Azul y Blanco opposed the government of General Juan Carlos Onganía, however, which its editors believed to be subordinating national interests to those of foreign investors.

Fernando Abal Medina participated in the May 1970 abduction and subsequent murder of a former dictator, General Pedro Aramburu, and on September 4, was killed in a police raid in the Buenos Aires suburb of William Morris.

He soon developed a good rapport with the leader of the Steelworkers' Union, Lorenzo Miguel, and the latter's close ally, CGT Secretary General José Ignacio Rucci, however.

Daniel Paladino, Perón's delegate since 1969, fell out of favor with much of the party machinery (as well as with their chief base of support, the CGT labor union) over differences in strategy as well as over his relatively conciliatory stance toward the dictatorship, and was dismissed by the national committee in November 1971.

Pursuant to an August 1971 announcement that preparations of elections would begin, and despite his original intent that Peronists be excluded, he allowed the courts to legalize Peronism on January 26, 1972.

Perón was 76, and rumors that he was suffering from both ill health and early signs of senility conspired with the myriad conditions imposed by President Lanusse on Peronists to make the exiled leader's return increasingly unlikely.

[5] Camporá was elected president in a landslide on March 11, and among the Peronist Youth, whose preferred candidates Abal Medina had retained on the ballot over Rucci's heated objections, the skilled young negotiator was now seen as a future leader.

[6] Garré, Santiago Díaz Ortiz, and the six others soon became known in Congress as the "Gang of Eight" for their increasingly vocal opposition to Perón's nomination of his right-wing wife, Isabel, as his running mate in snap elections called for September.

The Triple A was secretly commanded by Perón's astrologer and closest adviser, José López Rega, who had been given the Social Welfare portfolio (and thus controlled 30 percent of the federal budget).

Divorced from his second wife, he had a minor post at the Traffic and Transportation Secretariat and served as an agent of CISEN (Mexican State Intelligence) during the 1988–94 tenure of Interior Secretary Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios.