Dirty War (Argentina, 1976-83)

The Dirty War in Argentina, from 1976–1983, was a seven-year dictatorship and counterinsurgency campaign waged by the Argentinian military junta against left-wing guerrillas and supporting civilians. Tens of thousands of Argentinian nationals, both guerrillas and sympathizers among the civilian population, were abducted by military task groups and supporting volunteer civilian Triple A military death squads often in the middle of the night. They were taken to secret government detention centers where they were eventually released or killed. These people (including survivors from the detention camps) are known as internationally as "los desaparecidos" or detenidos-desaparecidos ("the disappeared" or "detained disappeared"). In 2003, The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons claimed the true number of disappeared to be around 13,000.

The Mainstream media often cites the Chilean Secret Police (DINA) report on the estimate by the Argentinian Army's 601st Intelligence Battalion (Batallón de Inteligencia 601) of 22,000 disappeared between 1975 and mid-1978, implying they were all killed. However, it was later established that during this period at least 12,000 "disappeared" were in fact detainees held under National Executive Power (Poder Ejecutivo Nacional or PEN), and kept in detention camps throughout Argentina before eventually being freed under diplomatic pressure.

This unexpected Argentinian military defeat during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 hastened the fall of the unpopular military junta that had lost the propaganda war, turning Argentina into a pariah state, and in mid-1982 Lieutenant-General Reynaldo Bignone (head of the interim government) restored basic civil liberties and retracted its ban on left-wing political parties. The Argentinian military dictatorship ended when Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín's UCR (Unión Cívica Radical or Radical Civic Union) civilian government took control of the country on December 10, 1983.

Many people, 7,158-13,000, both Peronist and Marxist guerrillas as well as civilian opponents of the Argentinian military regime were "disappeared". By the end of 1978, 22,000 thousand Argentinians (according to an often-quoted Chilean military intelligence report) had been taken to secret government detention centers where they were killed or eventually freed under international diplomatic pressure.

Terence Roehrig in his book The Prosecution of Former Military Leaders in Newly Democratic Nations: The Cases of Argentina, Greece, and South Korea (McFarland & Company, 2001) estimates that of the disappeared, "at least 10,000 were involved in various ways with the guerrillas". Argentinian Justice Minister Ricardo Gil Lavedra, who formed part of the 1985 tribunal for the Trial of the Juntas, later went on record saying, "I sincerely believe that the majority of the victims of the illegal repression were guerrilla militants".

The Montoneros in a statement issued in 1984 acknowledged having lost 5,000 guerrillas killed, and the Marxist–Leninist People's Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo or ERP) in 2007 admitted the deaths of some 5,000 of their own armed fighters. Mario Firmenich, the commander of the Montoneros, in a radio interview in late 2001 from Spain said that, "In a country that experienced a civil war, everybody has blood on their hands".

The left-wing guerrillas and their support base, were responsible for causing at least 6,000 casualties among the military, police forces and civilian population, according to a National Geographic Magazine special article published in the mid-1980s.

The leftist guerrillas caused at least 5,000 casualties among the military and police forces, according to a fairly recent article by Spanish journalist Carmen Muñoz from Periódico ABC in 2011.

Origins

The origins of the Dirty War have long been debated, with Professor Patricia Marchak in God's Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s and Professor Carlos Marcelo Shäferstein in Cien años de subversión en Argentina and historians Alejandro García and Antonius C. G. M. Robben and others arguing the political violence started with the anarchist bombing campaigns and armed uprisings in Buenos Aires and the Patagonia in the 1910s and 1920s. During the Patagonia uprisings in the Santa Cruz province in 1921 and 1922, some 300 anarchist were killed in action or executed by the Argentinian Army. During the Buenos Aires uprisings in 1919, some 140 anarchists were killed and several buildings in the capital were burnt down.

Prior to the armed uprisings, several efforts were made to interrupt the celebrations marking 100 years of Argentinian independence on May 25, 1910, including an anarchists handing over a hand-held bomb to a child to take inside a cathedral in Buenos Aires, but the bomb exploded prematurely killing the minor and mutilating another boy.

On June 28, 1910, another anarchist bomb exploded inside the Teatro Colón (in the Argentinian capital) and 20 theatregoers were gravely wounded, and the Argentinian senate approved soon after the death penalty for those anarchists responsible for deaths. On July 9, 1916, an anarchist armed with a hand-gun tried to kill the Argentinian president, Victorino de la Plaza. The attempted assassination took place while the president attended a military parade in Buenos Aires, during the centennial celebrations marking Argentinian independence from Spain.

On February 9, 1918, violent strikes took place in the main Argentinian cities and army units were rushed to the affected areas after anarchists sabotaged train lines and burnt carriages transporting wheat to Buenos Aires for exportation. Argentinian left-wing activists at the time printed and widely distributed, even among conscripts, a newspaper promoting a Communist Revolution in Argentina. According to the Buenos Aires police, the anarchists in 1919 held 203 meetings, and two massive street demonstrations in which 429 key figureheads gave speeches. By the end of 1919, Argentina would witness 367 crippling strikes by some 300,000 workers.

The first Bolshevik uprising in Argentina took place during the Tragic Week (Semana Trágica) in Buenos Aires, which began on January 9, 1919 when striking metalworkers opened fire on a detachment of the 8th Cavalry Regiment under Captain Luis A. Cafferata. Shortly later, a group of strikers shoot and kill an Army NCO, Sergeant Ramón Díaz, as he walked down Pueyrredón Street. In nearby Corrientes Street an Argentinian Army platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Agustín Ronzoni and a civilian are also killed by the armed strikers. A rifle platoon under Sergeant Bonifacio Manzo is ambushed and a company of the 7th Infantry Regiment is forced to use Vickers machine-guns to repel the assembled strikers. Placing the city under martial law, President Hipolito Yrigoyen appointed Army Colonel Luis Dellepiane as the commander of government forces, after which disturbances subsided. The 5th and 12th Army Cavalry Regiments reinforced the Buenos Aires garrison on January 12, and 300 marines and a mountain artillery regiment are also shipped to Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, on the morning of January 13, 1919, anarchists attempted to seize arms and ammunition from a local police station but were forced to retreat after coming under fire from a naval detachment from the Argentinian Navy cruiser ARA 'San Martin'.

