Raimundo Ongaro

Raimundo José Ongaro (13 February 1924 – 1 August 2016) was an Argentine union leader. He was secretary general of the General Confederation of Labour of the Argentines (CGTA) between 1968 and 1974.

Early career and rise to prominence Ongaro was born to a middle-class family of Italian Argentines from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, in the Argentine seashore city of Mar del Plata in 1924. Fluent in Latin and schooled in music composition, Ongaro became an apprenticed graphist and was eventually hired at COGTAL, one of Argentina's largest publishing cooperatives. Becoming active in the Buenos Aires Printworkers' Federation (FGB), the 1966 coup d'état against President Arturo Illia and its resulting advent of anti-labor policies led Ongaro to remove FGB leader Osvaldo Vigna in a coup of his own, that November. This move, however, met with the disapproval of José Alonso, the head of the CGT (among whose 62 unions the FGB belonged) and forced Ongaro to pursue alliances within the fractious CGT union (then South America's largest). Ongaro's only ally among the 62 unions was initially the sanitary workers' Amado Olmos, and the duo were no match for Alonso's conciliatory strategy with the repressive new regime of General Juan Carlos Onganía. This stance, shared with powerful CGT leaders such as the steelworkers' Augusto Vandor and the construction workers' Rogelio Coria, was shaken by Security Committee head General Osiris Villegas' violent March 1967 assault on CGT headquarters done to impede a planned general strike.

Belonging to a CGT disoriented by the regime's surprise attack, Ongaro traveled to Cuba in early 1968, where, during a political conference, he met Argentine journalist and writer Rodolfo Walsh, with whom Ongaro flew to Madrid to introduce to the CGT's benefactor, exiled populist leader Juan Perón. Perón was impressed with both men and subscribed to Ongaro's view that the CGT leadership's efforts at dialogue with the dictatorship would be in vain. President Onganía had already ordered eight of the 62 CGT unions into government receivership (including the second-largest, the railway workers') and CGT elections in March 1968 pitted the steelworker's Vandor against Perón's own choice, Raimundo Ongaro. Vandor's steelworkers' union was the largest in the CGT and he still had allies such as Alonso and Coría; but Ongaro's allies now included the rail workers' Lorenzo Pepe and the telecom workers' Julio Guillán, both of whose unions were in receivership. Where Ongaro had Perón's own support, Vandor could only boast the endorsement of Onganía's new Labor Minister, Rubens San Sebastián, the architect of the President's "divide and conquer" strategy towards the CGT.

The CGTA Ongaro was elected Secretary General of the CGT on March 30, 1968, without a concession from the defeated Vandor and the Labor Minister annulled the election, impeding Ongaro's taking office. Writer Rodolfo Walsh and numerous adherents of the activist Third World Priests' Movement joined Ongaro, Pepe and their CGT supporters in creating the Argentine CGT (CGTA), a coalition announced during a rally on May 1, the international labor day.

Terror and exile Political pressure led the dictatorship to call for free and fair national elections in March 1973, which Perón's Justicialist Party won in a landslide; one Basic Peronism supporter, journalist Rodolfo Ortega Peña, was among those elected to Congress on Perón's FREJULI party list. Ongaro's independent union and leftist stance, however, made him a target to the CGT and to a far-right adviser close to Perón himself, José López Rega. Congressman Ortega Peña was assassinated by López Rega's death squad, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A), on July 31, 1974,

Ongaro also kept a low profile during the advent of free market policies that ushered in an unprecedented era of corporate takeovers and mergers in Argentina during the 1990s. One such takeover, that of Editorial Atlántida (Argentina's leading magazine publisher) by Editorial Perfil in 1998, led to differences between affected employees and Ongaro, himself, who did not oppose the merger. The event led to strain between Ongaro and the FGB rank-and-file, though he has since been reelected as their Secretary General. The FGB's relatively conciliatory stance in collective bargaining negotiations fostered the emergence in 2011 of a rival faction, the Eduardo Ayala Classist Graphics Group.

Having led Argentina's largest print workers' unions, the FGB, since 1966, Ongaro became the dean of Argentine labor leaders.