Operation Massacre (23 page)

Together with representative Bronzini, I have been to the offices of two judges in order to gather impressions that would allow us to verify whether our information (
about the torture
) was true or not. What we have learned, especially from the words of Judge Viglione—whom I value as a man for his civic activism, and whom I respect even more for the adjudication skills he has demonstrated during this brief but brilliant term, carried out with such zeal and enthusiasm—is conclusive. And what we have verified has discouraged our faith in a number of men. It indicates a rise in the number of torture cases beginning at the start of this year and reaching its height during the uprising of June
9
and
10
 . . .

This is then followed by a few paragraphs that I have already cited in the main text of
Operation Massacre
. Dr. Schaposnik then continues:

I have encountered numerous torture cases in the criminal courts that leave no shred of doubt: in one of them, the perpetrators were sentenced in the first hearing to four years in prison by Judge Viglione, and the case is currently on appeal in the appropriate chamber. Another case, which is still in its first hearing in the same court, is worth highlighting to see whether the charges—overwhelming and painful for any man with two cents' worth of sensitivity to bear—are not damaging to the reputation of the institution.

I will now summarize some of the proceedings of the criminal case based on torture claims that is currently being tried in Judge Viglione's court.

Court minutes, page one: dated April
9
,
1956
, Judge Viglione, having been informed that illegal punishment has been carried out against the prisoners repeatedly, in the Lanús Bureau of Investigation, resolves to establish the Court in that police division.

Back of page one: Having established the court in the aforementioned police station, Judge Viglione examines the cells together with the Court clerks and is informed by prisoners Héctor Silva, Agustín Daniel Silva and Julio Jorge Silva, Agapito Rearte, Rómulo Fernández, Héctor A. Milito, Mariano Enrique Gareca, Carlos Neme, Miguel Artemio Longhi, Alfredo Richler, Alfonso Dande, Ernesto Arturo Suárez, Domingo Cuervo and Domingo Prieto, that they had injuries from torture inflicted upon them in that same police station, and which call for the attendance of the police medic, Dr. Ricardo Alberto Díaz, who is offering his report separately. The prisoners then identify their torturers: Rearte gives the name of Officer Farina; Milito was given the
picana
by Officers Zapiola and Fernández; Cuervo reports that he was beaten by Officer Gatti and others whom he would recognize; Prieto says that Officer Fumagalli and others beat him and gave him the
picana
; Richler saw his fellow prisoners being taken to the cell completely naked and in poor condition due to the torture they had endured. The minutes are signed by all of the aforementioned prisoners, the judge, and the clerks.

The police medic's report reads:

That prisoners Héctor, Agustín Daniel, and Julio Jorge Silva have the following injuries: linear abrasions on the lateral right and left side walls of the upper abdomen. Multiple punctated ecchymoses in most of the abdomen, seven days old, produced by a hard instrument; the rest produced from mild pressure throughout the area by a small instrument with a small blunt surface, which has been applied violently enough to produce these small superficial hemorrhages.

Agapito Néstor Rearte: two scars approximately half a centimeter in diameter in the dorsal region of the penis; given their size, they look like burns and are not less than seven days nor more than fifteen days old.

Rómulo Fernández: bruises approximately eight days old in the right lower eyelid, caused by a blunt object, possibly a punch.

Milito: ecchymosis in the inguinoscrotal region, caused by a blunt object.

Carlos Neme: punctate scars on the penis and scrotum, the same type as those of Rearte.

Domingo Prieto: contusion on his right knee and a superficial wound on his right arm; these injuries are in the process of fully healing and are three or four days old.

Then Dr. Schaposnik said:

I am not going to continue reading the records of the trial that convincingly demonstrate how poorly the prisoners were treated by the Lanús Bureau of Investigation. Commissioner Mucci, who led the investigation in Lanús, is still in office . . . What I posit here are examples. My presentation would be endless if I had set myself the task of extracting all of the necessary notes from the dossiers . . .

Does this not warrant another press conference? If we admit that a public reaction must be incited against terrorism in the streets (and I don't disagree), can't we also see how urgent it is that we support a great transformation in public opinion, one in favor of eliminating the high-up terrorists, the State torturers and the executioners, for all time?

I have begun to convince myself that always seeing both sides of the coin is a kind of misfortune, some sort of psychological defect that respectable people steer clear of; it's that two-cent coin of sensitivity that Dr. Schaposnik was asking for.

 

Provisional Epilogue

(to the first edition, July
1957
)

For various reasons, happenstance included, I was quite close to the three revolutions—two that were quashed in very different ways, and a victorious one in the middle—that rattled the country in
1955
and
1956
.

