Operation Massacre (3 page)

In
1970
, the Montoneros, a militant Peronist group, kidnapped and murdered General Pedro Aramburu, who had been the de facto president during the June
9
,
1
956
, failed Peronist uprising. The Montoneros cited the events of June
9
,
1956
—which they only knew about in such great detail thanks to
Operation Massacre
—as part of the justification for their actions. Walsh revised the fourth and final edition of the book, published in
1972
,
to reflect his opinions on Aramburu's murder—see Chapter
37
of this translation. Though he had his disagreements with the Montoneros, Walsh kept collaborating with them and eventually joined them in
1
973
. For him, they represented the most effective popular struggle for social justice at the time. His own true crime writings as well as his increased involvement in the armed Peronist resistance now made him a clear target in the eyes of the State.

Walsh began writing for
Noticias
, a Peronist newspaper, and had established his own network of people whom he used as intelligence sources for his writings.
After a Peronist victory in the national elections, Perón was invited back to Argentina. His many supporters, including Walsh, believed the change they had been hoping for was coming. But in the latter half of
1973
, Perón's health began to fail him, and he died on July
2
,
1974
. Another military junta came into power and began to persecute Peronists once more, this time with a vengeance. The
Noticias
office was forced to close. Walsh started his own underground news agency called ANCLA (“Agencia de Noticias Clandestinas” or “Clandestine News Agency”).

In
1957
, a writer like Walsh could write a book like
Operation Massacre
and have it published and widely read, as controversial as it may have been. By
1977
, there was no freedom of the press in Argentina, and the rule of law had been practically abolished. What was to be the most savage military junta in Argentina's history had been in power for a year. In his introduction to this book, Michael Greenberg describes the way in which more individuals suspected of subversive activities would disappear from the streets of Buenos Aires without a trace. Walsh walked around the city incognito, not acknowledging anyone he knew for fear of being caught. The final, chilling appendix to this book is Walsh's “Open Letter to the Military Junta,” dated March
24
,
1977
. After listing pages of grievances against his oppressors, he concludes:

These are the thoughts I wanted to pass on to the members of this Junta on the first anniversary of your ill-fated government, with no hope of being heard, with the certainty of being persecuted, but faithful to the commitment I made a long time ago to bear witness during difficult times.

The following day, after dropping the letter in the mail to mainstream newspapers in Buenos Aires, Walsh was on his way to a meeting with a fellow Montonero. The person he was supposed to meet was tortured until he surrendered the details of the meeting. Walsh was stopped in the street by one of the State's armed gangs and managed to get one shot off with the .
22
caliber gun he carried for protection before they gunned him down. He was fifty years old, and to this day his body has not been found.

Walsh's effort to tell the story became a fight for human decency. The story became one of life and death and the physical reality of ordinary people being treated horrifically and dying in a shameful way, leaving entire families bereft. Exactly how much is lost in the arbitrary execution of a group of men? Walsh was able to contain his rage and disappointment and convey what happened on the night of June
9
,
1956
, with ferocious precision and a forensic attention to detail. This, to me, is heroic: write so well about everyday people being murdered under a cruel regime that everyday readers sixty-six years later will know what it felt like and maybe also give a damn.

Translating this book was an enormous honor and a great challenge for me. The book came to me by chance, as a gift from my friend Dante in Buenos Aires. The prologue is what really caught my attention and made me think I could possibly do this text justice in English: Walsh's sentences were notably short and direct, not circuitous and ambiguous in the way that often makes Spanish deceivingly difficult to translate well. It made sense to me that he had read the English-language crime writers, that he himself had translated from English and came from a family of Irish immigrants. There was something familiarly English about his Spanish. Walsh does, however, change his tense all the time, which can be disorienting in English, but is less so in Spanish. I tried to preserve these changes inasmuch as they reflected the urgency that was present in the Spanish: a sudden switch to the present tense brings the reader swiftly to the present of the text itself. Suddenly she is there, bearing witness to the events of the night of the crime. I had also to acknowledge the frequent changes of register in Walsh's language: there is certainly a colloquial nature to much of Walsh's prose, and to that end, I have tried to use contractions sparingly and carefully, only in instances where I believe they help to reflect the rhythm of the Spanish text more faithfully. But there is also a more formal dignity and rectitude to his writing:

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 a simple decree, No.
14
.
975
—for restoring him to the world.

