• Cover
• Title page
• Introduction. A Perverted Dialectic and the Debt to History
• First part. Do Evil and Dread No Shame
  • 1. A Little Boy in the Street
  • 2. The Day After
  • 3. The Drum Kit
  • 4. Angels in Their Sleep
  • 5. Your Brother’s Blood
  • 6. Quarantine
  • 7. Paranoia
  • 8. Into the Dark
  • 9. The Paradox
  • 10. Nemesis
  • 11. Solitude
  • 12. Waking Up to See Another Day
  • 13. Bloody Sunday
• Second part. List of Terrorist Attacks and Their Victims in the Seventies
  • List of Abbreviations of Names of Terrorist Organizations
• Copyright page
• About the authors
• Spanish edition

Introduction

A Perverted Dialectic and the Debt to History

◆

Speaking about the 1970s in Argentina inevitably conjures up an association with grief and fratricidal struggles. Grief, however, comes in two forms: there is an accepted, recognized, politically correct grief, on the one hand, and another that continues to be denied its share of mourning, remembrance and homage, on the other.

The victims of terrorism in Argentina are less than a footnote in History. Their suffering has been belittled because it was not provoked by state agents. And those who should have protected them failed to rise to their responsibility.

First, a legal strategy was contrived in order to prevent the crimes committed by members of organizations like Montoneros, the People’s Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo - ERP), the Revolutionary Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias - FAR), the Peronist Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas – FAP) and others from being declared crimes against humanity; therefore, they became subject to the statute of limitations. The argument used was that those actions had not been perpetrated by public officers or under the aegis of the state—a condition that no International Law instrument imposes. This alone is grievous enough; first, because the Argentine courts claimed to rely precisely on International Law, and thus warped the letter of supranational law into saying something it does not say, something they fabricated with the clear intention of benefiting the cronies and allies of the Kirchner Administration in Argentina—as well as some from their own ranks in the process. Second, because when judging a blood-soaked confrontation that left thousands of families in bereavement on both sides of the conflict, the adoption of a rule tailored to only one of the parties and that does not apply to the other amounts to an unjustifiable inequity: it beclouds every sense of measure and limit in the use of judicial retribution, as the best guarantee of reasonableness is to be confident that the rule a judge applies to a case will apply, without any undue distinction, to anyone at all, whether friend or foe of those in power.

But even if one can grasp the horrifying meaning of such evisceration of the law, the cynicism of this ruse cloaked in a semblance of legality that helped intensify the intrusion of political power into the realm of the courts, this was not the worst to happen. What was really outrageous, what rounded off the cycle of this affront to Argentine society, what cemented the absolute impunity of terrorism and made the insult to the victims all the more appalling was the maneuvering of that legal ruse onto the moral front. Thus, the fallacy used in court to ensure that former guerrillas would go unpunished was then adopted into the culture of communication so that they would also appear to be beyond moral objection. It is as if accepting that the courts held the terrorist crimes to be time-barred under the law also meant that the perverted nature of their actions had likewise vanished in the public’s moral eye.

Would anyone dare say that the fact that a crime is statute-barred morally changes the criminal? Does the impunity secured in court by the members of Montoneros, ERP and other organizations render their past actions morally good, and their victims some despicable, insignificant matter, undeserving of the spotlight? This may all sound like utter nonsense, but it lays bare the consequences that the corruption of language has brought to bear on Argentine culture.

It is otherwise impossible to understand that the authors of those crimes now turn out to be judges of the rest of society, holding everyone to account for what they have done in the past while they are presented with the gift of oblivion, finding fault with omissions when they cannot bring their own actions to light, and pontificating about morality when they have not even confessed publicly to their own crimes. They write about their adventures and give lectures without ever being the target of an embarrassing question or answer; they are sought after as leading culture and business figures; they collect compensation and pension payouts bankrolled out of the public coffers, and they even present books authored by the judges who should have ordered an inquiry into their criminal actions. And as for the attackers who were killed, their names are engraved on the Wall of Memory, displayed for public recognition alongside the names of those who were victims of illegal procedures. In other words, no distinction is made between those who were victims of human rights violations and those who were killed while perpetrating, on their own initiative, an attack against a civilian or military facility.

The rationale for such a ludicrous paradox, the foundation stone of this veritable ‘kingdom of upside down,’ the ultimate reason for this nonsense lies in the state of culpable ignorance of a society that presumes—or simply decides to accept—that guerrilla fighters did nothing but defend themselves from a dictatorship determined to massacre them.

The recounting of true stories presented here, including names, circumstances and testimonies, proves that terrorists mounted attacks, to a degree that public opinion has not yet recognized, against the civilian population, as contemplated in the Geneva Conventions and other international instruments. Since 1949, the universal rule has been laid down that the civilian population is comprised of “persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause…”¹ This provision was drafted specifically for non-international armed conflicts, i.e., those taking place within the boundaries of a single political territory.

This book thus seeks to contribute to fostering a much needed, honest debate on a period of time that opened up a source of untold grief for thousands of Argentinians: for some of them because they were victims of illegal actions on the part of state forces, and for others because they were the targets of a terrorist attack.

We have focused our work on the victims of terrorism for various reasons. First, because those who were victims of human rights violations at the hands of state agents have already received extensive written coverage over the last thirty years, including materials funded by public monies like the book Nunca más (‘Never Again’). Second, because the authors of this book have already stated their position regarding the methods employed to suppress terrorism in the 1970s in various publications, lectures and interviews.² Third, because there are no second-class victims, such that it is not necessary to respect any purported hierarchy: the fact of having compiled a detailed report on the victims of terrorism and of having told their stories does not mean that we should focus—in order to compensate for this transgression—on the victims of state actions (especially when no such reciprocity is ever advocated for the other way around).

The purpose of this work is thus to fill a void, to break the silence prevailing over an area about which very little has been written and much more is unknown than known. Admittedly, very thorough works have been published regarding certain specific high-profile killings—more often than not because the victims were public personalities, like Argentina’s General Confederation of Labor secretary-general José Ignacio Rucci.³ But still awaiting their time to surface are the harrowing stories of thousands of civilian victims who are not well-known, or otherwise completely unknown, and who suffered the horror of terrorist attacks. And the truth is that in the period spanning from 1969 to 1979, the press reported the planting of 4,380 bombs by underground organizations in different locations, added to which there were street shootings, assaults on buildings, hijackings and a host of other incidents of violence that indiscriminately hit various sectors of the population. Not to mention the fact that thousands of attacks and victims remain unreported by the press.

Our focus on the victims among the civilian population does not mean that the victims among the armed forces or the security forces should not be remembered. First, they are included in this book whenever they were not taking part in the hostilities or were otherwise in a state of defenselessness at the time of the events, according to the Geneva Conventions.

For example, members of medical and religious personnel forming part of an armed force are non-combatants. Consequently, when the ambulance that was driving medical soldier Juan Ángel Toledo Pimentel, non-commissioned officer Alberto Lai and soldier Carlos Cajal was ambushed by an ERP group in the Tucumán forest on May 17, 1976, that action made the military men under attack victims of terrorism. The operation was mounted against an object protected by International Humanitarian Law, as are hospitals, universities and places of worship. Personnel members assigned to war duties are also non-combatants when they are on furlough, whether they be at home, on a public road or anywhere else.

Second, those who died and were wounded in armed confrontations have not been included in this book in order to avoid any controversy regarding the peculiarities of such confrontations. This does not mean that those dead and wounded are not deserving of tribute when their physical integrity was at stake in open combat with underground groups; but this would call for additional research that is well beyond the time and space allotted in the compilation of this book.

In addition, it should be noted that we have not used an arbitrary notion of ‘victim’; rather, we have relied on the concept adopted by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,⁴ which defines victims as

persons who individually or collectively suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that constitute gross violations of international human rights law, or serious violations of international humanitarian law.

Based on this definition, the number of victims comes to more than 17,000, according to the records kept by the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (Centro de Estudios Legales sobre el Terrorismo y sus Víctimas) (CELTYV). However, due to space limitations, the list included in the second part of this book only provides data on those who were killed, wounded or kidnapped. And we have not included in all cases (as we could have done in accordance with the above-referenced United Nations instrument) “the immediate family or dependants of the direct victim and persons who have suffered harm in intervening to assist victims in distress or to prevent victimization.”

The stories narrated in the first part of this book are representative of victims from different sectors of society: workmen, shop-owners, employees, businessmen, union representatives, military men, politicians, students, children… Argentinians will thus have a chance to learn about the suffering of thousands of innocent citizens who, even under consolidated democratic rule, have been denied vindication of their human rights for more than thirty years and are otherwise ignored in the reviews of the events that shaped our history in the 1970s. They too have ultimately gone missing.

* * *

When the CELTYV appeared before the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva in March 2007 in order to exchange ideas about the status of victims of terrorism in Argentina, the ICRC Head of Operations for Latin America, Michel Masson, admitted that he had never heard of such victims. The need to bring them to light thus became patent, not only by making their stories known but mainly through the compilation of a list disclosing their names, the type of attack suffered, the time and place of the events and, whenever possible, the perpetrators.

The victims of terrorism in Argentina, like all others in the world, should be entitled to exercise their rights to truth, justice and reparation. The purpose of asserting the right to truth is to get to know who were the assailants and why they acted as they did and, by means of a simple and prompt remedy guaranteed by the State, to obtain more information about the events and their implications.

The right to truth is also a right of a collective nature, as society must be afforded the possibility of knowing what really happened in a certain period of its history, as well as the circumstances in which many of the most heinous crimes were committed.⁵

From a personal perspective, a victim obtains relief through the conduct of a judicial proceeding, and on the collective front, society is afforded such relief as the events are disseminated by the public authorities, the media and academic institutions—by means of books, museums, television programs, but primarily through the establishment of truth commissions.

The victims of terrorism have the right to use legal channels to prevent the crimes affecting them from going unpunished; they are entitled to such monetary compensation as may help them improve their living conditions (on which the loss of a family member has almost always wreaked havoc) and to be provided with the medical and psychological care that they have been denied so far. Last but by no means least, they have the right to moral recognition on the part of society, which is of the utmost importance both in terms of appreciation of such victims and as a legacy to the community itself.

This book also intends to serve as a contribution to the younger generations, whom the public authorities have not given the chance of securing full knowledge of the events that unfolded in our recent past—or have otherwise provided them with a deliberately distorted recounting of such events.

During the course of the dissemination efforts deployed by the CELTYV at secondary schools, students are often surprised at the large number of attacks that took place in the seventies and at the dearth of information about them. Those teenagers feel that because they are under age, they are denied access to a part of history that helps contextualize that past and even our present.

This is why in 2008 the CELTYV undertook historical research to gather quantitative information about the victims of terrorism. With the cooperation of a team made up of volunteers, a plan was implemented in order to know and document how many people had been affected, as well as their names, the attacks they had suffered and the identity of the assailants, among other data that the authorities had never bothered to collect. The data were taken exclusively from public information, readily available to all citizens and published in newspaper issues of the time. Four newspapers having nationwide circulation in Argentina were selected: La Nación, Clarín, Crónica and La Prensa, which were reviewed and photographed at public newspaper archives. The period spanning from January 1, 1969 through December 31, 1979 was chosen for examination because it corresponds to the most vicious stage in the long stretch of terrorist attacks, and also because it is the period in which the organizations responsible for the crimes would presumably be easier to identify. More than 16,000 newspaper issues were photographed, from which material was taken and then winnowed down; each item of news was analyzed separately and abstracted on to a form. The information was in turn supplemented by books published over the last thirty years in which former members of armed organizations gave an account of events and provided details of the attacks, attempts on life and crimes they themselves had perpetrated. All was cross-checked with information contained in the magazines that those organizations used as their news media, like ERP’s Estrella Roja or Montoneros’ Evita Montonera.

In those cases in which newspapers report, for instance, on the hijacking of a passenger aircraft without disclosing the names of the victims, these appear as “Unidentified” on the list we have drawn up; the same applies to news items giving the number of wounded persons during an attack but without any identity details. It is in connection with these cases that the public authorities have an even more pressing duty to find out who suffered the attacks. In this regard, it should be noted that as a result of the hard work carried out, the CELTYV had the unfortunate privilege of becoming the only NGO in the world that compiled its own list of victims of terrorism without the aid of the government authorities.

It should nonetheless be recalled that there were many more attacks and victims than those published by the newspapers mentioned above. Due to the huge number of attacks perpetrated in some of those years, information did not always reach the media regarding all of the acts of terrorism that took place; besides, many of those acts were covered exclusively by newspapers from the interior of the country, in the specific location where they occurred. But the figures we have managed to put together still offer a very telling picture of the scale of the assaults. Our investigation has yielded 1,094 fatal victims over a period of eleven years. In Spain, by comparison, the total number of victims claimed by the Basque terrorist organization ETA throughout the history of this underground group (i.e., over a period of forty years spanning from 1961, the year of its first attack, to October 2011, when its leaders announced an end to the armed struggle) comes to 843. In one-fourth of that time, there were 251 more victims than those claimed by ETA, primarily at the hands of Montoneros and ERP.

The investigation conducted by the CELTYV does not include those persons who died days, months or years after the attacks as a consequence of the psychological or physical harm caused by the event. Neither does it include wounded persons who developed a disease stemming from the injuries or trauma they suffered. No such information arises from the sources reviewed, which underscores the sore need to set up a truth commission that can hear the complaints and testimony of all those affected.

Diego Moreno was the son of Julio César Moreno, one of the two security guards for the Klein family, who was killed by Montoneros on September 27, 1979. Diego was only one year old when his father was murdered; he never really got to know his dad or keep memories of him, and yearned for his presence his entire life. On September 27, 2012, on a new anniversary of his father’s murder, Diego drank hydrochloric acid, was a few days between life and death and finally died on October 5 of that year. Perhaps, the deep depression that had plagued him from a very early age could have been mitigated if the Argentine government had recognized the human rights of his family. Although Diego is a victim of terrorism, he has not been included in this first compilation of cases; but there are other children like him, and even grandchildren, who still experience the aftereffects of the attacks, which are passed from one generation to the next and become all the more bitter and ingrained in the face of such blatant lack of interest on the part of the public authorities in assisting and acknowledging the plight of this group of people.

In an article written for the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, the Bulgarian historian, linguist and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov shared these thoughts in connection with History’s omission with regard to the victims of terrorism:

“The issue that worries me does not have to do with an evaluation of the two ideologies that clashed with each other and continue to have their supporters; it is the issue of the understanding of History that I am concerned about. For any society needs to know its History, and not only to have a good memory. Common memory is subjective: it mirrors the experiences of one of the groups that make up a society, and can therefore be used by that group as a means to secure or strengthen a political position. As for History, it is not made by pursuing a political aim (and if it is, it is bad History), but rather under the only mandates of truth and justice. It aspires to objectivity and presents facts with accuracy, and the judgments it makes are based on intersubjectivity; in other words, it attempts to take account of the multiple points of view expressed within a society.”⁶

Argentine society is still in debt with History.

CARLOS MANFRONI and VICTORIA VILLARRUEL

January 2014

First part

Do Evil and Dread No Shame

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A Little Boy in the Street

◆

“…And the military would kill young people, a bit older than you are, in the seventies.” The teacher had a hard time finding the right words to explain the subject the principal had asked her to discuss in class, speaking over the din of children’s voices in that inconspicuous little school in a far-flung corner of Eastern Lanús. The racket would only die down every now and then because easily distracted as they often were, the students would just be startled at the teacher’s delivery of this talk of blood and death at their most tender age. Or not that tender any longer, perhaps. As a matter of fact, they already knew, only too well, how hard a blow they could take amid the overwhelming, sometimes unbearable troubles plaguing their families—not always those matching the complete model, by the way, but rather the reconstituted, jigsaw family kind.

Break time ought to be longer, or so the students seemed to think, and they would just drag their feet back to class against the hoarse cries of their teachers. Look now, what is all this about the seventies, and about kidnappings, tortures, bloodshed? They had already heard the story of Cabral, the heroic soldier who got speared in his back while saving the life of San Martín, the glorious captain. But that was different and buried in far-off days. It was an episode in the meager portion of Argentine history that remained undisputed; an event worthy of Billiken, the children’s magazine that school kids would turn to as a learning aid at the time. This new tirade they found shocking instead; there was something about this narrative that somehow echoed the noise they themselves would make… But it was they, if anyone, who should make a racket. Noise was theirs.

“My uncle Juan was killed in 1977, Miss!” suddenly cried Tiago, amid the astonished looks of his classmates.

“Oh yes? How did that happen, Tiago?” asked the teacher curiously, eager to hear an actual story that would draw her away for a moment from the dreariness of her own narrative and from the need to uphold it.

“He was three years old!” He was killed by the Montoneros, Miss, those bloody bastards!”

The astounded look on the teacher’s face now fused with a murmur of voices combining gasps of amazement and giggles among some of Tiago’s mates. They were amazed at the death of a three-year-old child. They giggled at the curse word Tiago had used to label the murderers.

Tiago Alejo Barrios was not the kind of child who would curse. Rather, he was the model student, with a grade average of 9.50 and also friendly and well-behaved in class.

An uncle who is three years old! Dead for more than thirty years! This too sounded weird. There is always something strange about certain situations going on in large families, in which an uncle turns out to be younger than his nephew. But at least both are alive and can grow up side by side. They become adults together, and those small age differences end up being cut down and blurred altogether over time. Because practically everything gets blurred over time. Not in this case, though. Juan, Tiago’s uncle, forever remained a boy of three, an age at which he had not even had the chance of starting primary school, of becoming one of those kids who were now in the classroom and making noise—though less and less of it as they grew aware of the tense, stiff demeanor adopted by the teacher, now looking like a blinded squirrel poised to dart away in any direction any time soon. And that was precisely what the teacher wished she could do: run away in any direction, break loose from the words she was hearing without having to give an answer or otherwise admit to having none at all.

“Tiago, come outside with me, will you,” the teacher finally said. She walked out of the classroom, down a few meters along the half-roofed corridor up to a point where they would not be overheard. Tiago got up from his seat and hurried behind her.

“Tiago, you are not to talk about that here.”

“I didn’t mean to curse, Miss. I just couldn’t help it. I really have it in for those murderers,” Tiago apologized. His mates also thought the teacher had asked him out of class because he had cursed.

“It’s not that bad word you said, Tiago. You see, you cannot name people killed by Montoneros,” she explained, with something of a struggle inside her as she said what she guessed she was supposed to say.

“But he was my dad’s brother… and he got killed…”

“I believe you, Tiago, but you cannot say that here. Just go back into class,” uttered the teacher, more frightened than the boy could be.

* * *

Clotildo Barrios is a working man, and has always been. He was born in the province of Corrientes and was adopted the same day he was born. Right then he began to fight with the odds of life. He started school at the age of seven, but could not complete it. In the area of Corrientes where he lived, there was only one rural school, and Clotildo did not always manage to make his way there. He had to work, work and help out… And that he always did, lend a helping hand. The expression on his face conveys a blend of kindness and quick thinking, a combination that may look strange in big cities but is familiar inland, where men are forced to get a jump on life.

At sixteen, Clotildo left for Chaco to earn his living as a laborer there, toiling through the forest for firewood and making charcoal.

“Is that a hard job?” he is sometimes asked.

“Very hard!” says Clotildo, stressing each word with untroubled self-assurance. No moaning, no rancor.

A relative asked him one day if he wanted to go to live in Buenos Aires, and Clotildo pulled up stakes again. He arrived in Buenos Aires in July 1971. After looking for a job for months, he found one in a metal-working factory in Monte Chingolo, so he had to settle nearby.

Yolanda is from Famaillá, Tucumán. As so many others coming from inland, her family moved to Buenos Aires because there was no work for them in their province. As soon as they arrived, they headed straight to Monte Chingolo, a suburb in Eastern Lanús.

That is where Clotildo and Yolanda first met. They got married. They lived at the junction of Tucumán St. and Yapeyú St., two blocks away from the 601st Battalion Viejo Bueno, which in 1975 was the target of an assault mounted by the largest guerrilla unit ever to be deployed against a military outpost in Argentina. It was the notorious attack perpetrated by the People’s Revolutionary Army (known by the acronym “ERP” in Spanish), led by Mario Roberto Santucho, a couple of days before Christmas during the government of Isabelita, Perón’s widow.

“By five or six in the afternoon, there were guerrillas lurking all around. When the assault began, the child, Yolanda and I just went and lay under the bed. Our neighbors did the same,” says Clotildo, who twice in his life came under guerrilla fire.

“They would hide in a eucalyptus forest nearby or in neighbors’ houses; we lived in a simple wooden house, so the bullets would just go through… We were scared the whole of that Christmastime,” recalls Clotildo, with the composure of someone who looks back on things past and has the painful experience of having lived a much grimmer time later.

“No one supported the guerrillas. I worked in a factory, used the train and the bus, made my way out of Avellaneda… I was out a lot. And it was tough out there. They jumped on and took over the train many times; they would write graffiti, have the train stop midway and force the passengers to get out and find their way back home on foot,” recounts Clotildo.

However, Clotildo does remember that a few people were recruited in his neighborhood. The organization would leave them a present, and if they took it, that was considered as a commitment of support. “At work we were told not to accept gifts. The business I worked for was quite small, and those of us there were all pretty close to the owners.”

Clotildo was no militant and did not understand what the clashes were all about or what the activists intended to accomplish. “All I knew was I had to get up at five in the morning and go to work to make the money for a little house, because I lived in a shack,” he explains when asked.

At 5.15 a.m. Clotildo took the bus, then worked until 3 p.m. and did overtime until 5. But his workday did not end at the factory. When he was finished there, he did half a shift at an office cleaning company, until 9 or 10 at night.

At that time, the only reward for the young couple’s hard efforts was their baby. Juan Eduardo was born on September 10, 1974, the same month exactly a year after Perón won the presidential elections with 60% of the vote. And the same month a year after Montoneros assassinated José Ignacio Rucci, the president-elect’s most-deeply trusted union leader.

During the day, Clotildo’s and Yolanda’s son stayed at home with his mother. Yolanda gave him as much loving care as a firstborn could get, cherishing the joy of having him all to herself at all times of day. Juan Eduardo would only sometimes meet the little boy next door. He had no friends and did not go to school yet.

“Those were such nice days,” Yolanda recollects, “but after December 6, 1977…” She is suddenly at a loss for words, her eyes frozen but not cold, chilled by a sadness that shakes Yolanda—and whoever looks at her—to the very depths of their being.

That December 6 the mother went on an errand with her little child to pay some bills. They were poor, very poor indeed, but clung on to a sense of dignity that prompted them to pay, to comply; there was nothing they would demand without first giving their all. They must have joined one of those endless lines that the governments of all times use as a recurrent form of ill-treatment of the ordinary people who stand by them. The child asked to have an ice-cream, and the two of them crossed the street to buy one at a kiosk. It was a pretty modern kiosk for its time, actually one of those convenience stores now called ‘maxi-kiosks.’

Juan took the ice-cream to his mouth. His mother paid for it and was about to cross the street back when she heard bursts typical of a shootout. The target was the police officer on duty in front of the bank. The shots came from a white car; a woman fired a shotgun until the policeman fell to the ground, seriously wounded. The woman then hurried to round off her feat: she got out of the car, doused the man with gasoline and set him on fire when he was still alive. Once she had gotten back into the white car, she opened fire again to cover her escape.

Juan had been looking on without knowing what was happening, his hand holding his mother’s. He cried ‘ow!’ and fell. Yolanda noticed that a bullet shot had ripped a hole through her jeans.

The kiosk vendor rushed them immediately to the municipal hospital.

* * *

In the sweltering summer heat, all the more searing at the smelting works, an ambulance from the Lanús hospital drove into the company where Clotildo worked on the afternoon of December 6. He saw it come in because he was having a break; workers at smelting plants need rest periods because no one could possibly tolerate the impact of continuous exposure to such high temperatures. But he had not been looking on for long when the foreman called him:

“Barrios!”

Clotildo walked over and the foreman placed a hand on his shoulder. He realized at once that there was some terrible news the foreman did not dare break to him. So the doctors called him over. Doctors are much more used to giving people the kind of news they do not want to hear, better prepared to take in their suffering, and especially so at hospitals in deprived areas, where health statistics cause all indices to worsen. But this was not the case of one of those illnesses that often come with poverty, let alone a case of statistics. Anyone could have been there. The attacks did not occur only in the poorer districts. At this, those in the guerrilla movement were even-handed: they knew how to ensure equal distribution, bringing death everywhere.

“Are you Barrios?” asked the doctor.

“What’s happened?” Clotildo said anxiously.

“There’s been a shootout. Your son’s been shot.”

“How is he?”

“Look, I’ll be honest to you… His condition is very serious. The chances are really small that he’ll make it.”

Clotildo ran to the hospital. When he got there, he found Yolanda in the middle of a nervous crisis. She could not utter a word. “Just like now,” notes her husband.

The couple stayed at the hospital a long time, although the doctors had been quick to inform them that Juan Eduardo had died. One of the bullets had perforated his abdomen, leaving holes at both the entry wound and the exit wound. Not long before they had celebrated his third birthday. Yes, his third birthday, the only one for which they had been able to put together a party…a small party indeed.

“Our family gave us a hand so we could make a cake, get the paper caps…,” says Clotildo. “He always asked for this or that, small things…like candy, you know. He liked it when I got him clothes, sneakers… I’d bought him a checked shirt for that birthday. I promised him he’d get a gift the day I was given my wages for the fortnight. And he would just look forward to that day.”

The wake was held at the home of Yolanda’s sister. In the living-room of that small house they set up the funeral chapel around the casket. Except for a few officers from the Monte Chingolo 6th Precinct, no government officials were in attendance.

The Barrios couple took three months to come back home. Once or twice a week, Yolanda would visit her sister and spend the day with her, just not to stay on her own. They did not want to come back, and Yolanda’s family would not leave her alone to her sorrow.

Clotildo still has a picture of Juan Eduardo, with his bangs and the checked shirt. It is the only picture they have of their child, because they did not have a camera and took a photo of him when someone lent them one. He looks at the picture and says, with a sad smile on his face:

He was a very clever boy. He remembered what days I would be home early, and when he saw me walking down the street two or three blocks away, he would run so happily towards me. His bangs flew up as he ran. After that day, all I wished was to be home to see my boy. But how could I? It was so tough, and it still is so very tough!

Two or three days after Juan’s death, the owners of the factory where Clotildo worked handed him a newspaper and told him, “here’s those who carried out the attack, those who killed your son.”

The paper gave an account of a communiqué by Montoneros, a group then referred to as ‘the organization that has gone underground’ or ‘that was the second to be declared illegal’ (the first one had been ERP).

In the communiqué they claimed responsibility for the death of First Corporal Herculiano Ojeda, the policeman standing at the bank door whom they set on fire after wounding him with shotgun blasts. Also reported in the newspaper was the murder of the boy Juan Eduardo Barrios, who was not mentioned in the statement released by Montoneros. “That’s natural. Who would claim responsibility for the murder of a child?” wonders Clotildo without expecting an answer, his rhetorical question filled with a compelling logic.

The child’s father started his own inquiries about the attack, embarking on a quest that continues to this day. He approached the kiosk vendor, who had not managed to see the whole thing. He approached the owner of the funeral home that had provided the service for his child, who told him that one of the persons who had also been wounded when Juan Eduardo was shot was called Carlitos and lived round the corner from the crime scene. It did not take Clotildo more than a few seconds to get to his place to ask him to testify in an inquiry.

“Please do not mention my name, because these guys now in power are the same that wounded me and killed your son,” Carlitos answered, several years into the Kirchner rule era. “They spared my life at that time, but they won’t do it again,” the witness exaggerated.

The woman who killed First Corporal Ojeda and Juancito may have been, according to Clotildo, Estela Inés Oesterheld; she was one of the daughters of Héctor Gemán Oesterheld, the author of the famous comic El Eternauta, whose hero figure was used to portray Néstor Kirchner after his death. A report published in the daily La Nación on Friday, December 23, 1977 attests to the facts as recalled by Clotildo.

One day Clotildo was watching the political opinion show hosted by Mariano Grondona on television and heard his son Juan Eduardo was mentioned among the victims of terrorism. “It was Ms. Victoria Villarruel, the chair of the CELTYV. I burst out crying, I thought no one would ever remember my child again. But I was wrong; there were others working on this.”

Those were the words of Clotildo Barrios at a presentation he was invited to make during the Ninth International Post-Traumatic Stress Conference held in Buenos Aires on June 25-27, 2008.

Barrios learned of a meeting announced to take place at San Martín Square, in the district of Retiro in Buenos Aires, to commemorate the victims of terrorism. He went and mingled with the crowd, and listened to the speeches with that strange feeling a patient experiences when a doctor opens up a wound to cleanse it. At the end, he nudged his way to the front and came up to meet the chair of the NGO. From then on, Clotildo Barrios was invited several times to speak about that politically incorrect issue, the death of his son, and about his pain and the consequences of that pain—about those things to which almost everyone closes their ears. And that is how he made it to that psychotherapy conference at which physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists and laboratory representatives heard him recount the details of his wife’s and his own suffering, which they both had held back for years.

It is a paradox that his testimony should be so valuable to the medical profession and so worthless to the courts, in a country in which it is the justice system that most needs treatment for ill health.

“When I hear certain comments in the media, I’d like to shout out that I too am a victim, but I cannot say that,” Clotildo explained in front of the professionals, who were interested to know how he was now.

“Why can’t you say that?” dared ask someone from among the audience.

“Because I’m not given a voice anywhere.”

* * *

After Juan Eduardo’s death, his parents had two more children: Christian David and Marcelo. Several years later Débora was born. She is the youngest child, but her brother’s death turned into a call for justice running in her blood. “When you cannot deal with this any longer, I will take over,” she said to her father.

Débora Barrios has a schoolmate who has an uncle that has gone missing (what has come to be known as a ‘desaparecido’ in Spanish). She never got to meet him, just like Débora never met her brother. They get on well and often visit each other. Clearly, it is not the victims who are prone to sow discord, even if they may fall prey to it as they grow into youth.