I can say again, without remorse, that I supported the September
1955
uprising. Not only for pressing, family reasons—which I had—but because I knew with certainty that a system that mocked civil liberties, that denied the right to freedom of expression, and that promoted obedience on the one hand and excess on the other, had just been overthrown. My memory is not short: what I thought then, right or wrong, I continue to think today.

Toward the end of
1955
, I wrote an article for the papers as a tribute to the three men of the naval air force who had died in an expedition to the South, fighting with simple and obvious heroism. For reasons that are better left unmentioned, the Navy authorities disavowed this article, first verbally and then in writing. Their understanding was that the fallen ones, their own dead, could do without such a tribute—a tribute that even their enemies might not have denied them—and my understanding was that I could do without the Navy's opinion. Because then as well as now I believe that the press has to be free, or it's a farce; there is no middle ground. And naturally, the article ran with my name on it, despite the explicit disavowal that I still have in my hands.

I am not just making idle mention of this incident; it was perhaps the first one in a long series of events that allowed the revolution to devour its heroes and forsake its dead, and with that, to lose its Liberating characteristic, among many other things. Because in the article I purposefully pointed out that, along with Captian Estivariz and Lieutenant Irigoin, a Peronist NCO had died. A man who could have dodged his service as many higher-ranking men had done, but instead had put his esprit de corps, his loyalty to the uniform, and his devotion to his superior first and foremost; at a very far second were his heartfelt and, in his case, respectable political opinions. The charred and unrecognizable remains of the three men—two revolutionaries and one Peronist inside the same plane that was blown to pieces, who died fighting the same battle, and who were consumed by the same fire of heroism—undoubtedly meant something. It was a sign, a warning, a massive symbol, a pact sealed with blood. What meaning does it carry now, almost two years later, when the short-sighted, the cowardly, and the dim-witted have done nothing but violate this pact? I can only think to say one thing: blessed are those three who lie dead, united, and untouched in their glorious eternity.

The June
9
revolution hit even closer to home. For purely geographic reasons, it literally came into my home. To reach my house in the early morning, I had to cross a war zone at the corner of Fifty-Fourth and Fourth in La Plata. In the thirty paces it took to cross the live fire zone of the Second Division Command, I learned what irrepressible physical fear was.

But I don't just remember this minor incident for love of the picturesque, either. On that same corner, behind a car that was being used as a barricade and amidst the crackling of gunshots, I was the final recipient of a “Haaalt!” that rang out endlessly, coming from invisible snipers all around me. I had been stopped by a short, rather fat man with a mustache, a leather jacket, and a submachine gun tucked into his belt. He asked me where I was going. My voice faltering, I told him about my family that was fifty meters away, in the area where the most intense shooting of the entire day was taking place. He didn't ask me for my ID, which I didn't have on me. He didn't ask my opinion about what was happening. He simply said, shrugging his shoulders:

—Go ahead, if you dare.

He was the leader of the rebel Peronist group. A man who now sells balloons in a plaza in Montevideo. I thought then and I think now—take good note of this—that the man was in the wrong. Because he could not have known that, at that very moment, he was being proven right. He could not have known that, at that very moment, an individual who would not dare to stick his nose in that battlefield was coldly ordering the execution of twelve poor bastards. He could not have known that, behind the wall and the little green door of the Command, another man—Juan Carlos Longoni—was risking his life for the exact opposite idea, was going to risk and lose his job for helping those poor bastards. Neither he, nor I, nor Longoni knew any of that.

But that same Seargeant Ferrari of the rebel group let me pass; he must have regretted it. Because two hours later my house became a shelter for the forty loyal soldiers who, having overcome their fear, were shooting at him. Those men of the City Bell Communications Second Batallion will not remember my face, which they could barely see in the darkness, or my name, which they didn't check. But I am certain that not one of them—not even Lieutenant Cruset, or Decruset, who was in charge—will ever forget the tall wooden door on Fifty-Fourth street that was the only one to open for them when they were caught in rebel fire that threatened to destroy them and that, on the sidewalk across the street, had already left a trail of dead marines.

One of them had just died, ten meters away, on the other side of the street. I heard the cry of terror and loneliness that he let out when he was dying and the patrol fell back for a moment, taken by surprise: “Don't leave me here alone! You sons of b———, don't leave me here alone!” Later on, his fellow soldiers took control of the machine-gun emplacement (located in a construction site) that had killed him. But Bernardino Rodríguez perished at age twenty-one believing that his brothers-in-arms, his friends, had abandoned him in death. That pained me at the time, and continues to pain me now, like so many other useless things.

That is the moment when I understood what a revolution was, its squalid face that nothing can make up for. And I hated that revolution with all my might. As a reflex, I also hated all the previous ones, however just they may have been. I came to a deeper understanding of it in the tense hours that followed, seeing undisguised fear all around me in the almost childlike faces of the soldiers who didn't know if they were “loyalists” or “rebels,” but knew that they had to shoot at other soldiers identical to themselves, who also didn't know if they were loyalists or rebels.

If there is one thing that I have tried to evoke in these pages it is the horror of revolutions, whose first victims are always innocent people like the executed men at José León Suárez or that dying soldier just a few meters from where I was. These poor people do not die screaming “Long live the nation” like they do in novels. They die vomiting from fear, like Nicolás Carranza, or cursing others for abandoning them, like Bernardino Rodríguez.

Only an idiot could not want peace.

But peace at any price is not acceptable.

And there will always be new seeds of revolution taking root, new surges of senseless revenge (that might later come to mean the complete opposite) on the rise as long as we keep men like the current Chief of Police of the Province of Buenos Aires, Lieutenant Colonel Desiderio Fernández Suárez, at the helm of repressive State institutions.

 

Epilogue

(to the second edition,
1964
)

I want now to state what I have accomplished with this book, but also, mainly, what I have not accomplished. I want to note the ways in which it was a triumph, and the ways in which it was a defeat; what I have won and what I have lost.

It was a triumph to be able to clarify some facts that were at first confusing, disturbing, even implausible, with little help aside from that of a young woman and a few harrassed men, namely the victims. It was a triumph to overcome the fear that came at me with a kind of intensity, primarily in the beginning, and to get them to overcome theirs too, even though they had experienced fear in a way that I will never be able to match. It was a triumph to get a man like “Marcelo,” who didn't even know us, to bring us his information, risking the ambush and the
picana
that tore him up later; to get even little Cassandra from Florida to know that she could entrust us with a man's life. It has been a triumph to find myself face to face years later with Troxler's childish grin, and to know that he saved everyone who survived, but not to say a word about that night.

As for the rest, I lost. I wanted the government—Aramburu's, Frondizi's, Guido's, any government really—to acknowledge, be it in the words of the most absent-minded and innocent of its public servants, that an atrocity had been committed on the night of June
10
,
1956
, in the name of the Argentine Republic.

I wanted one of the multiple governments of this country to acknowledge that its justice system was wrong to kill those men, that they were killed for no good reason, out of stupidity and blindness. I know it doesn't matter to the dead. But there was a question of decency at hand, I don't know how else to say it.

I wanted those who escaped—Livraga disfigured from bullet wounds; Giunta nearly insane; Di Chiano hiding in a basement; others in exile—to have some kind of authority, some institution, any respectable part of this civilized country, admit to them in words at least—here, where words are so easy, where they cost nothing—that there was a mistake, that there was a fatal lapse in consideration, let alone a murder.

I wanted Carranza's six children, Garibotti's six children, Rodríguez's three children, and Brión's only child, together with all of these men's wives, to be given some rights on account of the bloody corpses that the justice system of this country, and not any other, sent to their graves; on account of all the bodies that were once people loved by their families. To be given something, a testimony, a word, a monthly stipend, not as large as what they would give a general or a judge of the Court, because who could ask for so much. But something.

I failed at this. Aramburu promoted Fernández Suárez; he did not clear the names of the victims. Frondizi had a copy of this book in his hands with a dedication in it: he promoted Aramburu. After that is when I think I lost interest. In
1957
I boasted: “This case is in process, and will continue to be for as long as is necessary, months or even years.” I would like to retract that flawed statement. This case is no longer in process, it is barely a piece of history; this case is dead.

I failed at other things as well. I wanted Fernández Suárez to be tried, removed from office, and punished. When it became clear that none of this was going to happen, I wanted to punish him myself, in my own way, with my own weapons: I chased him perhaps as savagely as he chased, tortured, and killed; I whipped him week after week. To the extent that I resembled him in this effort, I again request a retraction. What do I care about Fernández Suárez at this point.

There is yet another failure. When I wrote this story, I was thirty years old. I had been a journalist for ten years. Suddenly I felt I understood that everything I had done before had nothing to do with a certain notion of journalism that had been taking shape in my mind, and this—investigating at all costs, gathering testimony of what is most hidden and most painful—this
did
have something do with it and fit into that notion. I was fortified by this thought, so I investigated and wrote about another secret story right away, the Satanowsky case.
45
It made more noise, but the outcome was the same: the dead, still dead; the murderers, proven guilty, but set free.

So I asked myself if it was worth it, if what I was chasing was not a fantasy, if the society we live in really needs to hear about these things. I still don't have an answer. In any event, you can understand how I may have lost some faith—faith in justice, in compensation, in democracy, in all those words, and finally, in what was once, but is no longer, my trade.

I am rereading the story that you all have read. There are entire sentences that bother me, I get annoyed thinking about how much better it would be if I wrote it now.

Would I write it now?

Footnotes: