Operation Massacre (26 page)

 

Glossary

Berta Figueroa
:
Nicolás Carranza's widow.

Captain/Commissioner-Inspector Benedicto Cuello
: Second-in-command to Rodríguez Moreno, Commissioner of the San Martín District Police Department at the time of the execution.

Carlos Lizaso
:
Works with his father at an auction house. On the night of the José León Suárez execution, he leaves his girlfriend a note that says “If all goes well tonight . . .” Killed on site at twenty-one years old.

Chief Inspector Rodolfo Rodríguez Moreno
: Chief of the San Martín District Police Department who obeyed the order from Fernández Suárez to carry out “Operation Massacre.”

Colonel Bonnecarrere
: Appointed by the Liberating Revolution to the highest position of State authority in the Province of Buenos Aires.

Colonel Desiderio A. Fernández Suárez
:
Chief of Police of the Province of Buenos Aires, responsible for ordering the executions at José León Suárez.

Commissioner F. Ferrairone
:
Replaces Commissioner Gregorio de Paula
as commissioner of the Moreno precinct after the José León Suárez execution.

Commissioner Gregorio de Paula
: Commissioner of the Moreno precinct at the time of the José León Suárez execution.

Doctor Carlos Chiesa
:
Police medic at the Moreno precinct.

Eduardo Schaposnik
:
Socialist representative for the Advisory Board of the Province of Buenos Aires who reports on alleged cases of torture within the justice system.

Enriqueta Muñiz
:
Walsh's right hand in the investigation.

Florinda Allende
:
Francisco Garibotti's widow.

Francisco Garibotti
:
Father of six and longtime railroad worker. Killed at thirty-eight years old in the José León Suárez execution.

Horacio di Chiano
:
Works as an electrician, lives with his wife and daughter, around fifty years old at the time of the José León Suárez execution. He survives and hides in his basement, consumed by fear.

Jorge Doglia, Esq.
:
Head of the Police Judicial Division at the time of Operation Massacre.

Juan Carlos Livraga
:
Critically injured survivor of the José León Suárez execution. He was nearly twenty-four years old and a bus driver at the time. Livraga's formal accusation was published in the newspaper
Propósitos.

Juan Carlos Torres
:
Tenant of the apartment where most of the victims of the José León Suárez executions were gathered on the night of June
9
,
1956
.

Judge Belisario Hueyo
:
Judge from La Plata who, aside from Walsh himself, most avidly seeks justice in the case of “Operation Massacre.”

Judge Viglione
:
Judge for the Province of Buenos Aires who is appointed to adjudicate Walsh's charges against Police Commissioner Fernández Suárez.

Julio Troxler
:
Twenty-nine-year-old Peronist and former police officer. He survives the José León Suárez execution and goes into exile in Bolivia.

“Marcelo”
:
a.k.a. Marcelo Rizzoni, an informant for Walsh in the investigation who never forgives himself for Carlos Lizaso's death and becomes a terrorist.

Mario Brión
:
Working man who lives with his wife and son. Killed at thirty-three years old in the José León Suárez execution.

Máximo von Kotsch, Esq.
:
Lawyer who represented survivors Giunta and Livraga.

Miguel Ángel Giunta
:
Critically injured survivor of the José León Suárez execution. Works at a shoe shop.

Nicolás Carranza
:
Father of six, Peronist, and fugitive. Killed in the José León Suárez execution.

Norberto Gavino
:
Fugitive from the law whose wife was taken hostage on account of his subversive activity. He is around forty years old at the time of the José León Suárez execution. He survives and goes into exile in Bolivia.

Ovidio R. de Bellis
:
Replaces Rodríguez Moreno as Chief of the San Martín District Police Department

Pedro Livraga
:
Father of Juan Carlos Livraga.

Reinaldo Benavídez
: Around thirty years old at the time of the José León Suárez execution. Survives and goes into exile in Bolivia.

