The global meanings of Vietnamese war and revolution: a South American point of view

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Introduction

This article seeks to examine the relevance of the “Vietnamese example” both in the construction of community ties at the international level and in the provision of a model of political intervention that transcended borders and gained prominence in the forms of activism and militancy deployed by different actors around the globe. To this end, we adopt as the object of analysis the trajectory of one of the main revolutionary organizations of the twentieth century in the Americas: the Revolutionary Workers’ Party–People’s Revolutionary Army [PRT-ERP]. As we argue throughout the text, for the Argentine group, strongly influenced by the context of decolonization and the struggle for independence in the then-called Third World, Vietnam constituted an unavoidable strategic reference and the predominant axis in the development of its political identity.

The first part of the article offers a synthetic review of the historiographical discussions surrounding our object of study. In the subsequent section of the text, we trace the trajectory of the PRT-ERP, highlighting the growing relevance of the Vietnamese example to the militant identity and the political options adopted by the organization. We argue that this recognition can offer important perspectives to the historiography dedicated to the study of left-wing activism during the 1960s and 1970s. The first concerns the identification of the impact exerted by a political phenomenon of global reach on the development of political experiences at the regional level. As in the much more extensively studied case of the Cuban Revolution, the revolutionary experience of Vietnam exercised a powerful attraction over Latin American leftists during the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to the expansion of their political and intellectual horizons—and therefore affecting their work “on the ground”.

Finally, we maintain that the approach adopted in this article allows us to recognize the global dimension of the processes of war and revolution in Indochina, bringing to light aspects scarcely addressed concerning their reception in other regions of what is now called the Global South. Although it figures as a contextual element in almost all works on the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, there are still few studies dedicated to investigating the specific way in which the Vietnamese experience permeated left-wing culture and militant practices in the region. In addition to seeking to make a small contribution to this field of study, this text suggests that examining the material and symbolic connections established between Latin American actors and the decolonization process in Vietnam is essential for developing a deeper understanding of Latin America’s place in the Global Cold War.

Historiographical overview

In academic studies on the Vietnam War—referred to in that country as the 'Anti-American Resistance War for National Salvation' (Cuộc kháng chiến chống Mỹ, cứu nước)—there are differing perspectives regarding its starting point. To cite just a few examples, Marilyn B. Young, author of an important critical study on the subject, places the beginning of the war between 1945 and 1946, starting with the Vietnamese declaration of independence and the French attempts to regain control over their former colonies in Southeast Asia [Young 1991]. In turn, Ilya V. Gaiduk, author of one of the first analyses of the conflict based on Soviet sources uncovered during the 1990s, argues that until 1964 no one could have foreseen “that the world would soon witness a conflict in the jungles of Indochina that would affect many countries and the entire system of international relations” [Gaiduk 1996: 3]. Finally, official United States diplomacy itself has alternated definitions of the war’s beginning between 1955, with the reorganization of the US military advisory mission in South Vietnam, and 1962, the start date of American combat actions on Vietnamese territory [Miller 2024: 8].

In broad terms, these differences in perspective are based on the weight that different authors attribute to the continuities between the decolonization process of Indochina, which began shortly after the Second World War — as in several other Asian and African countries [Jansen et al. 2017] — and the definitive reunification of the country in 1975. As demonstrated by Luong Thi Hong's [2022] work, unlike other imperialist powers such as England, the Netherlands, and the United States, France sought to sustain its colonial dominion in Southeast Asia through military means. This led to the outbreak of a conflict that extended until the mid-1950s and was powerfully influenced by the hegemonic disputes that marked the period.

Indeed, the division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel, officially established by the Geneva Accords (July 1954), between a Northern portion, with a communist government and its capital in Hanoi, and a Southern part, with its capital in Saigon and increasingly supported by the United States, turned the country into what Jessica M. Chapman [2023] called a "Cold War Crucible." According to the author, from then on until the victory over the United States and the reunification of the country, Vietnamese territory would become the stage for battles that embodied paradigmatic confrontations of the period: between capitalism and communism, between imperialism and liberation, and was even crossed by the tensions involving the Sino-Soviet disputes of that time. This scenario notably favored international actors such as the PRT-ERP to dedicate their efforts to grasping and assimilating what was taking place in the region.

