Montoneros

For the irregular forces of the Argentine Civil War, see Montoneras.

Montoneros
Movimiento Peronista Montonero
Also known asMPM
LeaderMario Firmenich
Dates of operation1970–1983[1]
MotivesBefore 6 September 1974:
Return of Juan Perón to power and establishment of a socialist state in Argentina [2]
After 6 September 1974:
Establishment of a socialist state according to the Tendencia Revolucionaria ideology[3]
Active regionsArgentina
IdeologyPeronist Revolutionary Tendency[4]
Left-wing nationalism[5]
Left-wing populism[6]
Liberation theology[7]
Catholic socialism[8]
Catholic left[9]
Political positionFar-left[10]
SloganBefore 6 September 1974:
Perón o muerte[11]
(English: Perón or death)
After 6 September 1974:
Patria o muerte[12]
(English: Fatherland or death)
Notable attacksKidnapping and execution of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, assassination of José Ignacio Rucci, Operation Primicia, raids on military barracks
StatusDecree 261 by Isabel Perón considered it a subversive group and ordered its annihilation. The group was harassed by the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance until 1975 and utterly defeated by the military dictatorship by 1981.
Size~10,000[13] (1975)
Allies ERP
FAL (merged in 1973)
FSLN[14]
Flag
Preceded by
Comando Camilo Torres[15] (1967-1970)[16]

Montoneros (Spanish: Movimiento Peronista Montonero, MPM) was an Argentine far-left Peronist and Catholic[17] revolutionary guerrilla organization, which emerged in the 1970s during the "Argentine Revolution" dictatorship. Its name was a reference to the 19th-century cavalry militias called Montoneras, which fought for the Federalist Party in the Argentine civil wars. Radicalized by the political repression of anti-Peronist regimes, the influence of Cuban Revolution and socialist worker-priests committed to liberation theology, the Montoneros emerged from the 1960s Catholic revolutionary guerilla Comando Camilo Torres as a "national liberation movement",[18] and became a convergence of revolutionary Peronism, Guevarism, and the revolutionary Catholicism of Juan García Elorrio shaped by Camilism.[19] They fought for the return of Juan Perón to Argentina and the establishment of "Christian national socialism", based on 'indigenous' Argentinian and Catholic socialism, seen as the ultimate conclusion of Peronist doctrine.[20]

Its first public action took place on 29 May 1970, with the kidnapping, subsequent revolutionary trial and assassination of the anti-Peronist ex-dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, one of the leaders of the 1955 coup that had overthrown the constitutional government led by President Juan Domingo Perón. Montoneros kidnapped the ex-dictator to put him on "revolutionary trial" for being a traitor to the homeland, for having shot 27 people to suppress the 1956 Valle uprising, and to recover the body of Eva Perón that Aramburu had kidnapped and made disappear. Montoneros was the armed nucleus of a set of non-military social organisations ("mass fronts") known as the Tendencia Revolucionaria del Peronismo, or simply "La Tendencia", which included the Juventud Peronista Regionales (JP), the Juventud Universitaria Peronista (JUP), the Juventud Trabajadora Peronista (JTP), the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios (UES), the Agrupación Evita and the Movimiento Villero Peronista.[21][22][23]

In 1972 it merged with Descamisados and in 1973 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), with which it had been acting together. Its actions contributed to the military dictatorship calling free elections in 1973, in which the multi-party electoral front of which it was a member (Frejuli) won, with the presidential candidacy of Peronist Héctor José Cámpora, a man close to Montoneros, as well as several governors, parliamentarians, ministers and high-ranking government officials.[24] Cámpora's government and its relationship with the Montoneros came under heavy pressure from the outset, from right-wing sectors and the Italian anti-communist lodge Propaganda Due and the CIA, and just 49 days later he had to resign after the Ezeiza massacre.[25]

After Cámpora's resignation as president on 12 July 1973, the Montoneros began to lose power and became progressively isolated, a situation that worsened after the assassination of trade union leader José Ignacio Rucci on 25 September 1973 - attributed to the organisation - and above all after Perón's death, on 1 July 1974, when a policy of state terrorism was unleashed by the right-wing para-police organisation known as the Triple A led by López Rega, who became the right-hand man of President María Estela Martínez de Perón. Two months later, Montoneros decided to go underground again and restart the armed struggle.[26] On 8 September 1975, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued Decree 2452/75 banning its activity and classifying it as a "subversive group".

On 24 March 1976, the constitutional government was overthrown and an anti-Peronist civilian-military dictatorship was established, which imposed a totalitarian regime focused on eliminating its opponents. Montoneros established its leadership in Mexico and fought the dictatorship, inflicting serious casualties on the civil-military government and suffering heavy losses, including a large number of militants and fighters who disappeared. In 1979 and 1980 it attempted two counter-offensives that failed militarily and politically. When democracy was restored in December 1983, the Montoneros organisation no longer existed as a political-military structure and sought to insert itself into democratic political life, within Peronism, under the name of Juventud Peronista, under the leadership of Patricia Bullrich and Pablo Unamuno, without ever forming an autonomous political organisation.[27] In the following years, several Montoneros adherents occupied important political posts in democratic governments.