Marcelo does not talk much about his brother’s death. On the other hand, David asks questions all the time, he wants to know all about it, but more than anything else, he wants to know why Juan is never ever mentioned in talks about human rights.

“What answer can I give him? I’m not the one who is supposed to give an answer to that,” says Clotildo.

David is the father of Tiago Alejo, the boy who had begun to tell his teacher and classmates about the brief years of Juan Eduardo’s life when the teacher broke in on his story and took him out of class. His mother, David’s wife, went to the school the next day; fearing that Tiago would be looked on as a wayward child, she asked to see the principal.

“I’m more or less acquainted with the subject, but we are not allowed to talk about that in class. We can only discuss the topics the Ministry of Education gives us authorization to discuss,” was the principal’s bureaucratic reply.

A plaque on the Wall of Memory pays tribute to the woman who murdered Juan Eduardo and First Corporal Ojeda. There is none in remembrance of Juan Eduardo. What kind of memory is it that pays homage to murderers and consigns murdered children to oblivion?

“When they began construction of a memorial to the victims, I had hopes that they would remember Juan,” says Clotildo.

Since that day Yolanda has lived in a state of bewilderment. Her face is almost devoid of expression or emotion, except for the tears rolling down her weather-beaten cheeks out of eyes that will barely make a movement. Her lips are tight too; she won’t utter a word. She is still under shock and will probably be until she dies. And when it comes to words, the official press, as well as a considerable portion of the rest, look like a macabre—and certainly less faithful—caricature of that profound silence.

After all, nobody will speak up.

Juan Eduardo Barrios

A policeman was murdered and a little boy was killed

The Day After

◆

“The worst day was the day after. When I got, up, the first thing I did was call my mom. And when I called out for her… that’s where everything started falling into place!”

What kind of place does everything fall into for a girl of ten when she wakes up and finds herself parentless in life? Actually no place at all, because depression goes too far downward, the pit is just too deep, as in bad dreams, and the girl is dragged down and down, without ever touching bottom. There is too much life down there to be lived without that first and paramount, cardinal, endless love of one’s parents, at an age when love can help dispense with other things and when, at the same time, only love is enough to live on. The love of one’s parents has something Christmas-like to it, being a beacon of light and joy even for a child sleeping in a small little hut.

Oscar Walter Ledesma was a professional photographer and also kept an optician’s and photography shop in the town of Granadero Baigorria, near the city of Rosario. He was a good photographer. Decent people care about doing a good job. He was often hired to do social functions, like weddings and birthdays, and also did portraits. He himself developed the pictures out of the celluloid film rolls. There were no digital cameras at that time, and customers, both old and young, would excitedly come into the shop to pick up their prints and see how the thirty-six photos had come out. Thirty-six photos were as many as could be shot using the traditional rolls of film, which are still widely available today; when a roll was used up, customers would bring it to the shop to have it developed and would have additional prints made for their mother, their grandmother, a brother, a cousin… Before taking the prints with them, the customers would take a good look at them at the counter—they just could not wait to get back home to see them. If they did not look good enough, they would seek advice right there. The shopkeeper was always willing to share his thoughts. The atmosphere was much more sociable, and people were so much fonder of one another. It was hard to even imagine hatred in that small-town, homey society, molded by camaraderie and relaxed conversation on the sidewalk, at the grocer’s, at every chance encounter, at the game of soccer on the neighboring waste ground…

Oscar loved soccer, naturally. He was a fan of Rosario Central, the soccer club known as the ‘canallas’ (‘the scoundrels’) and a longtime rival of Newell’s Old Boys, the other pioneering soccer club in Rosario. It could not be otherwise, as he lived three blocks away from ‘El Gigante de Arroyito’ (‘The Giant of Arroyito’), as Rosario Central’s home stadium was nicknamed.

Oscar was born in Córdoba, but adopted Rosario as his hometown, much in the same way as the founders of the soccer club he supported had done many years before: the English who built and managed the railroads established the club in 1889 as the Central Argentine Railway Athletic Club. In Rosario he met Irene Dib, a girl from the province of Santiago del Estero who had ventured to a larger city in search of better opportunities—just like so many other migrants from the Argentine northwest. They both worked at the time, but after they got married, Irene took care of the home and helped Oscar in the shop. It was also in Rosario, the most populous city in the province of Santa Fe, that Andrea, their pampered, spoilt daughter was born.

They used to spend their vacation in Mar del Plata. “Along with the hordes of pensioners,” she adds, because they would go in March, when accommodation was cheaper, and also because, most probably, the photo shop would not be as busy as during the peak season, when vacationers were all dying to see their pictures in swimsuits and trunks.

Oscar had another child, Ernesto, from a previous relationship. Much older than Andrea, he had joined the Army and had long left the family home. So she was treated as an only child, as Andrea herself recognizes. She would go fishing with her dad and spend days away with him; they most often headed for the small lake in Junín and camped out there, sleeping nights in a tent like Oscar had done in his youth.

“It was dad who actually went fishing; I went just to have a good time playing,” recalls Andrea nostalgically, and also remembers her mom as “the perfect housewife, who would keep herself busy with needlework and cooking and doing embroidery and knitting.”

Irene also cooked special food for Oscar, who had stomach problems. “Yummy food, mind you,” Andrea hurries to say. A family provides the best lessons in solidarity—the true kind, silent and selfless, unblemished by revolutions or proselytizing.

But what little Andrea liked most until she was ten was soccer, though not because of the game itself. “Soccer for the grown-ups, a huge hamburger for me at grandma’s. As far as I was concerned, the soccer game meant going on a picnic,” recounts Andrea, and it is impossible not to depict her as the happy child she was, as children are when they see their parents are happy too, no matter how severe the hardship they may be going through.

“On September 12, 1976 there was a tough match; it must have been tough, I guess, because they wouldn’t take me to it,” she still ponders gloomily. She does not remember what match it was. An Internet search shows that Rosario Central and Unión de Santa Fe would be facing off that day. As usual, the closer the geographical locations of the rival teams, the rougher the clash.

Andrea stayed at her grandma’s, climbing the mandarin trees that crowded the enormous yard at the home of her mother’s mom. She would climb up and hang and swing like a monkey, explore the treetop and then jump back to the ground, ready for the next climb… It was a routine in her childhood, which that day somehow helped her get over her frustration at not having gone to the stadium. Back from the match, Oscar came by to pick up his family. Andrea was clearly needing to vent her pent-up anger at having missed the game, at having been shut out from an event her elders claimed was dangerous and which a child would never believe to be so. Children do not think there is such a thing as danger; their imagination is guarded against the apprehension and fears adults are often filled with, and their childhood keeps them in steady contact with some sort of primal bliss—when their elders will so allow, naturally.

On top of that, she was now forced to leave grandma’s house. Andrea could not be more upset; she threw a tantrum and screamed, locked herself in the bathroom and would not go out.

Half an hour later, Oscar and Irene were driving back home and chatting lazily while Andrea sat quietly in the back seat, brooding over her annoyance. As they drove on, they passed by a police bus almost without noticing it; the bus was full of police officers who came back from providing security precisely for the match that had just ended. Andrea peered back through the rear window and saw a small car a few meters behind, with two people inside who were “sort of keeping themselves out of sight.” Suddenly, all she could see was a white rain and she thought, “someone’s sprinkling flour all over.”

Years later, as she watched a TV show hosted by Víctor Sueiro, a journalist who wrote extensively on angels, Andrea associated that image with her guardian angel. Because it was only an image. Explosions cannot usually be heard by those who are nearer, even if just a little farther away the noise from the blast can be deafening.

The back seat was torn apart. Andrea was wearing a plaid skirt, like those commonly worn by schoolgirls, but the cloth was now hardly discernible under a layer of broken glass. A trail of blood trickled down her face. She leaned forward, touched her mother and then her father. She got no answer. The girl got out of the car, crawled back into the front seat and sat on her mother’s lap. Still no reaction. Andrea supposed they had fainted and got out again. A boy with brownish fair hair, as she describes him, was standing against a wall, looking at the whole scene. She asked him for help and he took her to a neighbor’s house a few meters down the road. “A woman with glasses,” she still remembers, who handed her a towel, washed her face and put ice on her forehead. Then comes the image of herself sitting alone in the back seat of a police car, and then that of a hospital room, cold as cold could be without her mom and dad.

Andrea did not attend her parents’ funeral; she just couldn’t. The newspapers immediately reported the attack by Montoneros and its aftermath: nine police officers and two civilians dead. A device placed in a Citroën 2CV was remotely detonated, at the junction of Junín St. and Rawson St. in Rosario.

At thirty-six, Andrea still has a scar on her forehead and a piece of shrapnel inside her body. Needless to say, the most painful shrapnel wounds are those on her soul.

“When I woke up the next day I cried, ‘Mom!,’ and my grandmother turned up. And that’s about it. A new life started then,” Andrea says baldly, and the summary image is as vivid as it is heart-rending. She was allowed to skip school for a week; her school friends called on her, brought her presents… “A grim celebrity I was,” she muses sadly.

“If I hadn’t had that temper tantrum, if I hadn’t locked myself in the bathroom at grandma’s screaming that I didn’t want to go back home, maybe that time difference could have changed the course of the events.”

Poor little Andrea! Where were those who had set about changing the course of events in history? And now the excruciating pain at having been orphaned is compounded by a feeling of guilt! Where have the true culprits been hiding to this day? What mothers and grandmothers shield them from the people’s gaze, from the scrutinizing look of their victims?

One day Andrea was with her grandma at the house of a neighbor who was a dressmaker. As they came back home and walked past the inside iron door at the entrance, they spotted a white envelope in the hallway. Her grandma picked it up, read it and put it in her pocket. Inside the envelope was a note containing a strange explanation, which the granddaughter later managed to read on the sly. According to the letter, the person in charge of diverting traffic on the night of the attack had gotten distracted for a moment by something going on near the place where the explosive was located. The author apologized and threw in a rallying cry: “We shall win!”

‘We shall win!’? How bizarre an apology!

“All of a sudden, daytime became night-time. I had a family, a mom and a dad. And then there were no more birthdays or Christmas or Mother’s Day celebrations or weddings…,” Andrea says bitterly. Plain simple. This is how the winners won.

