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
