The Condor Years (10 page)

The revolutionary groups were ready to move forward with a common strategy to defeat the military dictatorships. In early November, Santucho gathered representatives from all four groups for a secret meeting at one of the ERP safe houses in Buenos Aires. It was a revolutionary summit of ERP, MIR, Tupamaros–MLN, and the Bolivian ELN.

The leaders all knew one another well. They had already met several times
to discuss the idea of a unified revolutionary organization—the brainchild of MIR leader Miguel Enríquez. MIR, ERP, and Tupamaros leaders held the first meetings in October 1972 in Chile. The Bolivians joined the group at a subsequent meeting in June 1973 in Argentina. Each organization had been sending cadres to Chile for military and ideological training in camps deep in the Andes Mountains, at Cajón del Maipo. In August, just a month before the coup, the four organizations had approved a formal alliance, called the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (
Junta Coordinadora Revolutionaria
—JCR).

Now, with the obstacle of Allende’s peaceful road to Socialism out of the way, it was time for the JCR to transform its strategy into action.

The men who took part in those meetings were the general staff of a grandly conceived continental revolution. For ERP, Mario Roberto Santucho was seconded by Luis Mattini, Domingo Menna, and Enrique Gorriarán Merlo. MIR leader Miguel Enríquez led the meetings in Chile, but was represented in Argentina by his brother, Edgardo Enríquez; Andrés Pascal; Nelson Gutiérrez; and military chief Alberto Villabela. Tupamaros leaders present were Efraín Luis Martínez Platero and William Whitelaw.

The Bolivians were represented by two men with stellar revolutionary reputations: Osvaldo “Chato” Peredo was the surviving brother of several who had fought with Che in Bolivia; Major Rubén Sánchez had fought on the other side, as an officer of the Bolivian army. He had switched sides ideologically during the short-lived revolutionary government of General Juan José Torres, and now served as Torres’s aide in exile in Argentina.

The JCR was no mere alliance, nor was it a merger of the separate organizations. Enriquez’s proposal was that no country’s revolutionary movement would be subordinate to another’s. Each group would fight according to its own timetable and with its own methods. As long as Allende remained in power, for example, MIR did not challenge the government with armed force—a principle the coup had made moot. Each member organization would choose when and how to take up arms. But together they would create an infrastructure—an international apparatus to provide mutual logistical, financial, and military support.

In the concept developed by Enríquez and his ideological partner Santucho, the JCR was for Latin America what the Third and Fourth Internationals had been for the world Socialist movement growing out of the Russian Revolution. Just as the Third International was the Communist Party’s instrument to defend
the Soviet Revolution, and the Fourth International embodied Leon Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution in many countries, the JCR was the Fifth International representing Latin America’s continent-wide revolution. Its heart was closer to Trotsky than to Stalin. The JCR was an implicit rebuke of a basic tenet of the international Communist Party, under the leadership of the Soviet Union—the idea that revolution should be consolidated in “one country,” namely Russia, before spreading worldwide.

This new organization was to be the fulfillment of the strategic vision of Che Guevara. In 1966, just before he left Cuba to take the revolutionary cause to Africa and the rest of Latin America, Che declared in a speech to an audience of revolutionaries from all over the world, gathered in Havana, that armed groups in Latin America should join together to “form something like
Juntas de Coordinación
(Revolutionary Coordinating Councils or boards) to make the repressive work of Yankee imperialism more difficult and to facilite their own cause.”

Che’s statement was quoted in a long manifesto, “To the Peoples of Latin America,” stating the JCR’s goals and strategy. The JCR, it said, would take up Che’s call to arms: to “develop a bloody and prolonged revolutionary war that will make the Latin American continent the second or third Vietnam of the world.”

The heated Marxist rhetoric is from another era, but is essential reading to understand the events that followed in the Condor Years. In this logic of revolution, the defeats in Chile and elsewhere showed the futility of “reformist” strategies such as Allende’s recently failed Popular Unity in Chile and the current danger of Perón’s. populism in Argentina. The left was at a crossroads. Only one strategy could lead ultimately to victory—the continent-wide guerrilla war set in motion by the Junta Coordinadora. Some excerpts:

The audacity of such an undertaking is breathtaking: to proclaim a revolutionary war at the very moment the military counterrevolution sponsored by the United States was at its most intense. In the event, none of the goals of the JCR were achieved, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the call to arms as merely overblown rhetoric. To the contrary, the JCR was taken so seriously by the military governments that it became the principle target of Operation Condor. Secret military documents devoted to analysis of the JCR “threat” show the military interest in the JCR was not merely for propaganda purposes. The secret reports make it indisputable that the military believed in the accuracy of the information about the JCR and acted on it. It is also true that the military propagandists used the specter of the JCR to taint the nonviolent opposition to the military governments with the violent tactics of the guerrilla groups. The ensuing “war on terrorism” against the JCR members was accompanied, not coincidentally, by a string of assassinations of democratic leaders with little or no connection to the radicals operating inside the JCR.

Two decades later, survivors among those who created the JCR would emphasize
its relative ineffectiveness. “When we announced the JCR it was like a
campanazo
—like ringing a big bell. They [the military governments] thought it was much bigger than it actually was, and they reacted very rapidly, with devasting force. We were in diapers, with lots of problems, and never really had the opportunity to do what we set out to do,” said René Valenzuela, a Chilean who was one of the JCR’s chief operatives in Europe.

