Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria

The Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria united four armed organizations of the Southern Cone: the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional of Uruguay, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria of Chile, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional of Bolivia, and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo of Argentina. Its first communiqué opened with Che Guevara's message to the Tricontinental, which had proposed that "the groups in arms could form something like Juntas of Coordination to make more difficult the repressive task of Yankee imperialism," and declared the four organizations' "decision to unite in a Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria" to "unify the revolutionary forces against the imperialist enemy."¹

Contacts dated from 1968, consolidation from 1972, and the junta was constituted in August 1973. Before the Chilean coup its cadres trained at Cajón del Maipo under Tupamaro instructors; afterward its central office moved to Argentina. The communiqué was published in the junta's magazine Che Guevara on November 1, 1974.²

Condor

Arrests of the junta's couriers in Paraguay in 1975, interrogated before an audience by Pastor Coronel, drew the first documented American participation in the multinational hunt, a letter from the FBI's Robert Scherrer to the Chilean police. By Scherrer's account the Paraguayan interrogations sent French agents to a Paris apartment looking for the ERP's Roberto Santucho and finding Carlos the Jackal instead. "They should be rounded up," Scherrer said. "But they should be tried, not slaughtered." The junta's pursuit is counted among the reasons for the November 1975 conference in Santiago that founded Operation Condor.²³