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
