RadioProfile | The death of Mario Santucho, leader of the ERP

On July 19, 1976, an Army task force killed the ERP leader, Mario Santucho.

The operation was led by Captain Juan Carlos Leonetti and members of the 601 Intelligence Battalion and SIDE personnel participated.

When he forcibly entered an apartment in the building at 3100 Venezuela Street, in Villa Martelli, he found Santucho and his partner, Liliana Delfino, alias “the German.”

Also present were Benito Urteaga, with his 3-year-old son, and Domingo Menna with his 6-month-pregnant wife, Ana Lanzilotto.

Immediately there was a shootout in which Urteaga and Leonetti were killed.

Mario Santucho, general secretary of the guerrilla group the People’s Revolutionary Army, was also seriously injured.

Santucho was transferred, together with the rest of the detainees, to the Campo de Mayo Military Unit, where he died a few hours later, without receiving medical attention.

Meanwhile, his partner, Delfino, and the Menna-Lanzilotto couple, detained alive during the operation, are still on the list of “disappeared.”

The event was presented to the media as a “great success” in the fight against the so-called “Judeo-Marxist subversion” through a statement from the de facto government written by Jorge Rafael Videla himself.

Although years later, before Justice, make sure you don’t remember.

The dictatorship will abandon keeping the remains of Santucho and Urteaga as “war trophies” and given the possibility of being a bargaining chip with the ERP.

In 2012, Videla acknowledged that when Santucho died, the military made his corpse disappear because, according to his words, “he was a person who generated expectations and tributes were going to be held in his memory.”

As was later learned in the Truth Trials, the genocidal Antonio Domingo Bussi inaugurated in 1979 the “Museum of Subversion” which he called Juan Carlos Leonetti and which multiplies in Campo de Mayo.

There, not only Santucho’s embalmed corpse was exhibited, but also his accountant diploma, ERP and Montoneros pamphlets, books, records, weapons, and even red and black flags.

Several student delegations even toured the place as part of a “school field trip.”

In 2016, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo identified a young man as the son of Domingo Menna and Ana Lanzilotto and became the 121st recovered grandson.

On July 19, 1976, an Army task force killed the ERP leader, Mario Santucho.

The story is also news on Radio Perfil. Script by Javier Pasaragua and locution by Pita Fortín.