“If we were hard up, my grandma made sure it didn’t show,” Andrea recalls fondly. A grandmother like so many others—or maybe like very few others—, certainly without any press reporters or cameras around her but conscious of her duty and of her own dignity, of the need for a modicum of dry sobriety in the eyes of the girl she was taking care of. A grandmother who had struggled to hold back the tears, God knows how many times, just out of generosity; because those who are filled with light continue to be generous even in their sunset days. Only mourning would cast a shadow over the home. Mourning, no less. Mourning shaped by restraint, without any high-sounding statements or claims for revenge but also dispensing with any pretense of joy.

Six years later, cancer took Andrea’s grandmother, so the girl went to live at an uncle’s in Rosario and then with another uncle and aunt in Córdoba. She would then drift around Buenos Aires before moving back to Córdoba. Her dad’s shop closed down and got burglarized.

Andrea no longer visits Rosario; she just passes through the city, which she admits she finds beautiful. But she cannot enjoy it.

“Why will nobody acknowledge my pain? I could go and sit side by side with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and share in their pain, because I lost my mother. I can understand the feelings of a mother who has never seen her child again. It must be horrible.”

It has been twenty-seven years now. Andrea does not talk with almost anyone about her tragedy. Her own children learned about it through Google. Perhaps she has inherited her grandmother’s dignified reticence, but also the suspicion that she will not be understood among the noise of the overpowering propaganda machine. However, she managed to contact Victoria Villarruel so that the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims would help her find out who killed her parents.

“And who had the nerve to come to my door with an apology on a piece of paper,” she adds.

When the Museum of Memory was announced with much fanfare, Andrea’s first impulse was to take a photograph of her parents there. She finally chose not to. Instead, she left a letter at the Office of the Secretary for Human Rights asking for a spot on that much publicized memorial building. The answer was that the petition was declined, as her case was not eligible.

If it is true that conditions are imposed by those who win, could it be argued that those who actually won were those who ‘neglected’ to divert traffic?

The temptation to write and rewrite History has been a recurrent theme in Argentina. In the process, an offense very much in the nature of a crime against humanity is paradoxically perpetrated against the dead themselves: on the one hand, there is the express desire for a certain portion of humanity not to exist, as witnessed by all those cold-blooded actions; and on the other hand, there is the desire, in these other cases, to erase all memory of those human beings, to make like they have never existed. It all comes down to a presumptuous attempt to control time, to wipe out a part of the past as if it had never been there. And never through contrition on the part of the perpetrators, but rather by subduing the innocent and keeping those who are unaffected in a state of indifference. But time passes inexorably and there is always a day after.

Terrorist attack in Rosario. Thirteen people killed

Oscar Walter Ledesma and his wife, Irene Dib

Eleven people killed in a terrorist attack in Rosario

The Drum Kit

◆

Marcelo was a teenager who, like most others, was interested in music. In general, saying that a teenager is interested in music sounds a bit too formal. Teenagers like music, have a passion for music and even become music fanatics, or rather fans of a particular kind of music. However, Marcelo not only loved music but also took a genuine interest in it.

Almost every Sunday, Marcelo, his parents and his sisters (Nora, aged eighteen and two years his senior, and Silvia, aged eleven) had lunch at the restaurant Claudio, located on Sarmiento St. between Paraná St. and Montevideo St. and backing on to the San Martín Theater in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires. To his father Mario, it meant a lot that the whole family shared a meal together, even if lunch was not prepared at home. Wishing to relieve his wife of the daily chores and to ensure they would all engage in conversation, Mario would often decide that the homemade food could be substituted by a meal out that they could all enjoy comfortably.

Mario had been introduced to his wife, Ángela, by a sister of hers, Lidia, now an aunt of Marcelo’s. When they first met, Mario dismissed the lady who would then become his girlfriend as being just too young, as she was four years his junior…

On their way to the restaurant, they would always pick up all four grandparents: Marcos and Sara, Mario’s parents, and Ángela’s parents, Natán and his wife, also called Sara.

Mario was very fond of his food. When he was dating Ángela, his future father-in-law, Natán, would nag at him for being too thin, and once presented him with a couple of bottles of cod-liver oil, commonly used as a tonic in former times. Eager to please his girlfriend’s dad, as suitors would be in those days, Mario made a habit of drinking some.

From the table at which they regularly sat, the family could see, right across the street, the Antigua Casa Núñez (“Old Nuñez Store”), a musical instruments shop located at 1573 Sarmiento St. and founded in 1870; by Argentine standards, Casa Núñez can be said to be truly old. A lot of musical instruments were displayed in the window, among which a drum kit was particularly eye-catching—or at least so it was for Marcelo. In fact, it was not always the same kit; the model changed every time the window was re-dressed, generally every week. So every Sunday Marcelo would walk across the street with his dad to take a look at the new set. But it was not only the boy who kept his eyes fixed on the drums. “Dad would take a good long look at them, but wouldn’t say a word,” Marcelo recalls tenderly.

Mario liked music. He could not play any instruments, but he had fostered in his children a love of rhythm and melody.

One day his father came home bringing an electronic organ for Nora, his eldest daughter, and an electric guitar for Silvia; but there was nothing for Marcelo. Although Marcelo loved his dad so much, or perhaps precisely for that reason, he could not hide his annoyance. He had been eyeing that drum kit in the window for months, and his father had been right there beside him! He was more interested in music than either of his sisters! And now his father came in with such presents, which he certainly had not bought for a song, and was not bringing even a couple of cymbals for him!

Marcelo immediately set about looking for a job that a sixteen-year-old could make some money from. He landed himself a job as a disc jockey at parties, and he would put by every peso he earned with only one purpose in mind.

He started off with a good old Wincofon record-player. He rigged up the lights for the dance using cardboard boxes and light-bulb sockets, a technique he later improved by moving over to wooden boxes, acrylic materials and spotlights. He can count as many as four hundred and fifty parties he did, most of them at Hacoaj Club. But long before coming this far he had begun to put together his set of drums. He did not need to buy the whole kit at once; he could get each of the pieces separately, and so he did. However, the toughest part was getting to make enough money to buy the bass drum, the most expensive piece. When Marcelo had managed to put together the other pieces, his father hurried to buy him the drum. One evening he got home carrying a package that easily gave away its contents. Marcelo had now two reasons to be happy: his father had not let him down, and at the same time he had taught him a lesson.

“This left a lasting mark on me,” Marcelo recognizes. “I learnt that if there was something I wanted to achieve, I had to do my best and work for it.” “And when one of my sisters had her birthday coming up and I wanted to get her something,” he adds, “dad would take me to the factory so I’d work there for two or three hours. With the money I made I could get her a gift.”

* * *

Mario Alpern and his brother Jorge got into electronics at a very young age. Mario started his business in a small-sized room, repairing TV sets. Over time, he came to have his own company and four hundred and fifty employees. Now they manufactured surge protectors, voltage regulators for TV sets and all kinds of machinery.

Marcelo liked electronics, printed circuit boards… He had an unfulfilled vocation for electronic engineering. It had remained unfulfilled, Marcelo explains, because his father had told him that as an electronic engineer he would always be an employee with some company; so Marcelo gave up his idea. However, he never lost his interest in music, and even kept it alive in connection with the operations in his dad’s factory. And his father would lend a careful ear to his suggestions.

“What would you invent?” his dad asked him one day.

“A speaker that is not connected by wires to the record-player,” Marcelo answered at once.

They did it. They manufactured loudspeakers that could each be plugged separately into a 220-volt socket, just like the record-player.

On another occasion, Marcelo said he would like to ‘see music.’ And they developed displays with audio-rhythmic lights that would flash on and off and change color according to the rhythm of the music.

Mario was devoted to his work and his family. He got up at 5.30 in the morning and left home at 6.15. He walked Nora, his eldest child, to the bus stop and then walked on with his son up to a parking garage where he left his car every night, four blocks away from home in a quiet area of the La Paternal neighborhood. He dropped Marcelo at school in Flores and then drove on to the company in the Pompeya quarter. He was back home at 10 p.m. Mario often also worked weekends, except for the time he spent with his family at lunchtime on Sundays. One thing was for sure, though: they all took their vacation together. It was not an easy life, and certainly not one of luxury. Nonetheless, neither Mario’s long daily drive nor the arduous work would stop him from wearing a jacket and a tie.

“Always in his jacket and tie, every day without fail; but not a suit, just a casual jacket and tie,” notes Marcelo, with that pleasure one typically derives from recalling some quaint trait of one’s parents.

In addition to the factory, Mario had started a construction materials business in Morón, a suburb in the province of Buenos Aires. He was a master builder, and sand, lime and cement were the centerpiece of his technical specialty, even if he spent most of his time working in electronics.

Mario Alpern was actually born in Brazil. His parents, Marcos and Sara, were Argentinian, but at some point they settled in Brazil in search of what appeared to be a more promising future. They returned when their son was five months old, after staying briefly in Uruguay. Mario could never visit the place where he was born, because under the laws of Brazil, he was to do military service there despite having become a naturalized Argentine citizen and faced a penalty for not having done it when mandatory.

Shortly after their return, Mario’s father died in an accident. Mario had to learn to toughen up at a very young age.

It seems that the family’s original last name was Ailper, but as happened in many other cases, some employee at the Immigration Office during the past generation inadvertently changed it.

“My family has Jewish roots. Dad was not particularly religious, though; my mother cared a bit more about religion, for her parents’ sake,” says Marcelo.

Mario’s Jewish origin had been the target of insults and protests by part of the workers in his factory, who more than once spread leaflets around bearing texts like ‘Exploiter Jews,’ ‘While the Jews are on vacation, we toil away,’ ‘We are being exploited,’ ‘We’ll call the Lone Ranger for justice.’ “I saw all that with my own eyes, no one told me,” Marcelo assures. He himself stopped by his father’s factory every now and then.

As for the Lone Ranger, it seems he was not that brave, because there was never any face-to-face insult or threat against the factory owner, although there were Montoneros and ERP groups there that exerted a constant influence on the workers, often by threatening them. Marcelo recounts it this way:

One other thing I remember was the threats; against dad, the secretary, the foreman, and even against the foreman’s son, who was then a child of three. It wasn’t like the foreman belonged to one or other side at the factory; he represented the factory, and dad was the factory. They were against the system, against the factory, and that’s why they stood against my father, the secretary…

The threats were always made through notes and leaflets. There was never a phone call at the Alperns’ home. Or if there ever was one, perhaps his father never let the family know.

