it is buried in a Roman cemetery under the Vatican’s care.

At day break on 1 June, Fernando Abal Medina gives Aramburu his sentence: “‘General, the Tribunal has sentenced you to death. You are going to be executed in half an hour.’ He tried to affect us emotionally. He spoke of the blood that we, young kids, were going to shed. We untied him when the half hour was over, made him sit on the bed and tied his hands on his back. He asked us to tie his shoes. We did so. He asked if he could shave himself. We said that we didn’t have the implements…. He asked for a confessor. We said that we couldn’t bring a confessor because the roads were being checked.”² They take Aramburu to the basement, stuff a handkerchief in his mouth, and put him against the wall. Mario Firmenich returns upstairs to hit with a wrench on a vise to dissimulate the shots. At 7:00 A.M., the twenty-two-year-old Fernando Abal Medina, who had received military training in Cuba in 1967, shoots the sixty-seven-year-old former President Lieutenant-General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu in the chest, and then gives three coups de grace. The body is buried in the basement, and discovered by the police six weeks later.³

The assassination of former President Aramburu by a guerrilla group of young Peronists rocked the nation. Many Peronists regarded the execution as a justified vengeance for his 1955 coup against Perón and the 1956 executions at José León Suárez. They were having barbecues in celebration. After all, Perón himself had said in 1956: “The day that Aramburu, Rojas, and the last of their murderers have died, we will have taken not only revenge for our brothers but then the Republic can sleep peacefully, free of the tremendous nightmare that weighs it down. Killing these infamous men is not only a matter of patriotism but also of self-defense.”⁴

Other sectors of Argentine society were horrified by the merciless act and worried that a new threshold had been crossed involving the country more deeply into a violent descent begun the previous year with the Cordoban worker and student insurrection. Aramburu’s abduction meant the decisive blow to a government already seriously destabilized by the crowd violence of 1969. Ten days after the abduction, President Onganía was forced out of office by army strongman General Lanusse and replaced by General Levingston. The Argentine military consider Lieutenant-General Aramburu as the first victim of the revolutionary violence of the 1970s.⁵

Aramburu’s execution signaled, in the eyes of many young Peronists, an end to the impunity of Argentine political leaders and made room for many more future Aramburazos. Any high-ranking military or police officer was now fair game, and there were hundreds of young Peronist and Marxist revolutionaries ready to reap the glory of an act of popular justice. One tiny group of determined young Peronists had shown that the military were not invincible. This encouraged others to join the armed struggle, carried forward by the groundswell of worker and student protest in Córdoba and Rosario.

The wheels of violence had been set in motion by the anger, hatred, and humiliation accumulated during nearly two decades of Peronist proscription, the succession of military dictatorships, the imprisonment of thousands of political opponents, and the deaths inflicted by the military. The repression was suffered by young and old alike, but the younger generation felt particularly oppressed by the disciplinary military regime. Still at the start of their lives, they were more inclined to rebel. Imprisonment, torture, and even death could not detain the young revolutionary left. The personal costs were known to all, but were regarded as inevitable sacrifices of the political struggle. The Aramburazo showed that retaliation was possible, and this gave a tremendous boost of confidence in the ability to change the country’s political direction.

Assassinations and executions had become legitimate political methods to enforce the transition from dictatorship to democracy, and these radical measures were supported by Perón, the Peronist leadership, and the young middle class. A tiny group of guerrillas, many of whom were too young to have had a personal recollection of Aramburu’s decisions, tried to undo the suffering of their parents’ generation. They became emotionally so tied up with those injustices that these resurfaced again and again, and could not be appeased. The young generation had become part of a social trauma which, furthermore, was fed by new humiliations, injustices, and traumas as they were hunted, abducted, and tortured in the early 1970s. New causes for violence were added to old ones. These emotions became enmeshed with ideological convictions that rationalized the use of violence in the pursuit of political objectives.

In this chapter, I describe the emergence of Peronist and Marxist guerrilla organizations, and demonstrate how they saw their violence as redemptive and retributive. I do not elaborate on the complex factionalism, internal squabbles, breakaways, temporary coalitions, and personnel changes within the revolutionary left.⁶ Instead, I organize the guerrilla insurgency into Marxist and Peronist guerrilla organizations, of which the PRT-ERP and the Montoneros became the most prominent after 1972.

Anger, Liberation, and Social Justice