Juan Carlos Onganía

Juan Carlos Onganía

Juan Carlos Onganía (born March 17, 1914 in Marcos Paz , † June 8, 1995 in Buenos Aires ) was an Argentine military and politician. He was de facto president of the country between 1966 and 1970 and founded the dictatorship of the so-called Revolución Argentina .

Life

Onganía joined the Argentine Army in 1931 and began an officer career. As members of the country's economic and political elite, younger officers from good families were courted at the time of Peronism by Opus Dei , which Onganía also joined. In 1959 he was promoted to general . At that time he belonged to the so-called blue faction of the military, which was relatively friendly to the Peronist movement and viewed it as a bulwark against communism . The red faction, on the other hand, was clearly anti-peronist.

In 1963 he was appointed commander of the Argentine armed forces . Out of dissatisfaction with Arturo Umberto Illias politics , Onganía organized the coup in 1966 and took over the office of president.

After his presidency, Onganía hit the headlines mainly because of two incidents. On the one hand, during the military dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, he was critical of the regime's human rights violations. In 1995 he also publicly criticized President Carlos Menem for the corruption that was widespread in his government and tried to profile himself as a presidential candidate. However, he was charged with libel and sentenced to house arrest. In the same year he died of complications from a stroke .

Term of office

Onganía's dictatorship was characterized on the one hand by a very conservative social policy, on the other hand by economic failures that aroused the resentment of the population and ultimately led to his resignation in 1970. His Minister of Economics, Adalbert Krieger Vasena, tried to combine the current of so-called desarrollismo , which was supposed to bring about the transformation of Latin American states into western-oriented industrial countries through forced industrialization, with liberal measures to combat inflation. Since he failed, however, there were popular uprisings at the end of the 1960s, such as the Cordobazo in Cordoba in 1969, which initiated his resignation. Onganía's harsh repression of student protest movements and rock music, which began to establish itself from 1967, also made headlines. In particular, the Noche de los Bastones Largos (Night of the Long Batons ) on July 28, 1966 went down in history when Onganía had protests by students and university professors against his government's violation of the autonomy of universities by his government with great severity .

In contrast to the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, the Onganías government allowed limited participation, which was known as participacionismo . The system consisted of committees from the various economic sectors that had limited influence on government policy.

Web links

• Reports of Onganía's suppression of the student movement

Individual evidence

1. ^ Paul Vallely: Pope Francis. Untying the knots. Bloomsbury, London 2013, p. 45.
2. ↑ Inga Kleinecke: The Cordobazo. November 23, 2009. Retrieved July 19, 2019 . 

predecessor	Office	successor
Arturo Umberto Illia	President of Argentina 1966–1970	Roberto Marcelo Levingston