Mario Alpern had no definite political affiliation. Once his son heard him speak ill of Onganía and also, on occasion, of Perón, and Mario used to term the murder of Aramburu an act of cowardice; but in general, politics was not a topic he would broach in conversation.

“His life revolved around his work and his family,” Marcelo asserts.

But at some point, the company came close to bankruptcy, so Alpern brought in a partner from the United States, Ezra Nasser, so as to see some capital coming in and keep the factory going. Montoneros and ERP groups drew on this to spout about ‘Yankee imperialism’ and to claim that the factory was in the hands of a multinational corporation. This is how abstractions and hot air begin to be manufactured, and then get blown out of all proportion and lead to unforeseeable consequences. To be precise, they are unforeseen by those who contribute to inflating the bubble through their recklessness and flippancy, but naturally enough, they are not unforeseeable for those who believe themselves to be in control of the consequences.

On June 15, 1976, Mario, Marcelo and Nora walked out of the house like every morning. A few minutes after 6 a.m., they left Nora at the bus stop where she would take the bus to Carlos Pellegrini School and walked the short distance to the parking garage. Suddenly, Marcelo saw a light blue Peugeot driving down the street with four people inside and the sunroof open. In those days, Peugeot was the only national make that sold cars with a sliding sunroof. Marcelo found it odd because it was very cold, and said to his father:

“Dad, look at those loonies driving with the sunroof open.”

He had no sooner said this than three people got out of the car and yelled, “Federal Police! Against the wall!”

“My dad did not utter a word. We stood against the wall and they shot him. They shot him in his nape, I saw him bleeding… He was there, lying on the ground with his eyes open.” The terrorists had used Ithacas and .45-caliber pistols.

Marcelo cried out in vain, “It was those from the factory!” He raced back home and telephoned his uncle Jorge, Mario’s brother and partner. He then went back immediately to the place where his father had been killed; the police were already there. At the age of forty-two, Mario Alpern lay on a sidewalk, his life cut short, as his teenage son stared in horror and despair, his eyes filled with unspeakable sadness.

The following day, leaflets were circulated around the factory in which Montoneros claimed responsibility for the attack. Mario had been worried about the threats, but deep down, he never thought they would come to much, despite the rivers of blood flowing in the seventies. Few people think they will ever be hit by fatality. Although death is the one ineluctable fact of human life, there is nothing we could feel to be more alien.

“Dad used to say that he would have the firefighters chase those who issued the threats… He never bore arms or had security guards. He didn’t bring his business problems home, but in the last four months he looked uneasy, downcast, embittered.”

In accordance with the Jewish tradition, the wake was held with the casket closed, and Mario was buried in La Tablada cemetery. Many company workers, whom Mario had helped build their homes, came to greet the family.

One month after the murder, four people piled out of a car and went after Marcelo, who managed to get home safely after running a block. It was twelve midnight. It is hardly probable that they were common criminals, at a time when thieves did not venture out on to the streets—simply because the consequences could be lethal if they happened to bump into some security force group.

Without thinking twice, the next day Marcelo, his mother and his sisters moved in with his mother’s mom, who had already died.

His mother Ángela, who, in Marcelo’s words, “had been a housewife her entire life,” had to look for a job to make ends meet, as the company was turned over to the American partner. Mario’s absence, coupled with what Marcelo describes as the scant ability of his uncle Jorge and an unconscionable clause in the contract, made it impossible to pay back to Mr. Nasser the money he had invested.

Ángela started to work with her sister Lidia (the one who had introduced her to Mario) and both opened a small children’s wear shop; they made the clothes themselves. As for Marcelo, he began to work with an uncle, a brother of his mother’s also called Jorge, who owned a chain of men’s wear shops. His first job was as an errand boy, taking care of the needs of six stores in downtown Buenos Aires. Then he became a clerk in charge of collecting the company’s receivables, which entailed hard and complex work because clothes were sold in installments under signature loans.

That job, the education he had had thanks to his father and a scholarship he was promptly awarded by the president of Belgrano University, Avelino Porto, enabled him to pay for his studies and graduate as an architect.

“Neither an electronic engineer, as I would have liked, nor a civil engineer, as dad wanted me to become. An architect!” Marcelo exclaims. “He was a wonderful father. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep him with me. I would have loved it if he could have seen for himself that all his effort paid off,” he still regrets as he remembers his dad. And he stresses that it is not only the next day that is tough: “It continues to be terribly tough when you’re forty, and still at fifty…”

Marcelo’s elder sister Nora gained a degree as a lawyer and then as a notary public. His younger sister Silvia, who was ten years old at the time of the slaying, is now a tour guide. “We owe all that to our mother, but it was also very tough for her,” he says gloomily.

According to Marcelo, practically no one came over to offer their support at that moment; just the family and some members of the Jewish community. “I now remember a Mr. Adolfo Mogilevsky, who died a short time ago,” he says gratefully. Marcelo means none other than the Atlanta Club trainer, who passed away at the age of ninety-six in August 2012 and was saluted by journalists as ‘the master of trainers’ after a career at the soccer clubs Racing, San Lorenzo, River Plate, Chacarita and Banfield, as well as with the National Soccer Team. The moral support provided by this gentleman, who participated in the sporting organization of the Macabi Club and of the Hebraica Argentina Club, must have been of great value to the family at that time and may also have prompted other expressions of support.

The feeling of despondency caused by the traumatic experience the Alperns had to go through when the father died, followed by times of hardship and solitude, is now rekindled by the injustice of such sheer indifference to the victims of terrorism—and worse still, by the reverse set of values used to take stock of History.

Going to therapy has helped me somehow; but it’s very, very hard in the present context, when you hear vindications presenting only one side of the story rather than the totality of the events, and you see that those who advocated violence as an ideal are now part of the government, have become gentlemen overnight and are held in such high regard. This sort of thing hurts a lot more…

Like so many other direct and indirect victims of terrorism, Marcelo is still unable to understand that human thinking can be capable of such evil in permitting, beyond crime and beyond sin, that a significant cultural movement in society will heartlessly offer a gruesome prize to the culprits. Crime, wrong or evil are part and parcel of every society. But the conversion of crime into an archetype of good is unique to a nation in a very advanced stage of decay.

A drum kit beats time for the whole band. The melody may be charming, the singers may be charismatic and the crowd may cheer enthusiastically, but the drum kit somehow sticks to its role as a guardian of rhythm, representing both disciplined effort and constant, systematic work that sometimes goes unnoticed. But it is that sort of work that keeps everyone going and ensures that the rest of the band will not fall into anarchy.

Mario Alpern

Angels in Their Sleep

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María de los Ángeles was sleeping, as her name precisely suggests, like an angel. ‘Like an angel’! What could be the origin of this popular simile? Do angels actually sleep? Are they not bodiless?! Or is it perhaps that we can only assume that people are kind and pure in their sleep? That must be what it is all about: the magnanimity of angels and the apparent kindness of anyone when they are sleeping.

She always liked to sleep a little longer in the morning, as she is not embarrassed to admit. And that April 14 it was only 6 a.m. The chilly fall weather had already made its way into Buenos Aires and, as is known, temperatures are often two to three degrees lower beyond General Paz Avenue (which marks the boundaries of the capital city) than in the capital itself. The western suburb of Morón is a little more than twenty kilometers away from downtown Buenos Aires. The early time of day and the low temperature were the best of excuses to sleep in. A good warm sleep under the blankets, her husband’s body cuddled by her side.

A warm sleep but no so peaceful as it might appear to be. Six days before, María de los Ángeles had had her car stolen, a brand-new car with no kilometers on it for which she had not even done the registration paperwork. It had been the fifth theft in the house where she lived, which she now wanted to move out of because she supposed, not without reason, that robbers had already singled it out as ‘easy prey.’ Up till then, however, the house had never been robbed while they were in; that last time, burglars rapidly broke in while the family was out, did not take long to find the keys to the car and made off with it. “It must be people we know!” Ángeles thought. The couple came back from a wedding reception and, upon arriving home, she immediately noticed that the car was missing, because she had left it in the garden. The entrance door was open, and inside, everything had been turned upside down, with the furniture bearing those unmistakable marks of rage that burglars leave even when they can call their raid a success at having stolen months’ or years’ worth of a family’s hard work. Ángeles had therefore been unable to sleep well that night, but now she was trying. She needed to make up for her lost sleep.

Jorge was also asleep. It was not long, however, before he was to get up for the day. It was Wednesday, and he liked to be on time for work—if possible, before entry time. He was also an early riser on weekends. He went to the baker’s and got Danishes for his wife, and many times he brought her breakfast to bed. Ángeles merrily declares that she had been spoilt by her mom, and jokes that breakfast in bed had been a sine qua non for her marriage to Jorge—or rather, to Georgie, as she calls him affectionately because of his descent.

Ricardo Jorge Kenny was the son of an Irish father and an English mother. They were strict parents whose marriage had broken down. Georgie’s was a rather disjointed family, and he had found a true home in the hospitality offered by María de los Ángeles’ parents and their six children, his wife’s five siblings. It was there, his wife recalls, that he learned to enjoy a Christmas celebration, a birthday party, an open-hearted family.

María de los Ángeles Iglesias and Georgie Kenny had started dating when they were both very young. She was fourteen years old and had made a habit of going to Huracán Club in San Justo, as doctors had advised her to take up swimming to help deal with some spine problems. Georgie was a regular at the club, which is located on Arieta St., one block away from the San Justo square. For several years they were just friends, or perhaps more than friends, until they officially started a relationship. At all stages, Ángeles’ father would not let her out anywhere without Georgie. It was a long run: they got married when she was twenty-five, and by then Georgie was like another child in the family.

If truth be told, all that Georgie had achieved in life had come little by little and through sustained effort since a very young age. He began work as an errand boy for the Chrysler company, where he eventually made it to manager. But no promotion ever changed his personality or his ideas. Much to the contrary, he stood up firmly for the workers’ rights, and when he believed that someone ought to earn more or get a better position, he would face anyone down until he had his way.

