(to the first edition, July 1957)
For various reasons, happenstance included, I was quite close to the three revolutions—two that were quashed in very different ways, and a victorious one in the middle—that rattled the country in 1955 and 1956.
I can say again, without remorse, that I supported the September 1955 uprising. Not only for pressing, family reasons—which I had—but because I knew with certainty that a system that mocked civil liberties, that denied the right to freedom of expression, and that promoted obedience on the one hand and excess on the other, had just been overthrown. My memory is not short: what I thought then, right or wrong, I continue to think today.
Toward the end of 1955, I wrote an article for the papers as a tribute to the three men of the naval air force who had died in an expedition to the South, fighting with simple and obvious heroism. For reasons that are better left unmentioned, the Navy authorities disavowed this article, first verbally and then in writing. Their understanding was that the fallen ones, their own dead, could do without such a tribute—a tribute that even their enemies might not have denied them—and my understanding was that I could do without the Navy’s opinion. Because then as well as now I believe that the press has to be free, or it’s a farce; there is no middle ground. And naturally, the article ran with my name on it, despite the explicit disavowal that I still have in my hands.
I am not just making idle mention of this incident; it was perhaps the first one in a long series of events that allowed the revolution to devour its heroes and forsake its dead, and with that, to lose its Liberating characteristic, among many other things. Because in the article I purposefully pointed out that, along with Captian Estivariz and Lieutenant Irigoin, a Peronist NCO had died. A man who could have dodged his service as many higher-ranking men had done, but instead had put his esprit de corps, his loyalty to the uniform, and his devotion to his superior first and foremost; at a very far second were his heartfelt and, in his case, respectable political opinions. The charred and unrecognizable remains of the three men—two revolutionaries and one Peronist inside the same plane that was blown to pieces, who died fighting the same battle, and who were consumed by the same fire of heroism—undoubtedly meant something. It was a sign, a warning, a massive symbol, a pact sealed with blood. What meaning does it carry now, almost two years later, when the short-sighted, the cowardly, and the dim-witted have done nothing but violate this pact? I can only think to say one thing: blessed are those three who lie dead, united, and untouched in their glorious eternity.
The June 9 revolution hit even closer to home. For purely geographic reasons, it literally came into my home. To reach my house in the early morning, I had to cross a war zone at the corner of Fifty-Fourth and Fourth in La Plata. In the thirty paces it took to cross the live fire zone of the Second Division Command, I learned what irrepressible physical fear was.
But I don’t just remember this minor incident for love of the picturesque, either. On that same corner, behind a car that was being used as a barricade and amidst the crackling of gunshots, I was the final recipient of a “Haaalt!” that rang out endlessly, coming from invisible snipers all around me. I had been stopped by a short, rather fat man with a mustache, a leather jacket, and a submachine gun tucked into his belt. He asked me where I was going. My voice faltering, I told him about my family that was fifty meters away, in the area where the most intense shooting of the entire day was taking place. He didn’t ask me for my ID, which I didn’t have on me. He didn’t ask my opinion about what was happening. He simply said, shrugging his shoulders:
—Go ahead, if you dare.
He was the leader of the rebel Peronist group. A man who now sells balloons in a plaza in Montevideo. I thought then and I think now—take good note of this—that the man was in the wrong. Because he could not have known that, at that very moment, he was being proven right. He could not have known that, at that very moment, an individual who would not dare to stick his nose in that battlefield was coldly ordering the execution of twelve poor bastards. He could not have known that, behind the wall and the little green door of the Command, another man—Juan Carlos Longoni—was risking his life for the exact opposite idea, was going to risk and lose his job for helping those poor bastards. Neither he, nor I, nor Longoni knew any of that.
But that same Seargeant Ferrari of the rebel group let me pass; he must have regretted it. Because two hours later my house became a shelter for the forty loyal soldiers who, having overcome their fear, were shooting at him. Those men of the City Bell Communications Second Batallion will not remember my face, which they could barely see in the darkness, or my name, which they didn’t check. But I am certain that not one of them—not even Lieutenant Cruset, or Decruset, who was in charge—will ever forget the tall wooden door on Fifty-Fourth street that was the only one to open for them when they were caught in rebel fire that threatened to destroy them and that, on the sidewalk across the street, had already left a trail of dead marines.
One of them had just died, ten meters away, on the other side of the street. I heard the cry of terror and loneliness that he let out when he was dying and the patrol fell back for a moment, taken by surprise: “Don’t leave me here alone! You sons of b———, don’t leave me here alone!” Later on, his fellow soldiers took control of the machine-gun emplacement (located in a construction site) that had killed him. But Bernardino Rodríguez perished at age twenty-one believing that his brothers-in-arms, his friends, had abandoned him in death. That pained me at the time, and continues to pain me now, like so many other useless things.
That is the moment when I understood what a revolution was, its squalid face that nothing can make up for. And I hated that revolution with all my might. As a reflex, I also hated all the previous ones, however just they may have been. I came to a deeper understanding of it in the tense hours that followed, seeing undisguised fear all around me in the almost childlike faces of the soldiers who didn’t know if they were “loyalists” or “rebels,” but knew that they had to shoot at other soldiers identical to themselves, who also didn’t know if they were loyalists or rebels.
If there is one thing that I have tried to evoke in these pages it is the horror of revolutions, whose first victims are always innocent people like the executed men at José León Suárez or that dying soldier just a few meters from where I was. These poor people do not die screaming “Long live the nation” like they do in novels. They die vomiting from fear, like Nicolás Carranza, or cursing others for abandoning them, like Bernardino Rodríguez.
Only an idiot could not want peace.
But peace at any price is not acceptable.
And there will always be new seeds of revolution taking root, new surges of senseless revenge (that might later come to mean the complete opposite) on the rise as long as we keep men like the current Chief of Police of the Province of Buenos Aires, Lieutenant Colonel Desiderio Fernández Suárez, at the helm of repressive State institutions.