The leftist 'Vanguardia' newspaper claimed that over 700 deaths were recorded on Tragic Week, as well as 2,000 injured; with the military crackdown resulting in an estimated 50,000 arrests in the subsequent weeks. Professor Patricia Marchak estimates the real number of workers killed in the uprising and immediate aftermath at more than 100. The conservative 'La Nación' newspaper reported the number of workers killed in the uprising at around 100 and 400 injured.

The left-wing violence continued throughout the 1920s. On December 24, 1927 two powerful anarchist bombs went off in two US-owned banks in downtown Buenos Aires, killing two employees. On May 23, 1923, the anarchists detonate another bomb inside the Italian consulate in the Argentinian capital, killing 9 and wounding 41, the majority of them Italian-Argentinians. On December 24, 1929, Argentinian president Hipólito Yrigoyen narrowly survived an attempt on his life. The would-be assassin, 44 year-old Italian anarchist Gualterio Marinelli is killed by the return fire from the protecting police detachment.

President Juan Domingo Perón

Juan Domingo Perón

A military coup overthrew president Juan Domingo Perón and restored the Argentinian political right to power in 1955. During the subsequent 18 years of exile, Perón used the Argentinian political left and Montoneros guerrillas as a primary means of breaking down law and order. He also used them to unite the left-wing trade unions in favour of Peronism in order to return to Argentinian presidency.

In 1973, as Juan Perón returned from exile, the Ezeiza massacre took place, marking the end of the alliance between left- and right-wing factions of Peronism.

By early 1974 President Perón had lost the support of the trade unions and its militant workers. Perón withdrew his support of the Montoneros shortly before his death on July 1, 1974.

President Isabel Martínez de Perón

Juan Perón's death precipitated a crisis that could be handled neither by his wife and vice-president nor by her top aid, José López Rega. During the presidency of his widow Isabel, the far-right civilian Argentinian Anticommunist Alliance (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina or Triple A) paramilitary group emerged. Armed struggle increased, and in 1975 Isabel signed a number of decrees empowering the military and the police to "annihilate" left-wing subversion, most prominently the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) armed incursion in the province of Tucumán.

The new conservative government also sought to eliminate leftist influence in the education system, particularly the universities,through the appointment of conservative officials to the Ministry of Education. Economic policies were directed at restructuring wages and currency devaluations in order to attract foreign investment in Argentina.

The conservative government soon led to labor unrest in the automotive industry. By mid-1975 devaluations had prompted a price increase that was resented even by workers whose wages had benefited from a pay rise. At that point the General Confederation of Labour (Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina or CGT) requested an across-the-board 100-percent wage increase that was rejected by the government, thus prompting further labour unrest. Threats of a general strike led to a reshuffling of Isabel's cabinet that failed to satisfy either the CGT or the top military commanders,whose allegiance the administration had been so eager to attract.

In response to the economic chaos and the lack of government political control of the various provinces, terrorist attacks began to rise. These were led by leftist organizations such as the Montoneros and the People's Revolutionary Army, as well as by the AAA. A general feeling of uneasiness grew as inflation skyrocketed to some 350 percent by the end of 1975.

López Rega was ousted as Isabel de Perón's adviser in June 1975; Lieutenant-General General Alberto Numa Laplane, the commander in chief of the army who had supported the administration through the López Rega period, was replaced by Lieutenant-General Jorge Rafael Videla in August 1975. On Christmas Eve, 1975, Videla issued an ultimatum calling for the government "to adopt decisions to resolve the country's problems."

As her government struggled with the problems of declining production, a growing budget deficit, the beginning of hyper inflation, and left-wing terrorism, the military overthrew her government. On March 24th 1976, exactly 90 days after the ultimatum was issued and shortly after the CGT had demanded Isabel de Perón's resignation, the armed forces removed her from the presidency. She was held under house arrest for several years before moving to Spain in 1981.

According to the International Congress for Victims of Terrorism in 2010, prior to the military takeover in 1976, there were a total of 16,000 victims (including killed, wounded or abducted) of left-wing terrorism in Argentina, including civilians and military personnel.

Left wing terror in the automotive industry

Left-wing terrorism in the automotive industry had already started before the presidency of Isabel de Perón: In November 1971, in solidarity with militant car workers, Montoneros guerrillas took over a car manufacturing plant in Caseros, sprayed 38 Fiats with petrol, and then set them alight. Dr. Oberdan Sallustro, director-general of the Fiat Concord company in Argentina ― which manufactured cars, rolling stock and power generators under license from Fiat of Italy, the parent company ― and an Italian citizen, was kidnapped by ERP guerrillas in Buenos Aires on March 21, 1972 and found murdered on April 10, after having been held in a "people's prison" in a working-class suburb of the city. On December 2, the bodyguards of a Chrysler Corporation executive were attacked by militants, two were killed and another wounded.

On May 21, 1973, Luis Giovanelli, a Ford Motor Company executive, was killed and a female employee was wounded when machine-gunned by the ERP guerrillas in a kidnapping attempt that netted the guerrillas US$1 million from Ford as "protection money". On May 25, ERP guerrillas attempted to kill two Ford Motor Company executives but only wounded them. On June 3, 1973, militants in Buenos Aires kidnapped Jose Chohelo, a Peugeot representative and later released him for a reported US$200,000.

