The Argentine Vietnam? The Revolutionary Left, Mass Mobilization, and the Construction of a New Consciousness, 1968–76

In 1974, the Marxist People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) launched a rural insurgency in Tucumán, northwestern Argentina: an impoverished, sugar-growing province with striking similarities to Cuba.  It was the fifth and final attempt to transform the region into an Argentine Vietnam.  In the end, however, it was the military that triumphed by employing genocidal French and American counter-insurgency tactics that would become the basis for its “Dirty War” following a coup d’etat one year later, in 1976.  Much of the historiography concerning Tucumán and the left during this period has heavily focused upon the ERP’s ill-fated decision.  Like the national historiography, this has meant an exclusive focus on armed struggle to the detriment of other forms of resistance.  It has also excluded other revolutionary organizations such as the Montoneros, as well.  My paper seeks to redress this gap by examining those transnational methodologies of the revolutionary left that went beyond a rural foco.  Nearly every other organization in the province disagreed with the ERP’s guerrilla as a means to mobilize sugar workers and seize power.  Instead, they proposed a prolonged effort that would use alternate strategies such as literacy campaigns, theater, the creation of radical spaces, and urban insurrections as methods to create a popular consciousness and mobilize the poor.  While Tucumán was a laboratory for rural armed struggle, my paper shall demonstrate that it was also a laboratory for other forms of revolution, both borrowed from abroad and crafted within the province itself.