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Carlos Mugica (October 7, 1930 – May 11, 1974) was an Argentine Catholic Church priest and activist.
Mugica enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires in 1949 and was accepted into its law school; but in 1952, following a year in Europe, he resolved to enter the priesthood. He entered the Villa Devoto Seminary and in 1954 was assigned to the Parish of Saint Rose of Lima, from where he began ministering to the faithful in tenements in Buenos Aires' working-class Constitución area. He contributed articles and commentary to the ecclesiastical Seminario magazine from 1957 and in 1959, was ordained as a priest by the local Roman Catholic Church.
Mugica became a regular guest at the leftist Young Catholic Students organization (JEC), with whom he worked in a rural Santa Fe Province mission. A number of the JEC's membership, however, formed the violent Montoneros organization in 1968, and Mugica took some distance from these individuals, though he stopped short of breaking with them entirely. He was increasingly at odds with conservatives both in the University of Buenos Aires faculty (notably executive and Agricultural Law Professor José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz) and in the local archdiocese (particularly Bishop Juan Carlos Aramburu, who increasingly managed the aging Cardinal Caggiano's activities). These frictions were exacerbated by Mugica's 1967 mission to Bolivia for the sake of recovering revolutionary Che Guevara's remains.
Mugica's growing involvement in politics led to his replacement at the Mallinkrodt school, whereby he obtained an appointment in the slum's new "Christ the Worker" Chapel, as well as Cardinal Caggiano's ordainment for the post. Continuing to teach university classes, he also served as vicar to the San Francisco Solano Parish in Buenos Aires' working-class Villa Luro neighborhood. His continued activism as a Third World Priest earned Bishop Armaburu's growing opposition, however, and in 1970, the Bishop banned the organization in the archdiocese. These differences reached a flash point when a fellow JEC priest, Father Alberto Carbone, was detained on charges of complicity in the Montoneros' murder of former President Pedro Aramburu. Mugica increasingly became a target, being regularly criticized in more conservative Argentine newspapers for his "justification of violence," as well as being put under surveillance by SIDE.
He defied orders by presiding over the September 1970 funerals of a number of executed Montoneros figures, which led to his suspension for 30 days by Bishop Aramburu. Following the suspension, Aramburu began actively pressing Mugica to renounce his vows, and he began taking increasingly intricate steps to conceal his whereabouts at night. Mugica improvised makeshift quarters at his parents' Recoleta district apartment building; but on July 2, 1971, a bomb exploded at the address. He then divided his time between the port-area slum and Monasterio Benedictino Santa María, Friar Mamerto Menapace's Benedictine monastery in Los Toldos (a pampas town well known for being the birthplace of former first lady Eva Perón). During a press conference following the blast, he declared that:
López Rega used the important cabinet position (and its control of 30% of the national budget) to organize and arm his Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A). The resulting return of revenge killings between the Triple A against the left and the violence that resulted (the Montoneros' violence being more strategic, such as bombing buildings of transnational corporations funding the AAA and Right-wing violence) led Mugica to leave his government post, as well as to break with the Montoneros, by December 1973. He became the subject of increasingly heated political debate, and numerous unauthorized compilations of his works appeared – with each arranging his prolific past articles in the order most amenable to their agenda. Mugica's repudiation of these did little to deter the practice, and he accepted RCA Victor's offer to create a recorded version of his recently written Mass for the Third World. The reading, set to indigenous music and chorus, was ordered destroyed by the government of Isabel Perón in early 1975, however.
The assassination is depicted the 2019 drama film The Two Popes, with Mugica played by Hernán Acentares in a non-speaking role.
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