Operation Massacre

by Rodolfo Walsh

  11. “. . . a newspaper where he has reported on alleged cases of torture . . .” False and ridiculous to anyone who knows what is being discussed.

  12. “He is the leader of ‘Operation Massacre’ . . .” False. It’s confirmed: the person who drafted this version is mentally disabled. The indisputable leader of “Operation Massacre” was Lieutenant Colonel Fernández Suárez.

  Earlier I showed that Fernández Suárez lied, statistically speaking, every other line. Now, with the help of my colleagues in the press, he has beaten his own record.

  Fernández Suárez tries to discredit everything I have published, making it seem like the information I am using as a foundation was supplied by a terrorist. But “Marcelo” is just one witness among fifty, and perhaps the least important one at that. The information, the real information, has been supplied to me by Fernández Suárez himself. He is my chief witness.

  Should a civil or military court, intelligence services, or publishers of serious newspapers want to retrace my research step by step, the following are the witnesses and statements I used, by order of importance:

  1. Fernández Suárez in his report before the Province Advisory Board on December 18, 1956;

  2. Juan Carlos Livraga’s formal accusation, restated before the judge, and his oral statements;

  3. Miguel Ángel Giunta’s statement;

  4. Horacio di Chiano’s oral testimony; (I have spoken to each of these three survivors at least half a dozen times, thoroughly rechecking every single detail)

  5. a statement signed by Norberto Gavino, which I have in my possession;

  6. a joint statement signed by Julio Troxler and Reinaldo Benavídez, in my possession;

  7. testimony from Vicente Rodríguez’s widow;

  8. testimony from Mario Brión’s relatives;

  9. testimony from Nicolás Carranza’s widow;

  10. testimony from Francisco Garibotti’s widow;

  11. testimony from Carlos Lizaso’s relatives;

  12. testimony from Juan Carlos Torres;

  13. testimony from Giunta’s relatives;

  14. testimony from Livraga’s relatives;

  15. testimony from Di Chiano’s relatives.

  Over the course of four months, I have conducted hundreds of interviews with these witnesses and with more minor ones, the vast majority of whom have not even made statements before a civil or military judge.

  Now that there is no imminent danger, I should think that my fellow journalists from the big newspapers could go to the lengths I have gone to instead of taking dictation from the lieutenant colonel executioner.

  Short History of an Investigation

  In my account, I mention “Marcelo” three times using the initial M. I did not know him as a terrorist, but as a witness. I can’t say, however, that I am surprised he became a terrorist: he was an embittered man who suffered tremendously. The ghost of Carlitos Lizaso—his blood-spattered chest, his cheek crushed by a bullet—tormented him relentlessly. His dear friend Mr. Pedro Lizaso had made him responsible for watching over the boy. He had brought him back dead.

  In order to illustrate how untrue it is that “Marcelo” supplied the “information used as the basis” for my articles, and in an effort to stave off any more fanciful manipulations, I will have to refer briefly to the phases of my investigation. I first heard news of the massacre on December 18, 1956. On the nineteenth, I met Judge Doglia. On the twentieth, I met von Kotsch, Esq., and obtained a copy of Livraga’s formal accusation. That afternoon, I sent it to the publisher of Propósitos. On the twenty-first, I met Livraga. On the twenty-third, the accusation was published in Propósitos.

  The accusation and Livraga’s oral statement were relatively precise, but they contained two basic errors that significantly hindered my later investigations. The first was the claim that, in the back apartment, where Livraga’s friend Rodríguez had taken him, there were only three more people. The second was the assumption that there were only ten prisoners in the assault car.

  On December 26, I finished writing my story on Livraga which, after a long pilgrimage, was going to be published in Revolución Nacional on January 15. It of course included those two errors. But it also included a noteworthy guess, a hunch even, based on a few words that Livraga heard in a semiconscious state: the theory of a third survivor. I never could have imagined how right it turned out to be. The piece also included another guess of mine that did not make it to the public: the nearly outright mention of the Chief of Police as the one responsible for everything. The editors at the newspaper thought it was too “bold” so they scrapped it.

  On December 27, while looking through newspapers from the time of the uprising, I discovered Vicente Rodríguez’s name at the top of a list of “those executed in the San Martín Region.” But there were unbelievable errors here as well that would prove to be real stumbling blocks. There was a “Crizaso” on the list who I later realized was Lizaso. Reinaldo Benavídez was listed as dead though he was really alive. And Mario Brión’s name was missing.

  So, at the time, using Livraga’s formal accusation and this list, you could glean the following, somewhat erroneous overview: there were two survivors (Livraga and Giunta), five known dead (Rodríguez, Carranza, Garibotti, “Crizaso,” and Benavídez); and three unknown dead.

  On December 28, it occurred to me to review all of the newspapers from the time of the uprising. Since it was All Fool’s Day, it shouldn’t have surprised me to come upon the Chief of Police’s statements where he told the story of the raid, saying he had arrested fourteen people. Thus began the endless and slightly Kafkaesque process in which I was either missing a body or a survivor, or had one too many . . .

  For rather unimportant reasons, I then reached an impasse that lasted twenty days.

