The day that Perón ordered the “cleansing” of Justicialism and ordered the Peronist left to be killed

At the beginning of October 1973, a few days after the assassination of the general secretary of the CGT, José Ignacio Rucci, at the hands of the left-wing terrorist group Montoneros, Juan Domingo Perón made a decision that would mark the new direction of his movement.

What during the exile was a tactical alliance to achieve his return, after his electoral victory, became an open confrontation for the control of Justicialism.

Despite the fact that the Peronist left expected Perón to lead a “Socialist Revolution”, the movement's own leader made it clear that his model was “incompatible” with Marxism, which represented a total breaking point.

In this context, the Peronist Superior Council, under the leadership of Perón himself, issued the so-called “Reserved Document” of October 1, 1973, which formalized the beginning of an ideological “cleansing” of Justicialism from the sectors identified with the Peronist left, whom it ordered to “eliminate”.

According to the document, Rucci's crime represented the peak of an offensive against the movement.

There it was stated that his assassination “marks the highest point of an escalation of aggressions” carried out by “Marxist terrorist and subversive groups”, which were identified as responsible for a “real war” against Peronism.

Based on this framework, the justicialist leadership established a series of political and operational directives that entailed unprecedented internal tightening.

The text declared the movement in a state of mobilization and required all its members to align themselves without question. Within this framework, it was ordered that the sectors that acted within Peronism should be publicly defined and comply “without any discussion

” with the directives of the leadership.

The central point was the identification of an “internal enemy”. Juan Domingo Perón placed in that place the currents linked to Marxism, such as the Peronist Youth and organizations such as Montoneros, which he accused of ideological infiltration and of trying to distort the doctrinal principles of

the movement.

In that sense, the document enabled a strategy of direct confrontation.

Among the directives were to prevent the participation of these sectors in public events “by all means”, to block their dissemination and to use all elements of the State to suppress the plans of the "enemy" with