Other important contributions on the subject dedicate themselves to investigating in depth the role of different actors in the Vietnamese liberation struggle, whether in the North or the South of the country [Hunt 2009]. In this field, research such as that of Lien-Hang T. Nguyen [2008, 2012] stands out, demonstrating, among other things, that despite their cohesion around the necessity of reunifying the country, the communist leaders of the North held varying positions regarding the launch of a military campaign toward the South in the period prior to the Tet Offensive. In this regard, the author demonstrates the decisive role occupied by revolutionary leaders involved in the activities of the National Liberation Front, such as Le Duan.^[1]

Finally, it is important to highlight the body of existing works on international support for the Vietnamese struggle. Studies such as those by Sedlmaier [2022] and Mohandesi [2023] have demonstrated how the explicit nature of foreign military intervention in a country recently freed from European colonization, combined with the growing global dissemination of news about the crimes committed on the battlefield, contributed to the construction of the Vietnam War as a symbol of injustice demanding a global commitment of solidarity. Furthermore, research such as that by Chrobaczyńska-Plucińska [2024] and Vučetić [2013] allows us to glimpse the impact of the war on the generation of ties and expressions of solidarity within different socialist/communist countries, suggesting that, in fact, the impact of the revolutionary experience and the struggle for liberation in Vietnam had a global reach.

Vietnam: A Luminous Example

The attack perpetrated by the Viet Cong in February 1965 on a US air base installed at Pleiku became the trigger for the definitive entry of the United States into the conflict from which it would suffer a resounding defeat[Goscha 2016]. On March 8, the first contingent of Marines landed on Da Nang beach. Two months later, in Argentina, the PRT was founded.

More than a curious coincidence, the concomitance between certain events occurring in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the Cold War reveals a deeply interconnected scenario of planetary upheaval. Not only were the actors of the period aware that the context seemed favorable to the development of different forms of questioning the status quo, but they also interpreted that the success of their objectives depended on their capacity to coalesce around globally convergent causes and political horizons. Undoubtedly, opposition to “Yankee imperialism” was one of the banners that could most powerfully be articulated, across different geographies, with the myriad demands formulated by the diverse sectors of society interested in the transformation of the world.

The founding congress of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PRT) took place on May 25, 1965, very shortly after the US invasions of Vietnam (March) and Santo Domingo (April). Despite belonging to very different political traditions, the organizations involved in the merger that gave rise to the new party—the Popular Indo-American Revolutionary Front (FRIP) and Palabra Obrera (Workers’ Word)—shared anti-imperialist convictions that underpinned their joint action until 1968^[2]. In its early documents, the newly formed organization insisted on the need to fully integrate into the expressions of international solidarity that had emerged in that context, even proposing the adoption of measures such as the seizure of factories with hostages in the event that the Argentine government offered support to US military incursions.^[3]

Crossed by debates surrounding the adoption of armed struggle as a method for the revolutionary offensive in Argentina, the PRT split in early 1968 into two fiercely opposed factions, named after the newspapers they began to publish: El Combatiente (The Combatant) and La Verdad (The Truth). The latter, led by a historic figure of local Trotskyism, leveled a profound critique of the “adventurism” of the guerrilla sectors proliferating in Latin America at that time and directed its efforts toward political intervention in guilds, unions, and universities. The members of the PRT-El Combatiente, in turn, assumed from the outset that armed struggle was “the only path to workers’ power and socialism” and prepared themselves for the creation of an armed wing, the Revolutionary Workers’ Army (ERP), whose founding in 1970 would ultimately define the structure adopted by the organization (PRT-ERP).

