Going Home

A guerrilla leader is seized

It was hardly a dramatic ending to one of Latin America's most notorious terrorist careers. When Brazilian federal police descended last week on a modest apartment in Rio de Janeiro's fashionable Ipanema district, their quarry no doubt expected the visit: he had returned home the night before to find Brazilian reporters squatting on his doorstep, clamoring for interviews. After the authorities finally arrived, Mario Eduardo Firmenich, leader of the quondam Argentine urban guerrilla organization known as the Montoneros, surrendered without a struggle.

Locked away in downtown Rio's Prac,a Maua jail, Firmenich now awaits formal extradition proceedings that would return him to the country where, during the 1970s, his crimes helped to create a decade of bloody turmoil and an eventual military dictatorship.

A onetime neofascist student leader, Firmenich, 36, virtually inaugurated the brutal period of terror and counterterror that became known as Argentina's "dirty war." In 1970 he and a small group of colleagues won instant fame by kidnaping and murdering a former Argentine provisional President, Army General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. The justification: "anti-imperialism." Eventually, Firmenich declared an underground guerrilla war against the incompetent regime of then President Maria Estela Martinez de Peron, better known as "Isabelita."

In its mid-'70s heyday, the Montonero organization grew in strength to about 20,000, including some 5,000 fighters. Under Firmenich's direction, they carried out countless assassinations and bombings that were financed through kidnapings. The guerrillas withered away, however, during the bloody repression that followed Argentina's 1976 military coup.

Firmenich escaped to Europe, where he issued defiant manifestoes and embraced luminaries like Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Firmenich also bragged from exile that his Montoneros played a small but vital part in the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Firmenich evidently developed pangs of home sickness after Argentina began reverting to civilian rule last year. In December he and four other Montonero leaders made a grand show of sending an open letter to the country's President-elect, Raul Alfonsin, offering to take part in a "constructive and democratic opposition."

Last week Firmenich finally received his formal reply.