Argentina: Cuba and the Rise of Armed Revolution

This paper does not propose that the Cuban Revolution singlehandedly promoted the armed rebellion of the early 1970s that resulted in extensive civil strife and bloodletting.  In fact, the roots of political contention began when the military ousted  Juan Perón’s populist regime in 1955.  For the next 18 years, the armed forces prevented Peronist participation in politics.  Then in 1959, Fidel Castro’s victory over dictatorship gave Peronist loyalists 1) an example of guerrilla fighters defeating the standing army; 2) direct links to revolution through Che Guevara; 3) guerrilla training; and 4) a theory of armed struggle with which to revise according to Argentinean reality.  The Cuban Revolution inspired the Peronist left, such as John William Cooke and Rodolfo Walsh, whose living in and writing about Cuba influenced a succeeding generation of youth with little memory of Peronism in power.  Others traveled to revolutionary Cuba.  Castro’s example led to the rural uprising of the Uturuncos in late 1959, followed by Guevara’s own creation with Cuban assets of the Comandante Segundo rebellion in 1963-4.  A third rural group of guerrillas, the People’s Revolutionary Army, took to the field in 1970 with avowedly Trotskyist and Maoist ideas.   However, the youngest generation of rebels, especially those of right-wing origins, came over to Peronism and discarded foquismo for urban warfare.  This group, the Montoneros, ultimately provoked the savage military repression that ended with massive human rights abuses in the late 1970s.