Montoneros (Spanish: Movimiento Peronista Montonero, MPM) was an Argentine far-left Peronist, Camilist and Roman Catholic revolutionary guerrilla organization, which emerged in the 1970s during the "Argentine Revolution" dictatorship. Its name was a reference to the 19th-century cavalry militias called Montoneras, which fought for the Federalist Party in the Argentine civil wars. Radicalized by the political repression of anti-Peronist regimes, the influence of the Cuban Revolution and liberation theology worker-priests, the Montoneros emerged from the 1960s Catholic revolutionary guerrilla Comando Camilo Torres as a "national liberation movement", and became a convergence of revolutionary Peronism, Guevarism, and the revolutionary Catholicism of Juan García Elorrio shaped by Camilism. They fought for the return of Juan Perón to Argentina and the establishment of "Christian national socialism", based on 'indigenous' Argentine and Catholic socialism, seen as the ultimate conclusion of Peronist doctrine.
Its first public action took place on 29 May 1970, with the kidnapping, subsequent revolutionary trial and assassination of the anti-Peronist ex-dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, one of the leaders of the 1955 coup that had overthrown the constitutional government led by President Juan Domingo Perón. Montoneros kidnapped the ex-dictator to put him on "revolutionary trial" for being a traitor to the homeland, for having shot 27 people to suppress the 1956 Valle uprising, and to recover the body of Eva Perón that Aramburu had kidnapped and made disappear. Montoneros was the armed nucleus of a set of non-military social organizations ("mass fronts") known as the Tendencia Revolucionaria del Peronismo, or simply "La Tendencia", which included the Juventud Peronista Regionales (JP), the Juventud Universitaria Peronista (JUP), the Juventud Trabajadora Peronista (JTP), the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios (UES), the Agrupación Evita and the Movimiento Villero Peronista.
