Operation Massacre

by Rodolfo Walsh

  At the same time, the four NCOs who had momentarily taken control of the Army Mechanics School are executed there, and the three NCOs of the Palermo Second Regiment who were also allegedly “involved” are executed in the National Penitentiary. Sometime afterward, I spoke to the widow of one of these men—the military band sergeant Luciano Isaías Rojas. She told me that on the night of the uprising, her husband had been sleeping beside her at their home.

  On June 12, General Valle turns himself in to put a stop to the killings. They execute him that same night.

  That makes for twenty-seven executions in less than seventy-two hours at six locations.

  They all fall under Article 18 of the National Constitution, active in that moment, which says: “The death penalty for political reasons is hereafter abolished.”

  In certain cases, martial law is applied retroactively. In others, res judicata is invoked over and over again in an abusive cycle. In yet others, the fact that the accused abandoned their weapons at the first opportunity is not taken into account. In short, it is a massive, arbitrary, illegal murder whose greatest culprits are the men who signed the decrees designed to validate it: Generals Aramburu and Ossorio Arana, Admirals Rojas and Hartung, and Brigadier General Krause.

  37. Aramburu and the Historical Trial

  On May 29, 1970, a Montonero commando kidnapped Lieutenant General Aramburu from his home. Two days later, they condemned him to death and listed the charges that the Peronists had against him. The first two included “the killing of twenty-seven Argentines without trial or just cause” on June 9, 1956.

  The commando bore the name of the executed General Valle. Aramburu was executed on June 1 at seven o’clock in the morning and his body turned up forty-five days later in the south of the Province of Buenos Aires.

  The incident shook the country in a number of different ways. The people did not cry over the death of Aramburu. The Army, the institutions, and the oligarchy raised an angry outcry. Among the hundreds of protests and statements that were made, there is one worth recalling. It classifies the event as a “monstrous and cowardly crime for which there is no precedent in the history of the Republic.” One of the signatories is General Bonnecarrere, Governor of the Province at the time of Operation Massacre. Another is General Leguizamón Martínez, who had executed Colonel Cogorno in the La Plata barracks. A third is Colonel Fernández Suárez himself. They did not seem like the best people to be talking about precedents.

  The execution of Aramburu provoked the fall of General Onganía one week later, whose dictatorship had already been damaged on a different May 29 (of the previous year) by the saga of the popular uprising known as Cordobazo;35 it also momentarily set back the plans of Liberal groups who saw in the executed general a second chance for the failed Argentine Revolution.36

  The dramatic nature of this death accelerated a process that usually takes years to accomplish: the creation of a national hero. In a matter of months, Liberal doctors, the press, and Aramburu’s political heirs canonized him in an unending stream of praise and elegy. Champion of democracy, soldier of liberty, beloved son of the fatherland, a military man cast in the classic mold of the San Martín tradition, an honest and unassuming ruler whose temperament did not allow him to overstep his authority, these are some of the incantations that hide the true portrait of Aramburu from history. Two years later he had his mausoleum, decorated with Virtues.

  Not all of Aramburu’s supporters were so foolish as to buy the image of him that was crafted in that language. Those who were smart enough to understand why the people hated him maintained that “the Aramburu of 1970 was not the Aramburu of 1956” and that the Aramburu of 1970, put in the same circumstances, would not have ordered executions, persecutions, or proscriptions. You could say the same for Lavalle, Dorrego’s murderer, that he only committed the terrible acts he committed because he was under the influence of devious advisers: all you had to do was switch Salvador del Carril’s name for Américo Ghioldi’s.37 Both of them would have regretted what they had done and, at the very last moment, come together in a puzzling union with their land and their people. From this perspective, one can see how Aramburu would come to warrant, in addition to the anti-Peronist memorial he received, an expiatory cantata written by some future Sábato.38

  In a less partial trial, this kind of transformation would not matter, even if it had truly happened. Here was an executor of a class policy whose foundation—exploitation—is in itself inhuman and whose acts of cruelty derive from this foundation like branches from a tree trunk: Aramburu’s perplexing turns, when he was already far removed from power, just barely illuminate the discrepancy between the abstract ideals and the concrete acts of the members of that class. The evil that he perpetrated was in his acts, and whatever goodness he had in his thoughts was a belated tremor of the bourgeois consciousness. Aramburu was obliged to execute and ban in the same way that his successors to this day have been forced to torture and murder: for the simple fact that they represent a usurping minority that can only stay in power through deceit and violence.