Walsh travels between these registers with grace, imbuing these passages with a nobility that I tried to render in English. Along similar lines, I have tried to keep phrasing that I believe Walsh made intentionally impenetrable in Spanish nearly as impenetrable in English. Walsh was writing in
1957
, after all, which meant that I was unfamiliar with certain expressions: What is a
multitudinario esquive de bulto
? Walsh uses the phrase to describe the reaction he is met with when he tries to publish the articles that would become
Operation Massacre
. Literally it means something like “a massive, swelling avoidance,” but it's a colloquial expression that I chose to translate as “no one wants anything to do with it.” No one was interested in publishing Walsh's yellowing pages, no one wanted to get too involved in his mess.

When I didn't know something and couldn't find any written evidence to help me, I would ask my mother, an Argentine who was born in the '
40
s, or my right hand in this entire operation, Pablo Martín Ruiz, born in the '
60
s in Argentina. Pablo checked over every single translated sentence at least twice with an eye for accuracy and political and historical context. I needed to understand where Walsh stood politically in order to translate his tone with integrity, especially when it came to the appendices, each one tracking a different current in Walsh's personal journey as an activist. Perhaps the most trying segments were in the third part of the book, which is composed primarily of abstruse legalese. I recruited my brother, a lawyer in the US Department of Justice, to check that my wording was as accurate as it could be, especially given the different justice systems and time periods involved.

I take my lead from Walsh in thanking those who helped make this translation possible: to my dear friend Dante for giving me Walsh's book as a gift, and to his mother, who took the time to find photographs for possible use in this edition. Thank you to Daniel Divinsky at Ediciones de la Flor and to everyone at Seven Stories Press. The writings of Eduardo Jozami, Michael McCaughan, and Luis Alberto Romero were especially useful to me. I am grateful to Ben for reading and keeping me to a higher standard of excellence. To my family, thank you for supporting me with your time, your attention, and your whole hearts, as always.
A Ileana, mi querida abuela, gracias por tu apoyo y tu amor siempre
. Pablo Martín Ruiz was my Enriqueta Muñiz: I simply could not have done this without him. Dan Simon was my Bruno and Tulio Jacovella, my Leónidas Barletta. But of course these comparisons are perverse: no one had to risk their lives so that this translation could be published, and for that I am truly thankful.

 

—Daniella Gitlin

Footnotes:

 

Prologue

News of the June
1956
secret executions first came to me by chance, toward the end of that year, in a La Plata café where people played chess, talked more about Keres and Nimzowitsch than Aramburu and Rojas, and the only military maneuver that enjoyed any kind of renown was Schlechter's bayonet attack in the Sicilian Defense.
5

Six months earlier, in that same place, we'd been startled around midnight by the shooting nearby that launched the assault on the Second Division Command and the police department—Valle's failed rebellion.
6
I remember how we left en masse, chess players, card players, and everyday customers, to see what the celebration was all about; how, the closer we got to San Martín Square, the more serious we became as our group became smaller; and how, when I finally got across the square, I was alone. When I reached the bus station there were several more of us again, including a poor dark-skinned boy in a guard's uniform who hid behind his goggles saying that, revolution or not, no one was going to take away his gun—a handsome
1901
Mauser.

I remember finding myself alone once more, in the darkness of Fifty-Fourth Street, just three blocks away from my house, which I kept wanting to get to and finally reached two hours later amid the smell of lime trees that always made me nervous, and did so on that night even more than usual. I remember the irrepressible will of my legs, the preference they showed at every street for the bus station, returning to it on their own two or three times. But each time they went a bit farther before turning back, until they didn't need to go back because we had gone past the line of fire and arrived at my house. My house was worse than the café and worse than the bus station because there were soldiers on the roof and also in the kitchen and the bedrooms, but mainly in the bathroom. Since then I've developed an aversion to houses that face police departments, headquarters, or barracks.

I also haven't forgotten how, standing by the window blinds, I heard a recruit dying in the street who did not say “Long live the nation!” but instead: “Don't leave me here alone, you sons of bitches.”

After that, I don't want to remember anything else—not the announcer's voice at dawn reporting that eighteen civilians had been executed in Lanús, nor the wave of blood that flooded the country up until Valle's death. It's too much for a single night. I'm not interested in Valle. I'm not interested in Perón, I'm not interested in revolution. Can I go back to playing chess?

I can. Back to chess and the fantasy literature I read, back to the detective stories I write, back to the “serious” novel I plan to draft in the next few years, back to the other things that I do to earn a living and that I call journalism, even though that's not what it is. Violence has spattered my walls, there are bullet holes in the windows, I've seen a car full of holes with a man inside it whose brains were spilling out—but it's only chance that has put all this before my eyes. It could have happened a hundred kilometers away, it could have happened when I wasn't there.

