People's Revolutionary Army (Argentina)

People's Revolutionary Army
The flag of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo.
Leader(s)	Mario Roberto Santucho, Enrique Gorriarán Merlo, Benito Urteaga
Active region(s)	Buenos Aires (urban) & Tucumán (rural)
Ideology	Communism Marxism Guevarism Foco

The People's Revolutionary Army (Spanish: Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, abbreviated as ERP) was the military branch of the communist Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT, Workers' Revolutionary Party) in Argentina.

The ERP was founded as the armed wing of the PRT, a communist party emerging from the Trotskyist tradition, but soon turned to the Maoist theory, especially the Cultural Revolution. During the 1960s, the PRT adopted the foquista strategy of insurgency associated with Che Guevara, who had fought alongside Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution.

The ERP launched its guerrilla campaign against the Argentine military dictatorship headed by Juan Carlos Onganía in 1969, using targeted urban guerrilla warfare methods such as assassinations and kidnappings of government officials and foreign company executives. For example, in 1973 Enrique Gorriarán Merlo and Benito Urteaga led the ERP kidnapping of Esso executive Victor Samuelson and obtaining a ransom of $12 million. They also assaulted several companies' offices using heavily armed commandos of the ERP's elite "Special Squad". Although claim and counter-claim are invariably difficult to reconcile, figures released for an official publication, Crónica de la subversión en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Depalma) at least give an indication of the kind of guerrilla activity undertaken, with claims that the rural guerrillas occupied 52 towns, robbed 166 banks and took US $76 million in ransoms for the kidnappings of 185 people.