  The June massacre exemplifies but does not represent the height of this regime’s perversity. Aramburu’s government imprisoned thousands of workers, stifled each and every strike, and did away with union organizing. Torture became the norm and spread throughout the entire country. The decree that prohibited mention of Perón’s name or the secret operation that snatched his wife’s body, mutilated it, and took it out of the country, were expressions of a hatred that even inanimate objects could not escape—sheets and silverware from the Foundation were burned and melted because they bore the imprint of this name that was thought to be demonic.39 An entire health and welfare program was destroyed, public swimming pools that called to mind “the cursed deed” were drained, and liberal humanism reached medieval lows: rarely has such hatred been seen here, rarely have two social classes clashed so strikingly.40

  But if this kind of violence reveals the true nature of Argentine society, fatally split, it is actually a different, less sensational and more pernicious violence that insinuates itself into the country with Aramburu. His government gives shape to a second década infame: enter the Alsogarays, the Kriegers, and the Verriers, who neatly rejoin the bonds of dependency that were broken during Perón’s government.41The Argentine Republic, one of the countries with the lowest foreign investment (5 percent of total investments), which had barely been sending remittances abroad of one dollar per inhabitant annually, begins to administer loans that only benefit the lender, to be duped into investing in technology scams, to build foreign capital with the national savings and to accumulate the debt that today saps 25 percent of our registered exports. One decree alone, number 13.125, divests the country of two billion dollars in nationalized bank deposits and places them under the control of the international bank that can now control national credit, throttle small businesses, and prepare for the massive influx of big monopolies.

  Fifteen years later, we are able to see the outcome of these policies: a dependent and stagnant country, a sunken working class, rebellion bubbling everywhere. This rebellion finally reaches Aramburu, confronts him with his deeds, and paralyzes the hand that was signing the loans, the decrees, the executions.

  Footnotes:

  35DG: Juan Carlos Onganía was the de facto President of Argentina from 1966 to 1970. He enforced social and economic policies that disempowered universities and unions, and his dictatorship was heavily bruised by the Cordobazo of May 1969—a civil protest coordinated by student and labor activist groups in the city of Córdoba that lasted three days and resulted in a number of deaths and hundreds wounded.

  36DG: Right-leaning, conservative groups who traditionally opposed Peronist policies.

  37DG: Manuel Dorrego was the governor of the Province of Buenos Aires from 1827 to 1828, when his office was overtaken by General Juan Lavalle in a military coup. Lavalle executed Dorre
go, only to be ousted himself not seven months later. Salvador María del Carril, the first vice president of the nation, advised Lavalle to execute Dorrego. Walsh suggests that Socialist Américo Ghioldi was similarly recruited to advise de facto President Lonardi’s regime on how best to dismantle Peronism.

  38DG: Walsh is referring to Argentine author Ernesto Sábato’s 1961 work Sobre héroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs), which contains a somewhat vindicating description of General Lavalle’s struggles and his death (see Note 37). Walsh considers the possibility of such a work, revisionist in nature, being written about Aramburu.

  39DG: The Eva Perón Foundation was founded by the First Lady herself in 1948, and kept running for three years after her death as a charitable institution, until her husband was ousted in 1955.

  40DG: Argentine Peronist elected official John William Cooke characterized Peronism as the “hecho maldito” (“cursed deed”) of the middle class. The phrase is most commonly interpreted as pertaining to Peronism’s complicated relationship to the middle class—specifically, to the movement’s tendency to submit to its desires

  41DG: Ministers of the Argentine Economy under Presidents Aramburu and Frondizi. For década infame, see Note 13.

  Appendices

  Prologue to the Book Edition

  (from the first edition, July 1957)42

  Operation Massacre was published in the journal Mayoría between May 27 and July 29 of 1957: nine articles in total.

  I had already covered the events that I recount there in a half-dozen articles that were published by the newspaper Revolución Nacional between January 15 and the end of March 1957.

  Now the book is being published by Ediciones Sigla.

  The names I mention here might suggest that I have an exclusive preference for tough, nationalist presses. That is not the case. I wrote this book for it to be published, for it to act, not so that it could join the vast number of reveries dreamed up by ideologues. I investigated and recounted these awful events to bring them to light in the fullest way possible, to provoke fear, to have them never happen again. I consider whoever helps me publish and circulate the story to be an ally; I will not ask what your politics are.

  That is how I respond to cowards and to those who are weak of spirit when they ask me why I—someone who considers himself a man of the Left—am collaborating journalistically with men and publications of the Right. I reply: because they dare to take the risk, and right now there is no hierarchy that I recognize or accept as being more noble than that of civil courage. Or would they prefer that I kept quiet about these things on account of ridiculous partisan prejudices? While the ideologues dream, more practical people torture and kill. That is concrete, that is urgent, that is of the here and now.

  If necessary, I can renounce or put off all political philosophies whose truths are, in the end, of a speculative nature. I cannot, I will not, and I should not renounce one basic feeling: indignation in the face of abuse, cowardice, and murder.

  I have also learned that partisan differences are perhaps the most superficial rifts that come between men. It’s other ones that matter: the insurmountable, irreducible differences in character. Among people who think like I do about the majority of abstract issues, I have discovered an alarming pragmatism when it comes to concrete situations that require almost instinctive reactions, the kinds of reactions that make being human worthwhile.

