Military Figure, Politician. Osvaldo Andrés Cacciatore was an Argentine Air Force brigadier and Mayor of Buenos Aires during the National Reorganization Process military dictatorship. He enrolled at the School of Military Aviation in 1946 and on September 28, 1951, joined an attempted coup d'état against populist President Juan Perón. The putsch, led by retired General Benjamín Menéndez, was a bid to thwart the upcoming 1951 general elections (in which Perón was re-elected). It quickly failed, however, and Menéndez, Cacciatore and a number of others escaped to neighboring Montevideo, Uruguay, whose government was at odds with Perón's. Cacciatore returned to Argentina and was reinstated into the Air Force. Following a collapse in Church-state relations in Argentina in late 1954, Cacciatore joined a second mutiny against the President, led by Rear Admiral Samuel Toranzo Calderón. On the eve of the planned, June 16, 1955, attack, Toranzo had decided to postpone the move; but unaware of the decision, an Air Force detachment, which included Cacciatore, carried out the brutal bombing of Plaza de Mayo (the public square facing the presidential offices, the Casa Rosada) as scheduled, and during a Peronist rally. Piloting one of the Gloster Meteor jets deployed for the raid, Cacciatore was among the pilots whose attack took over 300 civilian lives, after which the pilots flew to safety in Uruguay. An Army revolt led by General Eduardo Lonardi in September 1955 ultimately succeeded in deposing Perón, and following the September 23 installation of the Revolución Libertadora regime, Cacciatore returned. An uneventful career in subsequent years was capped by his appointment in 1972 as Acting Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President Alejandro Lanusse, whose military regime was in its final days. Elections called by Lanusse for March 1973, would include, for the first time since Perón's ouster, a lifting of the ban on Peronism, and Cacciatore chaired the government delegation to negotiate terms for Perón's preliminary November 17, 1972, Argentine visit. The return of Peronism to power in 1973 exacerbated political frictions in Argentina, however, and was ultimately followed by a March 1976 coup and the installation of the National Reorganization Process, the last Argentine dictatorship. Replacing nearly all elected officials, the new regime named Cacciatore to the post of Mayor of Buenos Aires, whose economy is nearly a fourth of the nation's total.