On November 22, 1973, FAP guerrillas ambushed and killed John Swint, the American general manager of a Ford Motor Company subsidiary and three of his bodyguards. On December 29, 1973, the director of Peugeot in Argentina was kidnapped by seven armed leftists. Between June 24–26, 1974, seventeen bombs planted by leftist militants exploded in Buenos Aires, damaging offices, warehouses, showrooms including Ford, General Motors and Fiat dealerships, according to the Bangor Daily News.

On August 27, 1974, during the presidency of Isabel de Perón, FAP guerrillas killed Ricardo Goya, the labour relations manager of the IKA-Renault Motor Company in Córdoba while he was driving to work. On January 8, 1975, Rodolfo Saurnier, manager of an auto parts factory, was kidnapped by Montoneros guerrillas. On 28 July 1975, a bomb of the urban militants exploded at the Peugeot dealership in La Plata. On 9 October 1975 several Molotov cocktails were thrown by militants at Car dealerships in city of Mendoza. On 24 October 1975, Heinrich Franz Metz, production manager of the Mercedes-Benz truck plant in Buenos Aires, was kidnapped by Montoneros guerrillas.

On 29 October 1975, four Montoneros killed the Fiat-Concord personnel manager. On 16 November, militants broke into the home of a Renault executive in Córdoba and took him hostage. On 26 March 1976, two security guards of a Ford executive were killed by militants firing from a car. On 14 April, militants in Buenos Aires killed an executive of the US Chrysler Corporation. On 4 May, militants assassinated a Fiat executive in a suburb of Buenos Aires.

The director of Renault Argentina was badly wounded by plastic explosives concealed in a box of flowers on 27 August. On 10 September a Chrysler executive was killed by militants while leaving his home in Buenos Aires. On 8 October, the Buenos Aires offices of Fiat, Mercedes Benz and Chevrolet were attacked by militants with bombs. On 10 October, Domingo Lozano, Argentine manager of the Renault plant in Córdoba, was shot and killed by Montoneros guerrillas after leaving a church service in Córdoba.

On 18 October 1976, seven months after the government of Isabel de Perón had been ousted, five guerrillas killed Enrique Aroza Garay, an executive of the German-owned Borgward automobile factory. On 3 November, a Chrysler executive, Carlos Roberto Souto, was killed in Buenos Aires by Montoneros. Later the same month, the Montoneros kidnapped Franz Metz, the industrial director of Mercedez Benz in Argentina, but released him five weeks later when the German company agreed to pay a ransom, reportedly US$S 5 million. On 13 October 1977, a Montoneros car bomb detonated outside the home of a Chrysler executive. The businessman was not there, but his guard and a neighbor were killed. On 16 December, Montoneros killed Andre Gasparoux, a top French executive of the Peugeot Motor Company.

Triple A

The Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina or Triple A) was a right-wing formations of death squads secretly founded in Argentina in 1973 and particularly active under the government of Isabel Perón. Initially associated with the Peronist right, the organisation opposed the Peronist left and other leftist organizations. It collaborated with the military and police to exterminate left wing guerrillas and their collaborators hidden among the civilian population. The paramilitary group was dissolved in 1976 by the military junta, which continued the tactics of the AAA until 1983.

Revolutionaries

Argentina experienced three failed attempts at rural guerrilla warfare between 1959 and 1969. At that point, the insurgents decided in favor of urban guerilla warfare. Jorge Ricardo Masetti, leader of the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (People's Guerrilla Army or EGP), which had infiltrated into Salta Province from Bolivia in 1964, is considered by some as Argentina's first "disappeared", as he went missing after the party militants' defeat in clashes with the Argentine gendarmerie. It seemed obvious that they would be safer and more relevant in crowded cities than in isolated rural areas.

Prior to 1973 the major revolutionary groups were the Peronist Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas or FAP), the Marxist–Leninist-Peronist Revolutionary Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias or FAR), and the Marxist–Leninist Armed Forces of Liberation (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación or FAL). The FAL guerrillas raided Campo de Mayo in April 1969 and stole 100 assault rifles from the elite 1st Patricios Infantry Regiment.

In time these armed groups consolidated, with the FAR joining the Montoneros, formerly an urban group of intellectuals and students, and the FAP and FAL being absorbed into the ERP. In 1970, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, one of the military leaders of the 1955 coup, was kidnapped and killed by the Montoneros, in its first claimed military action. In 1970, the Marxist People's Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo or ERP) was founded. By the early 1970s, leftist guerrillas kidnapped and assassinated high-ranking military and police officers almost weekly.

The ERP publicly remained in the forefront. ERP guerrilla activity took the form of attacks on military outposts, police stations and convoys. In 1971, the left-wing guerrillas killed 57 policemen, and in 1972 the ERP and Montoneros killed another 38 policemen. Between March and July 1971 the Argentine newspapers reported 316 armed attacks by the ERP.

On January 19, 1974 60–70 ERP guerrillas traveling aboard captured army trucks attacked the 2,000-strong barracks at Azul outside Buenos Aires, killing Corporal Daniel Osvaldo González, the Commanding Officer of the 10th Húsares de Pueyrredon Armoured Cavalry Regiment (Colonel Camilo Arturo Gay) and his wife (Hilda Irma Casaux). The guerrillas, dressed in captured Argentinian Army uniforms, held the barracks for seven hours. The guerrillas took the Commanding Officer of the 1st Artillery Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Jorge Roberto Ibarzábal hostage in the surprise attack. He would remain in guerrilla hands for 300 days, before 23-year-old university student Sergio Gustavo Dicovsky executed him at a police roadblock on November 19, 1974.

