Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Antonius C. G. M. Robben
89 wounded attributed to the violence.24 However, as James observes, the extent of the Peronist Resistance was exaggerated by the Peronists intent on demonstrating their strength and by the authorities eager to justify their repressive measures.25 As was explained in Chapter 2, government repression and the institutional pragmatism of integrationist union leaders ended the Peronist Resistance in the economic sector by 1961.
Perón ordered guerrilla warfare as the third form of opposition once civil resistance had destabilized the dictatorship. The guerrilla insurgency would aim at military installations, public utilities, and human targets.26 In a letter of 3 November 1956, Perón left no mistake about the nature of the violence: “The more violent we are the better: terror can only be beaten by greater terror.”27
Perón had one insurmountable problem. He was too far from the theater of operations to direct the Peronist Resistance. He relied mainly on John William Cooke. Cooke had been a Peronist congressman and had shown his unwavering loyalty to Perón in September 1955. He was imprisoned, tortured, and subjected to mock executions. Despite these abuses, Cooke conducted the Peronist Resistance from his prison cell in Río Gallegos. Perón had so much faith in Cooke that he had even designated him in November 1956 as his successor in case of a premature death. Cooke succeeded in making a spectacular prison escape to Chile in March 1957.28
Perón and Cooke shared the belief that a general insurrection would bring down the Aramburu-Rojas government, but disagreed on how to achieve this objective. Perón stated that a guerrilla war should only be initiated after civil resistance and a paralyzing general strike failed to bring down the military government.29 Cooke, instead, believed that only a combative and devoted vanguard, the “backbone of civil resistance,” could instigate a mass uprising.30
In June 1958, Perón decided that the time had arrived to lash out at the Frondizi government which had failed to keep its promise to protect worker rights. Perón proposed both violent and nonviolent resistance. He founded the CNP or Peronist National Command (Comando Nacional Peronista) to direct the multipronged offensive. This organization functioned as a clandestine general staff to Perón. The CNP was presided over by General Iñíguez and integrated several small guerrilla organizations.31 These groups consisted principally of retired military officers who were suspicious of civilian activists and reluctant to provide them with weapons.32 The failed November 1960 coup by General Iñíguez, and the subsequent arrests, ended the organized involvement of these retired Peronist officers in the Peronist Resistance.33 With the role of the retired Peronist military played out, Perón’s loyal second John William Cooke came to embody the armed resistance, and would become an inspiration for the Peronist guerrilla organizations of the 1970s.
After his escape from Argentina in 1957, Cooke tried in vain to organize the armed resistance from his exile in Chile and Uruguay. The Peronist Resistance remained a rank-and-file affair that never reached the organizational level of a guerrilla organization. Cooke shuttled between Chile and Uruguay from 1957 to 1960, entering Argentina clandestinely several times in attempts to organize the Peronist Resistance, especially during the 1959 Lisandro de la Torre insurrection, until he departed for Cuba in 1960. Before his departure, Cooke gave his approval to a rural guerrilla insurgency in the remote hills of Tucumán.34
In mid-1959, Argentina’s first rural guerrilla force arose, supported by tiny groups of young Peronists assaulting police stations to obtain weapons. The guerrilla group intended to overthrow Frondizi and pave the way for Perón’s return to power. The main force in Tucumán was a poorly armed group of about twenty men, under the command of Manuel Enrique Mena, calling themselves Uturuncos. Uturunco was the Quechua word for a legendary man who transformed himself into a tiger to avenge social injustice. The timing seemed right because the industrial working class continued in a combative mood, even after the military repression of the Lisandro de la Torre insurrection in January 1959.
The thoughts of the Uturuncos must certainly have gone out to the revolutionary victory in Cuba earlier that year. The terrain was comparable to the Sierra Maestra, the population consisted also of poor peasants, and Castro’s original group that began operations in December 1956 agreed more on their common opposition to the dictator Batista than on ideology. The Uturuncos were also ideologically divided, and only united in their common opposition to Frondizi. They were mostly former students coming from the left-wing JP or Peronist Youth (Juventud Peronista) and the right-wing ALN or Nationalist Liberating Alliance (Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista), as well as the PSRN or the Socialist Party of the National Revolution (Partido Socialista de la Revolución Nacional). The Peronist participants demanded the return of Perón, the nationalists opposed the drilling concessions made to foreign oil companies, and the socialists wanted more worker rights.
The small guerrilla force established two camps in northeast Tucumán, and hoped eventually to secure a liberated zone, a strategy that had proven successful in the Sierra Maestra. Their only feat of arms was the seizure of a police station in the hamlet of Frías on Christmas Day of 1959. The unexpected action received the public support of the Peronist Organization, but behind closed doors the violence was believed to be too radical and too threatening to the political space being negotiated with Frondizi. Weakened by internal divisions, ideological disagreements, and desertions, the group was finally trapped by a police force of several hundred on 10 January 1960. Three men were caught. The rest escaped to Bolivia and the city of Tucumán.35 Even though the guerrilla insurgency had been a military failure, the die had been cast. The Uturuncos demonstrated that political protest in Argentina was not restricted to strikes, occupations, crowd mobilizations, street violence, and sabotage, but that a small group might engage the state’s security forces in armed combat.
Jorge Rulli and his street fighters were impressed by the Uturuncos. “I believe that we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the armed struggle. What happens is that we were already on the pathway of violence, and it becomes then very difficult not to escalate further.”36 Some of Rulli’s friends entered the Peronist guerrilla groups, but most found a new basis in the unions and joined the resistance in factories.37 Revolutionary dreams were kindled by the contrast between the noncombative institutional pragmatism of the unions in Argentina during the 1960s, and an international context of heightened tension between East and West due to insurgency and national liberation movements in Algeria, Angola, the Congo, Vietnam, and, of course, Cuba.
The Cuban Revolution
The 1959 Cuban Revolution sent political shockwaves through the American continent. Within months after seizing power, Castro implemented radical agrarian reforms, strengthened the ties with the Soviet Union, and trained foreign revolutionaries in guerrilla warfare. The initiative for exporting the revolution was taken by the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His so-called Liberation Department trained combatants for incursions in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.38 Still hesitant to admit openly to the Revolution’s socialist course, Fidel Castro ordered during his April 1959 visit to Washington the rounding up of Nicaraguan trainees in Cuba, while Che Guevara declared that Cuba was exporting the revolutionary idea but not revolutions because revolutions were fought only by the exploited themselves.39 Guevara was of course hiding his real intentions, but he was right that revolutions do not prosper without a local resonance. The failure of the Uturuncos had demonstrated this all too clearly. As we shall see, neither the Argentine revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s nor Guevara himself would heed this advice. Guevara embarked on a fateful and ill-conceived adventure in Bolivia, while Argentine rural guerrillas would time and again fight their losing battles without the support of local peasants.
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was heating up within one year of the Cuban Revolution. The Soviet Union had gained a foothold on the Western hemisphere, less than a day’s sailing from the U.S. coast. To add insult to injury, Cuba expanded its efforts to spread the revolutionary faith in Latin America. Driven by a desire to combat American imperialism and protect the Cuban Revolution, Guevara hoped to duplicate the Cuban scenario all over Latin America. He drew three fundamental lessons about revolutionary warfare from the Cuban experience: