Operativo Independencia - The Military Operation

The Military Operation

The Argentine military used the territory of the smallest Argentine province to implement, within the framework of its national security doctrine, the methods of the "counter-revolutionary warfare". These included the use of terrorism, kidnappings, forced disappearances and concentration camps where hundreds of guerrillas and their supporters in Tucumán were tortured and murdered. The logistical and operational superiority of the military, headed first by General Acdel Vilas, and starting in December 1975 by Antonio Domingo Bussi, succeeded in crushing the insurgency after a year and by destroying earlier on the links the ERP, led by Roberto Santucho, had established with the local population.

Brigadier-General Acdel Vilas deployed over 4,000 soldiers, including two companies of elite army commandos, backed by jets, dogs, helicopters, US satellites and a Navy's Beechcraft Queen Air B-80 equipped with IR surveillance assets. The ERP enjoyed considerable support from the local population and its members moved at will among the towns of Santa Lucía, Los Sosa, Monteros and La Fronterita around Famaillá and the Monteros mountains, until the Fifth Brigade came on the scene, consisting of the 19th, 20th and 29th Regiments. and various support units. The guerrillas who had laid low when the mountain brigade first arrived, soon began to strike at the commando units. It was during the second week of February that a platoon from the commando companies was ambushed at Río Pueblo Viejo and took some losses including the death of its platoon commander First Lieutenant Héctor Cáceres. On 24 February an army UH-1H helicopter while supporting troops on the ground, crashes near the town of Ingenio Santa Lucia killing its pilot First Lieutenant Carlos María Casagrande and the co-pilot Second Lieutenant Gustavo Pablo López. On 28 February 1975, army corporal Desidero Dardo Pérez is killed while inspecting an abandoned car rigged with an explosive charge in the city of Famaillá in Tucumán. Three months of constant patrolling and 'cordons and search' operations, with helicopter-borne troops, soon reduced the ERP's effectiveness in the Famaillá area, and so in June, elements of the Fifth Brigade moved to the frontiers of Tucumán to guard against ERP and Montoneros guerrillas crossing into the province from Catamarca, and Santiago del Estero.

In May 1975, ERP representative Amílcar Santucho, brother of Roberto, was captured along with Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, a member of the Chilean MIR, trying to cross into Paraguay to promote the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR, Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria) unity effort with the MIR, the Uruguayan Tupamaros and the Bolivian National Liberation Army. During his interrogation, he provided information that helped the Argentine security agencies destroy the ERP. A 6 June 1975 letter from the United States Justice Department shows that Robert Scherrer, a FBI official, passed on information revealed by the two men to the Chilean DINA. By this point, Operation Condor, the campaign of repressive cooperation between Latin American intelligence agencies, was already being planned, the third phase of which included assassinations of political opponents in Latin America and abroad. Fuentes was then "released" and sent to Chile, where he was last seen in the torture center of Villa Grimaldi before becoming a desaparecido.

Nevertheless the military was not to have everything its own way. On 28 August 1975 a bomb was planted at the Tucumán air base airstrip by Montoneros, in a support action for their comrades in the ERP. The blast destroyed an Air Force C-130 transport carrying 116 anti-guerrilla Gendarmerie commandos heading for home leave, killing six (Sergeants Juan Rivero and Pedro Yáñez and Corporals Marcelo Godoy, Raúl Cuello, Juan Luna and Evaristo Gómez) and wounding 60. The following day saw the derailment of a train carrying troops back from the guerrilla front about 40 miles south of the city of Tucumán, without casualties on this occasion.

By July 1975, the commandos were mounting search-and-destroy missions in the mountains. Army special forces discovered Santucho's hideout in August, then raided the ERP urban headquarters in September.

With the underground network of ERP supporters in the form of Montoneros sympathizers largely uprooted in the capital of Tucumán province, the last week of the month of August 1975 saw a large number of armed actions on the part of the left-wing guerrillas in the city of Córdoba in order to divert the 2nd and 14th Airborne Infantry Regiments ordered to assist the 5th Mountain Infantry Brigade, which resulted in the death of at least 5 policemen and practically the whole of the elite 4th Airborne Infantry Brigade was called in to restore order and stand guard at strategic points around the city of Córdoba for the remainder of the year, after the bombing of the local police headquarters and radio communications centre.

Most of the Compañía de Monte's general staff was killed in a special forces raid in October but the guerrilla unit continued to fight. Between 7 and 10 October 1975, a senior corporal (First Corporal José Anselmo Ramírez) and 5 privates (Pío Ramón Fernández, Rogelio René Espinosa, Juan Carlos Castillo, Enrique Ernesto Guastoni and Fredy Ordoñez) and over 30 rural guerrillas were reported killed in clashes in Tucumán province.On 24 October in a night action that takes place on the banks of Fronterista River the 5th Brigade suffers three killed: Second Lieutenant Diego Barceló and Privates Orlando Aníbal Moya and Carlos Humberto Vizcarra. Between 8 and 16 November 1975 there were other engagements in which the 5th Brigade suffered another three killed: First Corporal Wilfredo Napoleón Méndez and privates Benito Edgar Pérez and Miguel Arturo Moya.