Montoneros

Montoneros (Spanish: Movimiento Peronista Montonero-MPM) was a revolutionary Argentine far-left Peronist and Catholic guerrilla organization, which emerged in the 1970s during the "Argentine Revolution" dictatorship. The name referenced the 19th-century cavalry militias called Montoneras, who fought for the Federalist Party in Argentine Civil Wars. Radicalized by the political repression of anti-Peronist regimes, the 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", and became a convergence of revolutionary Peronism, Guevarism, and revolutionary Catholicism of Juan García Elorrio as molded by Camilism. They fought for the return of Juan Perón to Argentina and establishment of "Christian national socialism", based on 'indigenous socialism' inspired by Argentinian and Catholic culture and tradition, seen as the ultimate conclusion of Peronist doctrine.

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.

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. 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.

After Héctor J. Cámpora resigned from the presidency. 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. 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 systematic regime of state terrorism and annihilation of 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. In the following years, several Montoneros adherents occupied important political posts in democratic governments.