The Condor Years (11 page)

Martínez Platero invoked Che’s memory as the inspiration for the Coordinating Junta, but Fidel was dismissive. He was far from opposed to the use of armed struggle to win the revolution, but he considered the JCR’s grand strategy impractical and even trivial. And he was disparaging of the Trotskyist ERP.

“I would like to honor you, but it is because you are a leader of the Tupamaros. I never would receive you as the representative of the JCR,” Martínez Platero quoted Fidel as saying. “Chico, don’t run around with those Trotskyists. It’s a waste of time.”

He cautioned that a military offensive in Uruguay now would be disastrous and could very well provoke the executions of the imprisoned leadership. He counseled a strategy of building strength while pursuing the establishment of broad coalitions with political parties. Training and support would be given to the Tupamaro militants, but he refused to consider the proposal that Cuba become the operational and training center for the JCR.

Soon after Martínez Platero left Cuba, another JCR representative arrived,
the ERP’s Luis Mattini. His main agenda was to inform Fidel about ERP’s plan to launch a guerrilla campaign in the mountains of Tucumán Province. In an all-night meeting on January 5, 1974, Fidel reminisced about his own experience using rural guerrilla tactics in his war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s. But he refused to consider giving military aid and training to the Argentine guerrillas. Perón’s government had opened lucrative trade relations with Cuba, with a long-term line of credit exceeding a billion dollars.

Fidel gave an even more politically cautious criticism of the launching of the JCR. “I quoted Che on the need to coordinate revolutionary forces,” Mattini recalled. “Fidel said, ‘you’re right, you have to coordinate. Unity is good. But it should be secret. You should not make it public.’ ” Already a veteran in world Communist infighting, Fidel saw the JCR as a challenge to the traditional Soviet-line Communist parties in the four countries where it was operating.

“Our reasoning was just the opposite to Fidel’s,” said Mattini. “We wanted the JCR to be public in order to attract other organizations to join us in a united armed revolution.” The old-line Communists were mired in “reformism”; the revolution, led by the JCR, was rightfully leaving them behind.

The other pillars of the JCR plan were soon in place. On December 6, 1973, Victor Samuelson, the dapper young general manager of the Argentine branch of Exxon Corporation, was taking a leisurely walk around the swimming pool at the company’s private club outside Buenos Aires. A voice behind him growled, “Don’t go any farther. The place is surrounded.” A dozen ERP troops had taken control of the club. They grabbed Samuelson and shoved him into a car. For the next few days he was stashed in an underground pit that had been used to change the oil on cars. When negotiations for a ransom began, he was moved to a more comfortable safe house, where he played games of chess in which he routinely beat his captors.

Kidnapping had become alarmingly common in Argentina. So common that Exxon officials negotiated directly with the ERP without involving the Argentine Federal Security Police (
Seguridad Federal
), itself a force with a shady reputation whose officers were known to have pulled off a few lucrative kidnappings of their own. The bidding started at $4 million, which was about what the ERP leaders expected to get. The initial negotiations were handled by Tupamaros.
When Exxon stalled at a low $2 million offer, Roberto Santucho gave the job to one of his toughest officers, Enrique Gorriarán. Months passed. In March, Exxon made a “final offer” of $10 million, and Santucho said, “OK, Take it, we can’t keep this gringo here forever.” Gorriarán, recalling the episode from his prison cell in Argentina, said he thought he could push for more. “I told them, “$14 million or we send you his ears,’ ” he said. According to Exxon officials, the threat was more deadly. Gorriarán met with the Exxon negotiator at a café in late February and delivered an ultimatum—which was later put in writing—that Samuelson would be executed in seventy-two hours if the ransom demand was not met. Exxon agreed and reached the ERP negotiator only an hour before the midnight execution deadline.

The ransom—$14.2 million—was flown from New York and delivered in packets of $100 bills packed in six suitcases. Exxon agreed to pay for food and clothing to be distributed to poor people in a Buenos Aires suburb—which accounted for the somewhat lopsided ransom amount. The ransom was by far the largest ERP had ever obtained in the half-dozen kidnappings the organization had pulled off in previous years.

Besides Samuelson, ERP kidnapped two other foreign businessmen to raise money for the JCR, according to Gorriarán. Firestone paid $3 million, and Swissair paid $3.8 million to free their executives. In the early months of 1974, the revolutionary war chest had fattened to more than $20 million.

In late January, the guerrillas’ military offensive opened in Argentina. A force of eighty troops led by ERP military commander Enrique Gorriarán made a late-night frontal assault on the Azul army base, a tank garrison in Buenos Aires Province. Armed with antitank grenade launchers and automatic rifles, they broke through the main gate with trucks intended to transport weapons and ammunition stolen from the base’s arsenal. The guerrillas killed the commander of the base and captured the second in command, then retreated under heavy fire after a seven-hour battle. They lost four men and failed to capture any weapons. The attack failed in its military objective, and ERP leaders criticized Gorriarán’s conduct of the battle. But the Azul battle succeeded grandly as propaganda. It was the closest a guerrilla force in Argentina had ever come to waging conventional warfare.

The ERP used the Azul battle as the occasion to announce the creation of the Coordinating Junta. On the morning of February 14, a small bus usually
used for businessmen’s tours of Buenos Aires picked up six journalists at predesignated locations and drove them to a restaurant and dance hall a few miles outside the city, in the town of Villa Bosch. Gorriarán, tautly muscled and balding, in his early thirties, was flanked by masked gunmen as he spoke to the journalists against a backdrop of posters of Che Guevara and Argentine military hero General José Francisco de San Martín.

Gorriarán said the Azul attack was just the beginning of an offensive against the army and denounced President Perón as a “bourgeois reformist.” In response to the ERP attack, Perón had pushed through new Draconian antiterrorist laws greatly increasing the army’s power. Other leftist groups in Argentina had denounced the ERP’s attack as a provocation whose main effect would be a crackdown on their legitimate activity. They favored giving the newly elected Perón—who had finally displaced the military—an opportunity to prove his independence. But for ERP, there could be no truce. “We consider that to halt or diminish the fight against the oppressor army would allow it to reorganize and to pass over to the offensive,” Gorriarán said.

Gorriarán distributed a six-page pamphlet containing the JCR’s manifesto, “To the Peoples of Latin America.” But stories on the clandestine press conference, including a twenty-five-inch story on an inside page of the
New York Times
, gave only brief mention to the formation of the four-country guerrilla front. A simultaneous announcement of the JCR formation was issued in Lisbon, Portugal.

The JCR organizations embarked on a period of intense preparations for the coming offensive. The ransom money from the three kidnappings ensured that whatever the guerrillas needed they could buy at top price. The sums of cash were so enormous, they created a financial and logistical problem. The money had to be converted into local currencies. At one point after the delivery of the Samuelson ransom, ERP operatives were delivering a daily suitcase of dollars to their black market money changer at the Liberty Hotel and bringing it back filled with Argentine, Chilean, and other currencies.

Sources differ somewhat about the distribution of the cash. MIR, ELN, and Tupamaros received $2 million apiece, according to Tupamaro leader Martínez Platero, and MIR’s Pascal Allende concurs that $2 million was earmarked for MIR. Luis Mattini recalls that it was $1 million each. A U.S. cable based on intelligence reports cites an “ERP communiqué stating that it had
given $5 million to its sister organizations in the JCR. The money was part of the ransom from the ERP kidnapping of a U.S. Exxon executive. According to a usually reliable source, the MIR’s portion was $3 million.”

The guerrillas took the military initiative in Argentina. A group of thirty well-equipped ERP combatants infiltrated into the mountains of Tucumán Province in northwest Argentina and established a base camp. On May 29, they descended from the camp and took over the small town of Acheral. They gave speeches to the populace, hung banners, stayed all day, and departed in the evening without encountering the slightest resistance. On the same day, another ERP commando attacked an army communications battalion in Rosario Province, hundreds of miles from Tucumán. Santucho’s guerrillas also planted a bomb at a Rosario police headquarters.

ERP units found recruiting to the revolution was fruitful among the tens of thousands of young men who had lost jobs in Tucumán’s collapsing sugar economy. Other high profile military operations kept ERP in the headlines. For a time, their challenge seemed more than the corruption-riddled Argentine military could handle. In a daring strike in August that demonstrated their ability to move about the country at will, seventy guerrillas from Tucumán drove in a rented bus and participated in a successful attack on the Villa María army munitions factory in Córdoba Province. Another group of guerrillas were caught, however, as they marched on foot back to their hideouts after the attack. Sixteen were killed, in what those who escaped charged was a massacre following surrender.

Despite the casualties, the ERP’s so-called Mountain Company seemed to be following the pattern of Castro’s victorious offensive in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra that led to the fall of the Batista dictatorship. Tucumán had dense jungles and high mountains, ideal for impregnable “liberated zones,” which Santucho predicted would be the next step. Progress was also evident among the other JCR member organizations. In Chile, a secure infrastructure for the clandestine MIR was in place and plans were being laid for a military campaign to open within a year. The JCR was also supporting the reorganization of the ELN inside Bolivia, and ERP was helping a fledgling group of Paraguayan revolutionaries. The revolution in the counterrevolution seemed to be on course.

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The United States had little time to bask in Pinochet’s victory in Chile. The administration was immediately faced with decisions about what to do next. Like an alcoholic agonizing over one more drink before going on the wagon, officials debated whether they should end the covert action programs that the CIA had been running since at least 1958, when Allende first ran for president.

CIA covert action had been used to undermine democracy; now the issue was whether to use it
against
Pinochet in favor of democracy. In one document, two deputy assistant secretaries in the State Department’s Latin America bureau disagreed about continuing CIA financial support for Chile’s Christian Democratic Party now that Pinochet was in power. Covert money and CIA propaganda operations had been propping up the party for more than a decade and had been instrumental in electing President Eduardo Frei Montalva in 1964. The Christian Democrats, Chile’s largest party, had opposed Allende, but now were likely to oppose Pinochet as it became clear he had no intention of returning Chile to democracy.

Harry Shlaudeman favored helping the party even in opposition to Pinochet:

Jack Kubisch was con:

Shlaudeman:

It was a debate over the dispensability of democracy as a goal of U.S. policy. The premise was that “knocking off Allende” in favor of a “right-wing dictatorship” was the successful outcome of the most recent U.S. covert action programs. As the choice of dictatorship versus democracy would present itself again and again in the post-coup period, democracy had few defenders among those making policy decisions. In this remarkably candid document, Secretary of State Kissinger is portrayed as setting an early and unequivocal policy for U.S. activities in Chile: Help the Pinochet junta and only the junta.