Rogelio Díaz
:
NCO who served as a sergeant, has retired from the Navy at the time of the José León Suárez execution. He survives.

Señora Pilar
:
Mr. Horacio's widow.

Vicente Damián Rodríguez
:
Dockworker and father of three. Killed at thirty-five years old in the José León Suárez execution.

 

Afterword

For many of us, Rodolfo Walsh serves as a synthesis of what one would call the political tradition in today's Argentine literature: he was a great writer who pushed the question of the intellectual's civic responsibility to its limit. He started by writing detective stories
à
la Borges, and went on to write longer works based on true crimes that made him a threat in the eyes of the State.
Operation Massacre
(
1957
) is one of the great Latin American texts of documentary literature. In a
1970
interview, speaking about another one of his works in which he exposed a true, unpunished crime, he told me:

A journalist asked me why I hadn't made a novel out of this subject that seemed so suitable for a novel. What he was clearly hiding was the notion that a novel on this subject is better or in a higher category than an indictment about this subject. I think that translating an indictment into the art that is the novel renders it inoffensive, namely, consecrates it as art. On the other hand, building upon a document or a testimony allows for every degree of perfection: immense artistic possibilities emerge from the process of selection and the work of investigation.

With
Operation Massacre
, Walsh puts forward and elevates the raw truth of the facts. He offers a direct accusation, a documentary story instead of a novel based on fictionalized political events. The political use of literature ought to take a step away from fiction. This is Walsh's great lesson.

He notes in his
Diario
that “[T]o be absolutely diaphanous” is the goal of his writing. Clarity is a virtue, but not because things need to be simplified in order for people to understand—that's just the rhetoric of journalism. The virtue lies in confronting a deliberate darkness, a global jargon, a certain established rhetoric that makes clarity difficult to attain. “For a rigorous man it becomes more difficult each year to say anything without raising the suspicion that he might be lying or mistaken,” he wrote. Aware of this difficulty and his social circumstances, Walsh produced a unique, flexible, and inimitable style that permeates every text he wrote and that we remember him for.

Throughout his work, Walsh engages with two distinct poetics. On the one hand, fiction for Walsh is the art of ellipsis: it deals with allusion and that which is not said. Its construction is in total opposition to the simplification and the aesthetic of urgency that characterize social realism. Walsh's second poetics manifests as the documentary story, the autobiographical treatment of testimonies, pamphlets, and diatribes: the writer is a historian of the present who speaks in the name of truth and denounces misuses of power. Walsh's “Open Letter to the Military Junta” is the greatest example of this kind of political writing.

There is one exemplary story in which the two poetics clearly play out and interact. “Esa mujer” (“That Woman”) is a story Walsh wrote in
1963
about someone who speaks to a former State Intelligence Services officer in an attempt to find the body of Eva Perón. The narrator is a journalist confronting and negotiating with this figure who symbolizes the world of power. He wants to unveil the secret that will lead him to Eva Perón's body, with everything that goes along with finding that woman who embodies the history of an entire people. This intellectual's investigation, this search, is the driving force of the story.

The first indicator of Walsh's poetics is that Eva Perón is never mentioned explicitly in the story. We all know that she is the one being discussed, but the most important aspect of a story should never be named. Walsh practices the art of ellipsis, which clearly calls for the reader to crack the encoded context to seek out the implicit story, what is said in the unsaid. Walsh moves his style in this direction of allusion and condensation, of saying the most with the fewest number of words.

We catch a glimpse of Walsh's other poetics in the stance of this educated man, this journalist who is confronted with an historical enigma. For Walsh, Eva Perón appears first as a secret, a problem that has to be solved, but also as a destination. “If I could find that woman I wouldn't feel alone anymore,” the narrator says. Finding Evita, who represents the masses and the popular tradition of Peronism, means the intellectual must cross over to the other side. But crossing over no longer means finding a world of terror; instead, it allows for the possibility of finding friends and allies. Suddenly the intellectual does not feel that the barbaric world of the masses is adversarial and antagonistic, but that it is a place to escape to, a point of arrival. This story can be read as a very early allegory foreshadowing Walsh's decisions to join the Montoneros and convert to Peronism.

