Montoneros. The Rise and Fall of Argentine Guerrilla

CAMPOS, ESTEBAN

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2022;

The Montoneros were the main guerrilla organisation in Argentina, in terms of their proximity to power and the influence of their youth, trade union, territorial and women’s organisations which could mobilise thousands of followers. In some aspects their trajectory represents a chapter in the history of urban guerrillas in the Southern Cone region, with social roots in the middle and upper classes of the large cities, and a political culture renewed by the New Left in the 1960s, which in the Montoneros was expressed by the fusion of Catholic youth and the Marxist left. But what makes this armed vanguardist organisation unique, with its goal of taking power in order to build socialism, was its conflictive inclusion in the populist movement headed by the charismatic leadership of General Juan Domingo Perón. Between 1970 and 1983, the Montoneros carried out small and large-scale armed actions, embedded themselves in public institutions and governmental structures, and developed their own network of publications, clandestine printworks and arms factories. After the military coup in 1976, the Montoneros leadership-in-exile forged links with sectors as diverse as the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the international human rights movement, and European social democratic parties; despite that it could not prevent the mass assassination of its militants by the illegal repression.