Operation Massacre

by Rodolfo Walsh

  It seems like the story could end here because there is no more to tell. Two survivors, and the rest are dead. I could publish the interview with Giunta and go back to that abandoned chess game in the café from a month ago. But it’s not over. At the last minute Giunta mentions a belief he has, not something he knows for sure, but something he has imagined or heard murmured: there is a third man who survived.

  Meanwhile, the great picana god and its submachine guns begin to roar from La Plata.7 My story floats on leaflets through corridors at Police Headquarters, and Lieutenant Colonel Fernández Suárez wants to know what the fuss is all about. The article wasn’t signed, but my initials appeared at the bottom of the original copies. There was a journalist working at the newspaper office who had the same initials, only his were ordered differently: J. W. R. He awakes one morning to an interesting assortment of rifles and other syllogistic tools, and his spirit experiences that surge of emotion before the revelation of a truth. They make him come out in his underwear and put him on a flight to La Plata where he’s brought to Police Headquarters. They sit him down in an armchair opposite the Lieutenant Colonel, who says to him, “And now I’d like you to write an article about me, please.” The journalist explains that he is not the man who deserves such an honor while quietly, to himself, he curses my mother.

  The wheels keep turning, and we have to trudge through some rough country in search of the third man, Horacio di Chiano, who is now living like a worm underground. It seems as though people know us already in a lot of these places, the kids at least are following us, and one day a young girl stops us in the street.

  —The man you’re looking for —she tells us— is in his house. They’re going to tell you he isn’t, but he is.

  —And you know why we’ve come?

  —Yes, I know everything.

  Okay, Cassandra.

  They tell us he’s not there, but he is, and we have to start pushing past the protective barriers, the wakeful gods that keep watch over a living dead man: a wall, a face that denies and distrusts. We cross over from the sunlight of the street to the shade of the porch. We ask for a glass of water and sit there in the dark offering wheedling words until the rustiest lock turns and Mr. Horacio di Chiano climbs the staircase holding onto his wife, who leads him by the hand like a child.

  So there are three.

  The next day the newspaper receives an anonymous letter that says “Livraga, Giunta, and the ex-NCO Gavino managed to escape.”

  So there are four. And Gavino, the letter says, “was able to get himself to the Bolivian Embassy and was granted asylum in that country.”

  I don’t find Gavino at the Bolivian Embassy, but I do find his friend Torres, who smiles and, counting it out on his fingers, says, “You’re missing two.” Then he tells me about Troxler and Benavídez.

  So there are six.

  And while we’re at it, why not seven? Could be, Torres tells me, because there was a sergeant with a very common last name, something like García or Rodríguez, and no one knows what’s become of him.

  Two or three days later I come back to see Torres and hit him pointblank with a name:

  —Rogelio Díaz.

  His face lights up.

  —How’d you do it?

  I don’t even remember how I did it. But there are seven.

  So now I can take a moment because I have already talked to survivors, widows, orphans, conspirators, political refugees, fugitives, alleged informers, anonymous heroes. By May, I have written half of this book. Once more, roaming around in search of someone who will publish it. At about that time, the Jacovella brothers had started putting out a magazine. I talk to Bruno, then Tulio. Tulio Jacovella reads the manuscript and laughs, not at the manuscript, but at the mess he is about to get himself into, and he goes for it.

  The rest is the story that follows. It was published in Mayoría from May through July of 1957. Later there were appendices, corollaries, denials, and retorts that dragged this press campaign out until April 1958. I have cut them all out, together with some of the evidence I used back then, which I am replacing here with more categorical proof. In light of this new evidence, I think any possible controversy can be set aside.

  Acknowledgements: to Jorge Doglia, Esq., former head of the legal department of the Province’s police, dismissed from his position based on the reports he gave for this case; to Máximo von Kotsch, Esq., the lawyer for Juan C. Livraga and Miguel Giunta; to Leónidas Barletta, head of the newspaper Intenciones, where Livraga’s initial accusation was published; to Dr. Cerruti Costa, head of the late newspaper Revolución Nacional, which ran the first articles about this case; to Bruno and Tulio Jacovella; to Dr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who published the first edition of this story in book form; to Edmundo A. Suárez, dismissed from his position at State Radio for giving me a photocopy of the Registry Book of Announcers for the broadcast that proved the exact time when martial law was declared; to the ex-terrorist named “Marcelo,” who took risks to get me information, and who was horribly tortured shortly thereafter; to the anonymous informant who signed his name “Atilas”; to the anonymous Cassandra who knew everything; to Horacio Maniglia, who gave me shelter; to the families of the victims.

  Footnotes:

  5Daniella Gitlin: Paul Keres, Aron Nimzowitsch, and Carl Schlechter were world-renowned chess masters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu served as the de facto President of Argentina from November 1955 to April 1958 and Admiral Isaac Francisco Rojas, originally of the Argentine Navy, served as his de facto Vice President. Aramburu had replaced General Eduardo Lonardi, who had served for less than two months. Lonardi headed the Liberating Revolution movement (see Note 16), which had originally ousted the twice democratically elected President Juan Perón in a military coup on September 16, 1955. Perón had championed a brand of populism and anti-capitalism throughout his term as President that has been reconfigured and fractured multiple times up until the present day. While he claimed to fight in the name of the people and for social justice, his detractors considered his regime corrupt and authoritarian.

  Aramburu was determined to erase Peronism from the public consciousness, and employed executive measures to that end. In 1970, Aramburu was kidnapped and killed by the Peronist guerrilla group, the Montoneros. Some accounts of this history suggest that he was killed in response to the execution of General Juan José Valle in 1956 (see Note 13).

  For a more comprehensive version of events, please refer to Luis Alberto Romero’s A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century.

  6DG: A group of Peronist officers in the military, led in part by General Juan José Valle, together with General Raúl Tanco, other military leaders, and a number of civilian groups, staged an uprising against the de facto government on June 9, 1956. The uprising was immediately and definitively quashed by Aramburu’s regime. Valle and others were executed by firing squad three days later. Tanco managed to escape.

  7DG: The picana was a torture device used by the police and the military in Argentina during the twentieth century, especially throughout the years of dictatorship. A metal prod was electrified and applied to the victim’s body, generally in highly sensitive areas. The high-voltage shocks were continually applied and the torture could be prolonged due to the fact that the current was kept at a relatively low level.

  Part 1

  The People

  1. Carranza

  Nicolás Carranza was not a happy man on the night of June 9, 1956. Protected by the shadows, he had just come into his house, and something might have been gnawing at him on the inside. We’ll never really know. A man carries so many heavy thoughts with him to the grave, and the earth at the bottom of Nicolás Carranza’s grave has already dried up.

  For a moment, though, he could forget his worries. After an initial, surprising silence, a chorus of shril
l voices rose to receive him. Nicolás Carranza had six children. The smaller ones might have hung on to his knees. The oldest, Elena, probably put her head just at her father’s arm’s reach. Tiny Julia Renée—barely forty days old—was asleep in her crib.

  His wife, Berta Figueroa, lifted her gaze from the sewing machine. She smiled at him with a mix of sadness and joy. It was always the same. Her man always came in like this: on the run, in the night, like a flash. Sometimes he stayed the night and then disappeared for weeks. Every so often he would have messages sent her way: at so-and-so’s house. And then she would be the one going to her meeting, leaving the children with a neighbor to be with him for a few hours racked with fear, anxiety, and the bitterness that came with having to leave him and wait for time to pass slowly without any word.

  Nicolás Carranza was a Peronist. And a fugitive.

  That’s why, whenever he would be coming home secretly like he was that night and some kid from the neighborhood yelled “Hello, Mr. Carranza!”, he would quicken his step and not answer.

  —Hey, Mr. Carranza! —curiosity was always following him.

  But Mr. Carranza—a short and stocky silhouette in the night—would walk away quickly on the dirt road, raising the lapels of his overcoat to meet his eyes.

  Now he was sitting in the armchair in the dining room bouncing his two-year-old, Berta Josefa, his three-year-old, Carlos Alberto, and maybe even his four-year-old, Juan Nicolás—he had a whole staircase worth of children, Mr. Carranza—on his knees. He rocked them back and forth, imitating the roar and whistle of trains run by the men who lived in that railroad suburban town, men like him.

  Next he talked to his favorite, eleven-year-old Elena—she was tall and slim for her age with big grey-brown eyes—and shared only some of his adventures, with a bit of happy fairytale mixed in. He asked her questions out of a sense of concern, fear, and tenderness, because the truth was that he felt a knot form in his heart whenever he looked at her, ever since the time she was put in jail.

  It’s hard to believe, but on January 26, 1956, she was locked up for a few hours in Frías (in Santiago del Estero). Her father had dropped her off there on the twenty-fifth with his wife’s family and continued on along his regular Belgrano line trip to the North, where he worked as a waiter. In Simoca, in the province of Tucumán, he was arrested for distributing pamphlets, a charge that was never proven.

  At eight o’clock the following morning, Elena was taken from her relatives’ home, brought to the police station, and interrogated for four hours. Was her father handing out pamphlets? Was her father a Peronist? Was her father a criminal?

  Mr. Carranza lost his mind when he heard the news.

  —Let them do what they want to me, but to a child . . .

  He howled and wept.

  And fled the police in Tucumán.

  It was probably from that moment on that a dangerous glaze washed over the eyes of this man whose features were clear and firm, who used to be a happy nature, the fun-loving best friend to his own kids and to everyone’s kids in the neighborhood.

  They all ate together on the night of June 9 in that working-class neighborhood of Boulogne. Afterward, they put the kids to bed and it was just the two of them, he and Berta.

  She shared her sorrows and her worries. Was the railway going to take away their home now that he was out of work and on the run? It was a good brick house with flowers in the garden, and they managed to fit everyone there, including a pair of women factory workers they had taken in as lodgers. What would she and the children live off of if they took her house away?

  She shared her fears. There was always the fear that they would drag him from his home on any given night and beat him senseless at some police station, leaving her with a vegetable for a husband. And she begged him as she always did:

  —Turn yourself in. If you turn yourself in, maybe they won’t beat you. At least you can get out of jail, Nicolás . . .

  He didn’t want to. He took refuge in harsh, dry, definitive statements:

  —I’ve stolen nothing. I’ve killed no one. I am not a criminal.

  The little radio on the shelf in the sideboard was playing folk songs. After a lengthy silence, Nicolás Carranza got up, took his overcoat from the coat stand, and slowly put it on.

  She looked at him again, her face resigned.

  —Where are you going?

  —I have some things to take care of. I might be back tomorrow.

  —You’re not sleeping here.

  —No. Tonight, I’m not sleeping here.

  He went into the bedroom and kissed his children one by one: Elena, María Eva, Juan Nicolás, Carlos Alberto, Berta Josefa, Julia Renée. Then he said goodbye to his wife.

  —Till tomorrow.

  He kissed her, went out to the sidewalk, and turned left. He crossed B Street and walked just a few paces before stopping at house number thirty-two.

  He rang the doorbell.

  2. Garibotti

  The young men are wild and there may be some aggression in the air at the home of the Garibottis in the working-class neighborhood of Boulogne. The father, Francisco, is the archetype of a man: tall, muscular, with a square and firm face, mildly hostile eyes, and a thin mustache that flows well over the corners of his mouth.

  The mother is a beautiful woman, even with her tough, common features. Tall, strong, with something contemptuous about her mouth and eyes that do not smile.

  There are six children here as well, just like at Carranza’s, but that’s where the similarities end. The five oldest ones are boys who range from Juan Carlos, who is about to turn eighteen, to eleven-year-old Norberto.

  Delia Beatriz, at nine years old, somewhat softens this otherwise intensely male environment. Dark-haired, with bangs and smiling eyes, her father melts when he sees her. There is a photo in a glass cabinet of her in a school uniform of white overalls standing next to a chalkboard.

  The whole family appears on the walls. Yellowing, far-off snapshots of Francisco and Florinda—they are young and laughing in the park—ID photos of the father and the kids, even some fleeting faces of relatives and friends, have all been glued to a big piece of board and stuck inside a frame. Just as at the Carranzas’, the inescapable “portrait artists” have been here as well and, beneath a double “bombé” frame, have left a wealth of blues and golds that attempt to portray two of the young boys, though we can’t figure out which ones.

  This passion for decor or mementos reaches its peak in the predictable print of Gardel all in black, his hat nearly covering his face, his foot resting on a chair as he strums a guitar.

  But it is a clean, solid, modestly furnished house, a house where a working man can live decently. And the “company” charges them less than one hundred pesos in rent.

  This may be why Francisco Garibotti doesn’t want to get into any trouble. He knows the union is not doing well—the military has gotten involved, friends have been arrested—but all of that will pass some day. One needs to be patient and wait it out.

  Garibotti is thirty-eight years old, with sixteen years of service to the Belgrano Railway under his belt. Now he works the local line.

  That afternoon he left work around five and came straight home.

  Of his two sons, he might favor the second eldest. He has his father’s name: Francisco, only with the extra middle name, Osmar. This sixteen-year-old young man with a serious look in his eye is all set to start working for the railroad as well.

  There is a true camaraderie between the two of them. The father likes playing the guitar while his son sings. This is what they’re doing that afternoon.

  It gets dark early on these midwinter June days. It’s already nighttime before they even bother to notice. Mother sets the table for dinner. A frying pan crackles in the kitchen.

  Francisco Garibotti has nearly finished his dinner already—he ate steak
and eggs that night—when the doorbell rings.

  It’s Mr. Carranza.

  What’s Nicolás Carranza come for?

  —He came to take him away. And they brought him back to me a corpse —Florinda Allende would later recall with resentment in her voice.

  The two men talk for a while. Florinda has stepped back into the kitchen. She senses that her husband is feeling an itch to go out on this particular Saturday night, and she plans to fight for her rights, but on her own turf, without the neighbor in the room.

  Francisco comes in after a moment.

  —I have to head out —he says, not looking at her.

  —We were going to go to the movies —she reminds him.

  —You’re right, we were. Maybe we can go later.

  —You said you’d go out with me.

  —I’ll be right back. I just have to run an errand and then I’ll be back.

  —I can’t imagine what errand you need to run.

  —I’ll explain later. The truth —he tries to make himself clear, anticipating her reproach— is that I’m also a little tired of this guy . . . and all his ideas . . .

  —Doesn’t seem like it.

  —Look, this is the last time I’ll give him the time of day. Wait for me a little while.

  And as though to prove that he is only going out for a minute, that he has every intention of coming back as soon as he can, he gets to the door and, just as he finishes putting on his overcoat, yells out:

  —If Vivas comes by, tell him to wait. Tell him I’m going to run an errand and I’ll be back.

  The two friends set out. They walk a few blocks along Guayaquil, a long street, and turn right, heading toward the station. They take the first local bound for the barrio of Florida. It’s only a few minutes away by train.