Operation Massacre (13 page)

 

29.
A Dead Man Seeks Asylum

Had Benavídez died? His friends, according to Troxler's story, had hopes of finding him alive. Those hopes were dashed on the morning of June
12
.

All the newspapers published a communiqué from the government with the official list of “men executed in the region of San Martín.” And Reinaldo Benavídez was on it.

Benavídez himself must have been the most surprised to find out, seeing how he had survived . . .
27

And yet, the explanation was very simple. It can be found in the blind irresponsibility that, from start to finish, has been behind this secret operation that was labeled as an execution.

You just have to read the list of men executed in San Martín to understand that the government did not have the slightest idea who its victims were.

They assumed Benavídez, who had been enjoying a clean bill of health ever since his escape from the garbage dump in José León Suárez, was dead. On the other hand, Brión, who had been killed, was not mentioned at all. They called Lizaso “Crizaso” and Garibotti “Garibotto.”

It's hard to believe that they were able to make so many mistakes in a list of barely five names—names that corresponded to five people who were officially executed by the government, no less.

The odd thing is that none of these macabre mistakes have been corrected, even after I reported them. So, officially, Benavídez is still dead. Officially, the government never had anything to do with Mario Brión.

But on November
4
,
1956
, the newspapers reported that the previous day, Reinaldo Benavídez had gone into exile in Bolivia.

Yes, the very same.

The “dead man.”

***

The families of the victims were not spared any trouble, humiliation, or uncertainty.

One of his brothers had a feeling that Lizaso was going to meet his tragic end based on things he had heard; he walked from precinct to precinct in search of concrete news. At seven o'clock on the morning of June
12
, when the news was already in the papers—and had been announced by Radio Mitre the night before—he went to the San Martín District Police Department. They had the cold-blooded cynicism to tell him that they didn't know Carlitos and to send him out to the Bureau of Investigation on what they knew was a wild-goose chase. From there he was sent to the Military District. And from there to Campo de Mayo, where the Head of the Military Camp came to speak with him:

—The only thing I can tell you for sure —he informed him— is that no civilians have been executed here.

He went to Florida's Second Precinct, then to the Army Department. No one knew anything. At the Government House, General Quaranta refused to see him.
28
Finally an Air Force officer, Major Valés Garbo, took pity on him and, with a few booming commands over the phone, succeeded in getting the police thugs to let go of the innocent kick that they were getting out of all this.

***

In Florida on the night of the eleventh, a police squad went to Vicente Rodríguez's house to retrieve the murdered dockworker's ID booklet. His wife, who still did not know anything, received a summons from the Department on the twelfth for the following day.

At the District Police Department, they made her wait for an hour before an officer tended to her. She had not read the papers. She asked again about her husband, asked if he was in jail . . . That's when the officer looked her up and down.

—Are you illiterate? —he asked disdainfully.

Let it be noted: when tormenting a poor woman, there are advantages that literacy can offer.

—Many men were executed —the trained officer said in closing.—
Among them, your husband.

They took her by van to the San Martín polyclinic. That is where Vicente's body was. She asked if she could take him with her to hold a wake for him. They told her she could not.

—Come back with a coffin. From here you go straight to the cemetery. Oh, and it has to be before Friday. If not, you won't find him here.

She came back with a coffin. And they went straight to the cemetery. With a police escort. It was only after the last clump of dirt had fallen that the last policeman withdrew.

***

In Boulogne, where Carranza and Garibotti lived, the process was similar, only with one strange variation. The man in charge of retrieving all the ID booklets was tall, heavyset, and dark-skinned; he had a mustache and a deep, husky voice. He wore light pants and a short, olive green jacket: the uniform of the Argentine Army.

He was not brandishing a .
45
caliber pistol in his right hand anymore.

At
7
:
00
p.m. on Monday, the eleventh, he stepped out of a jeep in front of Garibotti's house.

—I've come to collect your husband's booklet —he said to Florinda Allende, without introducing himself.

—It's not here —she replied.

—Look for it. It should be here.

He entered the house.

One of the railroad worker's sons, Raúl Alberto (thirteen years old), was sitting on the fence.

—Are you Garibotti's son? —the driver of the jeep asked him.

—Yes.

—The guy they killed?

The boy didn't know anything about it . . .

The dead man's booklet did not turn up. The tall, heavyset man crossed the street and knocked on the door at Carranza's house. Berta Figueroa did not yet know the fate of her husband or the whereabouts of the booklet.

—I don't know anything. He's the one who should have it.

—Look for it, ma'am, it has to be here because
he says it's here
—the military-police officer insisted.

Berta let him in and went looking for the ID.

Fernández Suárez stood looking at the large portrait of Nicolás Carranza that was hanging on the wall.

He was surrounded by Carranza's children looking at him shyly, their eyes wide and full of curiosity.

—Was that your dad? —the man asked Elena—the same “tall man” whose order was responsible for the fact that, though she didn't know it yet, the little one no longer had a dad.

—Yes —she responded.

—How many brothers and sisters do you have?

—Five —the girl answered.

—And you're the oldest?

—Yes.

Just then, Berta Figueroa returned with the booklet.

—Is my husband in jail? —she dared, anxiously, to ask.

—I don't know, ma'am —the Chief of Police of the Province of Buenos Aires replied in a hurry.— I don't know anything.

And from the jeep he added, with a voice huskier than before:

—They've asked for the booklet over in La Plata. It's for a procedural matter.

***

On the afternoon of June
10
, a young man was walking, deeply worried, toward Franklin Street in Florida. A woman he didn't know stopped him along the way.

—Are you related to Brión? —she asked.

—I'm his brother —he replied.

—Don't worry —she then said.— Horacio and Mario are okay.

And before he could ask anything more, the stranger left in a hurry.

It was the first piece of news he had received since Mario's disappearance the night before. All the events that followed would work to refute it, but this mysterious encounter would fuel—even in the face of hard evidence—the cruelest and most irrational hopes.

A brother-in-law of Mario's found out straightaway that he had been arrested and went to the District Police Department to ask after him. There—according to a third party—something strange happened.

—What did your brother-in-law look like? —asked the officer on duty.

—He was . . . —Just as Mario's relative had begun to explain, he caught the man's gaze and exclaimed in shock:— Actually, he looked just like you . . . !

Upon hearing these unexpected words, the officer apparently broke down and started to cry.

Mario's body was at the San Martín polyclinic, which is where his father went to retrieve him. They let him see his son for not more than a few seconds. One moment they were folding back the sheet that covered him, and the next they were wrapping him up again.

Months later, Mr. Manuel Brión received a mysterious phone call.

—Are you the father of Mario? —a voice asked.

—Yes . . .

—I want to talk to you about your son.

—Who are you?

—I'm a sailor. I've just returned from the south. I'll wait for you tonight next to the big wall of the Mechanics School . . .

He named a time and an exact location.

An unspeakable fear prevented the old man from making it to the meeting. But from that day forward he began to doubt what he had seen in the morgue at the polyclinic. Only the words of the night watchman at the depot, which we have already mentioned here, grounded him in the cruel reality of the situation.
29

Footnotes:

 

30.
The Telegram Guerrilla

Meanwhile, a silent battle was being fought for the life of Juan Carlos Livraga.

With Police Inspector Torres driving the jeep, Livraga is taken from the polyclinic to Moreno's First Precinct, where they throw him into a cell naked, without food or medical assistance. They don't list him in the registry book. Why would they? They are probably waiting to catch the other fugitives so they can execute him again, this time more carefully. Or they want him to die off on his own.

But his relatives will not rest. One of them manages to reach Colonel Arribau. There is strong evidence suggesting that this officer's intervention is what prevented Livraga from suffering another execution.

Mr. Pedro Livraga decides to appeal directly to the Pink House.
30
At
7
:
00
p.m. on June
11
, the following registered telegram is sent from Florida, addressed to his Excellency the President of the Nation, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, the Government House, Buenos Aires, and received at
7
:
15
p.m.:

In my capacity as Father Juan Carlos Livraga executed the 10th at dawn on route 8 but who survived being tended to thereafter san martin polyclinic from where he was moved sunday around 8 o'clock not knowning new whereabouts I anxiously request your human intervening to prevent being executed again assuring you there has been confusion as he is unconnected to any movement. Registered. Pedro Livraga.

The reply arrives quickly. Telegram No.
1185
—sent from the Government House on June
12
,
1956
, at
1
:
23
p.m., received at
8
:
37
p.m., and addressed to Mr. Pedro Livraga, Florida—reads:

In reference to telegram dated the 11th I report your son Juan Carlos was wounded during shooting escaped thereafter was arrested and is staying at Moreno precinct. House Military Chief.

Juan Carlos' family hurries to the Moreno precinct. And there again they pull the old police trick: Juan Carlos—say the same clerks who just saw him thrown into a cell—has never been there before. It's pointless for Mr. Pedro Livraga to show them the telegram from the president's office: Juan Carlos isn't there. They don't know him. They instill what they say with a professional air of innocence. Later, in front of the judge, the commissioner will say that no visitors came to see him . . .

His family moves heaven and earth. To no avail. The young man does not turn up and at this point no one has any news from him. With the slow passing of each day, Mr. Pedro begins to get used to the harsh idea. Everyone in Florida assumes his son is dead.

But Juan Carlos is not dead. Remarkably, he survives his infected wounds, his excruciating pain, the hunger, the cold, the damp Moreno dungeon. At night he is delirious. Night and day do not even really exist for him anymore. Everything is a shimmering bright light where the ghosts of his fever move about, often taking on the indelible forms of the firing squad. When they happen to leave him some leftover food out of pity by the door and he drags himself toward it like a small animal, he realizes that he can't eat, that his shattered teeth still harbor searing promises of pain inside the shapeless and numb mass that is his face.

And so the days go by. The bandage they gave him at the hospital is rotting, falling off by itself in infected little bits. Juan Carlos Livraga is the Leper of the Liberating Revolution.

We should not have anything to say in defense of the then-commissioner of Moreno, Gregorio de Paula. It's useless for a man to try to hide behind “orders from on high” when those orders include the slow murder of another unarmed and innocent man. But he must have been holding onto some shred of mercy when he arrived at the cell that night carrying a blanket at the tips of his fingers—until then, it had been used to cover the precinct dog—and let it fall over Livraga, saying:

—This isn't allowed, kid . . . There are orders from the top. But I'm bringing it to you as contraband.

Beneath this blanket, Juan Carlos Livraga felt strangely twinned with the animal it had previously sheltered. He was now, more than ever, the leprous dog of the Liberating Revolution.

***

In his cell at San Martín's First Precinct, Giunta hears continuous laughter that seems to be coming from far away, rolling around the hallways, and suddenly exploding right next to him. It is he who is laughing. He, Miguel Ángel Giunta. He checks this by bringing his hand to his mouth and stifling the hysterical flow of laughter as it gushes all of a sudden from inside him.

He has had to repress it more than once this way, through reason, saying out loud:

—Hush. It's me. I need to keep it together . . .

But then the whirlwind pulls him in again. He talks to himself, laughs, cries, rambles and explains, and falls again into the well of terror where Rodríguez Moreno's silhouette is tall against the eucalyptus in the night, a gun shining coolly in his hand, and men are taking one, two, three paces back to aim their rifles. Then there's the unforgettable and perverse buzzing of the bullets, the band of fugitives, the plop! of a bullet penetrating the flesh and the shrill ahhh! of a man running full-speed who drops to the ground, just two steps behind him. Giunta jostles his head between his hands and mumbles:

—It's me, I'm okay, it's me . . .

But every murmur he hears in the hallways renews his agony. “They're coming to take me away,” he thinks. “Now they're going to execute me again.”

Sleep, at last, redeems him. It is bitterly cold, but somehow he manages to sleep on the wooden trundle bed without covers. At midnight he is woken by the cries of people being tortured, people being “given the machine.”

No one, however, is focused on him. They don't even talk to him. Over the course of the eight days that he stays in the cell, they don't bring him even one plate of food or a glass of water. It's the ordinary prisoners, the ones going out for their regular walks, who save him from death by starvation. They throw pieces of stale bread and food scraps through the cell's peephole that the prisoner then scoops up eagerly from the floor. To ease his thirst, they think up an emergency procedure. They insert the spout of a kettle into the hole and the survivor feels for the falling stream of water with his mouth.

His family, meanwhile, has no news of him. The police play the fun game of blind man's bluff: from the District Police Department, they send them to the prison in Caseros, from Caseros to the penitentiary in Olmos, from Olmos to La Plata Police Headquarters, from La Plata to the precinct in Villa Ballester, from Villa Ballester to the San Martín District Police Department . . . a week of anxiety passes before they finally find out the truth: Miguel Ángel is at San Martín's First Precinct.

They go to see him, but are only allowed in the next day. They get there just in time—his wife, his elderly father, his cousin, his brother-in-law—to witness a pitiful scene. They have hardly had time to embrace him before he is taken away: they bring him out into the street, shackled and with an armed escort, and steer him toward the railway station. The pleas of his family—proper middle-class people for whom the mere idea of walking the streets handcuffed is worse than death—are of no use. There they go, this strange bunch, along the main roads of the city of San Martín at midday: the “frightening” prisoner, the armed thugs, and the crying family members who trail behind them. People gaze at this spectacle, astonished.

Thin, bearded, with a faraway look in his eyes, a ghost of himself, Miguel Ángel Giunta was taken to the penitentiary in Olmos on June
25
. There, life would begin to change for him.

Footnotes: