Francisco Urondo

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.

Urondo published multiple collections of poetry, short stories, theatrical works, and a novel, as well as La patria fusilada, his famous interview with the survivors of the massacre at Trelew, and his critical essay Veinte años de poesía argentina. He also collaborated in the writing of movie scripts such as Pajarito Gómez (which includes a cameo appearance) and Noche terrible, and adapted for television Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, and Eça de Queiroz's Os Maias.

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.

At 18, Urondo left home to study chemistry, then law, and then philosophy and letters, but none of these satisfied him. He abandoned academics and went to Buenos Aires where he led a thriving social life and was known among his friends for his lively and intellectual personality. He practiced puppeteering there for a short while.

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.”

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