  On January 19, I located the site of the execution and took photographs. The twentieth was an extraordinary day. I went to Florida, met Giunta, managed to break down his dogged resistance, and got him to tell me his version of what had happened. That same afternoon, I interviewed Rodríguez’s widow. I used that opportunity to talk to the neighbors. There were three extremely important pieces of information that came to the fore from all of these conversations: 1) the existence of a “third man,” a new survivor, just as I had thought; 2) the first mention of Mario Brión; 3) the first mention of the mysterious tenant in the back apartment, “a tall man who escaped,” according to what the neighborhood kids told me. I learned more in that one afternoon than I had in an entire month of false starts.

  On January 29, 1957, Revolución Nacional published my story on Rodríguez’s widow where, for the first time, I singled out Fernández Suárez as the perpetrator of the arrests and the one responsible for the executions.

  On February 7, I had in my hands transcriptions of both Province Advisory Board sessions in which the torture and executions were discussed. One of them included the now notorious confession from Fernández Suárez.

  On February 10, I returned to Florida for what I knew from the start would be one of the more difficult tasks: locating the “third man.” I already knew his name. I had his address. I had been told, though, that I wasn’t going to find him. He was hiding somewhere as a fugitive. He would not let himself be seen by anyone. His life was still dominated by panic.

  As usual, the kids from the neighborhood were my best informants. A little girl with bright eyes mysteriously approached us.

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

  —And you know why we’ve come? —I asked her.

  —Yes. I know everything —she replied, with the utmost dignity.

  (There were dozens of scenes like this.)

  I won’t recount the feats of eloquence I had to display to get face to face, finally, with Mr. Horacio di Chiano. But there he was, the third surviv
or, alive and kicking.

  With that, I thought the matter of survivors had come to an end. It was already a miracle that the three of them had saved themselves. But on the following day, February 11, I got one of the biggest shocks of my life. The letter I held in my hands was real, palpable. And in it, like a bomb, was this paragraph: “When the innocent victims stepped out of the assault car, Livraga, Giunta, and the ex-NCO Gavino managed to escape. The latter was able to get himself to the Bolivian Embassy and was granted asylum in that country.”

  So the number of survivors had gone up to four. I began to ask myself whether anyone had actually died. I went back to “my witnesses” and kept putting the sentence “The tall man who escaped . . .” out there as though at random, until I got the immediate, mechanical response I was looking for:

  —Torres.

  —At the embassy . . . ?

  —The Bolivian one.

  By the time my informant had raised his hand to cover his mouth, it was already too late. Aside from the children, no one said anything voluntarily. But people have reflexes. On February 19, I saw Torres at the Bolivian Embassy. On the twenty-first, I came back to see him again. You could say that the investigation came to a close that day. Torres’ account was shocking. Not only was Gavino’s existence confirmed; it turned out that Benavídez, the one from the official list of those executed, was not dead: he was in exile in Bolivia. And with him was a sixth survivor, whose name I heard uttered for the first time: Julio Troxler. And there may have also been a seventh who, according to some, was locked up in Olmos. Torres could not remember the last name. He only knew it was something common, something like Rodríguez . . . I looked at a list of the prisoners in Olmos. When I saw Torres again, I hit him pointblank with a name:

  —Díaz?

  His face lit up.

  —Díaz! How’d you do it?

  —Rogelio Díaz?

  —Exactly.

  The list was complete. Rogelio Díaz was the seventh survivor.

  That same nineteenth of February, the third and most important of my articles—“The Truth about the Executed Men”—appeared in Revolución Nacional and included all the facts I had gathered before going to see Torres. In it, I already made mention of Mario Brión, claimed that there were three living survivors, and speculated that there might be two more—I was certainly getting ahead of myself with all this, given the information I had in my possession when I wrote it. On the twenty-first, I managed to locate Mario Brión’s relatives. In the meantime, I had already found addresses for Carranza’s and Garibotti’s widows.

  It was then and only then, with the case completely clear and resolved, that “Marcelo” came into the picture.

  Regarding “Marcelo”

  At first, “Marcelo” was simply a voice on the telephone. A tense, nervous voice that would call the main office at the Revolución Nacional bureau and ask to speak to the author who wrote the articles on the José León Suárez executions. We set up an interview for February 22, 1957. “Marcelo” was devastated when he found out that he was taking a risk unnecessarily, since Torres had already provided me with all the information he brought me. The funny thing is, even if I had never met either of these two men, I still would have found out about the other survivors. Because on the twenty-third or the twenty-fourth of February, I received a third letter with a list of all the survivors from the informant who signed his name “Atilas.” “Atilas” arrived forty-eight hours late, but I still want to take the opportunity—if he happens to be reading this—to thank him for his valuable help.

  There is not one important piece of information in the text of Operation Massacre that hasn’t been matched and double-checked with the testimony of three or four people, sometimes more. With respect to the basic facts, I have ruthlessly thrown out any information that was not corroborated, as sensational as it might have been. It’s possible that some minor mistakes in detail have slipped, but the account is fundamentally accurate and I can prove it before any civil or military court.

