Operation Massacre (19 page)

 

36.
Epilogue

One of my concerns upon finding out about this massacre and telling its story while the executioners were still in power was to keep it separate, to the extent possible, from the other executions, whose victims were primarily military personnel. Here was an incident that the Liberating Revolution could not even respond to with sophistries.

This approach forced me to make a specific allegation instead of a historical argument. It meant presenting the Liberating Revolution and its heirs to date with the borderline case of an unjustified atrocity, and asking them a question: Did they acknowledge the atrocity as their own, or did they explicitly disapprove of it? The only way to show that they had not authorized it was to punish those responsible and offer moral and material compensation for the victims. Three editions of this book, about forty published articles, a bill presented to Congress, and countless smaller initiatives have all served to pose the question to five successive governments over the course of twelve years. The response has always been silence. The ruling class that these governments represent supports this act of murder, accepts it as a part of itself, and does not punish anyone for it simply because it does not want to punish itself.

The executions of military personnel in the barracks were, of course, just as barbaric, illegal, and arbitrary as the civilian executions in the garbage dump.

The six men who, following Colonel Yrigoyen's orders, attempted to establish Valle's command in Avellaneda, put up no resistance when they were caught. They are executed in the Lanús District Police Department at dawn on June
1
0
.

Colonel Cogorno, the leader of the uprising in La Plata, is executed during the first minutes of June
11
in the Seventh Regiment barracks. The civilian Alberto Abadíe, wounded in the skirmish, is first
treated
. Then, at nightfall on the twelfth, he is ready for the firing squad, which he has to face in the Bosque de La Plata park.

On June
10
at noon, Colonels Cortínez and Ibazeta, along with five junior officers, are tried at Campo de Mayo. The court, presided over by General Lorio, decides that the case does not warrant the death penalty. The Executive Power completely disregards
res judicata
and passes Decree
10
.
364
, which condemns six of the seven accused men to death. The order is carried out at
3
:
40
a.m. on June
11
near an embankment.

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
1
2
, 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
d
é
cada infame
: enter the Alsogarays, the Kriegers, and the Verriers, who neatly rejoin the bonds of dependency that were broken during Perón's government.
41
The 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:

 

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: