The telegram addressed to Mr. Pedro Livraga, Florida, said:
State of health of your son good in Olmos La Plata. He can be visited on Friday 9 to 11 or between 13 and 17 hrs. Only parents, sons or siblings carrying their appropriate identity papers. Col. Victor Arribau.
It was telegram number 110, and it had been sent from the Government House at 7:30 p.m. and received at 8:37 p.m. It was Monday, July 2, 1956.
Juan Carlos was still in Moreno. But it was clear already that his fate was being decided by the Pink House and not La Plata Police Headquarters. On Tuesday the third, they transferred him to Olmos. And his parents—who had assumed he was dead—anxiously counted down the days until Friday.
At last they saw him. They found it hard to recognize him: he had lost ten kilos, his face erased by bandages. That said, ever since his arrival at the penitentiary, he had been treated humanely and given appropriate medical attention. His health had actually improved considerably during these few days.
Giunta was also recovering from his anxious depression. At first, he’d been suffering a great deal from being grouped with the ordinary prisoners. That’s when he decided to speak with the director of the penitentiary and recount his strange odyssey to him. The director—a kindhearted man who was later replaced—looked pensive.
—Many have come to me with that kind of story —he finally replied.— But they’re not always true. If what you’re saying is true, we’ll see what can be done . . .
He ordered for him to be transferred to the political prisoner block. Giunta felt better there. The prisoners included communist and nationalist militants, union leaders, even a journalist, and with them at least he could talk, even if he wasn’t interested in debates about politics or labor.
Afterward, Livraga arrived. Giunta didn’t remember him. Juan Carlos, on the other hand, had held onto a crisp image of Livraga. The experience they shared brought them closer together. At first, Livraga had preferred to stay with the ordinary criminals: he still feared for his life and thought he had a greater chance of going unnoticed among them. Later his worries subsided and he asked to be moved to the other block.
Among the prisoners, one La Plata lawyer’s name kept coming up: von Kotsch, Esq. They mentioned cases of prisoners who had been set free thanks to his intervention. Máximo von Kotsch, Esq., a thirty-two-year-old attorney actively affiliated with the Radical Instransigente Party, did indeed devote his well-known dynamism to the defense of detained union members.31 Among them were the numerous oil workers tortured by the Province of Buenos Aires Police. Giunta and Livraga asked to speak with him, and von Kotsch, Esq., listened with awe to the story of what happened in the early morning hours of June 10 in the outskirts of José León Suárez. He agreed to defend the two survivors at once and, given the lack of a judicial process—they were at the disposal of the Executive Power—and of any real reasons that might justify their imprisonment, requested that they be set free.
On the night of August 16, 1956, the prisoners of the political block were getting ready for bed when they heard a guard’s voice order:
—Quiet, people! —and then:— If I call your name, come out with all your things.
A shiver ran through the block. Some would be set free, others would stay. Everyone listened eagerly while those whose names were called gathered their things together in a frenzy.
—. . . Miguel Ángel Giunta . . . —the guard rattled off,— Juan Carlos Livraga . . .
They were the last two on the list. They looked at each other in disbelief. They embraced. Then the same thought occurred to them simultaneously. Maybe it was a ruse to kill them. But there, leaning against a column outside the prisoners’ block, was von Kotsch, Esq., waiting for them. He was smiling. Giunta says he will never forget that moment.
That same night, the lawyer took them to La Plata’s Police Headquarters to get their release papers approved. In Giunta’s box for “Grounds,” there was an expressive line of typed dashes.
There had been, in fact, no grounds for trying to execute him. No grounds for torturing him psychologically to the limits of what a person can endure. No grounds for condemning him to hunger and thirst. No grounds for shackling and handcuffing him. And now, there were no grounds—only by virtue of a simple decree, No. 14.975—for restoring him to the world.
***
Giunta and Livraga owed their freedom and even their lives not only to the efforts of von Kotsch, Esq., but to a happy circumstance. They were not, as they previously thought, the only surviving witnesses of “Operation Massacre.” The Province of Buenos Aires Police had tried to catch the other fugitives and recover all the evidence, mainly the receipts issued by the San Martín District Police Department. If they had accomplished that, it is likely that everything—both people and things—would have disappeared in one final, silent act of carnage. But their attempt had failed and “Operation Massacre,” even without Giunta and Livraga, was going to be widely publicized both here and abroad.
Gavino sought asylum in the Bolivian embassy before the last echoes of the executions had stopped ringing out. He was carrying the receipt with him when he left for that country.
Julio Troxler and Reinaldo Benavídez could not be arrested either. In mid-October, they took refuge in the same embassy, and on November 3, an airplane took them to La Paz. On October 17, a tall and dark-skinned man walked calmly to the entrance of the embassy at 500 Corrientes Street. Two policemen dressed as civilians hurtled themselves onto him and even got a hand on him. But they were too late: Juan Carlos Torres, the tenant of the apartment in back, had just escaped Fernández Suárez’s clutches and was now on foreign ground. In June 1957 he, too, left for Bolivia.
Mr. Horacio di Chiano was in hiding for four months before returning timidly to his house in Florida. The terrifying experience had left him deeply scarred. They had wanted to kill him at close range. For countless seconds, beneath the headlights of the police van, he had waited for the coup de grâce that never came. He had not committed a crime, but he was on the run. He had lost his job after seventeen years of service and now he was squandering his savings to support his family. He will never understand anything about what happened.
Livraga and Giunta went back to work. Livraga helped his father laying bricks; Giunta returned to his old job.
Sergeant Díaz was not completely spared the fury that was unleashed that night in June. He was held prisoner for many months in Olmos.
In the cemeteries of Boulogne, San Martín, Olivos, and Chacarita, modest crosses serve as reminders of the fallen: Nicolás Carranza, Francisco Garibotti, Vicente Rodríguez, Carlos Lizaso, Mario Brión.
In Montevideo, soon after hearing the news, Mr. Pedro Lizaso, Carlitos’s father, passed away. In his final days he was heard repeating, over and over again:
—It’s my fault . . . It’s my fault . . .
At the end of 1956, Vicente Damián Rodríguez would have fathered his fourth child. His wife, hopeless and consumed by misery, resigned herself to his loss.
The massacre left sixteen children without fathers: Carranza’s six, Garibotti’s six, Rodríguez’s three, and Brión’s one. These little children who, for the most part, were doomed to a life of poverty and resentment, will know one day—they already know—that the “liberating” and “democratic” Argentina of June 1956 was on a par with Nazi hell.
That is where the ledger stands.
In my view, though, what best symbolizes the irresponsibility, the blindness, and the disgrace of “Operation Massacre” is a little piece of paper. A rectangle of official paper, twenty-five centimeters long by fifteen centimeters wide. It is dated several months after June 9, 1956, and, after being run by all the local province police stations—including that of the Province of Buenos Aires—it is issued in the name of Miguel Ángel Giunta, the surviving executed man. His name and ID number appear over the background of a white and light-blue-colored shield. Above, it reads: Argentine Republic – Ministry of Interior – Federal Police. And then, in larger letters, four words: “Certificate of Good Conduct.”
Footnotes:
31 DG: After Perón was ousted in 1955, the Unión Cívica Radical (see Note 10) party split into two factions, the UCR Intransigente and the UCR del Pueblo [The People’s Radical Civil Union]. The Intransigente party was more prepared to work together with Peronist supporters and was led by Arturo Frondizi, while the more rigidly anti-Peronist faction, UCR del Pueblo, was led by Ricardo Balbín.