Joe Baxter Papers

Biography

José Luis (Joe) Baxter; nickname El Gordo because of his hang to corpulentness; born in Marcos Paz, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina 1940, died near Paris 1973; activist and revolutionary; his family had an Anglo-Irish protestant background; sent to elementary school in the English School of Córdoba; family moved to Buenos Aires after the death of father Joseph Baxter in 1952; secondary school at Instituto Martínez in Buenos Aires; Joe visited political debate meetings and became an enthousiastic pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic activist; after the Soviet occupation of Hungary in November 1956 Baxter joined the Nationalist Union of Secondary Students, a high school student branch of the right-wing Catholic organization Tacuara, led by Alberto Ezcurra Uriburu; became secretary-general of Tacuara 1958; was working as international operator in the state-owned telephone company of Argentina; participated in violent raids against the URSS consulate, synagogues and other Jewish institutions; in 1962 Baxter was captivated with Castro's revolution in Cuba and began his metamorphosis from fascism to Marxism; by 1963 Baxter was a full-time activist; planned an invasion to Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1963; in 1964 started his international career; visited Juan Domingo Perón in Madrid; settled in Uruguay and transformed Tupamaros revolutionary group into an urban guerilla organization; in 1965, he received training in northern Vietnam; entered in 1966 clandestinely in Argentina and went to Cuba 1967; married in Havana Ruth Arrieta, daughter of a Bolivian nationalist officer; Baxter was in Paris during the Fourth International of 1968, where he represented the Trotskyist groups; Baxter was among the grounders of the Peoples Revolutionary Army (ERP), a Trotskyist terror organization in Argentina; after the hijacking of Fiat Argenina's chief executive Oberdan Sallustro Baxter broke with the ERP and created radical groups like Leninist Trend and Red Fraction; by the early 1970s Baxter was living in Chile with his wife and daughter Mariana, born in 1968 in Cuba; Joe Baxter died on 11 July 1973 when the Boeing 707 en route to Rio de Janeiro attempted an emergency landing near Paris; he was travelling on a false passport and carried with him $40,000 dollars, presumably to support the fighting of the Sandinist National Liberation Front of Nicaragua.

Content

Documents concerning the Trotzkyist movement in Latin America (Argentina: PRT and Chile: PSR) 1972-1974.