Cuban involvement

During the height of Argentine left-wing terrorism, the Cubans used their embassy in Buenos Aires to maintain direct contact with Argentine guerrillas. In 1973, the Montoneros merged with the Cuban-backed Armed Revolutionary Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias or FAR) that in 1972 had planted a bomb in the Sheraton hotel in Buenos Aires that killed a Canadian tourist. On February 13, 1974, a clandestine meeting was held in Mendoza, Argentina, and the Junta of Revolutionary Coordination (Junta de Coordinacion Revolucionaria or JCR) was formed. The JCR consisted of four guerrilla groups: the Uruguayan Tupamaros (MLN-T), the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and the Bolivian Revolutionary Army (ELN). The ERP guerrillas set up a guerrilla warfare training school, an arms factory, and a false documentation center in Argentina. These were all shut down in 1975 by Argentinian security forces. In 1976, ERP guerrillas started receiving training in Cuba on an 1800 hectare (7 square miles) estate near Guanabo as well as at another site in Pinar del Rio.

In July 2008, Fidel Castro admitted that he backed left-wing activists and guerrilla forces in Argentina in order to start an armed revolution: "The only place where we didn't promote a revolution was in Mexico. In the rest (of Latin America) we tried, without exception."

PLO involvement

The first meeting with the Montoneros and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representatives took place in 1971, when Montoneros comandante Rodolfo Galimberti entered into agreement with Saad Chedid, president of the Center for Arabic Studies in Argentina, to obtain open support for the Palestinian cause within the Peronist movement. In August 1972, Galimberti made his first trip to Lebanon and received the backing from the exiled Juan Perón in Spain.

By late 1972, the first batch of Montoneros started receiving terrorist training in Lebanon. Upon completion of training, they served as political contacts in Europe before setting up administrative headquarters to handle logistics, falsify documents, and traffic arms. The PLO-Montoneros alliance was made public in 1977 when Montoneros commanders Mario Firmenich and Fernando Vaca Narvaja flew to Beirut to meet and be photographed with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. At that time, Arafat and the PLO were receiving much financial and political support from left-wing governments and political parties worldwide.

When the PLO split and Al Fatah was formed, the new militant wing offered the Montoneros further training camps in Lebanon, military instructors, and heavy weaponry in return for the installation in Southern Lebanon of a plastic explosives factory that had been pioneered by an Argentine civilian supporter of the Montoneros with a PhD in chemical engineering.

In January 1979, the Montoneros leadership publicly announced through its Evita Montonera magazine that it was ready to launch a counteroffensive in Argentina and topple the Military Junta, with the help of the various trade unions and affiliated workers. As a precursor to their final attacks, the Montoneros had targeted the World Cup Football Tournament being held in Argentina in 1978, launching a number of bomb attacks.

The Montoneros commanders had carefully studied the strategy that made possible the Sandinista victory in July 1979 in Nicaragua. Firmenich had even travelled to Managua to study in person the lessons of the Nicaraguan Revolution. As Firmenich declared on the eve of the Sandinista victory: "the solution to the crisis experienced in Argentina is to do what is being done in Nicaragua." The comandante of the Montoneros commandos (Tropas Especiales de Infantería or TEI) selected to take part in the infiltration in the work factories, Raúl Yager, explained that the purpose of the infiltrations was to assist in promoting open street battles. The conditions were ripe for a revolution, he believed, because the trade union protests had already gained momentum.

In late 1979, the Montoneros launched their "strategic counteroffensive" in Argentina, and the forewarned security forces killed more than one hundred of the exiled Montoneros, who had been sent back to Argentina with false passports after receiving special forces training in PLO camps in Lebanon.

The Montoneros TEI teams that were successfully infiltrated destroyed with bombs the homes of Juan Alemann (Secretary of Housing) on June 21 and Guillermo Walter Klein (Vice Minister of the Economy), after killing the two policemen (Hugo Cardacci and Julio Morenoon) on sentry duty outside, trapping his daughter Marina in the debris on September 27. The Montoneros also targeted businessman Francisco Soldati and his chauffeur, both shot dead by Montoneros disguised as policemen in downtown Buenos Aires on November 13.

According to France's intelligence service Deuxième Bureau, the explosives technology utilized in these attacks would allow the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings to take place that would result in the deaths of 299 US and French peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Church involvement

Some Catholic priests sympathized with and helped the Montoneros. Radical priests, including Father Alberto Carbone, who was eventually indicted in the murder of former President Pedro Aramburu, preached Marxism and presented the early Church fathers as model revolutionaries in an attempt to legitimise the violence. A Catholic youth leader, Juan Ignacio Isla Casares, with the help of the Montoneros commander Eduardo Pereira Rossi (nom de guerre "El Carlón") was the mastermind behind the ambush and killing of five policemen (Pedro Dettle, Juan Ramón Costa, Carlos Livio Cejas, Cleofás Galeano and Juan Fernández) and the destruction of their patrol car near San Isidro Cathedral in Buenos Aires on October 26, 1975.

Mario Firmenich, who later became the leader of the Montoneros, was the ex-president of the Catholic Action Youth Group and a former seminarian himself. The Montoneros had ties with the Third World Priest Movement and a Jesuit priest, Father Carlos Mugica. The Third World Priest Movement believed that the Church could not remain neutral in the conflict between the Peronist and anti-Peronists and a number of priests participated in the armed struggle alongside the guerrillas.

Rural guerrilla warfare

A determined effort on the part of the Argentinian left was made at creating a guerrilla front in Tucumán province. In 1974, Marxist guerrillas led by Roberto Santucho in the form of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) took control of the remote province of Tucumán and declared it an independent state. In 1975 the Argentinian Army 5th Mountain Infantry Brigade was ordered to Tucumán to eradicate the insurgents and restore the province to the Argentinian state.

The Marxist guerrilla campaign in northern Argentina started with no more than 100 men and women of the ERP's Compañía de Monte Ramón Rosa Jiménez (Mountain Company) and ended with about 300 in the mountains of Tucumán (including reinforcements in the form of the elite Montoneros 65-strong Jungle Company that arrived in February 1976 and latter the ERP's Decididos de Córdoba Urban Company), which the 5th Mountain Brigade and parachute units from 4th Airborne Brigade managed to defeat, but at a cost.

The first ERP attack in Tucumán took place on September 6, 1971, when a platoon attacked the Villa Urquiza Prison and freed twelve convicted terrorist, killing five prison guards in their escape.

Prior to this attack, Montoneros guerrillas operating in the province had shot and killed two policeman (Juan C. Ceballos and Juan Carlos Vallejo) on October 9, 1970.

During a joint operation in Tucumán Province on July 27, 1972, Montoneros and FAR guerrillas stole weapons and uniforms from a police station, killing two policemen in the process.

On August 5, 1973, ERP guerrillas in the province shot and killed a police inspector, Major Hugo Tomagnini. On October 4, the Marxist guerrillas struck again in Tucumán, mortally wounding a policeman, Casimiro Reyes Mansilla.

On May 22, 1974, a Police Corporal (Vicente Marcelo Lazarte) succumbs to his wounds, after having been gunned down by ERP guerrillas while on traffic control duties in Tucumán Province.

On September 20, 1974, the ERP guerrillas operating in the province kill another two policemen, Eudoro Ibarra and Héctor Oscar Zaraspe.

On January 5, 1975, an Army DHC-6 transport plane was downed near the Monteros mountains, shot down by Marxist Guerrillas. All thirteen on board were killed.

On 14 February 1975, Senior Lieutenant Héctor Cáceres from the Army Commando Company supporting the 5th Mountain Infantry Brigade, is killed in an ERP ambush near Pueblo Viejo River. Another Army Commando, Lieutenant Rodolfo Ritcher is badly wounded and left wheelchair bound for life. Two Army helicopter gunships attempt to cut off the guerrilla escape route but are repelled by shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles.

The Argentinian Army 5th Brigade (consisting of the 19th, 20th and 29th Mountain Infantry Regiments and commanded by Brigadier-General Acdel Vilas) received the order to move to Famailla in the foothills of the Monteros mountains on February 8, 1975. While fighting the guerrillas in the jungle, Vilas concentrated on uprooting the ERP civilian support network in the towns, using terror tactics later adopted nationwide, as well as a hearts and mind campaign. The Argentinian security forces used techniques no different from their US and French counterparts in Vietnam and Algeria.

In February 1976, in the Battle of El Cadillal, soldiers of the 14th Airborne Infantry Regiment engage the 65-strong Montonero Army Mountain Force sent to Tucumán Province as reinforcements, Corporal Héctor Roberto Lazarte and Private Pedro Burguener from the Paratroop Regiment are killed in the fierce action. Nevertheless, the paratroopers kill several Montoneros guerrillas in the army ambush, including Juan Carlos Alsogaray, commander of the mountain company and son of the former Commander in Chief of the Argentinian Army, Lieutenant-General Julio Alzogaray.

On September 28, 1977 counterinsurgency operations in Tucumán province finally came to an end, with the Argentinian military and police reporting 100 killed and 500 wounded in defeating the guerrillas.

Urban guerilla warfare

The Montonero insurgent leadership made a conscious decision to “militarize” the struggle and attack directly the Argentinian police and military forces in the main cities. The political objectives that originally motivated the envisioned proportionate action were sacrificed in favour of military escalation. The groups that were supposedly to bring national and social liberation to the country developed into mirror images of the Argentinian armed forces with their own military banners and uniforms, and legitimizing political-psychological efforts were considered unproductive niceties.

The urban guerrillas operating in Buenos Aires made major headlines on April 5, 1969 when armed members of the Armed Forces of Liberation (Fuerzas Argentinas de Liberación or FAL) attacked the Campo de Mayo Army Barracks and seized 100 automatic rifles from the Elite 1st 'Patricios' Regiment.

The leftist militants bombed and destroyed numerous buildings in the 1970s in its campaign against the civilian and military authorities; these belonged chiefly to police and military hierarchies. But a number of civilian and non-governmental buildings were targeted as well, such as the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Buenos Aires, which was bombed in 1972 (killing a Canadian woman, Lois Crozier and injuring her husband Gerry Crozier) and the bombing of a crowded theatre in downtown Buenos Aires in 1975. In November 1971, in solidarity with striking workers, Montoneros guerrillas seized an Italian car plant in Caseros and set alight and destroyed with gasoline several Fiat 38 vehicles. In 1971, the leftist guerrillas killed 57 policemen, and in 1972, despite a heightened alert, the guerrilleros managed to kill another 38 policemen.

On February 4, 1972, police corporal Conrado Likay Faldi was shot dead in the Bernal suburb of Buenos Aires. On February 14, 1972, FAL guerrillas supporting urban operations in the Barrio Norte suburb of Buenos Aires, delivered a bomb concealed in a flower bouquet to the house of the ex-Justice Minister Jaime Perriaux, killing three policemen (Roque Russo, Rómulo Salvatierra and Néstor Godoy) and mortally wounding another (Oscar Raúl Pereda) of an anti-explosives unit, and wounding eleven others, including neighbors. In July 1972 a bomb planted by Montoneros activists in Plaza de San Isidro in Buenos Aires, wounded three policemen and blinded a fireman (Carlos Adrián Ayala) who died of his injuries in hospital. On December 28, 1972, Marine Private Julio César Provenzano, operating on behalf of the ERP guerrillas, is killed while plating a bomb in the men's room of the Argentinian Navy Headquarters.

