Latinnews Archive
Latin American Weekly Report - 24 July 1970
Argentina: all done with mirrors?
The discovery of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's corpse may yet prove as great an embarrassment to President Levingston as was the General's disappearance to President Ongania.
The authorized version of the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping and murder of General Aramburu is that young Catholic extremists, calling themselves Montoneros , who were responsible for the successful raid on La Calera (see LATIN AMERICA, Vol. IV, Nos. 28 & 29), also killed the former provisional President. It is true that some of the later communiques allegedly put out by the kidnappers, which appeared following Aramburu's disapperance on 29 May, were signed Montoneros . It is also a fact that the body was found very soon after the police had made a number of arrests in Cordoba in connection with the attack on La Calera on 1 July. The body was found on Thursday, 16 May buried about 6 feet under ground, dressed in a priest's cassock and covered with lime, in the cellar of a farmhouse, Finca La Celma, near Timote, in the province of Buenos Aires about 240 miles west of the capital. The owner of the farm, Carlos Ramus, a 21-year-old cattle dealer, is among those who are alleged by the police to have been involved in the kidnapping. At his point, the facts come to an end and the unanswered questions begin; the most interesting is to ask why Aramburu should have been killed. Although the somewhat improbable ransom of Eva Peron's bones was at one time demanded, the kidnapping of Aramburu does not appear to have had ransom as its goal.
The most plausible reason so far advanced for his murder is that at the time of his death he had undoubtedly become a powerful contender for the presidency. On the one hand, he had impeccably 'liberal' antecedents, having led the purge of peronists as provisional head of state from 1955 to 1958.During this time he ordered the execution of a number of peronists, including General Juan Valle, who were accused of plotting to restore Peron to the presidency. On the other hand he handed over in 1958 to the duly elected President Arturo Frondizi, whose political views were diametrically opposed to his own. He was also reported to be in close touch with orthodox peronist leaders shortly before his death. His political views were close to those of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Alejandro Lanusse, who led the move to replace Ongania principally because he disliked the former President's apparent desire to establish some form of 'corporate' state in Argentina. Why Aramburu's presidential ambitions should have led young Catholic revolutionaries to murder him is very much harder to explain. A second question hinges on the date of Aramburu's death. If unofficial reports that he had been dead for about 40 days when his body was found are correct, then why did communiques from the kidnappers and offers to negotiate a ransom continue into the second week of July, communiques and offers which can only have increased the risks for the group responsible? Indeed some police sources have alleged that the communiques led the authorities to the typewriter of Alberto Carbone, a priest of the radical Third World Group who has also been arrested in connection with the kidnapping.
The third tough question concerns the undoubted Catholicism of the alleged kidnappers, their alleged communique saying that their victim had received a 'Christian burial', and the quite incontrovertible fact of the priest's cassock in which Aramburu's body was found. It is hard to believe that confessing Catholics, however revolutionary they might be, would have been guilty of such a crude burlesque. In this connection, it should be noted that two of the Montoneros named by the police as having taken part in the kidnapping, Eduardo Firmenich and Fernando Luis Abal Medina, have since been acknowledged as Catholics by Catholic Action and the Third World Group with which they were associated.
It would be unwarrantedly speculative at this stage to propose any theory to account for all the apparently contradictory aspects of the Aramburu affair. The police will shortly publish a statement and prosecutions in court will undoubtedly follow. President Levingston has affirmed his intention that the death penalty, re-introduced by President Ongania as a weapon against acts of terrorism, including kidnapping, just before his downfall, should be applied in such cases.
According to Argentine police sources, the events leading up to the discovery of Aramburu's body were as follows: During the week following the Montonero attack on La Calera, the police arrested two youths, who crashed a car in Cordoba carrying one million of the ten million pesos stolen in the raid. It was two days after the raid that the first communique linking the Montoneros with the kidnapping of Aramburu appeared.
These arrests led to a number of raids in Cordoba and three more arrests, one after a gun battle in which one of the arrested men, Emilio Mazza, fell seriously wounded. Mazza died and Aramburu's widow on being shown his corpse said he looked like one of the two men dressed in army uniform who visited her husband on 29 May and drove him away in a white Peugeot 504. She has since said that she could not be sure he was the same man. A driving licence found during one of the raids led police to the house of Jorge Maguid, where the negative of a photograph of a medal belonging to Aramburu was found. Maguid, a photographer, and his wife were arrested. These arrests led the police to Firmenich, Abal Medina and two sisters, Norma and Esther Arrostito. The police say they believe that Abal Medina and Mazza were the two men who actually kidnapped Aramburu and that they, aided by the others named above, handed him over to another group, including Ramus, who took him to La Celma.Apart from the Maguids and Father Carbone, none of the persons named here have yet been arrested, unless they are among the four surviving detainees who were arrested in Cordoba for complicity in the attack on La Calera, but who have not been named by the police.
The case is worth examining in some detail as it could have profound consequences for the immediate political future in Argentina. The trials, unless they are held in secret, will undoubtedly rake over political ground that the government would prefer to leave undisturbed.
The fact that the alleged kidnappers are almost all catholics and include a priest could re-open the whole question of the government's relationship with the Church, which has not always been a happy one since the overthrow of President Arturo Illia in 1966. Although the Argentine hierarchy is largely composed of ecclesiastical conservatives, the younger clergy are as radical as any in Latin America and the Third World Group, which had its origin in a declaration signed in 1968, has more than 500 members.
The emergence of the Montoneros as a revolutionary group inevitably invites comparison with the recent history of the Tupamaros in Uruguay. President Levingston and his government will undoubtedly be looking for an early kill to avoid the promotional effect which the Tupamaros ' successes have had in Uruguay, but the fact that the cost of living is romping ahead of the increase in wages at present is likely to increase sympathy for the young revolutionaries among the poorer sectors of the population and make the government's task more difficult. Since the original wage freeze in March 1967, the cost of living has increased by over 50 per cent, whereas wages have increased by about 25 per cent. Increasingly militant labour action in Cordoba and elsewhere is one consequence of the government's economic policies and the sharpening conflict with extreme left-wing and nationalist groups is another.
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