Those dismal reflections are hindsight. From the point of view of late 1973, the JCR was a burst of earnest energy and revolutionary optimism. “We imagined a sort of an embryonic Vietnam in all of Latin America,” said Luis Mattini. “We were going to take the idea of the JCR to Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Caracas. We thought the revolution was about to start in all of Latin America.”

Although the JCR agreement already existed before the Chilean coup, the meeting in Buenos Aires was the beginning of concrete action. There was much to be done. As described by participants, the meeting produced a strategy and an ambitious agenda to be accomplished in the coming months.

The immediate priority was support of MIR in Chile. The groups urged MIR to launch a military counterattack as soon as possible. The JCR would provide material support—money and arms—to generate solidarity for Chile and propaganda against the Pinochet dictatorship.

The overall military strategy of the JCR reflected the strong militaristic views of ERP leader Roberto Santucho. Members would coordinate the timing and location of military offensives to create maximum mutual support. The ERP would go first. A band of guerrillas was trained, armed, and ready to launch guerrilla warfare in the mountains of Tucumán Province in northwestern Argentina. Bolivia’s ELN and MIR would open supporting offensives across nearby borders—Chile in the south around Neuquén and Temuco, and Bolivia in Tarija Province to the north. Tupamaros, following the directives of their leaders imprisoned in Uruguay, were to strike with a counteroffensive planned for May Day 1974. With wars breaking out almost simultaneously in four countries, it was thought, the military would face internal rebellion, be thrown on the defensive, and eventually collapse.

For the Tupamaros and the ELN, the first task was to reorganize inside their respective countries to prepare their militants for armed struggle. Both groups had been decimated by the military crackdowns of the past two years, and their networks of militants were in fearful disarray. To reconnect the cells and mobilize them for action, the groups needed to build the basic infrastructure
of clandestine urban warfare: a secure communications system of couriers, codes, and “
berretines
” (camouflaged hiding places for people, arms, and messages). They needed top quality forged documents, credible front businesses to handle financial transactions and provide cover jobs, and they needed to rent or buy hundreds of secure houses and apartments for operations and living quarters.

Such grandiose goals demanded enormous amounts of money and weapons. The JCR would provide both. The ERP, already the richest of the organizations, was carrying out a series of kidnappings and proposed to dedicate most of the ransom money to JCR projects. The JCR budget was to exceed $20 million.

Acquiring and stockpiling weapons was the most difficult task. In the years before narcotics trafficking, there was no large-scale international arms market in South America, and shipping to the southern parts of South America involved enormous distances and vulnerability to military surveillance. MIR had a practical contribution it was proud to offer to the JCR: a weapons factory. A team of Chilean engineers and metal workers had meticulously copied the design of the Swedish submachine gun, the Karl Gustav, which was a standard-issue weapon to Chile’s Carabinero police. Capable of automatic fire, it used relatively easy to obtain nine-millimeter bullets in a thirty-shot magazine. The MIR technicians also had worked up the manufacturing specifications for hand grenades, a grenade launcher, and light mortar. The clandestine factory had started production in Chile. As the coup approached the MIR technicians had moved the operation to Argentina and expected to have the first finished weapons in early 1974.

It was a colossal undertaking, Efraín Martínez Platero said. “We intended to develop a grand, an enormous infrastructure network for all of the countries—Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay. That’s how we spent all those millions of dollars of JCR money—in buying airplanes and trucks, in creating a structure capable of giving us the possibility of penetrating each of those countries, so that if we wanted to we could transport weapons, fighters, money, people, moving it all in and out at will.”

Public relations was an indispensable part of any popular movement, even a clandestine one like the JCR. The JCR members decided they would make a public announcement of the JCR call to arms in the coming months. A thick magazine, called
Che Guevara: Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria
(of which
three issues ranging from forty-eight to seventy-six pages were published in Spanish, English, and other languages), was the international voice of the JCR.

Before going public, however, the new organization needed to advise its friends and potential allies. Above all, almost as monks going to Rome to submit to the authority of the Pope, the JCR leaders wanted to lay the idea at the feet of Fidel Castro. Immediately following the meeting in Buenos Aires, Martínez Platero was designated the JCR’s official ambassador, its “international representative,” to travel first to Cuba and then to Europe.

Martínez Platero was a logical choice to be the JCR international representative. The Tupamaros had become a household word in Europe, and were universally respected in leftist circles as nonsectarian, Robin Hood revolutionaries. When he arrived in Cuba he went through channels. He first explained the JCR to Manuel Piñeiro, the famous
Barbaroja
(Red Beard), chief of the Cuban Communist Party’s Department of America, whose name was synonymous with Cuba’s support of revolutionary groups in Latin America. Piñiero had set up military training courses for the hundreds of Tupamaros who had come to Cuba from Chile just before the coup. For some, there was an elite officers course. Martínez Platero inspected the troops in the courses and took part in the “voluntary work” in sugar fields that was expected of visitors of all classes. Still, it was weeks before he was given an audience with Fidel. It came only a few days before he was scheduled to leave for Europe, in late October.