On February 1, 1973, First Lieutenant José Maria Naccarato was killed while driving in the city of Resistencia in Chaco Province when a bomb planted in his car detonated. On March 6, 1973, urban guerrillas shot dead three policemen (1st Corporal Máximo Maydana and Corporals José Sergio Contreras and Luis María Benítez) at a dance hall in the José C. Paz suburb of Buenos Aires. Between September 16 and 17 1974, about 100 Montoneros bombs exploded throughout Argentina against ceremonies commemorating the military revolt which ended Juan Perón's first term as president and foreign companies.

During the month of August 1975, the Argentinian city of Córdoba witnessed a number of armed actions on the part of the local left-wing guerrillas and militants that resulted in the death of at least five policemen (Sergeant Juan Carlos Román, Corporal Rosario del Carmen Moyano and Agents Luis Rodolfo López, Jorge Natividad Luna and Juan Antonio Diaz) and parachute units from the Elite 4th Airborne Infantry Brigade earmarked for deployment in Tucumán Province, were obliged to be called in to stand guard at strategic points around the city for the remainder of the year, after the bombing of the local police headquarters and the police radio communications centre.

Targets in the bombings included three Ford showrooms; Peugeot and IKA-Renault showrooms; Goodyear and Firestone tire distributors, Riker and Eli pharmaceutical laboratories, Union carbide Battery Company, Bank of Boston and Chase Manhattan Bank branches, Xerox Corporation; and Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola bottling companies. In all, 83 members of the armed forces and policemen were killed in left-wing terror attacks between 1973 and 1974.

On November 13, 1975, three policemen and a leftist were reported killed in shoot-outs in the La Plata suburb of Buenos Aires. On November 16, about 40 Montoneros guerrillas stormed the police station at Arana, 30 miles south of Buenos Aires. Five policemen and one army captain were wounded in this gun- battle.

On December 15 a large Montoneros bomb planted in the Ministry of Defence building in downtown Buenos Aires kills 14 senior officers attending a counterinsurgency meeting.

In December 1975 most 5th Army Brigade units were committed to the border areas of Tucumán with over 5,000 troops deployed in the province. There was however, nothing to prevent infiltrating through this outer ring and the ERP guerrillas were still strong inside Buenos Aires. Mario Santucho's Christmas offensive opened on December 23, 1975. The operation was dramatic in its impact, with ERP units, supported by local Montoneros guerrillas, mounting a large scale assault against the army's Domingo Viejobueno supply base in the industrial suburb of Monte Chingolo, south of Buenos Aires. The attackers were defeated and driven off with 53 ERP guerrillas and 9 supporting Montoneros militants from the local suburbs killed.

Seven army troops and three policemen were reported killed. In this particular battle the ERP and supporting Montoneros militants had about 1,000 leftist militants deployed against 1,000 government forces. This large-scale operation was made possible not only by the planning of the guerrillas involved, but also by their civilian supporters who provided them safe houses, supplies and getaway vehicles.

On January 13, 1976, leftists set fire to a Buenos Aires commuter train after forcing passengers to descend at gunpoint. On January 26, ERP guerrillas supporting Montoneros operations in the suburb of Barracas in Buenos Aires, shoot and kill a female police traffic officer (21-year-old Silvia Ester Rosboch de Campana). On January 29, during a raid on the Bendix factory in the suburb of Munro in Buenos Aires, Montoneros shoot and kill Alberto Olabarrieta and Jorge Sarlenga of the factory's management, and an off-duty policeman, Juan Carlos Garavaglio, who had tried to intervene. On February 2, 1976 about fifty Montoneros attacked the Juan Vucetich Police Academy in Buenos Aires in an attempt to capture the helicopter-gunships stationed there, but were repelled in heavy fighting involving police reinforcements. In the week preceding the military coup, the Montoneros killed 13 policemen as part of its renewed offensive aptly named Third National Military Campaign. On March 15, a powerful guerrilla bomb exploded next to the Argentine Army Headquarters, smashing windows in the nearby Casa Rosada and wounding 15 military personnel and 6 civilians as well as killing a civilian passerby. On July 2, 1976, the Montoneros detonated a powerful bomb in the Argentinian Federal Police Headquarters in Buenos Aires, killing 24 and wounding 66 policemen and employees. During 1976, Videla himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in which a time bomb planted in the reviewing stand at the vast Campo de Mayo barracks blew out a meter-wide hole at the exact spot where he had been standing.

On September 12, 1976, a Montoneros car bomb destroyed a bus carrying police officers in the City of Rosario, killing nine policemen and a married couple: 56-year-old Oscar Walter Ledesma and 42-year-old Irene Ángela Dib. There were at least 50 wounded in the bomb blast. On September 29, 1976 fierce fighting took place in the Floresta suburb of Buenos Aires, where one-hundred soldiers and policemen were forced to use bazookas and armored cars against heavily armed guerrillas. On October 2, Lieutenant-General Jorge Videla narrowly escaped death when a bomb packed in metal tubing supporting a reviewing stand at the Campo de Mayo army barracks exploded only moments after he left. On October 4, 1976, Buenos Aires police foiled a leftist terror attack against American actress Rita Hayworth and members of the local press, during her widely publicized stay in the Sheraton Hotel. On October 17 a bomb blast in an Army Club Cinema in downtown Buenos Aires killed 11 and wounded about 50 officers and attending family members. On December 15, another bomb planted in a Defense Ministry movie hall killed 14 senior officers and injured another 30 military men and accompanying family members. By the first anniversary of the coup that ousted President Isabel Perón, 124 soldiers and police had been killed combating left-wing guerrillas and militants in what the military referred to as, "the Dirty War".

