Abstract
In recent years, investigation on 1960s/1970s revolutionary activism in Argentina has led to the publication of multiple case studies. Building on this literature, a more general view of what is often called the “new left” indicates that it is characterized by the importance assigned to three issues: social liberation, national liberation, and revolutionary violence. Two differentiating lines within this political space are an ideological divide (Marxism vs. Peronism) and an instrumental division over the strategic status of violence (insurrection vs. protracted people’s war vs. political-military action).
En los últimos años, las investigaciones sobre el activismo revolucionario de la década de 1960–1970 en Argentina han dado lugar a la publicación de múltiples estudios de caso. En base a este material, se propone una visión más general de la a menudo denominada “nueva izquierda”, y cómo esta se caracteriza a partir de la importancia asignada a tres factores: la liberación social, la liberación nacional y la violencia revolucionaria. Hay dos dimensiones dentro de este espacio político: una división ideológica (marxismo vs. peronismo) y una división instrumental en torno al papel estratégico de la violencia (insurrección vs. guerra popular prolongada vs. acción político-militar).
In the 1960s and 1970s, Argentina experienced an unprecedented wave of political unrest (Anzorena, 1998; de Riz, 2000; Franco, 2012; Novaro and Palermo, 2003). After the urban insurrection of Córdoba in 1969 (often nicknamed the Cordobazo), a series of armed revolutionary organizations emerged in public space. These revolutionary movements deeply affected Argentine politics up until 1977, when they were physically annihilated by a civil-military dictatorship established a year earlier (Carnovale, 2011; Gillespie, 1982). They have become a major element in Argentine contemporary political debates, marked by regular controversies over the 1970s “guerrilla”; oversimplified and/or anachronistic accounts of recent history are a common component of Argentine political competition. At the same time, academic contributions have privileged case-study approaches rather than theoretical synthesis, making it harder for the public to grasp the main issues of the period’s revolutionary action. This article aims at providing a general frame for understanding the complex dynamics of radical protest during that period. It discusses some of the concepts used to describe that cycle of mobilization with a special focus on the new left, for which it provides a synthetic definition based on the existing literature.
From a global perspective, the new left was a wave of radical movements that emerged in the “long sixties” (Marwick, 1998) or “1968 years” (Dreyfus-Armand et al., 2000). These movements criticized the traditional left focus on economic exploitation and denounced a broader process of alienation in capitalist and bureaucratic systems (Gosse, 2005; Keucheyan, 2012). In Latin America “there was a tendency to define the left not so much by the goal it was pursuing [i.e., socialism] [as] by the means it used to reach that goal” (Harnecker, 2015), armed struggle or institutional struggle. What is usually referred to as “new left” in the region is the combined appeal for socialism and armed struggle. However, the idea of a new left involves a very heterogeneous political reality whose limits are hard to draw and whose form and content vary from one country to another.
Although Argentina was clearly a major actor in the consolidation of a transnational new-left political culture in Latin America (Marchesi, 2017), there have been strong discussions in Argentine scholarship on radical politics about the correctness of the “new-left” label. Indeed, Argentina’s political structure of divisions has some peculiarities—notably the impact of Peronism on the blurring of ideologies. Studies on radical Peronist organizations have seldom used the new-left frame and instead privileged the concept of “revolutionary Peronism” (Bozza, 2001). This may seem logical, since a large proportion of progressive Peronists (aspiring to a “socialist homeland”) do not identify themselves as part of the left, which is sometimes associated with antinationalism and intellectual elitism. However, interactions between revolutionary Peronists and left-wing organizations, intellectuals, and activists were constant (Altamirano, 2011), forming a universe of common references that is key to understanding the Argentine politics of that period. It will therefore be argued that the concept “new left” can be a useful (although imperfect) tool for exploring revolutionary unrest in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s and more specifically between 1969 (Cordobazo) and 1977 (annihilation of revolutionary organizations on Argentine soil).
Defining the Argentine New Left
Scholars and activists have used several conceptual frames to study the 1960s/1970s Argentine revolutionary wave, but none of them has achieved general approval. This section first gives a definition of the “new left” based on three criteria and then discusses the relevance of the alternative “revolutionary left” framework.
First, we can define the Argentine new left in terms of its belief in an immediate horizon of social liberation, one directly connected to the influence of the Cuban Revolution. The seizing of power by Fidel Castro in Havana in 1959 was an important milestone for the Latin American left as a whole: it questioned the reformist tactics privileged by socialists and communists in the context of post-1956 East/West peaceful coexistence. The favorable results obtained by guerrilla warfare in Cuba seemed to show, on the contrary, that a direct revolutionary strategy was possible for Latin American countries, although this sharply contradicted the Kremlin’s instructions. Through the Cuban example, social liberation (i.e., the creation of a socialist society) was reaffirmed as an immediate aspiration in Latin America. In Argentina this led to a serious dispute within the traditional Socialist and Communist Parties, resulting in a series of splits and the emergence in the early 1960s of a pro-Cuban current (Tortti, 2009).
A second feature of the Argentine new left was the relationship to Peronism and to the idea of national liberation. Named after Juan Domingo Perón (Argentine president, 1946–1955), Peronism blurred the distinction between left and right politics by advocating a strong form of nationalism and developing social policies directed toward the working classes. Peronism thus covered a wide spectrum of the Argentine political landscape, ranging from pro-fascist to pro-Castroist sectors and including conservative populists as well as progressive welfare-state reformists. Multiple disputes over Peronism took place within the traditional socialist and communist left. In the 1950s, despite grassroots popular support for Perón, the Socialist and Communist Parties had taken a clear anti-Peronist stance in the name of antitotalitarianism or antifascism. A characteristic of the new left was to reassess the “revolutionary potentialities of Peronism” (Tortti, 1999: 213). Indeed, considering that Peronism had reached high levels of support within the working classes, some sectors broke with the Socialist and Communist Parties, advocating for the Peronization of the left in order to reconnect with its original social base. The new left therefore argued that the political culture of the left had to be reassessed to account for Peronism and favored ideological and practical encounters with Peronists around a set of common objectives. This evolution can also be connected to the global move toward decolonization in the postwar period, mainly in Africa and Asia, and to the diffusion of the economic theory of dependency (Ferraro, 2008). These converging influences fostered preexisting anti-imperialist tendencies, the denunciation of Argentina’s “semicolonial” status under U.S. domination, and the pursuit of a new political independence (or national liberation). Within the Argentine left, this anticolonial school of thought paved the way for an increased dialogue with Peronism, which had always taken a strong stance against imperialism in the name of the Third Position, “neither Yankee nor Marxist” (Zanatta and Aguas, 2005). These ideological interactions between left-wing and Peronist anti-imperialism thus promoted national liberation as a shared principle.
The use of violence as a legitimate revolutionary tool, which skyrocketed after 1969, was a third defining element of the Argentine new left. This must be connected to the influence of the Cuban Revolution and the anticolonial wars in Algeria and Vietnam in particular. Among scholars, there is no agreement on the importance of violence in characterizing the new left. In their founding essay, Hilb and Lutzky (1984: 8, 29) equated the new left with “armed struggle, as immediate practice or as near future and, most of all, as a desired goal,” and with the idea that “war [is] the only way to make politics.” More recent research has challenged this view, criticizing its reduction of the new left to armed organizations: Oberti and Pittaluga (2011) have even suggested talking about “new lefts.” There is no straightforward conclusion to be drawn from this discussion. It nevertheless shows that for the new left violence was always a debatable issue, involving different (and sometimes opposing) responses and strategies around a shared concern. Violence itself took multiple forms and was often combined with electoral or institutional participation. It could even be perceived as a tool for defending human rights or as a path toward democracy—despite a frequent (but not systematic) rejection of liberal institutions (Copello, 2019a; 2019b). One of the challenges here is to classify these relations to violence in a mobile ideological and organizational landscape.
Choosing the new-left frame does not mean denying the various problems it may carry or rejecting alternative conceptualizations. It aims at identifying political dynamics that would otherwise be invisible, for instance, in using labels such as “revolutionary left,” a concept that is useful for avoiding overstatement of the old/new division. Indeed, important sectors of the new left came from the old communist and Trotskyist left as a result of organizational and ideological splits in the 1950s and 1960s. The impact of this provenience on the modeling of individual trajectories should not be underestimated. Moreover, the distinction between old and new left is not always obvious: several Trotskyist groups had changing tactics and objectives in the period analyzed. They sometimes bridged the gap between Marxism and nationalism in the name of anti-imperialism and sometimes advocated an orthodox form of class-struggle internationalism instead (Coggiola, 2006). Nevertheless, the distinction between old and new left (problematic as it is) has been an object of inquiry and public debate with real political effects and has had an impact on the way political actors themselves have conceived of their behavior. There is a difference between the 1960s/1970s revolutionary wave and earlier forms of revolutionary activism, and it should not go unnoticed because of possible confusions.
However imperfect, the concept of an Argentine new left thus brings a heuristic perspective to the radical mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It conveys the image of a political playground on which actors from different political traditions can position themselves on shared issues. Although insufficient, it is useful for understanding the subjective dimensions of political divisions in the 1968 years. To be part of the Argentine new left, one must invest social liberation, national liberation, and armed struggle with a subjective meaning and consider them key to the political moment, but their interpretation and combination will vary along ideological and instrumental lines.
