Francisco Urondo

Urondo's assassins were convicted in 2011. Juan Agustín Oyarzábal Navarro, Eduardo Smahá Borzuk ("Ruso"), Alberto Rodríguez Vázquez (“Pájaro Loco”), and Celustiano Lucero (“Mono”) received the maximum sentence. Dardo Migno received 12 years in prison.

In 1968 he was named General Culture Director for the Santa Fe Province, and in 1973 Director of the Literature Department of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the University of Buenos Aires. As a journalist, he collaborated in several national and international media, among them Primera Plana, Panorama, Crisis, La Opiníon and Noticias. On June 17, 1976, he was assassinated by Argentine Security Forces in an ambush.

Though he held a position of responsibility within the Montoneros, in 1976 Urondo found himself demoted for internal political reasons and had to be transferred. He asked to not be sent to Santa Fe or to Mendoza because he was well known in both places, but nevertheless they placed him as head of the Mendoza column. Out of options, Urondo left for Mendoza in the beginning of May, 1976 with his then-companion Alicia Raboy and their one-year-old child Angela.

Urondo was imprisoned in 1973 but released; that same year, he published La Patria Fusilada which recounts through interview the stories of the three survivors of the Trelew massacre.

His writing career developed with the production of his first collections, La Perichole and Historia Antigua, in the 1950s. Too, his militancy grew, first with his participation in the Argentine guerrilla organization FAR, and later the Montoneros. For Urondo, his writing and his militancy were inseparable, despite a mutual mistrust among the two groups. Juan Gelman, a fellow poet and friend, remembers Urondo as saying once that he “took up arms because he was looking for the right word.”

Francisco "Paco" Urondo (January 10, 1930 in Santa Fe – June 17, 1976 in Mendoza) was an Argentine writer and member of the Montoneros guerrilla organization.