  The torturer who becomes an executioner at the slightest provocation is a present-day problem, a clear target that the civil conscience ought to obliterate. We have ignored the fact that there has been a beast lurking among us. Even in Nazi Germany, years of misery, fear, and bombings were necessary to bring it to light. In the Argentine Republic, six hours of rebellion were enough to make its repulsive silhouette emerge. Here it is, with the name it happens to carry today, for all to see. And to act accordingly.

  The rest, at this exact moment, does not interest me.

  Footnotes:

  42Necessary clarification: In the editions of Operation Massacre that appeared during Walsh’s life, there is some confusion regarding this prologue (which the author signs “La Plata, July 1957”), the “Introduction” (p. 157) (signed “La Plata, March 1957”), and the “Obligatory Appendix” (p. 165), also dated March of that year. The first book version, published by Sigla, finished printing on November 30, 1957, and included these texts (without further clarifications), which were written beforehand during different months. [Ediciones de la Flor Editor’s Note.]

  Introduction

  (to the first edition, March 1957)

  News of the massacre in José León Suárez first came to my ears by pure chance, on December 18, 1956. The news was not quite accurate, which was only fitting for the place where I heard it—a café. It suggested that a man who was allegedly executed during the Peronist uprising of June 9 and 10 of that year had survived and was not in jail.

  The story sounded like a movie to me, primed for all sorts of exercises in disbelief. (It had the same effect on many people, which was unfortunate. An official of the armed forces, for example, whom I told about the events before publishing anything, described them in all sincerity as “a serialized novel.”)

  But this kind of disbelief can be thinly disguised wisdom. The absolute nonbeliever can be as naïve as he who believes everything; at bottom, the two fall under the same psychological category.

  I asked for more information. And the following day I met the first key player of the drama: Jorge Doglia, Esq. The interview with him left a strong impression on me. It may be that Doglia, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, had his nerves shredded from waging a battle without respite for a number of months against the police “methods” he had witnessed as head of the Judicial Division of the Police Department for the Province. But he sounded utterly sincere to me. He told me about horrific cases of torture using the picana and burning cigarettes, of rubber and wire whips, of common criminals—usually “drifters” and pickpockets with no families to come looking for them—beaten to death in various precincts throughout the Province. And all of this under the regime of a “liberating revolution” that many Argentines received with hope because they believed it would put an end to abuses of police authority.

  Doglia had fought valiantly against all of this, but now he was starting to feel defeated. Two months earlier, he had reported the illegal executions and the torture to a branch of Intelligence Services. But a bureaucrat there who could easily have spent the rest of his days looking up rules in basic textbooks for how to handle an informant—an ethical principle that we assume is basic knowledge for every branch of this kind—could think of nothing better than to expose him. Instead of protecting him, they put his life in danger, and he has received unequivocal death threats ever since.

  Doglia presented a similar report to the Ministry of the Government of the Province that generated a stack of abstruse documents. Within this file—the prose worthy of Gracián in his weakest moments—a certain undersecretary comes to the conclusion that there is something there, but he isn’t sure what it is.43 At this juncture, the file keeps expanding, accumulating pages, dust, and rhetorical phrases. But, in short, nothing. In short, sloth and ineptitude when it is obvious how important it is for the matter to be resolved quickly and completely. This is what some of today’s public servants have to offer.

  Doglia did not put too much faith in journalism. He assumed the official newspapers were not going to take on such a prickly issue, and on the other hand he didn’t want the voices of the opposition to exploit it for political reasons. He didn’t expect very much from the same justice system that had just been presented with the surviving executed man as a plaintiff. From the very start, Doglia predicted: 1) that the case would be claimed by a Military Court and 2) that this motion would be approved. (The first happened promptly at the start of February 1957. The second remained to be seen. Ev
erything depended on what the ruling of the National Supreme Court would be on the jurisdictional conflict. By the time this book was being published, Doglia’s second prediction had also come true.)

  As for the surviving executed man, I acquired the first piece of concrete evidence that night: his name was Juan Carlos Livraga. On the morning of December 20, I had in my hands a copy of the report that Livraga had filed. Later on, I was able to verify that his account of events was essentially accurate, though it contained a few significant omissions and inaccuracies when it came to details. But it was still too cinematic. Seemed as though it’d been pulled straight out of a movie.

  And yet, the report was already a fact. What he alleged there could have been entirely false or not, but it was a fact: a man who said he had been executed in an unusual and illegal fashion was appearing before the reviewing judge to charge “whoever was responsible” with attempted homicide and assault.

  There was something else. The document made mention of a second survivor, a certain Giunta, which opened up the immediate possibility of checking the facts that had already been reported. We were already quite far away from that first rumor overheard in a café thirty-six hours earlier.

  That same afternoon the copy of the report landed in the hands of Mr. Leónidas Barletta, who ran Propósitos. Barletta spoke little and promised nothing. He only asked whether the circulation of this text might not disrupt the ongoing legal investigation. He received a reply stating that the most pressing concern was to use the right kind of publicity to protect the plaintiff’s life, Doglia’s life, and the lives of other witnesses who were thought to be in danger. Three days later, on the night of December 23, the report was out in the streets, brought there by Propósitos.