Ideological Division
The main ideological division within the Argentine new left opposed Peronism and Marxism. Peronists relied on a multiclass alliance to promote national sovereignty, while Marxists aimed at establishing socialism under the primacy of the working class. However, this principal contradiction was multiform, open to hybridization and fluctuations: multiple groups presenting diverse combinations of Peronism and Marxism coexisted in the space of the Argentine new left. Figure 1 shows a simplified graphic understanding of these dynamics.
Ideological division of the Argentine new left. Juventud Peronista Lealtad split from the Montoneros to adopt a more movementist stance toward Peronism; Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) 22 split from the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT)–ERP to adopt a more populist stance, closer to Peronism; ERP Fracción Roja split from PRT-ERP to adopt a more classist stance; and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR) merged with the Montoneros.
Marxism-Peronism: The Principal Contradiction
Two major organizations epitomized the new left’s main contradiction—for Peronism the Montoneros and for Marxism the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores–Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (Workers’ Revolutionary Party–People’s Revolutionary Army—PRT-ERP). The Montoneros (Bartoletti, 2010a; Gillespie, 2008) were created at the end of the 1960s by a few dozen activists mainly based in Buenos Aires and Córdoba (Lanusse, 2005). Its initial action, Operation Pindapoy, took place in May 1970, a year after the Cordobazo, and consisted in the kidnapping and assassination of one of the main symbols of anti-Peronism, General Pedro Aramburu (leader of the military coup against Perón in 1955). In the years following this action the Montoneros gained popularity and absorbed other armed groups: a section of the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas (Peronist Armed Forces—FAP) (Duhalde and Pérez, 2001; Luvecce, 1993; Stavale, 2012), the Descamisados (Campos, 2012), and, above all, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces—FAR) (González Canosa, 2012). Between 1970 and 1973, Montoneros activists performed many acts of armed propaganda, mainly bombings of symbolic targets. They also set up kidnappings to finance these operations and stole weapons from police or military facilities. The aim of these activities was not to seize power through armed struggle but to pressure the military regime of the moment and facilitate Perón’s return from exile in Spain. In 1973 the Montoneros lent their full support to Héctor Cámpora, the Peronist candidate in the presidential election called by the decaying military administration. After the electoral victory, they placed a few sympathizers on governmental teams and in Congress and diversified their activities. Special activist groups were created in secondary schools (Garaño and Pertot, 2002; Manzano, 2011), universities (Chama and González Canosa, 2011; Rodríguez, 2014), and slums (Camelli, 2011; Snitcofsky, 2014). A youth territorial extension (Robles, 2014) and a female branch (Grammático, 2011) were also launched. Between 1973 and 1974, these front organizations (as opposed to the Montoneros’ clandestine apparatus) put together multiple street demonstrations with massive attendance (Gillespie, 2008: 194–195). According to most reasonable estimates, the organization had no more than 1,500–2,500 permanent armed combatants (Central Intelligence Agency, 1977) but surely assembled tens of thousands of sympathizers at the peak of its activism. However, after Perón himself replaced President Cámpora in October 1973, the government made a political U-turn to the far right, displacing the Montoneros from power centers. After the death of Perón in May 1974, the Montoneros and all their front organizations went underground and took up armed action again, this time against the Peronist government led by Perón’s widow, María Estela “Isabelita” Martínez de Perón (Gillespie, 2008: 249). Although their explicit new objective became the creation of a popular army in preparation for integral war, its operations still basically amounted to urban guerrilla warfare: kidnappings and bombings or raids on police stations and garrisons. Nevertheless, the military capabilities of the organization increased dramatically, and it started encouraging the indiscriminate murder of soldiers and policemen. Interestingly, although the Montoneros entered into direct conflict with the Peronist administration, they maintained their affiliation with Peronism. They tried to account for the sudden about-face of Perón in terms of manipulation by his entourage. This conspiracy theory enabled the Montoneros to claim their Peronist authenticity and loyalty in the face of Perón himself (Salas, 2007). Therefore they remained the main organization at the Peronist pole of the Argentine new left.
At the other end of this ideological spectrum, the Marxist pole was dominated by the PRT (Carnovale, 2011; Pozzi, 2004; Rubenstein, 2005). This organization appeared in 1965 with the merging of Palabra Obrera (Labor Word), a Trotskyist party headed by Nahuel Moreno, and the Frente Revolucionario Indoamericanista Popular (Popular Indo-Americanist Revolutionary Front—FRIP), led by Mario Roberto Santucho. Composed of a few hundred activists, it combined Marxism with anti-imperialist indigenism. In 1968, internal tensions resulted in a split between PRT–La Verdad (The Truth), led by Moreno, and PRT–El Combatiente (The Combatant), led by Santucho. The latter advocated armed struggle and in 1970 created a parallel military structure, the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army—ERP). Party and army coexisted within the same organization, usually called the PRT-ERP. In the main, it concentrated its armed operations in the urban sector, but, in contrast to the Montoneros, it also proposed creation of a rural guerrilla force in the short term. During the 1973 elections, the PRT-ERP recommended a blank ballot. After the victory of Peronism, the organization declared that it would not undertake actions against the new authorities if they did not suppress revolutionary activism. However, it maintained an overtly aggressive posture toward the armed forces, considered enemies of the people, and created a rural guerrilla foco in the province of Tucumán (in the north of Argentina) in 1974. From then on, there was increased militarization of activism and decreasing debate on political orientations among adherents. Following the example of the Vietnamese liberation process, there was a strategic turn toward protracted people’s war. However, after the direct intervention of the army in “law enforcement” in February 1975, the PRT-ERP rural foco was dismantled, and the organization gradually declined. Although uncertain, the number of its active members has been estimated between 2,500 and 6,000 at its peak in 1975 (Carnovale, 2011: 15). From a strictly quantitative point of view, this was the major revolutionary armed force on Argentine soil.
An Impure Cleavage
The above account creates an impression of homogeneity, but both the Montoneros and the PRT-ERP welcomed activists of very diverse origins, some of whose ideological preferences were integrated and reformulated in ways that altered the fixed conceptions of Marxism and Peronism. The impact of post–Vatican II Catholicism on the founders of the Montoneros, for instance, was crucial. In the 1960s, leaders such as Mario Firmenich or Roberto Perdía started out as devout Christians involved in Acción Católica (Catholic Action) (Celesia and Waisberg, 2010). There they met with Third-Worldist priests such as Carlos Mugica (Magne, 2004; Martín, 1992; Touris, 2012) and discovered journals like Cristianismo y Revolución (Morello, 2003). For them religion paved the way for Peronism (Donatello, 2010). More generally, the impact of Catholicism has been commonly mentioned to account for the prevalence of traditional gender norms among revolutionary organizations (Cosse, 2017), although these were often challenged in the practice of activism (Andújar, D’Antonio, and Gil Lozano 2009).
As for the PRT-ERP, the coherence of its doctrinal attachment to Marxism can be questioned, given its theoretical fluidity. One of its foundational nuclei originally advocated a generic form of anti-imperialism and only later converted to Marxism. The connection to Trotskyism was ambivalent as well. Although the initial fusion with Nahuel Moreno’s group helped in building ties with the Fourth International (preserved up until 1973), this affiliation relied on tactics rather than conviction. According to Jérémy Rubenstein (2005: 46–48), the PRT-ERP’s rapprochement with Trotskyism aimed at raising international support with the final objective of “a new Guevara-inspired International” involving the Chinese, Albanian, Cuban, and Vietnamese Communist Parties. The ideological and strategic identification with Marxism was expressed in a hybrid form associating Guevarism with Vietnamese national liberation struggles and Maoism. Moreover, this ideological stance turned out to be very fluid: in 1973 the organization broke with the Fourth International and approached the Third International controlled by the Soviet Union (Weisz, 2004: 22–25). The PRT-ERP had reached a hegemonic position at the Marxist pole of the Argentine new left, but the contours of its Marxism were extremely hazy.
Nationalism was also an influential motif for both the PRT-ERP and the Montoneros, as exemplified by the far-right nationalist, anticommunist, and anti-Semitic Movimiento Nacionalista Tacuara (Tacuara Nationalist Movement—MNT) (Gutman, 2003). In 1962, a group of activists influenced by Peronism and Marxism left the MNT and created the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario Tacuara (Tacuara Revolutionary Nationalist Movement— MNRT). Among its founding members were José Luis Nell, who later joined the Montoneros (Tarcus, 2007: 458), and Joe Baxter, who later became a member of the PRT-ERP (Tarcus, 2007: 52–54). There were thus paths from far-right nationalism to both Peronism and Marxism or at least toward the syncretic forms of Peronism and Marxism proposed by the Montoneros and the PRT-ERP.
Considering the intense circulation of actors and ideas within this complex organizational landscape, it can be argued that beyond the space of the Argentine new left there was a larger “organizational nebula of activism” that connected very different ideological traditions (Cucchetti, 2013: 36). This nebula reflected a generalized political radicalization beyond the traditional political divisions that was connected with other cross-organizational issues of the period such as the politicization of young people and the counterculture (Manzano, 2014). The new left was no exception in this syncretic kaleidoscope, and its main ideological poles (Peronism and Marxism) must be seen as landmarks rather than stable anchor points.
Multiple Articulations of Peronism and Marxism
Apart from the Montoneros and the PRT-ERP, many organizations appeared on the left during the same period, some assembling a handful of activists and others recruiting hundreds of partisans (precise membership figures are usually difficult to determine for such clandestine organizations). They offered diverse ideological combinations of Peronism and Marxism. For movementist Peronists, what was paramount was respect for Perón’s leadership, and this meant peaceful coexistence with the whole Peronist movement, including its most reactionary sectors. The Juventud Peronista Lealtad (Youth Loyalty Peronist—JP Lealtad), which emerged from a split in the Montoneros in 1973 (Garategaray, 2012; Pozzoni, 2013), embodied this position. Peronism opposed this sector to an alternativist sector represented by organizations such as the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas–Comando Nacional (Peronist Armed Forces–National Command, a remainder of the original FAP that did not merge with the Montoneros) and the associated Peronismo de Base (Duhalde and Pérez, 2001; Luvecce, 1993; Stavale, 2012), which Daniel James (1976) deemed “true” revolutionary Peronists (in contrast to the Montoneros). These activists saw a conflict within Peronism opposing a bourgeois board with a working-class base whose interests had to be defended. Although alternativists fought for the return of Perón until 1973, they also produced systematic criticism of his leadership. The Peronist pole of the Argentine new left was thus divided between to two opposing “gravitational” forces, movementism (which drove Peronism away from Marxism) and alternativism (which brought it closer to Marxism), with the Montoneros being equidistant from both.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Marxist new leftists were divided according to two symmetrical “gravitational forces,” classism and populism. Classism assembled organizations clearly privileging social liberation over national liberation, more firmly opposed to Peronism and focused on the autonomous activism of the working class. Populists, despite being Marxist, stressed national liberation against imperialism and accepted collaboration with some sectors of the bourgeoisie. Among classist organizations, the Organización Comunista Poder Obrero (Workers’ Power Communist Organization— OCPO), with several hundred activists, is said to have been Argentina’s third-largest revolutionary organization (Castro and Iturburu, 2004; Cormick, 2015). The OCPO gave priority to anticapitalism over national liberation, although anti-imperialism was part of its discursive repertoire. The Fracción Roja (Red Fraction) of the PRT-ERP was at a similar level on the populist/classist axis. This organization was the result of a split that occurred in 1972–1973, when the PRT-ERP gave up on Trotskyism as well as on the Fourth International and increasingly emphasized the nationalist dimensions of its discourse (Cormick, 2012). In contrast, the ERP Fracción Roja reaffirmed its affiliation with Trotskyism and its radical rejection of Peronism. The OCPO and the ERP Fracción Roja thus embodied the classist fringe at the Marxist pole of the new left. At the other end of the Marxist spectrum was the ERP 22, created in 1972–1973 after another division in the PRT-ERP. Against the call to cast a blank vote by the majority sector of the PRT-ERP in 1973, ERP 22 gave its support to the Peronist candidate in the presidential election (Weisz, 2005). It created a journal, Liberación por la Patria Socialista, whose collaborators included figures from Peronismo de Base and FAP–Comando Nacional. It can be seen here that individuals circulated easily between Marxist populist fringes and Peronist alternativist fringes thanks to a set of common references notably articulated around Cuba. Occasionally, this closeness even led to attempts at ideological and organizational fusion, as in the aborted discussions between the ERP 22 and the FAP–Comando Nacional (Weisz, 2005: 37–38).
Further, multiple kinds of mobility were possible between these opposing poles, also allowing for nonlinear trajectories. One could in fact move through poles by “skipping” one or several of the previously presented positions. This happened to the FAR, whose founding members had left the Communist Party in the 1960s to adopt Guevarist views but quickly moved closer to Peronism. This led to the merging of the FAR and the Montoneros officially announced in 1973 (González Canosa, 2012). Thus there were combinations of Marxism with movementist Peronism, bypassing intermediate stages such as alternativist Peronism, and therefore we must approach the linear division between Marxism and Peronism with caution: ideological fluctuations may follow very diverse tracks. At the same time, the very existence of these complex fluctuations between Peronism and Marxism shows that the Argentine new left was a relatively autonomous space, allowing for internal mobility and exchanges between poles.
Instrumental Division
The rejection of “pacifism”—understood as peaceful coexistence with capitalism—was one of the new left’s main characteristics, but new-left politics were not restricted to warfare strategies (Hilb and Lutzky, 1984) or to the influence of Régis Debray’s (1967) Guevara-inspired foquismo 1 (Terán, 2004). As Aldo Marchesi (2019: 187) points out, the new left’s political culture “was not merely the result of preformed ideas or ideologies. Rather, it resulted from the interaction of previously held ideas and the political circumstances that . . . activists had to face.” While violence and armed struggle were indeed central issues, the rejection of pacifism led to multiple conceptions of revolutionary action irreducible to warfare or foquismo. Figure 2 displays diverse positions on this issue, with three strategic points of reference: insurrection (left), protracted people’s war (right), and (by far the more frequent) mixed conceptions of political-military action (center).