During 1977, in just Buenos Aires alone, 36 police were reported killed combating left-wing guerrillas and militants.

Power vaccum

After the death of the controversial President Juan Perón in 1974, his wife, Isabel Perón, assumed power. However, she was not very strong politically and a military junta led a coup against her and removed her from office. This military junta maintained its grip on power by cracking down on anybody whom they believed was associated with the guerrillas. The new regime under General Jorge Rafaél Videla attempted to apply a monetarist solution to economic problems and launched what it called the war against subversion, which came to be widely known to others as the "Dirty War", in an attempt to completely defeat left-wing guerrilla activity that was out of control by early 1976.

The Baltimore Sun reported in January 1976 on the fighting taking place in Tucumán province:

In the jungle-covered mountains of Tucumán, long known as 'Argentina's garden', Argentines are fighting Argentines in a Vietnam-style civil war. So far, the outcome is in doubt. But there is no doubt about the seriousness of the combat, which involves 2,000 or so leftist guerrillas and perhaps as many as 10,000 soldiers.

National Reorganization Process

With the initial support of the majority of the Argentinian population, the military regime undertook widespread kidnappings, torture, and murder — not only of the violent guerrillas of the left but also civilian supporters in the form of the unarmed leftist political activists, guerrilla sympathizers, and their lawyers and families. The war against subversion was viewed within the military's National Security Doctrine as the beginning of "World War III," which it defined as a struggle against the efforts of communism for world supremacy. In seven years as many as 30,000 Argentines were either killed or imprisoned.

Military victory was achieved after three years of open fighting and a stream of kidnappings, disappearances and imprisonments that brought a total breakdown of due process for those suspected of being connected with the guerrillas. By June 1978 the guerrillas were all but eliminated, and the military junta declared victory. However, the Montoneros launched a counteroffensive in 1979 that resulted in the almost total annihilation of their returning PLO-trained Special Forces. By 1980 the last vestiges of the terrorist groups had died out, and the disappearances had stopped.

In the view of the National Reorganization Process (Proceso de Reorganización Nacional or Proceso), the eradication of subversion meant not only the guerrillas' activities, but also any form of left-wing activism whether found in the universities, the church, the press, the factory, or even the arts or culture. Building a new national framework required eradicating the Peronists, the left-wing trade unions, parliamentary radicals and leftist revolutionaries. To build the economy required eliminating Cultural Marxism and an industrial sector controlled by a blue-collar worker class sympathetic to the guerrilla movement.

Victims

Leftists were viewed with suspicion and tens of thousands were detained at one point: union leaders who agitated for wage increases and militancy in the US and European-owned car plants in Argentina, students who were members of the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios (Union of High School Students or UES) that supplied the People's Revolutionary Army with fighters in Tucumán province, left-wing journalists like Rodolfo Jorge Walsh that were not fearful of the dictatorship, human-rights lawyers who defended left-wing guerrillas and militants, young communists, socialists, nuns and priests that had ties with the Third World Priest Movement. And family members or friends of any of them; people that provided the left-wing guerrillas and militants with safe houses and financial support.

Children of the Disappeared

With the return of democracy, human rights groups in Argentina started searching for the grandchildren stolen from detained female guerrillas and civilian supporters and adopted in the military community. At the time, the Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Plaza de Mayo claimed that 172 children disappeared together with their parents or were born at the numerous detention camps and had not been returned to their families.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo now claim that 500 grandchildren were adopted by military families. 121 were admittedly located and reunited with their biological families by late 2016 with the announcement that Gustavo Menna, son of Domingo Mingo Menna, and Ana María La Aní Lanzillotto (both ERP militants) had been discovered. On April 13, 2000, the grandmothers received a tip off that the birth certificate of Rosa Roisinblit's infant grandson, born in detention, had been falsified and the child given to an Air Force civil employee and his wife. Following the anonymous phone call, he was located and agreed to a DNA blood test, confirming his true identity. Rodolfo Fernando, grandson of Roisinblit, is the first known newborn of missing children returned to his family through the work of the grandmothers. Roisinblit's daughter, 25-year-old Patricia Julia Roisinblit de Perez, who was a Montoneros member, was kidnapped along with her husband, 24-year-old José Martínas Pérez Rojo, on October 6, 1978.

The case of Maria Eugenia Sampallo (born some time in 1978) also received considerable attention. Sampallo sued the couple who adopted her illegally as a baby after her parents disappeared, both admittedly Montoneros. Her grandmother spent 24 years looking for her. The case was filed in 2001, after DNA tests indicated that Osvaldo Rivas and Maria Cristina Gomez were not her biological parents. They, along with Army Captain Enrique Berthier, who furnished the couple with the baby, were sentenced respectively to 8, 7 and 10 years in prison for kidnapping during the Kirchner government.

The PEN Disappeared held in detention camps

By the time of the coup on March 24, 1976, the number of disappeared held under Poder Ejecutivo Nacional (PEN) stood at least 5,182. Some 18,000 disappeared in the form of PEN detainees were imprisoned in Argentina by the end of 1977 and it is estimated that some 3,000-4,000 deaths occurred in the Navy Engineering School (ESMA). These disappeared were held incommunicado and reportedly tortured. Some, like senator Hipolito Solari Yrigoyen and socialist leader professor Alfredo Bravo, were detenidos-desaparecidos. Alicia Partnoy, a poet and member of the Peronist Youth that had links with the Montoneros, also counts as one of the victims who had disappeared but later "reappeared." On November 10, 1977, Colonel Ricardo Flouret and Captain Eduardo Andujar, representing the interior ministry, explained to Amnesty International that many of the disappeared were in fact guerrillas who had gone underground or fled the country.

