Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

434 • MOLLY MAGUIRESand faced extradition to Germany in 1995. Although sentenced to12 years’ imprisonment, she was released on orders of the NorwegianCentral Prison Administration on 30 November 1999 due to herdeclining health.MOLLY MAGUIRES. This was a nonstate entrepreneurial terroristgroup of labor agitators who carried out a campaign of intimidationand murder against anthracite coal mine owners and operators in fivecounties in northeastern Pennsylvania in the period 1865–1875. Theywere all members of an Irish-American fraternal society, the AncientOrder of Hibernians, but they took their label of “Molly Maguire”from the name of an underground group in Ireland that had resistedoppressive landlords. The group, which reputedly numbered around3,000 members at its height, engaged in assaults, assassinations, andarson. Eventually the group obtained recognition as a union in 1875and called a miners’ strike that crippled the operations of the Philadelphia,Reading, and Lehigh Valley railroads. Franklin B. Gowen,the president of the Reading Railroad, engaged the services of thePinkerton Agency, whose agent, James McParland, infiltrated theorganization. After McParland gathered sufficient evidence, 20 of theleaders of the Molly Maguires were tried and convicted for murderand then hanged in 1877, effectively ending the organization.MONTONEROS. The Movimiento Peronista Montonero was a leftistArgentinean guerrilla group formed in 1970 to promote the populistand nationalistic policies of the exiled dictator, Juan Domingo Perón,and to facilitate his return to power. Although the group was notMarxist-Leninist, it did seek a type of socialist revolution withinArgentina coupled with a fight to rid Argentina of foreign economicpenetration. Following Perón’s return to power in 1973, once theMontoneros learned that Perón had embraced the more conservativewings of the Peronist movement, they turned against him to pursuetheir own populist and socialist revolution.Prior to Perón’s return, the Montoneros sought and received helpfrom Cuba. In the early 1970s they had contacts with other leftistinsurgents in Latin America, such as Colombia’s M-19 group, andwithin Argentina they had about 10,000 supporters. Following Perón’sdenunciation of the Montoneros on 1 May 1974, the group made commoncause with the Cuban-backed Revolutionary Armed Forces(FAR) as well as with Trotskyite groups in fighting the regime.