page_title: Argentine Revolution
section_title: Increasing protests
hierarchical_section_title: Argentine Revolution / Onganía's rule (1966–70) / Increasing protests
caption_attribution_description: Cordobazo. General strike in protest against the political and economic decisions of the military dictatorship. Bulevar San Juan, Córdoba Capital. In that place was murdered that day, the SMATA worker Máximo Mena.
context_page_description: Argentine Revolution was the name given by its leaders to a military coup d'état which overthrew the government of Argentina in June 1966 and began a period of military dictatorship by a junta from then until 1973.
context_section_description: On 19 September 1968, two important events affected Revolutionary Peronism. John William Cooke, former personal delegate of Perón, an ideologist of the Peronist Left and friend of Fidel Castro, died from natural causes. On the same day a group of 13 men and one woman who aimed at establishing a foco in Tucumán Province, in order to head the resistance against the junta, was captured; among them was Envar El Kadre, then a leader of the Peronist Youth.
  In 1969, the CGT de los Argentinos (led by Raimundo Ongaro) headed protest movements, in particular the Cordobazo, as well as other movements in Tucumán, Santa Fe and Rosario (Rosariazo). While Perón managed a reconciliation with Augusto Vandor, he followed, in particular through the voice of his delegate Jorge Paladino, a cautious line of opposition to the military junta, criticizing with moderation the neoliberal policies of the junta but waiting for discontent inside the government ("hay que desensillar hasta que aclare", said Perón, advocating patience). Thus, Onganía had an interview with 46 CGT delegates, among them Vandor, who agreed on "participationism" with the military junta, thus uniting themselves with the Nueva Corriente de Opinión headed by José Alonso and Rogelio Coria.
  In December 1969, more than 20 priests, members of the Movement of Priests for the Third World (MSTM), marched on the Casa Rosada to present to Onganía a petition pleading him to abandon the eradication plan of villas miserias (shanty towns).
  The same year, the MSTM issued a declaration supporting Socialist revolutionary movements, which led the Catholic hierarchy, by the voice of Juan Carlos Aramburu, coadjutor archbishop of Buenos Aires, to proscribe priests from making political or social declarations.
  Various armed actions, headed by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación (FAL), composed by former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, occurred in April 1969, leading to several arrests among FAL members. These were the first left-wing urban guerrilla actions in Argentina. Beside these isolated actions, the Cordobazo uprising of 1969, called forth by the CGT de los Argentinos, and its Cordobese leader, Agustín Tosco, prompted demonstrations in the entire country. The same year, the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) was formed as the military branch of the Trotskyist Workers' Revolutionary Party, leading an armed struggle against the dictatorship.
caption: Images of the Cordobazo, May–June 1969
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