PRINCIPAL COMBATANTS: The Argentine government and
military junta vs. all political rivals, principally left-wing guerrillas
PRINCIPAL THEATER(S): Argentina DECLARATION: None
MAJOR ISSUES AND OBJECTIVES: Control of the Argentine
government
OUTCOME: Although the leftists were defeated, the
extreme right-wing junta ultimately lost control, and on October 30, 1983, democratic elections were held.
APPROXIMATE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF MEN UNDER ARMS:
Government forces, 154,000 (plus thousands of right- wing terrorists); guerrilla forces, about 3,000
CASUALTIES: About 18,000 killed or “disappeared,” mostly
leftists
TREATIES: None
The so-called Dirty War was fought by a variety of guer- rilla groups against the ruling military dictatorship of Argentina. Among the welter of organizations involved, the two main guerrilla armies were the Montoneros, a left- ist group favoring the return of populist leader Juan Perón (1895–1974), and the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), a radical Marxist group, established on July 28, 1970, which had the goal of leading a mass uprising.
As its name suggests, the war was not fought in set battles by regular armies but was a long sequence of guer- rilla and terrorist acts, the first of which was the abduc- tion, on June 1, 1969, and execution of former president Pedro Aramburu (c. 1903–70), a leading anti-Perónist, by the Montoneros. This was followed by low-level terrorist warfare, which included the August 15, 1972, escape of 25 ERP political prisoners in Patagonia. A handful hijacked an airplane and escaped, but 16 were captured and sum- marily machine-gunned to death. This act gave the Marx- ists martyrs, around whom they rallied, and on June 20, 1973, an airport celebration to welcome Juan Perón from 18 years of Spanish exile erupted into a gun battle in which 30 died and 300 were wounded.
Shortly after his return to Argentina, Perón again became president of Argentina, with his second wife, Isabel (b. 1931), as vice president. This temporarily quelled national violence, but that was renewed as Perón leaned increasingly toward the right. His death on July 1, 1974, brought Isabel Perón into office and reignited vio- lence on a large scale. The ERP and the Montoneros con- sisted of at most a few thousand troops, whereas the Argentine government commanded a military of 85,000 soldiers, 33,000 sailors and marines, 17,000 airmen, and 19,000 paramilitary police troops. In addition, right-wing militias consisted of several thousands.
As the general violence escalated, the ERP was rein- forced by guerrilla exiles from Chile, Bolivia, and Uruguay. These groups incited rebellion in rural districts, while the Montoneros focused on the cities. The Argentine army launched a sweeping offensive against the ERP in Tucuman during February–April 1975. The government forces, 8,000 strong, reported killing some 350 guerrillas, and within the first eight months of 1975 that toll had risen to
800. However, rebels launched several attacks directly on the military, including a December 23, 1975, assault on the arsenal at Monte Chingolo, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Simultaneously with this attack, some 170 guerrillas struck military and police targets in the city proper. Government forces repulsed all the attacks. A total of 85 guerrillas died, as did seven government soldiers and 10 civilians.
The chronic violence, compounded by the widespread corruption of the Isabel Perón regime, prompted the mili- tary to mount a coup, which ousted Perón on March 24, 1976. A military junta under General Jorge Rafael Videla (b. 1925) took draconian measures against the leftists. Between March 1976 and March 1977 1,700 guerrillas and leftist “sympathizers” were killed at the cost of 124 deaths among military forces.
The Argentine military actively recruited the assistance of right-wing terror squads, which initiated a campaign against some 25,000 political exiles living in Argentina. The most prominent of these was the former leftist president of Bolivia, Juan José Torres (1947–76), murdered by rightists in June 1976.
Despite the forces mounted against them, leftist guer- rillas continued to strike back. In June 1976 the Mon- toneros assassinated federal police chief General Cesareo Cardozo and the next month detonated a bomb in the din- ing room of the Superintendency of Federal Security, killing 43 officers and wounding 100. In October Videla was the target of a bomb planted under a reviewing stand; he narrowly escaped death. But the July 1976 assassina- tion of General Omar Carlos Actis by the guerrillas trig- gered massive retaliation from rightist terror squads, which assassinated some 50 prominent leftists, including the top members of the ERP.
The year 1976 was the bloodiest of the period of rightist repression, with a death toll of 1,480. In 1977, 677 died, and by 1978 the leftist guerrillas had been badly sapped, down to a few hundred hard-liners. By the end of the decade the guerrilla movement had been effectively crushed. About 9,000 leftists had lost their lives since 1970, and another 7,000 had simply vanished—disap- peared—after arrest by the junta. The junta reported a total of 2,050 civilians killed by terrorists of the left as well as right during the period 1973–79. More objective observers attribute only about 700 deaths to leftist terror- ism. The military government of Argentina also killed political refugees from neighboring nations. Pursuant to secret agreements with other right-wing South American dictatorships, “Operation Condor” killed 118 Uruguayan exiles, 57 Paraguayans, 49 Chileans, and nine Brazilians.
Between April 2 and June 14, 1982, the Argentine mil- itary was embroiled in war with Great Britain over control of the Falkland Islands (see FALKLANDISLANDSWAR). After
Argentina’s initial success in overpowering the 84-man Royal Marine garrison at Port Stanley, the military leader- ship was discredited, and by June 14 the military governor
of the Falklands, General Mario Benjamín Menéndez (active 1970s–80s), surrendered to British major general Jeremy Moore (b. 1933). Three days later President Leo- poldo Galtieri (1926–2003) resigned and was succeeded by Major General Reynaldo Bignone, who reconstituted the junta and began taking steps toward reinstating civilian rule. On October 30, 1983, Raúl Alfonsín (b. 1926) was elected president. Inaugurated on December 10, the new president quickly stated his intention to arrest the mem- bers of the military junta who had conducted the “dirty war” since 1976. He prosecuted members of the armed forces for human rights abuses, and a number of high- ranking government officials were tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Under pressure from the military, which threatened a new coup, Alfonsín pardoned most of those convicted before he left office in 1989.
Further reading: Iain Guest, Behind the Disappear-
ances: Argentina’s Dirty War Against Human Rights and the United Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2000); Daniel K. Lewis, The History of Argentina (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).