ABSTRACT
In June 1963, a group led by Peronist Ricardo Jorge Massetti arrived in Bolivia from Cuba and set up a guerrilla training camp near the Argentine border. In September of that year, Massetti filtered men and arms into Argentina and created a foco in the province of Salta in northwestern Argentina. The Ejercito Revolucionario del (ERP) was Argentina's most notorious and effective Communist guerrilla organization from its birth in 1970 to its definitive defeat in 1977. The ERP had little doctrinal tolerance for the other guerrilla groups in Argentina of Peronist origin, especially the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias. The ERP began the year 1974 with a bold and successful assault on the army barracks in Azul, an act the army and the government considered deeply humiliating. The movement's most famous operation, the "liberation" of Tucuman, took place in November 1974. Tucuman is a destitute, densely populated sugar-growing province in northwestern Argentina.