Instrumental division of the Argentine new left. The Partido Comunista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Communist Party—PCR) and the Vanguardia Comunista (Communist Vanguard—VC) took an insurrectionist stance on the use of violence. The Montoneros, originally a political-military organization (PMO), later evolved toward a people’s war strategy.
Insurrectional Strategies
Despite rejecting the pacifist discourse of the communist parties, supporters of insurrection also rejected guerrilla warfare. They conceived revolution as the outcome of a massive urban uprising following long-term militant action fostering class consciousness among the working classes, in labor unions in particular. Armed struggle was to emerge only when the uprising had reached its terminal phase: the masses would take over the revolutionary movement and create an armed wing (with restricted and subordinate tasks) consisting of self-organized militias or sleeper cells of the revolutionary party. The historical reference for insurrection was the October Revolution in 1917 Russia (Lissandrello, 2013).
The armed road to socialism was certainly a major trait of the Argentine new left, but it did not involve reproducing Cuba’s foquista model in every circumstance. Foquismo’s use of violence aimed at creating the subjective conditions (consciousness and will) to spark the revolution, without waiting for socialism’s objective (socioeconomic) preconditions. Conversely, the insurrectional model was to bring about violence only when the revolutionary process was already engaged and met the requirements (objective and subjective) for its success. Likewise, while foquismo favored the establishment of a rural army, the insurrectional strategy relied upon the rallying of the urban proletariat. This preference could be considered logical in the Argentine context, where the vast majority of the population lived in urban areas.
Besides, in the late 1960s a series of foquista setbacks stimulated the insurrectional option: the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, the tragic outcome of rural guerrilla attempts in Argentina in the 1960s (Duhalde and Pérez, 2001; Salas, 2006b), and the Cordobazo. This last event especially reinforced the insurrectionist conviction that, contrary to the foquistas’ belief, a self-organized insurrection led by workers and students in city centers was best suited to provoking a regime crisis (Lissandrello, 2013). In this context, insurrection appeared to some a more efficient revolutionary strategy for Argentina than guerrilla warfare.
In organizational terms, Maoist and Trotskyist groups were the main supporters of this strategy. The Partido Comunista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Communist Party—PCR) and Vanguardia Comunista (Communist Vanguard—VC), for instance, two pro-Chinese organizations resulting (respectively) from splits in the Communist and Socialist Parties in the 1960s, adhered to insurrection (Campione, 2008; Celentano, 2014; Lissandrello, 2013). The PRT also responded to this model up until 1968, when the division between PRT–El Combatiente (at the root of the ERP) and PRT–La Verdad (which maintained the insurrectional line of action) took place (Campione, 2008; Mangiantini, 2014).
Protracted People’s War
Partisans of protracted people’s war (also called “integral war”) usually took the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions rather than the Cuban as models. Their strategy relied on the progressive construction of a popular army based on a mixed urban and rural network. It was meant to become a regular army capable of defeating state-loyal forces militarily in the ultimate stage of the revolution (Mao, 1954; Nguyên Giáp, 1962). Taking this logic to its extreme, the triumph of the revolution would rely exclusively on military conditions, with unarmed activism in labor unions or universities becoming either superfluous or subordinate.
Protracted people’s war had one feature in common with foquismo: the idea that, where the objective (socioeconomic) conditions for socialism were absent, armed struggle could create the subjective conditions for it. However, the two strategies diverged in the importance they gave to rural action. In most accounts of foquismo, rural action is an exclusive priority: “ ‘the city,’ Fidel says, ‘is a cemetery of revolutionaries and resources’” (Debray, 1967: 69). On the contrary, for the protracted people’s war strategy, building a strong supporting network in the city is a priority provided that it is under the political direction of a popular army implanted in rural areas.