Everything in the story is condensed into the blind search for Eva Perón's missing body, but at the same time, Walsh is exploring two separate tensions. First, we have the tension between the intellectual and the masses. And second, we have the tension between the ex-Intelligence officer who knows where that woman is, on the one hand, and, on the other, we have the narrator of the story—the journalist who happens to share some of Walsh's traits in his commitment to decoding secrets and investigating manipulations of power. This is where the writer comes in: his task is to establish the truth, to act like a detective, to discover the secret that the State is hiding, to reveal the truth that is being hidden—buried, in this case, in a hidden body, a historical, symbolic body that has been stolen and disgraced.

Walsh summons both poetics again when he confronts the question that many writers of the
20
th
century, among them Primo Levi, Osip Mandelstam, and Paul Célan, have wrestled with: How can you narrate horror? How can you convey horror without just reporting on it? The experience of the concentration camps, of the Gulag, of genocide. Literature shows us that there are events that are nearly impossible to convey and that thus suggest a new relationship to the limits of language. The most poignant example of this in Walsh's work is the way he tells the story of his daughter's death in what is known as “Letter to Vicky,” which he wrote to Maria Victoria Walsh in
1976
, in the thick of the military dictatorship. This piece of writing is by no means a work of fiction, but Walsh practices ellipsis and displacement nonetheless. After recreating the exact moment when he finds out about her death over the radio and the gesture that comes with this revelation (“I heard your name mispronounced, and it took a second for it to register. I automatically started to cross myself the way I used to as a child”), he writes: “Last night I had a terrible nightmare. There was a pillar of fire, powerful, but contained within its borders, that was flaring up quite intensely.” A nightmare with virtually no content, condensed into a horrific abstract image.

He then writes: “Today on the train a man said ‘I suffer greatly, I'd like to go to sleep and wake up in a year.'” And Walsh concludes: “He was speaking for himself but for me as well.” He puts words in the mouth of someone else who is speaking about his pain, a stranger on the train, a stranger who happens to be around. The small step he takes away from what he is trying to say is a metaphor that conveys the experience of limits: someone speaks for him and expresses the pain in a somber, direct, and very moving way. From this displacement you get everything: the pain, the compassion, a lesson in style. Through this movement, Walsh shows what cannot be told.

Walsh uses the same displacement in his “Letter to My Friends” (written several days later), when he reconstructs the circumstances of Vicky's death. He reconstructs the ambush on the house where his daughter is in the middle of the city, the siege, the resistance, the combat, the military forces that surround the house. In order to tell the story of what happened, he once again endows someone else with a voice: “I received the testimony of one of those men, a conscript.” He then transcribes the story as told by this man who was there, besieging the place: “The fighting lasted more than an hour and a half. A man and a woman were shooting from up top. The woman caught our attention because every time she shot a burst and we ducked, she laughed.” The laughter is there, the extreme youth, the shock, everything is condensed and narrated by someone else. The impersonality of the story and the admiration for his own enemies reinforce the heroism of the scene: those who are going to kill her are the first ones who recognize her bravery, just as the best epic tradition dictates. Just like the case of the man on the train, here too there is a displacement and the voice is given to another who condenses what he is trying to say, and therefore becomes the solder who tells the story. This displacement recalls the form of a fiction that is intending to tell the truth. Maybe that soldier never existed, just as maybe that man on the train never existed, it doesn't matter. What matters is the vision it produces, the fact that they are there to witness and can then tell the story of the experience.

We see this movement as well in the prologue to the third edition of
Operation Massacre
(
1968
), where he describes the first scene, the origin of how history and politics came into his life. Walsh is at a café in La Plata where he always goes to talk about literature and play chess. One night in June of
1956
, they hear shooting, people are running in the streets, a group of Peronists and rebel officers attack the Second Division Command: it is the start of Valle's failed rebellion that will result in secret repression and the José León Suárez executions. And that night, Walsh leaves the café, runs along the tree-lined streets, and finally finds shelter in his house. This is when he tells the story: “I also haven't forgotten how, standing by the window blinds, I heard a recruit dying in the street who didn't say ‘Long live the nation!' but instead: ‘Don't leave me here alone, you sons of bitches.'”

The other conscript who is lying there terrified and about to die, in him we see the truth of the story. A displacement to the other, a fictional movement towards a scene that condenses and crystallizes a network of multiple meanings. That is how the experience is conveyed; it is far beyond simple information. Walsh had a natural ability to depict a scene using what is heard and to condense pure experience. It is a movement that occurs within the story, an ellipsis that displaces truth-telling onto the Other.

Walsh is wise enough to know, however, that the writer is not the only one using fictions to his advantage. The State also narrates, constructs fictions, and manipulates certain stories, while literature and the writer construct alternative stories that are in tension with them. The French poet Paul Valéry confronts these questions with the following logic: “A society rises from brutality to order. Barbarism is the age of the fact, so the age of order is necessarily the realm of fictions, because there is no power capable of establishing the order of the body solely through bodily force. Fictional forces are necessary.” The State cannot function by pure coercion alone; it needs what Valéry calls
fictional forces
. It needs to construct consensus, to construct stories and make people believe a certain version of events.

What matters is not only the content of these State fictions, not just the material that they manipulate, but also the form that they take. To begin to understand their form, we can look to the methods and devices used to construct them. During the period of the military dictatorship, for example, one of the stories being constructed was what we might call the
surgical
story, a story that pertained to bodies. The military used a medical metaphor to explain what they were doing. They concealed everything that was happening, but simultaneously
did
say what was happening, just in the form of a story about sickness and health. They spoke of Argentina as a sick body that had a tumor, a cancer that was spreading—this was the subversive element or revolution—and the role of the military was to operate on it. As doctors, their work was aseptic, beyond good and evil, an appropriate response to the needs of science, which calls for destruction and mutilation for the sake of saving a life. Everything that was secret was actually revealed in this story, just displaced. There were, as in every story, two stories being told: there was the attempt to make people believe that Argentina was a sick society and that the military was coming in from the outside as technicians to fix the problem, and then there was the idea that a painful operation had to be performed and, as Videla used to say, it was an operation that had to be performed without anesthesia. That was the discourse, the fictional version, that the State used: it told the truth about what it was doing, but in a covert and allegorical way.

This is a very small example of a State fiction. Running in tandem with these fictions are a series of anti-State stories, stories of resistance and opposition that circulate within a society and resist the State fictions. I have often thought that these social stories—anonymous fictions, micro-stories, testimonies that are exchanged and circulated—are the greatest context that literature uses. The writer is the one who knows how to hear them, who is attuned to this social narration; he is also the one who imagines them and writes them.

As just one example of these anonymous stories, consider an anti-State fiction that circulated during the military dictatorship, around
1978
and
1979
, at the time of the conflict with Chile. The war was about to become one of the political schemes that the military was looking for, just as the Malvinas later were. Attempting to construct political consensus through war was the only way that the military had of generating public support. There was a pervasive feeling of repression in the country, and the idea of going to the South in search of conflict was in the air. Multiple versions of an anonymous story began circulating in the city. It was said that somebody knew somebody who had seen a train stacked with coffins headed south at a deserted train station in the suburbs at dawn. A cargo train that someone had seen pass by slowly, like a ghost, in the silence of the night. Those empty coffins corresponded to the disappeared, to the bodies with no graves. It was also a story that foresaw the war in the Malvinas because there was no question that those coffins in that imaginary train were headed towards the Malvinas, to where soldiers were going to die and need to be buried.