  Returning now to “Marcelo”: his and Torres’s matching testimony was damaging to Livraga and benefited Fernández Suárez, which demonstrates conclusively that it was true. Based on Livraga’s formal accusation, I had assumed in my first articles for Revolución Nacional that Fernández Suárez arrested only five people at the house in Florida, and indiscriminately rounded up the rest in the surrounding area. Torres and “Marcelo” explained to me that this was not the case, that all the executed men had been arrested inside the house. From this perspective, the raid at least had a certain logic to it and Fernández Suárez’s behavior before the mass murder seemed easier to explain. I was completely honest about this and made it clear the first chance I got. Torres went further still: he admitted that he and Gavino were involved in the uprising, even though they did not get to act. These people were completely frank with me and told me who had been involved: Torres and Gavino. The ones who had simply known about it were Carranza and Lizaso. And those who knew absolutely nothing were Brión, Giunta, Di Chiano, Livraga, and Garibotti. For lack of concrete facts, I was still in the dark about the state of mind of men like Rodríguez and Díaz. All of this is stated very clearly in my account. As for Troxler and Benavídez, it doesn’t really matter if they were involved or whether they knew anything: they were taken to be executed for the sole crime of ringing a doorbell.

  “Marcelo” was a short man with olive skin, dark glasses, and a bitter, disdainful expression on his face. He was thirty-seven years old but looked older. His most valuable contributions to my book were the moving, faltering words he used to speak about Carlitos Lizaso. He remembered him with almost as much intensity as a father would his son: in his way of being, in his little anecdotes, in his youthful happiness. Over the course of the months I have spent digging around in this case, I have met women who weep every rotten day as a matter of habit; I have met small children with an unmistakably distant look in their eyes (“Do you miss your father very much?” “Oh, yes, you have no idea . . .”); and I have met brothers whose clenched fists on the table are a natural extension of the murderous look in their eyes. But I have seen few things like the dull, terrible, cutting pain of this man when he remembers that boy. He would try, uselessly, to recreate him with a gesture, to bring his smile back to life with an awkward grimace, “to bring him back and ungag him”; he, a ruined and unwell man.

  I am sorry that “Marcelo” decided to follow the fruitless road of terror to banish this ghost. But my question is: Have the high judges and rulers who are protecting his friend’s murderer given him any other way? I know that there is nothing more difficult than justifying a bomb-thrower, and I do not even plan to try. All I can say is that, at heart, that’s not who “Marcelo” was. At heart, he was a man who suffered terribly, constantly, sleeplessly. Every time he would think back on leaving the house in Florida ten minutes before the raid, he would say again: “If I had just stayed . . . If I had just . . .” A sense of male pride stopped him from saying that he, too, wished he were dead.

  Now “Marcelo” is in jail, and I am happy for his sake that they caught him before his bombs could take innocent lives. But I will not be the one to call this wreck of a man an irresponsible and cowardly criminal. I leave that work to my colleagues, the serious journalists, lovers of easy truths.

  Terrorism in the abstract is no doubt criminal, irresponsible, and cowardly. But if I have to choose between a desperate man like “Marcelo,” eaten away by his own ghost and his thirst for vengeance, and a cold, capricious, cognizant, methodical torturer and executioner, don’t ask me whom I would pick.

  The Press Conference That Judge Viglione Never Gave

  On July 11, 1957, Judge Viglione called the press together at the Police Headquarters of the Province to report on a terrorist organization that had recently been discovered in Boulogne, and whose leader was allegedly “Marcelo.” I think it’s good that a judge intervened in the p
roceedings and monitored the treatment of the prisoners, because that’s the main duty of a judge in the Province of Buenos Aires. I think it’s great, also, that he quickly supplied the public with information because “in a democracy, dialogue is interesting,” as Fernández Suárez once put it. What seems wrong to me is that he took advantage of the situation to discredit, in a childish maneuver, the unclearable charges of multiple homicide that I have made against the Chief of Police. If not for this, I would have nothing to say and I would not be publishing this article. But malice is a double-edged sword, and here we have the second edge. This is my response to the clumsiness that I mentioned earlier.

  I won’t say it was Banquo’s ghost exactly that hovered over Judge Viglione’s press conference, but rather a specter of the other failed press conference from the end of this past January in which a different judge, Judge Hueyo, was going to announce the trial of Fernández Suárez. For this reason—and because I might have wanted to ask some modest and respectful questions of the Chief of Police in attendance (as I have gathered that a press conference is basically like a question-and-answer contest)—I was sorry not to be invited. One of these days, God willing.

  What I am even more sorry about is the fact that the judge missed a nearly unique opportunity to educate and be a model for the people, which itself is another one of his duties. The judge could have explained that terrorism is not a product of spontaneous generation. He could have explained that the behavior of a terrorist down in the streets who sets a bomb is a response to the picana terrorism being inflicted on high by the State. He could have explained that the bomb that kills an innocent person is not so different from the firing squad rounds that kill another innocent person. And that, if any kind of subtle distinction should be made, it is in favor of the terrorist in the streets who at least does not act with complete impunity, does not believe he is defending democracy, liberty, and justice, and does not organize press conferences.