Three major organizations identified discursively (and in much more imperfect practical forms) with this strategy. One of them was the PRT after 1968 and more so after 1970 with the creation of the ERP (Carnovale, 2011: 69–120). Another was the FAR, which originally preferred secret military action to political action directed toward the masses. At the very beginning of the 1970s, individuals seeking to join the organization were requested to resign from labor unions and student groups and dedicate themselves exclusively to clandestine military action. Starting in 1972, the articulation between the FAR and the front organizations was, however, reinforced in their merging with the Montoneros (González Canosa, 2012: 187–269), but in early 1976 the Montoneros also evolved toward protracted people’s war with the creation of the Ejército Montonero (Montonero Army, distinct from the Partido Montonero [Montonero Party]). The organization’s new aim was to build an autonomous military force distinct from the Peronist movement and capable of conducting the revolutionary process on its own (Salas, 2009). This war logic led to the introduction of military ranks and the wearing of uniforms by activists (Gillespie, 2008: 275; Salas, 2006a: 18). The cases of the PRT-ERP and the Montoneros thus show a militarization (Bartoletti, 2010a; 2010b; Calveiro, 2005; Carnovale, 2011: 92–120; Moyano, 1995; Pozzi, 2004; Vezzetti, 2009) leading to the formal creation of autonomous revolutionary armies. What differentiated these organizations’ conception of guerrilla war from foquismo was the explicit rejection of the latter by revolutionaries themselves. The Montoneros even used the concept as a veiled insult to so-called deviant tendencies within the organization (Gillespie, 2008: 144, 400, 417). As for the PRT-ERP, despite claiming to be Guevarist, it clearly privileged Chinese and Vietnamese conceptions of protracted people’s war over Cuban-style foquismo (Antognazzi, 1997; Carnovale, 2011: 69–120; Mangiantini, 2012).
Nonetheless, in spite of the declared will to create a proto-regular army, revolutionary groups still emphasized urban guerrilla actions rather than territorial military strategy. The Montoneros and the PRT-ERP were part of the broader transnational trend that followed the death of Che Guevara in 1967 (Lamberg, 1971): instead of abandoning the guerrilla scenario, they adapted it in many ways. After the 1960s, marked by the spread of rural guerrilla forces, there was an upsurge of urban guerrillas in the 1970s (Ramírez, 2010) theorized by the Brazilian Carlos Marighella in 1969 (Marighella, 1970). Compared with foquismo, the protracted people’s war strategy, based on the articulation between rural and urban spaces, seemed better-suited to this general evolution. Its mixed nature also seemed more in line with the organizations’ practice: despite sophisticated theoretical ambitions, they basically resorted to an accumulation of disparate actions. Vera Carnovale (2011: 87) has noted that, in spite of harsh controversies over strategy, the PRT-ERP’s activism concretely privileged a catchall dynamic—combining militant action in the labor unions, urban guerrilla stunts, and attempts to create rural guerrilla focos.
The theory of protracted people’s war must therefore be understood as a regulatory ideal rather than as a real organizational construction. What prevailed in the end was the conviction (common to protracted people’s war and foquismo) that armed struggle could create the subjective conditions for revolution and that the intensification of violence and its militarization could accelerate the achievement of socialism.
Political-Military Strategy
Political-military organizations were the dominant form of revolutionary organization in the new left. Their strategy was vague and did not rely on any specific body of doctrine, but its main aspects can be synthesized as follows: (1) It considered armed struggle a means to awaken and strengthen the national and social consciousness of the popular classes. (2) The seizing of power depended not on the creation of a popular army but on the articulation of violent action by small armed groups and activism by the masses, especially in labor unions. (3) This articulation did not necessarily lead to unifying armed cells and front organizations, these organizations stimulated popular uprisings but did not always aim at taking their political direction. (4) The action of these organizations thus combined military tactics (without replicating the model of a popular army) and political logics (without replicating the model of insurrectionist parties). In practice, their action mainly consisted in acts of “armed propaganda”—armed operations without military objectives, violent actions with symbolic purposes.
Logistical factors made the choice of political-military strategy a cheaper option than protracted people’s war or insurrection. The former meant assembling a large and expensive arsenal: only a minority of organizations could raise enough money to create even an ersatz popular army. The latter was also costly in terms of rank-and-file militancy, for it required the activation of a dense and nationwide activist network involved in labor unions. Comparatively, the action of political-military organizations required much more limited financial and human resources. A few activists were enough to undertake armed actions against symbolic targets with high levels of public impact financed with a few robberies or the theft of a few weapons.
At some point of its organizational trajectory, every Argentine armed group went through a stage during which the role of physical violence was mainly symbolic. Indeed, despite accumulating targeted assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings, most armed operations were intended not to dispute the state’s control over territory but to stimulate a popular uprising—and also, incidentally, to finance further armed operations through ransom or weapons stealing. While it claimed to be a real people’s army, most of the PRT-ERP’s activities responded to that more modest logic. This is even clearer in the case of the Montoneros, who did not formally separate political and military action before 1976 and kept being referred to as the organización politico-militar Montoneros up until that moment (Ramírez, 2010; Salas, 2007). For instance, by assassinating the former dictator Aramburu in 1970, they sought to influence politicians and the public rather than to gain victory on the military field.