Despite the profound differences that marked their actions from then on, neither of the two tendencies abandoned the vindication of the “Vietnamese example” in terms of its “heroic struggle” against the “principal enemy of humanity.” For all progressive or left-wing currents in the Third World, regardless of their inclination toward any of the prevailing political traditions [nationalism, Castroism, Maoism, Trotskyism, anarchism, etc.], Vietnam represented an unquestionable reference of resistance and courage. Its successive confrontation with two imperialist powers seemed to indicate the possibility of defeating a more powerful enemy in combat and alerted to the violations the United States was willing to commit in defense of its hegemonic project. Indeed, this interpretive key occupies an important place and is expressed with notable forcefulness in one of the most important documents produced during the 1960s and 1970s: Ernesto Che Guevara’s “Message to the Peoples of the World through the Tricontinental” (1966).

This text, in which Guevara articulated his proposal for the need to create “many Vietnams” in Latin America, experienced a dizzying and massive dissemination among leftist sectors on the continent and, with few exceptions, was celebrated simultaneously as an important interpretation of the conjuncture and as a guide for revolutionary action. The members of the Combatiente faction of the PRT took note of “Che’s” exhortation and included in the founding document of the new grouping a detailed reflection on the matter:

Why does Che say two, three, many Vietnams, and not two, three, many Cubas? Because he recognizes the exceptionality of the Cuban revolution, which will not be repeated. Because from the strategic analysis, from the overall picture of the world revolution, he foresees the inevitable intervention of imperialism before the revolution takes power; and the transformation of this into a prolonged anti-imperialist war, of one or several nations occupied by the Yankee army: [...] ‘Little by little, the obsolete weapons sufficient for the repression of small armed bands will become modern weapons, and groups of advisers will become American combatants, until, at a certain point, they are forced to send increasing numbers of regular troops to ensure the relative stability of a power whose puppet national army disintegrates before the guerrilla’s combat. This is the path of Vietnam; this is the path that peoples must follow; this is the path that America will follow, with the special characteristic that armed groups could form something like coordination committees to make the repressive task of Yankee imperialism more difficult and to facilitate their own cause.’ ‘America... will have a task of much greater significance: that of creating the second or third Vietnam, or the second and third Vietnam of the world.’^[4]

Coming from an organizational experience with predominantly regional and indigenist political horizons—the FRIP—Mario Roberto Santucho and his comrades in the leadership of the new PRT-El Combatiente had to seek references with which to bring their conviction about the need to develop an armed project in Argentina into dialogue. Reading the text suggests that, faced with the challenge of founding a new organization on the basis of the choice for arms, the PRT had difficulty—or was not interested—in inscribing itself within an already existing party-political identity, and instead continually strove to incorporate diverse influences and compose its own referential matrix.

In this sense, the revolutionary experience of Vietnam emerged on the party’s horizon as part of a progressive process of expanding its intellectual reach, developing experiences on the ground, and attributing similarities between the reality in Southeast Asia and the dictatorial context in Argentina. The launch of the Tet Offensive between January and September 1968, precisely when the PRT-El Combatiente was taking shape, occupied an important place in this process.

Since June 28, 1966, Argentina had been under the dictatorship of the self-styled Argentine Revolution, headed at that time by General Juan Carlos Onganía. The persecution of political activity in universities and workplaces was intense and seemed to foreshadow, for certain sectors of the Latin American left, an intensification of the actions of US imperialism on the continent through the implantation of “puppet governments”. The analogy, therefore, was constructed in the following terms: just as South Vietnam, several regions of South America, including Argentina, were subjected to the imperialist orbit through the actions of coup-imposed regimes complicit with the United States. In this sense, understanding how the Vietnamese successfully confronted the neocolonial onslaught could illuminate the path to liberation in other regions as well. This interpretation, corroborated by Guevara’s message to the Tricontinental, reinforced the conviction that it was essential to support and draw nourishment from the example coming from Southeast Asia.

