Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

436 • MONTONEROSU.S. chancery building, causing $10,000 in damages. Attacks on theArgentinean government included the 1 November 1974 bombingthat killed Federal Police Chief Alberto Villar; the murder of GeneralJorge Cáceres Monie on 3 November 1975; and the murder ofGeneral Cesaro Cardozo on 18 June 1976. On 22 August 1975 theMontoneros bombed and sank the naval destroyer ARA SantisimaTrinidad under construction, causing $70 million in damages.The Montoneros succeeded at least in their immediate goal ofprovoking a violent right-wing crackdown. Ultimately, however,this crackdown led to the complete suppression of all leftist insurgentgroups in the country. The Argentine military took control ofall security forces and undertook its dirty war to kill all suspectedleftists beginning in February 1975. By the end of 1976 about 1,600Montoneros had been killed, and another 500 were killed in thefirst half of 1977. Following the flight of Montoneros founder andleader Mario Firmenich to Rome in October 1977, along with a fewof his lieutenants, Montonero activities continued only sporadicallyin Argentina and ended in 1979 when security forces killed HoracioMendizábal, the chief Montonero leader, who had remainedactive underground within Argentina. Finally in December 1981,Mario Firmenich called on surviving Montoneros to cease armedstruggle in favor of political action, in effect signaling the endof the Montoneros as an active guerrilla and terrorist group. Firmenichreturned in June 1987 to Argentina where he was tried forthe terrorist offenses of the Montoneros and sentenced to 30 years’imprisonment. Firmenich received a presidential pardon on 29 December1990, ironically, along with General Jorge Videla, who hadconducted the dirty war campaign against leftist groups such as theMontoneros.The Montoneros failed to perceive that the populist message ofJuan Perón, as an eclectic hodgepodge combining leftist and rightistappeals designed to draw as broad a following as possible, could notbe reduced simply to an unambiguous appeal for socialist revolution.Likewise, the broad support the Montoneros received prior to Perón’sreturn was largely a function of public adulation of Perón and wasextended to the Montoneros only insofar as they were perceived ashis loyal followers. Thus, when the Montoneros undertook their campaignin 1974, they overestimated the degree of popular support forthemselves and their own “authentic Peronism.”