IT HAPPENED TODAY: Oberdan Salustro, from Naples to Buenos Aires, this is how Agnelli’s friend Fiat manager was killed by ERP 52 years ago.

Il April 10, 1972 was found in a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires lifeless body of
Oberdan Salustrogeneral manager of Argentina’s Fiat Concordkidnapped and killed byERP (People’s Revolutionary Army). The honor of the blood that other Fiat men, victims of the Red Brigade terror, would shed in Italy in the following years began on the other side of the world. His father’s family had moved to Argentina from Naples in the second half of the nineteenth century. Gaetano Salustro, together with his wife Anna D’Amato, moved to Asunción in Paraguay in 1899 where they started a jewelry manufacturing and marketing business, and in 1915 their third child, Oberdan, was born, named after the unknown patriot Guglielmo Oberdan. Trieste in 1882 by the Austro-Hungarians.

Oberdan Salustro, who was he?

The Salustro family, now quite wealthy, returned to Naples in the early twenties. And it was in Naples where their firstborn Attila, betraying the expectations of his father who wanted him to be a lawyer, would become the first Paraguayan player in the Italian championship, playing as a captain for 11 years with a Napoli shirt, and did so. , immediately after obtaining citizenship, some matches in the national team of the university of that time and in the national team of seniors. For many years Attila Salustro played for Napoli for free because his father thought it was not worth getting paid to play. After turning professional, he married Lucy D’Albert, one of the most popular show girls of the time, of Russian and later Italian origin.

Once he put his boots on the nails, and after a short time as the coach of Napoli himself, he would be the director of the San Paolo Stadium in Naples for more than twenty years. Only fifty years later Neapolitans will love another South American, Diego Armando Maradona, but Naples and its surroundings will remember Attila Sallustro by dedicating a street to him in the Ponticelli district, the street of Pomigliano d’Arco. and the square in Casavatore, as well as the municipal square of Carbonara di Nola.

Oberdan Salustro, meeting with Gianni Agnelli in Turin

Oberdan also, following in the footsteps of his older brother, began his career as a football player. After finishing high school in Naples, he returned to Paraguay to play for Nacional de Asunción but with little luck. After a few years he returned to Italy and enrolled in the faculty of law in Turin where he met Gianni AgnelliThe future lawyer and Fiat owner. A native Italian for a time, at the outbreak of World War II Oberdan Salustro was a reserve officer on the Greek front. After September 8 he will join the brigades of members of Justice and Freedom in Piedmont.

At the end of the war he returned to Turin where in 1946 he graduated in law from the same school.
year he began his diplomatic career as the commercial attaché of the Italian embassy in Asunción in Paraguay. In 1949, at Valletta’s request to the then Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza, Oberdan Salustro partnered with Fiat’s South American subsidiary, Turin. Aurelio Pecceifor reestablishing commercial relations with Argentina and identifying a possible industrial area in which it will establish its production, due to the great potential that the country offered at that time.

Oberdan Salustro and the rise of Fiat in Argentina

In Buenos Aires you will also have the opportunity to meet Susanna Agnelli and her husband count Urbano Rattazzi, who had fled to Argentina for a few years, after Rattazzi’s time in the X Mas squad of the social republic of Salò in 1944-1945. In the same year, also thanks to the work done by Sallustro, an agreement was reached between Fiat and the Argentine Military Fabricaciones Militares for the construction in Cordoba of a factory for the production of trucks, tractors and railway equipment.

Oberdan Salustro is now a full part of Fiat and Peccei continues to build relationships with government authorities to create a car production center in the country, despite the opposition of competition from American companies that have already been there for some time, especially. of General Motorsis concerned about the role that Fiat itself could play in Argentina’s industrial development.

Fiat, a turning point: yes to car production in Argentina

country, after the fall in 1956 of Peron, a period of economic development passes, accompanied by the replacement of rail transport with mass car transport. It has been established Fiat ConcordePresident Aurelio Peccei and director general Oberdan Salustro, cars began to be imported directly from Italy, especially the icon of the Italian miracle, Fiat 600. Thanks to the work of Peccei and Sallustro, in 1959 the Argentine government. of course it authorizes Fiat to produce cars in the country. In 1960, the first Fiat Concord 600, similar to that of the parent company, rolled off the assembly lines of the Caseros factory in the Buenos Aires area. Three years later, Peugeot also lived in El Palomar, still in mainland Buenos Aires. Under the leadership of Oberdan Sallustro, Fiat Concord will rise to the top of the Argentine automakers with a production that will vary from 150,000 to 200,000 cars a year, after identifying that part of the middle class market that the American automakers above all had . to be ignored.

