Tacuara Nationalist Movement

The Movimiento Nacionalista Tacuara (MNT, Tacuara Nationalist Movement) was an Argentine far right group in the 1960s, which, after having violently opposed Peronism, later integrated Juan Perón's right-wing “Special Formations”. Linked to the more conservative sectors of the Peronist movement, and directly inspired by Julio Meinvielle's Catholic pronouncements, Tacuara defended nationalist, Catholic, anti-communist, antisemitic and anti-democratic ideas, and had as its first model the Spaniard Primo de Rivera's fascist Falange. Its main leaders were Alberto Ezcurra Medrano, Joe Baxter, Oscar Denovi and Eduardo Rosa. The Tacuara movement became the street and political university for many young people, and various contradictory tendencies emerged from this group, spanning from the far-right to the far-left. After three important splits in the early 1960s, the police cracked down on both the far-right and far-left factions in the same month, March 1964. A year later, the entire MNT was outlawed by President Arturo Illia (UCR). Composed of right-wing young people from wealthy backgrounds, it has been called the "first urban guerrilla group in Argentina".

A tacuara was an improvised weapon used by gaucho militias during the Argentine war of independence. It consisted of a knife blade tied to a stalk of sugarcane, resulting in a rudimentary lance.