  1. ^ ACCIO NES PEN A LES D EC R E T O N" 157;83 Archived 8 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine f
  2. ^ José Amorín: "The thing is that, by 1973, very few partners were ready to plan a political future from a position of power that was not derived from popular activism or, in their case, "from the cannon of a shotgun". For the majority the chance to build power from the institutions was unthinkable. In our experience, power was taken: from our side, as with the Winter Palace or the entry to La Habana, and from the other side, as with the military and their coups d'état." Montoneros: La buena historia Archived 12 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine, p. 99
  3. ^ Juan Domingo Perón (1. ed.). Buenos Aires: Ed. Planeta. 2004. pp. 137–139. ISBN 950-49-1255-9.
  4. ^ Latin American Monitor Ltd, Business Monitor International (1989). Argentina. Latin American Monitor Ltd, p. 18
  5. ^ Rock, David (1993). Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact. University of California Press. p. 220. ISBN 0-520-20352-6.
  6. ^ Hodges, Donald C. (1976). Argentina 1943-1976: The National Revolution and Resistance. University of New Mexico Press. pp. 68–69. ISBN 0-8263-0422-2. The program of national liberation defended by the Montoneros was an evidently populist one, predicated on the establishment of a popular state which would control and plan the economy as a necessary condition of political and economic independence.
  7. ^ Koch, Robert D. (27 March 2020). The Geopolitics of Juan Perón: A New Order for an Imperfect World (Doctor of Philosophy in History thesis). University of South Florida. p. 239. Archived from the original on 25 December 2023. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
  8. ^ Hodges, Donald C. (1976). Argentina 1943-1976: The National Revolution and Resistance. University of New Mexico Press. p. 135. ISBN 0-8263-0422-2.
  9. ^ Gillespie, Richard (1982). Soldiers of Peron: Argentina's Montoneros. Oxford University Press. p. 48. ISBN 0-19-821131-7.
  10. ^ Sachar, Howard M. (2005). A History of the Jews in the Modern World. Vintage Books. p. 803. ISBN 978-0-30742436-5. In 1975, following still another military coup, the violence escalated into a civil war between the army and the far-left Montoneros.
  11. ^ Salcedo, Javier. "¿Vanguardia socialista y masas peronistas? : Montoneros". repositorio.uca.edu.ar. Pontifica Universidad Catolica Argentina. Archived from the original on 2 February 2024. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
  12. ^ Martin, Gus (2010). Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc. p. 236. ISBN 978-1-4129-7059-4.
  13. ^ Crenshaw, Martha (1995). Terrorism in Context. Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 212. ISBN 0-271-01015-0.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference katz was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Hodges, Donald (1991). Argentina's "Dirty War": An Intellectual Biography. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-292-77689-0. He also encouraged them to go underground to form the Camilo Torres Commando, the armed precursor of the Montoneros.
  16. ^ Gillespie, Richard (1982). Soldiers of Peron: Argentina's Montoneros. Oxford University Press. p. 57. ISBN 0-19-821131-7. In establishing the Camilo Torres Command in 1967, the three became comrades of Juan Garcia Elorrio. The Command, committed to Peronism, socialism, and armed struggle, was merely a stepping stone en route to the creation of the Montonero organization a year later, and its only publicized feat took place on May Day 1967, when Garcia Elorrio and two others broke up a mass attended by General Ongania in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Buenos Aires.
  17. ^ Galván, Javier A. (2013). Latin American Dictators of the 20th Century: The Lives and Regimes of 15 Rulers. McFarland. p. 156. ISBN 9781476600161.
  18. ^ Cirilo Perdía, Roberto (2013). Montoneros: El peronismo combatiente en primera persona (in Spanish). Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Planeta S.A.I.C. p. 89. ISBN 978-950-49-3259-8.
  19. ^ Hodges, Donald C. (1976). Argentina 1943-1976: The National Revolution and Resistance. University of New Mexico Press. p. 54. ISBN 0-8263-0422-2.
  20. ^ "Cuba: cómo es el socialismo nacional" (PDF). El Descamisado (in Spanish). 1 (35): 16–21. 15 January 1974. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 October 2020. Retrieved 22 January 2024. Y llegamos a un país socialista. Un país donde se practica el socialismo nacional, ese que nosotros cantamos en nuestras consignas, el que tanta polvareda ha levantado en el Movimiento Peronista desde que Perón habló de él.
  21. ^ "A 50 años del secuestro de Aramburu". Mar del Plata (in Spanish). La Capital. 30 May 2020. Archived from the original on 18 April 2023. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  22. ^ "A 50 años del secuestro de Aramburu, gestado en una casa de Parque Chas" (in Spanish). 25 June 2020. Archived from the original on 26 October 2020. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  23. ^ "Montoneros: el llanto para el enemigo" (in Spanish). Cedema. Archived from the original on 21 October 2020. Retrieved 28 August 2020.
  24. ^ "Perón enfrenta a la conspiración". Cedema (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 26 February 2024. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
  25. ^ "Por la conducción en manos de los trabajadores peronistas". Cedema (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 14 April 2023. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
  26. ^ "Evita Montonera Nro. 12" (PDF) (in Spanish). Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 October 2020. Retrieved 20 March 2014.
  27. ^ Fidanza, Andrés (2019). "La conversión de la piba". Revista Anfibia (in Spanish). Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Archived from the original on 19 September 2021. Retrieved 22 January 2024.