The political-military organizations’ logic appears even more clearly among armed groups that never claimed popular-army status. Usually, these organizations were either smaller or more decentralized, with a few local groups of armed activists reaching a minimal ideological and strategic consensus but maintaining high levels of operational autonomy. Among the organizations mentioned, the ERP 22 and the ERP Fracción Roja were political-military organizations in the strictest sense (despite the reference to an “army” in their designations), along with the OCPO. We can expand that list to include groups such as the Grupo Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Workers’ Group—GOR) (Cortina Orero, 2011) and the Fuerzas Argentinas de Liberación (Argentine Liberation Forces—FAL, also called Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación [Liberation Armed Forces] or Frente Argentino de Liberación [Argentine Liberation Front], depending on the period) (Grenat, 2010; Hendler, 2010). After 1968 and the dismantling of its rural guerrilla foco, the FAP was also a political-military organization, since it focused on armed propaganda and on building connections with the grassroots working classes (through Peronismo de Base) (Antón, 2003).
Argentine new-left organizations can therefore be classified on a horizontal axis representing their instrumental choices according to the importance they gave to armed struggle in revolutionary praxis. Rejecting pacifism is a necessary condition to appear on the axis, but this can give rise to several options—insurrection, political-military organization, or protracted people’s war (from left to right on the axis). Interestingly, relationship to legal action and even electoral participation are not relevant criteria for differentiating organizations on the instrumental axis of the Argentine new left; armed struggle did not preclude supporting candidates and casting ballots. Often deemed a “farce,” elections could still serve as an instrument of political accumulation among others. The differences among new-left organizations relied on other criteria. For example, the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (Workers’ Socialist Party—PST [the former PRT–La Verdad]) and the PCR were both insurrectionists, but while the PST presented independent candidates in the presidential elections of March and September 1973 the PCR appealed for a blank vote and publicized the slogan Ni golpe ni elección: revolución (Neither coup nor election: revolution) (Campione, 2008: 91–92). Similarly, the right side of the instrumental axis welcomed varying views on the matter: while the PRT-ERP boycotted the 1973 elections, the Montoneros gave their full support to Peronist candidates. There is therefore no strict dichotomy between armed struggle and electoral turnout. The case of the ERP 22 is particularly illustrative. This political-military organization appeared publicly on March 8, 1973, when its “commando Eduardo Capello” kidnapped the head of the daily Crónica. In exchange for his liberation, it demanded the publication on the front page of a platform supporting the Peronist presidential candidate (Liberación, 1974; Weisz, 2005: 26). Thus the ERP 22 publicized its electoral choice through an armed operation, a paradoxical move that showed that these two dimensions of political action were not perceived as incompatible.
Conclusion
Between 1969 and 1977, the Argentine new left was a political space delimited by three frontiers and organized in two dimensions. Considering social liberation, national liberation, and armed struggle as issues that made sense simultaneously (three frontiers) was a necessary condition for being part of the new left. Activists were then differentiated in ideological terms, opposing Peronism and Marxism, and in instrumental terms, opposing partisans of insurrection, political-military action, and war. So far I have presented these two dimensions of the new-left space separately, but they can also be merged in a single graph model (Figure 3). This map is a simplified overview of political divisions in a complex political reality: it does not aim to be either complete or indisputable, but it can be a useful tool to discuss individual and collective trajectories of the Argentine new left.
The Argentine new left.
There is unity in the new-left space; placing each organization on a continuous Marxism/Peronism scale helps us to understanding their evolution. While it is generally assumed that understanding the Argentine left’s relation to Peronism is crucial, this is also true of that of revolutionary Peronists to Marxism, and none of the groups considered can be easily isolated from the rest. Similar discussions on violence take place on both the Peronist and the Marxist side of the map. The concept of new left thus provides a useful complement to alternative frames that consider revolutionary actors separately. The map is also useful for exploring the complexity of the Argentine new left. It is apparent that warfare is far from being the only option available to activists and that people’s war remains a rather distant perspective. Further, it can be observed that strategic divisions over reform/revolution or institutions/violence do not play a crucial role in differentiating new-left organizations. Partisans of protracted war do not necessarily reject elections, and partisans of insurrection do not value “bourgeois” institutions at all.
More generally, this paper shows that new-left political identities are best understood from a relational point of view. Moving farther from separate case studies illustrates how competing actors’ attitudes affect ideological and instrumental choices in the new-left space. This relational prism can in turn help us to understand how internationally defined ideological postures are recast in specific contexts. Thus Argentine Maoists preferred old-style insurrectionist syndicalism to the people’s war embraced by the Peronist Montoneros. Following from this, future research should consider the uses of the “new-left” label by activists to test its subjective congruence with the field investigated. Somewhat unexpectedly, mapping the Argentine new left can thus contribute to de-essentializing our approach to political identities.
Footnotes
Notes
David Copello is a postdoctoral researcher at Casa de Velázquez (Madrid). He thanks Felix de Montéty, Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli, Pablo Pozzi, and Kevin A. Young for their very useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.