In the second issue of El Combatiente, published just weeks after the beginning of the Tet Offensive, the issue was addressed in detail in an article titled “Support Vietnam by Fighting the Dictatorship.” Throughout the text, the main characteristics of the military action coordinated by General Giap were presented, underscoring its strategic significance within the framework of a people’s war that had already been ongoing for over two decades. In this regard, the material set forth a history of the conflict based on the recognition that a militia “much weaker than the combined force of imperialism and the puppet government in Saigon,” through guerrilla operations and a willingness to sustain a prolonged conflict, had been able to garner the support of middle sectors and peasants in the South to constitute the powerful army with which, from the Tet Offensive onward, it was launching its offensive. This perspective seemed to offer quite favorable future prospects for the 200 militants who comprised the PRT in 1968.^[5]

Similarly, the newly formed organization saw in the repressive actions of the dictatorship a sign that battles were also being waged in Argentina that needed to be resisted militarily. For this very reason, it extrapolated the expressions of support for the Vietnamese people, directly suggesting the development of a practical example:

“Ambassador of Onganía’s dictatorship to imperialism, Álvaro Alsogaray [...] defended the actions of the US in Vietnam and Santo Domingo. These statements reveal once again the character of regency on behalf of imperialism that the military dictatorship possesses [...]. The working class and the people have only two paths before imperialism and the puppet dictatorship: on one hand, the path of the Vietnamese people, that is, the organization of the revolutionary party of the working class, the preparation, initiation, and development of revolutionary struggle for national liberation and socialism; on the other hand, hunger, super-exploitation, and, in an ever-closer future, the prospect that their children will become cannon fodder for imperialism in any counterrevolutionary adventure anywhere in the world. Imperialism is a world system that everywhere counts on the alliance of national exploiters. It can only be defeated in a worldwide confrontation”^[6].

The idea of a global confrontation with imperialism was a determining key to the Latin American and Afro-Asian internationalism propagated by organizations like PRT. However, even from that point, the members of the El Combatiente faction demonstrated their intention to advance toward a more complete understanding of why it was necessary to create many Vietnams. The article published in El Combatiente also included a long excerpt from People's War, People's Army by General Giap, published in 1965 in Argentina by the Maoist-oriented publisher Horizonte. Reading this work allowed the organization to imagine a methodology of intervention for workers in Argentina at a conjuncture of increasing repression. In its view, the working class should organize itself around Clandestine Resistance Committees, seeking to overcome the demand for strictly trade-union objectives, in order to progress gradually toward a political struggle against the employers' dictatorship, to which would be added the preparation of the best cadres for revolutionary armed struggle.

The following years offered the PRT some conjunctural elements that reinforced its conviction about the possibility of deepening the confrontation with the government along Vietnamese lines. Having overcome the period of stagnation in popular organization immediately following the 1966 coup, experiences of “molecular resistance” to the dictatorship gradually restructured themselves in factories, workshops, and universities, favoring a progressive recovery of activism by mid-1968 [Schneider 2005]. The decisive turning point in the country’s politics, however, occurred in May 1969 in the province of Córdoba.

The massive worker-student uprising that came to be known as the Cordobazo became the hallmark of a period of enormous social agitation characterized by the radicalization of actors from the most varied political spectra. After more than a decade under a political order delegitimized principally due to the proscription of the country’s most important popular movement, Peronism, and in a global context of rising demands, a series of radical initiatives took shape that profoundly impacted the Argentine social and cultural landscape: from artistic avant-gardes, political parties, countercultural movements, and class-based trade unions, to armed organizations such as the PRT, which in 1970 formed the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP)^[7].

In the immediate term, the social explosion of May 1969 mortally wounded the dictatorship, which shortly thereafter began to seek institutional paths to restructure itself and withdraw from power—something that ultimately occurred between 1972 and 1973. Despite the many twists and turns that shaped the Argentine conjuncture during this period, the cycle of protests inaugurated by the Cordobazo, accompanied by a series of other uprisings in the rest of the country, continued until mid-1975. In practice, this meant that organizations such as the PRT-ERP—whose number of militants steadily increased throughout this period—operated in a context that was locally propitious for the struggle for social transformation in radical terms. This characteristic of the domestic context undoubtedly facilitated the elaboration of analogies with insurgent experiences abroad and deeply impacted the way the party interpreted the Vietnamese experience.

Despite the great divergences concerning the reasons that led the Nixon-Kissinger administration to sustain US intervention in Southeast Asia for so many years, historiography agrees that from the Tet Offensive onward, the high command of the US armed forces was already aware that its allies in South Vietnam were doomed to defeat without its direct support [Nguyen 2008]. Therefore, the history of the PRT-ERP in Argentina unfolded almost in parallel with that of the advance of the Vietnamese revolutionaries until their victory in the war, sealed in April 1975. This fact also helps to explain why, as its own intellectual and organizational development deepened and the margins for its intervention in Argentina expanded, the party sought to intensify (through a series of readings and theoretical exchanges) its apprehension of the “Vietnamese examples” [Duarte 2024].

The local and the global thus converged through a series of political options adopted by concrete subjects who, in May 1972, expressed their point of view in this way:

“Revolutionaries must not content ourselves with merely pointing out the heroism of this people (the Vietnamese). We must see in this war the inescapable future of our own liberation struggle, and in the heroism of each Vietnamese the measure of sacrifice and death that freedom will cost us. And thus contribute to the struggle and victory of the Vietnamese people by making our own the extraordinarily rich experience accumulated over long years of tenacious combat. [...] Only in this way will victory be guaranteed not only for Vietnam, for all the Indochinese peoples, but for all the oppressed of the world. This is the main support we can offer to the Indochinese revolutionaries: to bring about the dispersal of the imperialist enemy, creating and developing new fronts of struggle”.^[8]

From this point of view, apprehending the revolutionary methods of the Vietnamese was indispensable to supporting them in a struggle that was interconnected on a global level. During the period in which this article was produced, a significant portion of the PRT leadership was in prison. The organization’s intellectual development was affected by the impossibility of holding meetings and training courses, and the mere production and distribution of El Combatiente represented a challenge that was sometimes insurmountable from within clandestinity. Nevertheless, the party’s gaze remained directed toward Vietnam from an internationalist perspective that would increasingly incorporate theoretical and political elements from that experience.

At the beginning of 1973, the outlook for Argentine revolutionaries appeared, at least in part, promising. After escaping from Rawson prison in August of the previous year, taking temporary asylum in Chile and Cuba, and traveling to Europe to discuss international affiliations, the main leaders of the PRT were once again in an Argentina that, after years of dictatorship, was preparing for the electoral contest that would return Peronism to power. Convinced of the path of arms and of the dangers of “bourgeois reformism,” the organization chose not to support any candidates. Instead, it directed its energies toward building channels for legal political intervention, such as grassroots committees and trade union and student fronts, without for that reason neglecting clandestine action. The formula, presented at a meeting of the organization’s Executive Committee on January 16, 1973, determined the expansion of ties with the masses “by boldly taking advantage of legal loopholes” while continuing to promote “the option of revolutionary war”. On the horizon once again was Vietnam:

“It is necessary at this time to redouble efforts, initiative, and ingenuity to continuously improve and expand our legal activity in the coming months of preparation. We must not forget for a single moment that without broad and efficient legal work that keeps the organization closely linked to the broadest proletarian and non-proletarian masses, there is no possibility of developing the war, of developing the clandestine organisms, of victoriously confronting the enemy’s military force. This must be burned into us; we must follow the example of the Vietnamese; we must remember how they developed the movement during the Geneva Accords; remember that their movement brought tens of thousands of people into the streets. A sign of the importance the Vietnamese Workers’ Party attached to this movement is that the main leader of this legal front, the lawyer Nguyen Huu Tho, finally imprisoned for his legal activity, later rescued from his prison in a commando action, is today the president of the National Liberation Front”.^[9]