By refusing to acknowledge the existence of what was later established to be at least 340 detention camps throughout the country they also denied the existence of their occupants, some 30,000 Argentines are estimated to have passed through the camps. The total number of people who were detained for long periods was 8,625. Among them was future President Carlos Menem, who between 1976 and 1981 had been a political prisoner.

US President Jimmy Carter offered to accept 3,000 PEN detainees, as long as they had no terrorist background. Some 8,600 PEN disappeared were eventually released under international pressure. Of these 4,029 were held in illegal detention centres for less than a year, 2,296 for one to three years, 1,172 for three to five years, 668 for five to seven years, and 431 for seven to nine years. Of these detenidos-desaparecidos 157 were killed after being released from detention.

Casualty estimates

The New York Times reporter David Vidal wrote on January 5, 1979 that the number of disappeared in Latin America as a whole now numbered 30,000. The Christian Science Monitor and The Boston Globe soon followed suit with similar stories, claiming 30,000 people had disappeared under military dictatorships in Latin America and not just Argentina. The Los Angeles Times repeated the claims of 30,000 Latin Americans and not just Argentinians, disappeared in a new article published in October 1979 and November of that year. The Nunca Más report issued by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) in 1984, identified 8,961 persons "disappeared" between 1976 and 1983, in a case by case verification, and another list of 1,300 victims seen alive in clandestine detention centres.

In 1977, General Albano Harguindeguy, Interior Minister, admitted that 5,618 people disappeared in the form of PEN detenidos-desaparecidos were being held in detention camps throughout Argentina. According to a secret cable from DINA (Chilean secret police) operating in Buenos Aires, an intercepted report by the Argentine 601st Intelligence Battalion in mid-July 1978, which started counting victims in 1975, estimated that up to 22,000 people were missing in Argentina in 1978 (killed or held in detention camps) – this document was first published by John Dinges in 2004.

The total number of disappeared in the form of PEN prisoners was 8,625 and of these disappeared 157 were killed after being released from detention. Human Rights Groups in Argentina often cite a figure of 30,000 disappeared, Amnesty International estimates 20,000 while other observers think 12,000 is a more accurate figure. In 1988, the Asamblea por los Derechos Humanos (APDH or Assembly for Human Rights) published its findings on the disappearances and stated that 12,261 people were killed or disappeared during the Dirty War. The Montoneros admitted losing 5,000 guerrillas killed, and the ERP admitted 5,000 of their own guerrillas had been killed. By comparison, Argentinian security forces also suffered heavy losses in the form of 523 killed between 1969 and 1975 and another 205 killed between 1976 and 1978. In all, there were 18,331 victims of left-wing terrorism, including 13,000 civilians and close to 5,000 killed, wounded or maimed for life in the military and police forces.

There is no agreement on the number of detenidos-desaparecidos. In a 2009 interview with the Buenos Aires daily newspaper Clarín, Graciela Fernández Meijide, who formed part of the 1984 truth commission, claimed that the proven number of Argentinian killed or disappeared was closer to 9,000. Between 1969 and 1979, left-wing guerrillas accounted for 3,249 kidnappings and murders and 5,215 bombings. CONADEP also recorded 458 assassinations (attributed to the Argentinian Anti-Communist Alliance) and about 600 forced disappearances during the period of democratic rule between 1973 and 1976.

In a final report televised on April 28, 1983 as the military prepared their departure, the ruling junta officially declared that the disappeared were all dead but said the military junta had saved the nation by their actions. Human Rights Group, such as the Argentinian League for Human Rights, condemned the junta's final report and claimed at the time, that between 6,000 and 15,000 people had disappeared in Argentina between 1975 and 1979. Some 11,000 Argentinians have applied for and received around US$200,000 each as monetary compensation for the loss of loved ones during the military dictatorship. In more recent times, journalist Alfonso Daniels put forward the outlandish claim in an article he wrote for the Daily Telegraph that over 30,000 Argentinians disappeared.

Military downfall

Although the military junta carried out its successful war against suspected subversives throughout its entire existence, it was ironically a foreign foe allied with the Chilean military government of General Augusto Pinochet which brought the Argentinian regime to an end. In the early 1980s, it became clear to both the world and the Argentinian people that the military junta was behind the brutal disappearances and imprisonment of tens of thousands of kidnappings. The junta, facing increasing opposition over its human rights record, as well as mounting allegations of corruption, sought to allay domestic criticism by launching a successful campaign to regain Las Islas Malvinas (the Falkland Islands).

British military historian Martin Middlebrook argues that the military junta occupied the Falklands/Malvinas in order to suppress its opposition, principally the exiled Peronists, because the cost - measured in terms of legitimacy - of suppressing their supporters was relatively low at the beginning of the junta's rule. But the cost of suppression increased over time because of the military regime's ruthless suppression of anyone who supported the guerrillas, its failed economic policies, and its defeat in the Falkland Islands/Malvinas War, and thus it had to tolerate its opposition and eventually return power to civilian authority.

The Falklands/Malvinas Islands had been a thorn in the relations between Argentina and Britain, which reoccupied them in 1833, and Argentina, which claimed them since independence. The junta had thought that it could occupy these islands without a British military response, regaining its popularity and control over its people in the process. However, the government was wrong in its conclusions when 72 days after the initial Argentinian military operations, British army and marine units won the ground war, having captured over 11,000 Argentinians in the process.

External links

• Encyclopædia Britannica article