José Ignacio Rucci (5 March 1924 – 25 September 1973) was an Argentine politician and union leader, appointed general secretary of the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) in 1970. Close to the Argentine president Juan Perón, and a chief representative of the "syndical bureaucracy" (the trade-union movement's right wing), he was assassinated in 1973.

The son of modest Italian immigrants, he was born in Alcorta, Santa Fe Province, and emigrated to Buenos Aires as a young man to find work. He became a steelworker in the Ballester-Molina weapons factory. There he met Hilario Salvo, leader of the recently founded Unión Obrera Metalúrgica (UOM) steelworkers' union.

Rucci was present on the Plaza de Mayo, as well as thousands of workers, on 17 October 1945, a historical date in Peronism. Elected trade union delegate for the first time in 1947, he retained this function until 1953.

Following the self-styled Revolución Libertadora, a military coup which ousted Perón in 1955, Rucci progressively acquired fame by participating in the Peronist Resistance movement and was jailed several times for breaching Decree Law 4161/56, which proscribed the very mention of Perón's name. Following the creation of the 62 Organizations, the political branch of the CGT, to which he ascribed, Rucci quickly progressed inside the unions' hierarchy, alongside fellow UOM leader Augusto Vandor.

At first a unionist leader in the SOMISA steelworking factory in San Nicolás de los Arroyos (the nation's largest), he assumed the post of press secretary of the UOM in 1960 and sat on its board of directors alongside Vandor, Paulino Niembro, Avelino Fernández and Lorenzo Miguel. He was named inspector in 1964 for the San Nicolás de los Arroyos union local, where he later became the general secretary.

Rucci strongly opposed the unionist Agustín Tosco, the leader of the Córdoba trade union Luz y Fuerza, who held a more leftist position than Rucci and opposed the syndical bureaucracy's "participationist" (pragmatic) stance towards the military government of General Juan Carlos Onganía, installed in 1966.

The CGT split into the conservative Azopardo branch (named after the headquarters' address in Buenos Aires) and the CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA) following the annulment of the election of the left-wing graphic workers' leader Raimundo Ongaro as secretary general. The eventual Cordobazo of May 1969 led to the CGT-Azopardo's placement in receivership (the CGTA had been banned from the start), though in December, the order was lifted.

Displacing José Alonso in July 1970, Rucci was elected general secretary of the CGT, by 544 delegates of 618 present, during the Normalization Congress, which led to deepened differences between the CGT-Azopardo and the CGTA, which claimed a more radical leftist stance opposed to the military junta. Those who voted against were the Vandoristas, on the right-wing (Vandor had spoken in favour of a "Peronism without Perón", supporting the "participationist" tendency among the workers' movement), and the Cordobeses, who were in favour of armed struggle against the junta.