Internal bulletins, as the name suggests, circulated exclusively among the party’s leaders and militants. They were often the product of their meetings, gatherings, and committees. They addressed crucial issues in the internal life of the organization, ranging from analysis of the conjuncture to evaluation of completed activities and the dissemination of instructions on the conduct of daily tasks [fundraising, holding assemblies in unions, contacting new members, etc.]. Unlike newspapers, whose contents can be understood in their didactic and propagandistic dimension, also directed outward from the party, the “I.Bs” or minutes reveal the exchange of ideas among members of the PRT leadership in a less conditioned manner. They are, therefore, peculiar testimonies of the conceptions that guided the PRT’s political action at different moments in its trajectory. In this case, they allow us to note the repeated presence of Vietnam in the daily life of the organization, through analogies, commentaries, readings, etc.

The document cited above was produced one week before the agreements between Vietnam and the United States were signed in Paris, which decreed the end of direct participation by US troops in the conflict. Although it did not guarantee the end of the war, the occasion was perceived worldwide as a victory for the North Vietnamese revolutionaries and reinforced, for the PRT, its convictions about the relevance of their example. From then until the brutal coup d’état of March 1976, which buried the period of popular agitation inaugurated by the Cordobazo, the party would seek to adapt its militant structure to conduct a political intervention in Argentina in keeping with the experience from which it ceaselessly drew lessons.

To achieve this objective, the PRT—which already had an armed wing, the ERP, and which had decided not to stop fighting against the Armed Forces, despite having offered a truce to the Peronist government elected in 1973—made several important decisions to deepen its concomitant action in both the legal and clandestine spheres: it promoted the founding of the Anti-Imperialist Front for Socialism (FAS); it encouraged the development of a Rank-and-File Trade Union Movement (MSB); and it attempted to establish a liberated zone in the northern province of Tucumán, with the launch of the military campaign led by the Ramón Rosa Jiménez Mountain Company. In each of these initiatives, the “Vietnamese example” was explicitly present:

“The Vietnam War shows us that in the victories achieved, the role played by the revolutionary party was fundamental […]. The Vietnam War teaches us that to militarily defeat the enemy it is necessary to build a powerful army of the masses, a People’s Army, composed of the best men and women of the people. An army that is built in the course of the war, going from the first small detachments to the large formations that gathered for the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The correct construction of this Army is achieved through the political leadership of the same Revolutionary Party […]. The Vietnamese war of liberation indicates that the working class, to victoriously carry forward the revolutionary war, needs to win the broadest popular sectors to its side. […] That is, a National Liberation Front that unites all the demands of the different sectors, channeling their struggles against the common enemy. The Vietnamese revolutionaries built the Viet Minh, this front of the entire people, channeling through it the political violence of the masses, the unarmed struggles, the militant organization of women, youth, patriotic and progressive parties and movements, and the people as a whole, all under the leadership of the working class, expressed through its party, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party”^[10].

Thus, in a lengthy article distinguishing the legal and clandestine functions of the People’s Army and the Liberation Front in the revolutionary process, El Combatiente made explicit in January 1974 the perspective that was to guide its militancy from then on:

“The difference in tasks also determines a difference in the composition of both organizations. Although by their programs both allow any person of the people to join, the combatant character of the People’s Army’s tasks requires a much more rigorous selection of personnel. In the Front, on the other hand, the broadest masses—even the elderly and children—have ample opportunity to deploy the immense richness of their creative capacity and their energy, as proven by the thousands of Vietnamese examples. It is not worth dwelling on this subject, since in the article we cite, the Vietnamese comrades analyze it with depth and precision, in light of their vast experience. Certainly, the Front and the Army in Argentina will have their own characteristics, corresponding to our national particularities. But these national particularities will emerge from practice, from the creative capacity of our people, and not from the theoretical speculation we might develop”^[11].

Although it did not seem willing on that occasion to predict the directions of the revolutionary struggle in Argentina, the author of El Combatiente indicated with great clarity on what its expectations were based. It was not merely a matter of the ghostly adoption of a model: what the PRT extracted from Vietnam were examples and practical lessons that, assimilated through a complex process of appropriation and interpretation, decisively influenced the party’s actions in Argentina.

Concluding Remarks

The expectation of assimilating the qualities and learning the methods of the Vietnamese revolutionaries was a decisive element in the history of the PRT — and possibly also in the trajectory of other militants and activists during the Latin American 1960s and 1970s. The PRT-ERP activities extended during the 1960s and 1970s across several other countries in the Latin American subcontinent. Furthermore, together with the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Chile), the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional–Tupamaros (Uruguay), and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Bolivia), the party formed the Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria (JCR, according to its Spanish acronym), whose political activities became notable even in Europe. Former PRT militants also participated as logistical and combat support in the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution.

Without an adequate examination of this determining element of the revolutionary culture of the Left during the Cold War, one cannot properly understand the ideological and political dynamics that contributed to the emergence of armed socialist projects in the Americas and their connections with the emancipatory struggles in different parts of the Third World.

Throughout this article we have sought to underscore the global relevance of the experiences of war and revolution in Vietnam, noting their impact on an Argentine political-military organization whose actions were deeply influenced by the ideas and forms of intervention originating from Southeast Asia. A brief review of the documents produced by actors such as the PRT leaves hanging an inquiry into why historiography has thus far practically ignored the relevance of the “Vietnamese example” in shaping the political options and identities formulated during the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America.

In general, almost all works written on the period point to the Vietnam War as a relevant contextual element, but, as we noted earlier, far fewer address exactly in what manner. The discussions presented in this article aim to suggest, therefore, that the theoretical, ethical, and political influence of the Vietnamese experience was a determining component in the material and symbolic constitution of the lefts of the period. It is very likely that, in Argentina, the PRT-ERP was a particular case regarding the centrality granted to the “Vietnamese example,” but it is also possible that by looking at other contexts, other organizations, we may uncover forms of appropriation of these experiences that help us understand elements of the history of the period that remain little explored.

¹ Recent research demonstrates that, in addition to classic authors such as Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, the books of Le Duan were among the most read by the PRT-ERP. On this subject, see: [Duarte 2023, 2024].

² For a more extensive analysis of the trajectory of the two organizations, see: Carnovale [2011]; Duarte [2024]; Mangiantini [2012]; Pozzi [2022].

³ “Boletín interno regional Litoral,” no. 3, May 1965, Partido Unificado FRIP—Palabra Obrera; Regional Litoral. Fundación Pluma: Documents between 1959 and 1968.

⁴ Carlos Ramírez [Mario Roberto Santucho], Sergio Domecg [Oscar Demetrio Prada] y Juan Candela [Félix Helio Prieto]. El único camino hasta el poder obrero y el socialismo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Combate, 1968, p.22.

⁵ By the mid-1970s, the party had around six thousand militants and an area of influence that Pablo Pozzi [2022] estimated at approximately twenty thousand sympathizers, adherents, and formal members.

⁶ El Combatiente, no. 2, March 15, 1968, p. 5..

⁷ Throughout its existence—drastically affected by the state terrorism implemented after the new coup led by the Argentine military in March 1976—the main armed actions carried out by the ERP were: assaults on armored trucks, banks, and police stations; expropriation and distribution of food, clothing, school supplies, and construction materials in working-class neighborhoods; destruction of patrol cars, attacks on police facilities, and theft of weaponry; attacks against members of the armed forces; and, less commonly, the kidnapping of representatives of large companies and US corporations. For a more detailed description of the actions of the PRT-ERP, see: Carnovale [2011] and Duarte [2024].

⁸ El Combatiente, May 1972, no. 69, p. 3.

⁹ Boletín Interno no. 35, January 16, 1973, p. 5.

¹⁰ El Combatiente, no. 117, May 15, 1974, pp. 5–8.

¹¹ El Combatiente, no. 103, January 2, 1974, p. 8.

About the authors

Lucas Duarte

Author for correspondence.
Email: lucas.lado@gmail.com

Ph.D (Historical sciences), Assistant Professor

References

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