SIDE-Montoneros: La Conexión Secreta (Historia del Doble Agente Mario Firmenich)

In September 1974 the Montoneros, often portrayed then and later as Latin America's largest urban terrorist organization, kidnapped the Born brothers, the main stockholders of Bunge Born, Argentina’s largest grain export business. Nearly two dozen urban guerrillas dressed as policemen shot dead a bodyguard and chauffeur in the well-orchestrated ambush. The Montoneros demanded and reportedly received a ransom of $60 million in cash, at the time called a world record, and on June 20, 1975 the last of the Born duo, Jorge, was released in a supposedly clandestine but highly-publicized news conference.What was not reported, until June 1987, was that the Montoneros' "safe house" was actually owned and operated by rightwing death squad agents working for the state intelligence secretariat (SIDE)--itself under the sway of the military. The agents not only tortured and murdered an adolescent at the house in an extortive kidnapping gambit, but were themselves there as the Montonero press conference took place.The Born kidnapping helped create a climate of terror in a country whose economy was falling apart, something the military used to justify its march back power in March of 1976. The Born drama also came at the same time the army initiated an orchestrated terror campaign against Marxist ERP guerrillas in Tucuman, who it claimed, were poised to establish a "Red Republic" in that remote province. However, the military’s own secret documents—as reported in Dossier Secreto; Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War"—show that normal guerrilla strength in Tucuman was between 60-70 poorly trained and armed militants, except for a two-week period where they numbered 120. And that force had been effectively crushed, by regular army troops numbering as many as 5,000, six months before the generals launched their coup under the pretext of saving the country from “subversion.”It is important to remember that it was the highly-respected Robert W. Scherrer, who as the FBI legal attaché stationed in Buenos Aires during those years was responsible for monitoring violence for our embassy there, later wrote: “A considerable portion of the murders, kidnappings and extortions attributed to the guerrillas were caused by other elements. … Terrorism in Argentina was serious and deadly but its scope was exaggerated. … [it was] a convenient vehicle for irresponsible elements of the military and their civilian counterparts to seek retaliation against real or imagined wrongs.”Scherrer also confirmed that Montonero leader Mario Firmenich actually worked for the Army's 601 intelligence battalion and reported directly to General Alberto Valin, who in the early 1980s was used by the Reagan Administration to secretly organize the Nicaraguan Contra.For more on this, please see:Montonero (and Argentine military intelligence plant) Mario Firmenich / Letter from FBI Legal Attache Robert W. Scherrer @ http://goo.gl/OAoMFJPope Francis and some still dirty secrets from Argentina’s so-called dirty 'war' @ http://www.offnews.info/verArticulo.php?contenidoID=44546When Thousands Vanished @ http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/09/books/when-thousands-vanished.html