Mario Firmenich
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Mario Eduardo Firmenich (b. Buenos Aires, 24 January 1948) was a founder and active member of the Montoneros organization in Argentina before and during the Dirty War of the 1970s.
In his youth, Mario Firmenich studied in Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and participated in the right-wing Catholic Youth Students organization. There he met the Jesuit Carlos Mugica, who would influence him on his conversion to left-wing thinking, and he became an activist in the Peronist Justicialist Party . He remained a good friend of Mugica until his murder in 1974 by the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance.
On May 29, 1970, Firmenich took part in Operación Pindapoy, which consisted of the kidnapping and unofficial trial of ex-dictator Pedro Aramburu. Aramburu was later executed. After the deaths of Abal Medina, and Ramus and Carlos Sabino Navarro, Firmenich became the leader, from 1971 to 1977, of the Montoneros. Following the Ezeiza massacre on June 20, 1973, when the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance shot at the Montoneros, and Juan Peron's death in July 1974, the organization led by Firmenich decided to become clandestine.
A year after the 1976 coup which brought Jorge Rafael Videla to power, Firmenich went into exile, living in Rome, Mexico and Cuba. In 1978 he organized a commercial campaign before the Football World Cup in order to make the international community aware of the human-rights abuses by the military junta. The same year, he reorganized the Montoneros into a political and a military branch.
In 1979, while Firmenich was still in exile, the Montoneros led a large offensive against the dictatorship, which ended up in the capture and death of most members of the organization. Firmenich visited the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua.
During Raúl Alfonsín's presidency during the democratic transition, Firmenich was captured in Brazil, extradited and condemned to 30 years in prison under charges of "terrorism" and "subversion", along with Fernando Vaca Narvaja, Enrique Gorriarán Merlo and Roberto Perdía. In prison he led the Peronismo Revolucionario, an internal movement of the Justicialist Party which revived the objectives of the peronist-left of the 1970s.
Excluded from president Carlos Menem's first amnesty of guerrillero leaders and military officers, he was freed on December 29, 1990.
He has long had to face accusations from among survivors of Argentina's various guerrilla movements that he was a double agent, working for the Argentine security forces all along.
He's of Croat origin.