Argentina is unstable between governments, military coups and kidnappings

Moreover, in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, political and social instability prevailed: legitimately elected governments alternated with military coups, in the face of guerrilla warfare organized by left-wing groups such as the Montoneros of Peronist origin or ERP (Ejército). Revolucionario del Pueblo) of Marxist-Trotskyist inspiration. He was an ERP commando who kidnapped Oberdan Salustro on March 21, 1972 near his home while he was on his way to office. The news also attracted a lot of attention in Italy because three weeks earlier, on March 3, the kidnapping of the Red Brigades took place for the first time, that of the manager of the Milan office of Sit-Siemens Idalgo Macchiarini.

The abduction lasted only about twenty minutes: time to load her into a car, take her picture and leave her a few hundred meters from her home. The photo was sent to the newspapers with Macchiarini being shown with a sign around his neck bearing the words that would become famous “Hit and run. Dial 1 to educate 100.” The terrorists justified the kidnapping of Sallustro by accusing him, as the perpetrators can do, of being an ally of the President of Argentina, General Alejandro Lanusse by arresting about 250 members of the same ERP present in the Fiat Concord factories.

Oberdan Salustro: kidnapping, negotiations refused and ransom not paid.

As stated later, their goal was to obtain a one-time compensation of approximately 2 million dollars and the release of all arrested Fiat employees. The General Lanusse he will refuse any negotiations despite pressure from Fiat, not only from Aurelio Peccei but also from Gianni Agnelli, a friend of Oberdan Salustro since his University days, ready to pay the ransom. The pressure on Lanusse was also useless Pope Paul VI, who in 1968 had awarded Oberdan Salustro the Papal Award of St. Gregory the Great, and his call to terrorists. Eight thousand Fiat Concord workers will also protest several times for his release. The only ones who will applaud the “revolutionary” ERP program in France will be the typical left-wing intellectuals, such as Jean Paul Sartre and Julio Cortàzar.

Hunting terrorists and killing Salustro

The hunt for terrorists lasts about twenty days. Every time the federal police arrest members
of the commandos, the rest move the hostages from one place to another, until the dawn of April 10.
1972 the police raided a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The three remaining guards manage to escape, but not before being killed, in a “man cell”, by several gunshots.
fire Oberdan Salustro. They will be arrested later, but it will never be known who actually shot them, blaming each other and never going to court due to an intervening amnesty.

Oberdan Salustro and a letter to his wife

It will be found on Salustro’s body a letter written to his wife: “I am very calm, like Socrates too, because I will finally know the truth of Giorgio (the child died young, etc) and of God. Oberdan”. Gianni Agnelli will also participate in his funeral in Argentina and will make the arrangements 5 minutes of silence as a sign of mourning at all Fiat factories worldwide. There will be only the second time that Fiat factories around the world will stop for 5 minutes of silence as a sign of mourning for the death of the lawyer.

Argentina, amnesty for all terrorists

In May 1973, a Peronist was elected President of Argentina Hector Campora which he will give general amnesty for all terrorists, including Oberdan Salustro’s captors. Some of these will return to the armed struggle, others will enjoy the transfer of gold to France based on the teachings of Mitterand, others will disappear with the arrival of the new military junta of General Videla in 1976. When the Fiat Concord will launch the Fiat 133 in 1977, a car designed directly in Argentina, the Argentinians themselves will nickname it “Salustro”. In 1980, Fiat Concord will merge with PSA, which will create “Argentina Sevel” in El Palomar. In Argentina, Fiat will retain the Cordoba plant, which will be called Cor. Mec., which he returned to making cars in 1996, as a branch of the Fiat factory in Brazil. The El Palomar and Cordoba plants are now part of the Stellantis Group, born from the merger of FCA and PSA.