Ezeiza massacre (Masacre de Ezeiza)

A plane, a sea of flags, and the sound that broke the day

They had come to see him. In the low June light, the airport field was a river of blue-and-white banners and makeshift signs, a movement returned to the open air after eighteen years. Men and women from factories, shantytowns, unions, student groups, and guerrilla cells had squeezed into the long strip of land around Ezeiza. Some carried placards; others wore armbands that marked allegiances plain and dangerous. The roar of the approaching jet should have been the afternoon’s only drama. Instead, it became the signal for something else: sudden bursts of rifle fire from above.

Eyewitnesses later remember the abruptness. One moment the crowd was singing and craning for a glimpse of Juan Domingo Perón; the next, people were falling and running, cries mixing with the smell of cordite and dust. Shooters fired from towers, from the roofs of vehicles, and from pockets inside the crowd. People tripped and were trampled as thousands surged toward the gates. By nightfall, the field was littered with discarded flags and personal effects, and a number of dead lay folded under blankets while the city tried to count what had happened.

A return years in the making, a movement pulled in two directions

The context is essential to understand why Ezeiza did not feel, to many who were there, like random violence. Perón had been Argentina’s dominant political figure from 1946 until his overthrow in 1955. For nearly two decades he lived in Spain, but Peronism remained a mass force at home — a coalition glued together by loyalty, patronage, and the charisma of the man who promised labor, dignity, and national sovereignty. By the early 1970s those currents had frayed into competing visions.

On one side stood youthful, often armed groups and leftist intellectuals who wanted a socially revolutionary Peronism. The Montoneros were the best-known of these, but they were part of a broader ecosystem of activists and militants who believed Perón’s return could be a moment for deep social change. On the other side were the movement’s “orthodox” elements: trade-union leaders, conservative syndicates, and emerging hardliners like José López Rega. These factions wanted to preserve the movement’s traditional structures and were suspicious of the left’s militancy.

Héctor Cámpora’s triumph in the March 1973 election and his inauguration in May opened the door for Perón to come back. But the return was never meant to be a quiet, private reunion. It was a political performance, an enormous demonstration staged at Ezeiza on June 20, 1973. Organizers tried to segment the crowd by union and faction — an admission, perhaps, that the movement was no longer a single body but many bodies standing next to each other, tense and watchful.

When the plane touched down: targeting a crowd from above

Survivors describe pockets of organized men, clearly armed, positioned in strategic spots: on light poles, scaffolds, and the backs of pickup trucks. Witnesses said shooters also moved within the crowd. The shooting did not appear to be a spontaneous clash between two rival groups in the crush; accounts across newspapers, later interviews, and historians point to coordinated, elevated firing intended to disperse and terrorize certain sectors of the crowd.

Those targeted often bore signs of left-wing affiliation — red armbands, Montonero banners, or placement in areas organized by leftist unions. But the violence was not surgical. Bullets hit bystanders, and the crush itself crushed people who had nothing to do with factional symbols. Panic spread rapidly: people ran for fences and lanes; others pushed and fell. Nurses and volunteers improvised triage on the grass. The airport’s control tower and distant terminal buildings watched an event that no official plan had seemed built to stop.

In the confusion, police responses were inconsistent. Uniformed officers appeared at times as if trying to restore order; at others, they were accused of doing little while organized contingents of right-wing Peronist gunmen operated. Later testimony and investigative work point to a troubling overlap — that some shooters were allied to right-wing union sectors and that elements of state security were complicit or at least willfully negligent. Yet the precise chain of command — who ordered the firing, who financed the operation, and which individual shooters pulled triggers — remained opaque.

Blood and numbers: disputed counts and the first tally of damage

From the first night, accounts of the dead and wounded varied. Contemporary press reports gave differing totals, hospitals admitted hundreds, and organizers offered their own figures. Over time, historians have converged on a commonly cited range: roughly 11 to 13 people killed that day (some sources list 13 as the usual figure) and several hundred wounded — many tallies put injured people in the 300–365 range. The uncertainty matters: it reflects the chaos of the scene, political incentives to inflate or downplay numbers, and the fact that some victims were hospitalized elsewhere or died later from injuries.

There was little property destruction in the sense of fires or smashed storefronts. The primary damage was human and political: the massacre tore open a rift that had been widening for years and left a social psychology of terror in its wake. For many left-wing Peronists, Ezeiza proved that the movement’s leadership could be turned against them, even at mass gatherings meant to celebrate unity.

The messages the guns sent: political consequences the same evening

What made Ezeiza more than a tragic riot was how it functioned as political theater. That evening, the idea that Peronism might be reconciled — that leftists and rightists could coexist under a returning Perón — was fatally weakened. The massacre validated the right wing’s claim that force could purge or discipline the movement’s more radical elements. It also emboldened figures who favored repression as policy.

In the months after, José López Rega — a shadowy and influential figure close to Perón — consolidated networks that blurred politics and paramilitary violence. The Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, known as Triple A, appeared and carried out targeted killings and intimidation that disproportionately hit leftists. The read of Ezeiza among many scholars is blunt: the massacre did not alone create the repressive architecture of the late 1970s, but it accelerated polarization and helped normalize lethal tactics inside politics.

For the Cámpora government and for Perón’s return, the event created a crisis of legitimacy. Slogans of reconciliation rang hollow when so many were struck down in a scene ostensibly meant for celebration. The left felt betrayed; the right felt validated. Both moved toward harder lines. Swept into this was the broader state apparatus, which soon proved unwilling or unable to investigate fully the perpetrators and the chain of responsibility.

Investigations that never closed the book

The immediate aftermath held hospital corridors and improvised morgues, but it did not produce a transparent legal reckoning. Investigations were hampered by the political status quo, by the withdrawal of will among institutions that could have probed the connections between union bosses, paramilitary contingents, and security services, and by the general climate of intimidation that followed.

Over the decades, journalists, historians, and human-rights researchers pieced together testimony and archival records that support the conclusion that right-wing Peronist gunmen and complicit security elements carried out much of the shooting. Yet the exact chain of command — who gave the orders, how the operation was financed, and every individual shooter’s identity — remains incompletely documented in public judicial records. When prosecutions did occur in the post-dictatorship era, they focused more on the broader crimes of the Dirty War than on establishing comprehensive accountability for Ezeiza itself.

Oral histories and memoirs have filled gaps. Survivors’ accounts, photographs, and period reporting created a mosaic that confirmed the massacre’s organized nature. Still, many families waited decades for full answers that never arrived. That absence of closure became, in itself, part of the massacre’s legacy: an injury not only to bodies, but to the idea that a democratic state would investigate political violence transparently.

The massacre as a map to what came next

Ezeiza is not an isolated, closed chapter. It is a hinge in Argentina’s modern history — a public and lethal demonstration of what intra-Peronist rivalry could produce. In the months and years that followed, political violence escalated: kidnappings, assassinations, and targeted disappearances multiplied. Triple A’s death-squad activity and the growing power of security-minded hardliners set patterns that the 1976 military coup later institutionalized in a nationwide campaign of repression.

Historians do not treat Ezeiza as the sole cause of the Dirty War, but they do see it as a decisive moment in which political violence moved from the margins into the center of mass politics. It taught actors on both sides that force could shape politics and that mass mobilization could be met not just with counter-demonstration but with lethal, planned suppression.

Memory, testimony, and the settling of accounts

In the years after Argentina returned to democracy, human-rights trials and archives focused largely on the dictatorship’s crimes. Ezeiza remained an emblematic prelude: scholars and survivors continued to argue its significance, and public memory kept it as a reference point for the movement’s fracture. New testimony and investigative work have clarified elements of what happened, but absolute closure has been elusive.

The field at Ezeiza has changed over time. Where once banners lay in the mud and people were picked up in ambulances, later visits find quieter, official remembrance and contested commemorations. For families of the dead and wounded, the day is still a wound that defines part of the political genealogy of loss in Argentina.

A moment that stayed embedded in a nation’s politics

The Ezeiza massacre belongs to a category of events that are both particular and prophetic. It was a discrete day of violence with a discernible arc: celebration, then shooting, then panic and aftermath. It was also prophetic because it revealed the willingness of some political actors to use clandestine, lethal methods against fellow citizens who had once been comrades in a larger movement.

The exact numbers, the command chains, and all individual culpabilities may never be fully catalogued in a single court file. But the core truth most historians accept is plain: on June 20, 1973, organized gunmen opened fire on a mass of Peronist supporters in a way that changed the movement’s course and hardened the country’s political climate. The massacre’s echoes — in broken lives, in shifted alliances, and in the normalization of violence — continued to shape Argentina long after the flags were folded and the airport field lay still.