Six months later, on a suffocating summer night with a glass of beer in front of him, a man says to me:

—One of the executed men is alive.

I don't know what it is about this vague, remote, highly unlikely story that manages to draw me in. I don't know why I ask to talk to that man, why I end up talking to Juan Carlos Livraga.

But afterward I do know why. I look at that face, the hole in his cheek, the bigger hole in his throat, his broken mouth and dull eyes, where a shadow of death still lingers. I feel insulted, just as I felt without realizing it when I heard that chilling cry while standing behind the blinds.

Livraga tells me his unbelievable story; I believe it on the spot.

And right there the investigation, this book, is born. The long night of June
9
comes back over me, pulls me out of “the soft quiet seasons” for a second time. Now I won't think about anything else for almost a year; I'll leave my house and my job behind; I'll go by the name Francisco Freyre; I'll have a fake ID with that name on it; a friend will lend me his house in Tigre; I'll live on a frozen ranch in Merlo for two months; I'll carry a gun; and at every moment the characters of the story will come back to me obsessively: Livraga covered in blood walking through that never-ending alley he took to escape death, the other man who survived with him by running back into the field amid the gunfire, and those who survived without his knowing about it, and those who didn't survive.

Because what Livraga knows is that there was a bunch of them, that they were taken out to be shot, that there were about ten of them taken out, and that he and Giunta were still alive. That's the story I hear him repeat before the judge one morning when I say I'm Livraga's cousin so they let me into the court where everything is infused with a sense of discretion and skepticism. The story sounds a bit more absurd here, a little more lush, and I can see the judge doubting it, right up until Livraga's voice climbs over that grueling hill, to where all that's left is a sob, and he makes a gesture to take off his clothes so that everyone can see the other gunshot wound. Then we all feel ashamed, the judge seems to be moved, and I feel myself moved again by the tragedy that has befallen my cousin.

That's the story I write feverishly and in one sitting so that no one beats me to it, but that later gets more wrinkled every day in my pocket because I walk around all of Buenos Aires with it and hardly anyone wants to know about it, let alone publish it. You begin to believe in the crime novels you've read or written, and think that a story like this, with a talking dead man, is going to be fought over by the presses. You think you're running a race against time, that at any given moment a big newspaper is going to send out a dozen reporters and photographers, just like in the movies. But instead you find that no one wants anything to do with it.

It's funny, really, to read through all the newspapers twelve years later and see that this story doesn't exist and never did.

So I wander into increasingly remote outskirts of journalism until finally I walk into a basement on Leandro Alem Avenue where they are putting out a union pamphlet, and I find a man who's willing to take the risk. He is trembling and sweating because he's no movie hero either, just a man who is willing to take the risk, and that's worth more than a movie hero. And the story is printed, a flurry of little yellow leaflets in the kiosks: badly designed, with no signature, and with all the headings changed, but it's printed. I look at it affectionately as it's snatched up by ten thousand anonymous hands.

But I've had even more luck than that. There is a young journalist named Enriqueta Muñiz who has been with me from the very beginning and has put herself entirely on the line. It is difficult to do her justice in just a few sentences. I simply want to say that if I have written “I did,” “I went,” “I discovered” anywhere in this book, it should all be read as “We did,” “We went,” “We discovered.” There were several important things that she got alone, like testimonies from Troxler, Benavídez, and Gavino, who were all in exile. At the time, I didn't see the world as an ordered sequence of guarantees and certainties, but rather as the exact opposite. In Enriqueta Muñiz I found the security, bravery, and intelligence that seemed so hard to come by.

So one afternoon we take the train to José León Suárez and bring a camera with us, along with a little map that Livraga has drawn up for us in pencil, a detailed bus driver's map. He has marked the roads and rail crossings for us, as well as a grove and an X where it all happened. At dusk, we walk about eight blocks along a paved road, catch sight of the tall, dark row of eucalyptus trees that the executioner Rodríguez Moreno had deemed “an appropriate place for the task” (namely, the task of shooting them), and find ourselves in front of a sea of tin cans and delusions. One of the greatest delusions was the notion that a place like this cannot remain so calm, so quiet and forgotten beneath the setting sun, without someone keeping watch over the history imprisoned in the garbage that glistens with a false tide of thoughtfully gleaming dead metals. But Enriqueta says “It happened here,” and casually sits down on the ground so that I can take a picnic photo of her because, just at that moment, a tall sullen man with a big sullen dog walks by. I don't know why one notices these things. But this was where it happened, and Livraga's story feels more real now: here was the path, over there was the ditch, the garbage dump and the night all around us.

The following day we go see the other survivor, Miguel Ángel Giunta, who greets us by slamming the door in our faces. He doesn't believe us when we tell him we're journalists and asks for credentials that we don't have. I don't know what it is that we say to him through the screen door, what vow of silence, what hidden key, that gets him to gradually open the door and start to come out, which takes about half an hour, and to talk, which takes much longer.

It kills you to listen to Giunta because you get the feeling you're watching a movie that has been rolling and rolling in his head since the night it was filmed and can't be stopped. All the tiny details are there: the faces, the lights, the field, the small noises, the cold and the heat, the escape from among the tin cans, the smell of gunpowder, and panic. You get the feeling that once he finishes he's going to start again from the beginning, just as the endless loop must start over again in his head: “This is how they executed me.” But the more upsetting thing is the affront to his person that this man carries within him, how he has been hurt by the mistake they made with him, because after all he's a decent man who wasn't even a Peronist, “and you can ask anybody, they'd tell you who I am.” But actually we're not sure about this anymore because there appear to be two Giuntas, the one who is talking fervently as he acts out this movie for us, and the other one who is sometimes distracted and manages to smile and crack a joke or two, like old times.

It seems like the story could end here because there is no more to tell. Two survivors, and the rest are dead. I could publish the interview with Giunta and go back to that abandoned chess game in the café from a month ago. But it's not over. At the last minute Giunta mentions a belief he has, not something he knows for sure, but something he has imagined or heard murmured: there is a third man who survived.

Meanwhile, the great
picana
god and its submachine guns begin to roar from La Plata.
7
My story floats on leaflets through corridors at Police Headquarters, and Lieutenant Colonel Fernández Suárez wants to know what the fuss is all about. The article wasn't signed, but my initials appeared at the bottom of the original copies. There was a journalist working at the newspaper office who had the same initials, only his were ordered differently: J. W. R. He awakes one morning to an interesting assortment of rifles and other syllogistic tools, and his spirit experiences that surge of emotion before the revelation of a truth. They make him come out in his underwear and put him on a flight to La Plata where he's brought to Police Headquarters. They sit him down in an armchair opposite the Lieutenant Colonel, who says to him, “And now I'd like you to write an article about
me
, please.” The journalist explains that he is not the man who deserves such an honor while quietly, to himself, he curses my mother.

The wheels keep turning, and we have to trudge through some rough country in search of the third man, Horacio di Chiano, who is now living like a worm underground. It seems as though people know us already in a lot of these places, the kids at least are following us, and one day a young girl stops us in the street.

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

—And you know why we've come?

—Yes, I know everything.

Okay, Cassandra.

They tell us he's not there, but he is, and we have to start pushing past the protective barriers, the wakeful gods that keep watch over a living dead man: a wall, a face that denies and distrusts. We cross over from the sunlight of the street to the shade of the porch. We ask for a glass of water and sit there in the dark offering wheedling words until the rustiest lock turns and Mr. Horacio di Chiano climbs the staircase holding onto his wife, who leads him by the hand like a child.

So there are three.

The next day the newspaper receives an anonymous letter that says “Livraga, Giunta, and the ex-NCO Gavino managed to escape.”

So there are four. And Gavino, the letter says, “was able to get himself to the Bolivian Embassy and was granted asylum in that country.”

I don't find Gavino at the Bolivian Embassy, but I do find his friend Torres, who smiles and, counting it out on his fingers, says, “You're missing two.” Then he tells me about Troxler and Benavídez.

So there are six.

And while we're at it, why not seven? Could be, Torres tells me, because there was a sergeant with a very common last name, something like García or Rodríguez, and no one knows what's become of him.

Two or three days later I come back to see Torres and hit him pointblank with a name:

—Rogelio Díaz.

His face lights up.

—How'd you do it?

I don't even remember how I did it. But there are seven.

So now I can take a moment because I have already talked to survivors, widows, orphans, conspirators, political refugees, fugitives, alleged informers, anonymous heroes. By May, I have written half of this book. Once more, roaming around in search of someone who will publish it. At about that time, the Jacovella brothers had started putting out a magazine. I talk to Bruno, then Tulio. Tulio Jacovella reads the manuscript and laughs, not at the manuscript, but at the mess he is about to get himself into, and he goes for it.