Above all, Georgie was extremely sociable, both in and outside the company. “We could never get much privacy,” says Ángeles. “We went for a meal at the finest restaurant and suddenly voices would go up, ‘Hi Kenny!,’ ‘How are you doing, Kenny?’” We went to the cheapest restaurant and it was the same routine, ‘Hello, Kenny!,’ ‘Hi there!’” smiles Ángeles, mimicking the greetings of fellow workers, colleagues and acquaintances.

At that time, in 1976, it was still very much in use to call people by their last name. Clearly, Georgie’s last name made it easy to follow that custom, as it sounded like an English or American nickname, like Tony, Johnny, Tommy, Charley, Willy… In fact, Kenny is itself an English short form for the first name Kenneth.

Whatever the case, Kenny perfectly matched the cordiality of its bearer. Precisely because of that cordiality and affability of his, the Kennys were all the time having friends over. “My house was home to any poor old soul that had nowhere else to go,” Ángeles recounts. “Suppose you didn’t have anyone to spend Christmas with. Easy…off to Kenny’s! Or if someone didn’t know where to go for a game of cards…no problem…at Kenny’s! That’s the way it was. My house was the kind of house where everyone came to hang out,” she sums up.

In that hospitable vein, Georgie would go to the supermarket after bringing home the Danishes for his wife’s breakfast and would choose the wines and whisky he would enjoy with his friends at night.

María de los Ángeles returned all his attention with loving care. “I’m like my mom, of the old school; I did everything at home, took care of him. I worked to please him,” she says with genuine affection. I enjoyed preparing to welcome him back from work after I’d put Patricio to bed, making sure I was properly dressed; I liked to pour him a drink, get some snacks and then dinner ready, whatever he wanted. I liked to spoil him.”

Patricio (‘Patrick’ in English, a quintessential Irish name) is the son of the Kenny family. Much as his dad loved him, he could enjoy little of the child’s company; because of his work schedule, Georgie would only be back home when Patricio was already asleep. Besides, due to his full command of English, Georgie was the manager that Chrysler more often sent on business abroad. Georgie had been brought up in a home in which only English was spoken, and the ability to use the language like a native speaker was a comparative advantage much more highly valued in the seventies than at present.

Though Georgie did not come back home at an extremely late hour, Ángeles used rigorous discipline to raise her little child: she spent the whole day with him, and at 8 p.m. the evening routine was set in motion, which she summarizes as “his bath, his food, his pajamas, a couple of minutes’ play and then off to his room.” However, no matter how early Patricio went to bed, at 6 a.m. he was also still asleep. A little boy has to get a nice long rest, especially while he remains lucky enough to take it.

So everyone was sleeping when someone knocked on the door.

Only half awake, María de los Ángeles began to wonder. She was starting a business of her own in those days, and a decorator who was a friend of her husband’s sometimes came by to pick her up. But not at that early hour… Maybe a girl she was friends with? “Not a chance!” she replied to herself at once. “It must be someone with news about the car I’ve had stolen,” she said aloud. But she could hardly keep her eyes open and, turning in her bed, she got back to sleep.

Georgie, for his part, got up from bed without so much conjecture and went to see who was knocking at that hour. He did not exactly answer the door, but just drew back a bit the curtain on a window next to the entrance door and looked out, as he always did before opening the door. Whoever it was that had knocked was well aware of that habit of his.

María de los Ángeles heard something like a blast—being half asleep, at least that is what she thought it had sounded like.

“What on earth was that?” she wondered. She went out of the room, walked a couple of meters and saw her husband falling to the floor. “It looked like he had fainted!” says Ángeles. She only realized that his body had been riddled with machine-gun bullets when she noticed the pool of blood spreading across the floor.

Their neighbors saw three people run away from the Kennys’ garden and get into a car—a vehicle which, “coincidentally or not,” Ángeles notes, had been stolen from an acquaintance of her husband’s.

“Georgie, what have they done to you?!” She took him in her arms and propped him up a bit. He stared at her, stretched out his arm and his hand as if pointing to Patricio’s bedroom, managed to gasp “Pa…” That was the last sound he made.

Ángeles left him lying on the floor; she unplugged the telephone at the side, and as she called out to Patricio’s nanny to ask her to make sure that the child would not leave the room, she hurried into her bedroom, plugged the phone in and called the police. “God laid His hand on me at that moment,” says Ángeles, “because I don’t know how I was able to pull myself together and handle all that.”

The police arrived immediately, because the Morón police station was only eight blocks from the house. Ángeles also telephoned a friend who lived nearby. “Georgie has been killed. Please come, I don’t know what to do.”

The police officers found that Kenny’s heart was still beating. Georgie’s car, the one the company had given him, was there, so Ángeles suggested rushing him to a clinic near her home, which she knew well because she had worked there until she married. “Although I no longer worked for them, I had spent long hours at that clinic and everyone was very fond of me. All I had to say was ‘it’s me, María de los Ángeles’ to get whatever help I needed.”

“No, madam, we have our own car. But his heart is hardly beating at all,” said the police officer. They drove him to the clinic all the same.

“There’s nothing else we can do. We’ve tried our very best, but…” and the doctor’s words quenched her last glimmer of hope. Georgie’s body was then taken to the morgue for an autopsy.

“The place where we held the wake for Georgie was very large, but it was packed to capacity. Both sides of the block were lined with wreaths,” Ángeles recollects, like wishing to underscore to how many people her husband was dear.

The cortege went from Ramos Mejía to San Justo, because Chrysler’s workers asked that it stop at the company so they could bid farewell to Ricardo Jorge Kenny. The line of vehicles slowly moved on, and as it approached the company, a car coming the wrong way down the street drove past and someone shouted from inside: “Go on, cry your eyes out, there are many more to follow!” And a short time later, two other Chrysler managers were murdered. Others resigned for fear they would be killed.

The Chrysler company was then located in the building that is now home to the University of La Matanza. It has a flight of steps and columns at the front, and all the factory workers had gathered there to salute Kenny with a wave of applause. And they walked behind the cortege, clapping and clapping all the way to the San Justo cemetery.

While Kenny’s murderers, who were none other than Montoneros, ‘the leaders of the workers’ revolution,’ mocked their victim and his family at the very funeral, the workers clapped and mourned their former boss.

“Also with us that day was Father Marconi, the priest who married us, who held Georgie so dear; he was weeping so much that he could barely speak,” adds Ángeles.

The family also received expressions of affection from people in distant places: a friend who lived one hundred and twenty kilometers away and who came to the wake after hearing the news of Georgie’s death on the radio, relatives of María de los Ángeles in Spain (where she was born) who had heard through the European media, other relatives living in Italy… Nobody could believe what had happened.

That such a horrible thing could happen did cross, however, the mind of the victim himself, Ricardo Jorge Kenny—the direct victim, that is, because the entire family was made a victim, as were his friends and his fellow workers at the company. As a matter of fact, Georgie had had more than one warning. He used to play golf at Hurlingham Club. One day a club representative came to the Kennys and explained to María de los Ángeles that the purpose of his visit was to compensate the family for the cost of Georgie’s golf clubs. Bombs had been planted in the players’ lockers and all their golf clubs had been ripped apart. “They wanted Americans out of the club,” explains Ángeles.

When Kenny finished work at the company, he used to take a stroll across the San Justo square. Ángeles happened to pass by one day because the shop she was planning to open was not far from there; she saw him leaning against a wall, his arms folded. He looked worried, uneasy; she got out of the car and asked him:

“Hey, Georgie, what is it?”

“I’ve just been to check a house. I think it might be a good one to rent.”

The prospect of renting a house when they already had their own was a sign of the need to rapidly abandon the place where they lived.

“Please Georgie, lighten up, let’s go home!”

“No, no, you go ahead. I’ve got some calls to make.”

“I don’t know who he may have called,” says Ángeles, “but I came back home and just broke down in tears. I cried the entire weekend. My husband saw me looking so upset that he decided to take the kid to my mother’s.”

Not long ago, a supervisor had been killed. Ángeles cannot remember whether he worked at Ford or General Motors, but it was a young person, like Georgie. Kenny knew that any time he himself could be a target. In fact, there had been a prior attempt. One day he woke up with a very high fever and called in sick, which was a rare thing for him to do. However, he did need to have some papers picked up at a car wash business he owned, so his wife offered to run the errand for him. As Ángeles was driving back down Camino de Cintura, past a curve on the road where there is a church that everyone calls The Round One (the Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish Church in San Justo), she passed by the grillroom Jury, where Kenny then used to have lunch with other fellow employees. She could see a group of Gendarmerie officers standing about, dressed in camouflage fatigues.

As soon as she came back home, she told her husband about it. Georgie went pale; he picked up the phone and called someone (she does not know who) to ask for information. A suspect had been detained at that spot, a guy who had been asking after a Chrysler manager who drove a black coupé. The only manager at Chrysler whose car answered the description given by the informant was Georgie, who also regularly went to have lunch there.

In addition, not long before, Montoneros had assassinated former Radical minister Arturo Mor Roig at the restaurant Rincón de Italia, also located in San Justo.

Kenny asked his wife that she go stay a few days with Patricio at the farm of his godmother’s, but she refused. She refused to leave her home and her husband. But some time later she would be forced to leave all behind, because not even Georgie’s death appeared to be enough for the murderers.

On the night of December 23 the year Georgie was killed, Ángeles arrived home late; it was past midnight when the telephone rang. She did not find it odd that the phone would ring at that late hour, as it was the day before Christmas Eve and maybe a relative or friend was calling. A voice on the other end asked after her, and when she said it was herself speaking, she heard: “Well then, take good care of yourself, because first we were after the executives and now we are after their wives and children.”

Terrorists made sadly popular in Argentina those hideous expressions, ‘we were after…’ and ‘we are after…’ Worse still, they equipped them with a meaning of their own in the political arena: to eliminate all those that ideological vagaries identify as opponents and to take possession of their own territory, even of the air they breathe.

But a widow with a child of five, a victim of the very murderers who were now calling her, was no possible opponent. Or were there just no bounds to senselessness?

Ángeles “froze,” as she herself recounts. She called a friend who lived three blocks from her place and who also worked at Chrysler. “You must leave,” her friend told her. She also called her father; it was Christmas Eve. On January 6, Three Kings’ Day, Ángeles left for Spain with her son. She stayed there for two months and traveled back so that Patricio could start primary school at San José School in Morón, where his father had enrolled him. That was the last thing Georgie Kenny had done.

“Much as he missed us, my dad got very angry when I came back, because the spate of murders did not stop, they went on for three more years, until 1979,” recalls Ángeles. “You should have stayed and made a life in Spain,” he said. Ángeles’ father, José Iglesias, died shortly afterwards. He could never overcome the grief at the loss of his son-in-law, whom he loved as if he were his own son.

It was not long before María de los Ángeles was about to agree that her father was right. That was when Patricio did not come back home from school. She asked the owner of the school bus that drove him every day, but he did not know why Patricio had not exited the school at the usual time. She asked at the school, in her own shop, at her mother’s, and still no news. The San Justo police force and the brigade began searching. María de los Ángeles was screaming at the top of her voice. This was only too much… And then the telephone rang; someone from school let her know that Patricio had turned up. Accompanied by her sister, Ángeles ran to the school; when she got there, she had such a pained expression on her face that her little son burst out crying the moment he saw her.

Patricio had been crying before because he did not want to stay at the school. Moved by the scene, the mother of one of his classmates invited him to tea and to play a while at her home, but finally she did not take him with her. Patricio felt disappointed at missing tea at a classmate’s and ended up getting into a car with another classmate of his whom an uncle had gone to pick up from school; that was how he made his way to that other house, although he was not close friends with this other child. In those days, it was unusual for all of the children in the same class to be so close to each other as they are now; only some of them were considered true friends. So the child’s mother did not know what to do with Patricio or how to let Ángeles know, and eventually made up her mind to take him back to the school.

Those who are stricken by tragedy as the Kennys were see their life change for ever. Small mishaps are magnified—and in this case, not without reason. Anyone would have gotten desperate in the circumstances, but a mother whose husband had been killed and who had received threats against herself and her son must have felt that each passing minute took an eternity.

No, life never goes back to the way it was.

“I simply couldn’t stand people joking around me. I couldn’t tolerate laughter; I just didn’t accept that someone could be laughing around me,” Ángeles declares. While she was at her shop, she would sometimes leave the counter and go cry in secret, and her customers, almost all of them regulars, would notice it. The thing is that Ángeles had to begin to work shortly after the murder, as the money she got from the company quickly ran out. The company kept them on health insurance, made a car with a chauffeur available to her and gave her a car to replace the one she had had stolen. But she had to pay the household and school expenses, support the needs of what was left of her family. So she went on to open the clothes shop she had been planning to start, which she called Balbina (after a sister of her mother’s who lived in Spain) and which was also located on Arieta Street, half a block away from the club where she and Georgie had first met. Everything seemed to retrace its steps back to the same place, which now looked much more dreary, clouded by a feeling of nostalgia for a life that had been so happy.

Today, Patricio is a grown-up, naturally, and he barely remembers anything about his father, except that he used to be so cheerful and affectionate.

“I would have liked to see someone go to prison for my dad’s murder, but when I say that, they call me a ‘military man,’ a ‘dictator,’ a ‘fascist pig’…”

A fascist! They call him a fascist for his dead loved ones! Kenny did not have any political interests or bonds of any kind. They call him a fascist just because he is a victim of Montoneros!

Something has heavily corroded Argentine society if we have come to this point. Something that does not necessarily make it an accomplice of such outrage, but which does lay bare its stance of silence, its fear of contravening the politically correct language.

A short time after she told her story for this book, María de los Ángeles died. The life of uneasiness and anguish she led had driven her to smoke heavily. The angels that protect her after her own name now guard her rest. We will all leave; it is only a matter of time. But there were some who dared, almost forty years ago, to take the others’ time in their own hands. And they were not precisely angels.

Ricardo Jorge Kenny

Your Brother’s Blood

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The story of Brigadier Arturo Longinotti is one of excruciating pain, however it is not an isolated case that will deeply move due its unordinary features. Longinotti’s murder is a crime similar to many other crimes targeted at military men and their families during the seventies. If it touches the heart of the reader, if it shocks the listener—as any of those other real stories would do—it is because although society at large was aware of such murders through the media, the cruelty deployed in each case was so intense, in its circumstances and in its details, that each murder stands apart and appears to be unordinary.

Such is the case with violence. Intentionally planned violent and cruel actions call for a prior mental exercise: abstraction. The assailant group disregards individuals as such since its goal is to annihilate a whole to which it has arbitrarily attached malignant features in an attempt to suppress it from the universe of the existing. But when the homicide is ultimately perpetrated on a real flesh-and-blood human being, the abstraction is finally exposed in all of its horror, but also in its error, in its inequity, in its disproportion... Blood reflects back at the murderer, as in a mirror, the image of his own cruelty; the certainty that he has killed someone who, like himself, has a mother, a father, maybe a wife, children, siblings... “Cain! What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”⁷ Precisely, this is the reason why it is hard to imagine what goes on in the mind of someone who recurrently persists in killing, again and again. Possibly, the group to which the murderer belongs resends him—through psychological techniques—to the initial abstraction, to the ideology that manages to place individuals within empty groups and to set the criminal’s mind into a black hole that absorbs any feeling of compassion, of empathy with the humanity of the victim.

In October 1975, María Estela Martínez, Juan Domingo Perón’s widow, whose presidency she had inherited—in the true sense of the word—was still in office. The old political leader had taken her to the vice-presidency in the September 1973 presidential elections, where the Perón-Perón ticket won by approximately 60% of the votes in Argentina.

The terrorist organizations, who never laid down their arms, found in the frailty of the government of Isabel—Peron’s wife adopted political nickname— the best incentive to resume their attacks. They were pursuing goals of their own choice, in spite of the ingenuousness that they attributed to the people for which they had to serve as vanguard, in spite of such people, as the Bavarian Illuminati, the “Illuminati.” And military men were precisely one of the targets of their promoted revolution; not any one military man in particular, not even a group to which they could attach liability for an event for which to seek revenge, but any military man whomsoever. This was much easier and, after all, this is precisely the matrix of terrorism worldwide: any victim represents the group. But above all, this was much easier... Ideology always, or nearly always, sublimates a personal frustration, a limitation, an unaccepted weakness vis-à-vis a goal that is seen as unattainable.

* * *

Arturo Leopoldo Vicente Longinotti had made his career in the Communications Division of the Argentine Air Force, which he had joined immediately after graduating from the Military Academy. When he retired from the Air Force, a general was ruling in Argentina; but by 1975, he had already been enjoying his retirement for three years and a half. His retirement consisted of what the retirement of most working people consists of: enjoying the peaceful calm of his own home. He would spend his days mostly at home, located at 1900 Pedro Goyena Street, in Castelar, a suburb in the western part of the City of Buenos Aires, a middle-class district where austere dwellings mingle with some beautiful but not impressively expensive houses; very far from the stereotype neighborhood that one would imagine for “oligarchy supporters,” the label used by the leftists of that time to describe military men. Thus, Longinotti would go out to the sidewalk to drink mate standing by the garden pillars. There he would probably recall years long past when he would get up at the crack of dawn—a habit he still kept from his early childhood, since he entered the Military Academy at the age of 12, thanks to a scholarship he received; because the country that the revolutionaries were attacking afforded equality of opportunities for all.

Arturo Longinotti really enjoyed his family. First, his wife, Alicia Esther Strupler, whom he had first met in the neighborhood of Belgrano, at the corner of the Salvatori pharmacy, between Juramento and 11 de Septiembre Streets. At that time (not so long ago from a historical perspective), territory and neighborhood were still a meeting point for young people. His son, named Arturo after him and aged 24 at that time, was studying Marketing at UADE University; and his daughter, Alicia, named after her mother and aged 19, had graduated from high school the previous year.

As any high school fresh graduate, Alicia was keen on reuniting with her former schoolmates, so that Saturday October 25th her friends had organized a meeting at the home of one of them. At midday, Alicia had lunch with her family—an appetizing barbecue as every weekend. Her friend’s place was several blocks away from her home, on the other side of the long railroad line dividing western districts in the Greater Buenos Aires area; so it was best to borrow the family car to get there.

Alicia started up her short journey and crossed from northern Castelar to southern Castelar; she met with her former classmates and from 5 p.m. she spent a couple of hours chatting lively with them. Meanwhile, at her home, her mother was reading in the living room, her father was drinking mate in the kitchen and her brother was watching TV.

Once Alicia grew tired of listening to and repeating school stories—most likely shared one thousand times already—she started her way back home. She crossed the railroad gate and continued driving down the street that runs alongside the railroad leading to her home. On reaching the corner, where the Chapel “Dulce Nombre de María” is located, right next to her school, she saw a van that was closing off the traffic. The van was the type of vehicle operated at that time by the “Radio Patrol Police” (Comando Radioeléctrico), a Federal Police Division to be called in emergency cases.

“You cannot pass, Miss,” a police officer warned her off.

“How come? That´s my house,” Alicia replied, and went ahead.

The police officer must have felt his stomach tie up in a knot upon hearing the girl say “that’s my house.” That was a time when the family of anyone wearing a military uniform had no peace of mind, so it was likely that he himself pictured his own children’s faces, one thousand times, bearing the same expression of surprise that Alicia had on her face. He probably empathized with the imminent painful scream and heartbreaking cry that was about to be uttered by the girl that was opening her way, in a somewhat daring and bewildered manner, towards the police squad that was surrounding her house.

When the girl walked across the short and never-ending distance that separated her from the entrance gate, she saw her mother standing there, her face contorted, who in a painful tone repeated the police officer’s warning:

“No, no, do not enter!”

A pool of blood streamed down from the door, crossed the sidewalk and stretched to the mercury light lamp post on the edge of the street.

“Your dad is in the kitchen. Arturito has just been taken to the clinic, the Clínica Modelo de Morón,” her mother said, without actually telling her the whole truth that her face foreshadowed.

The neighbors were incessantly coming in and out of the house. The walls were sprayed with bullets, the windows had been shattered and the entrance door had been torn apart... They had stormed in by tearing down the door, and once inside, they had started shooting at Mr. Longinotti and at anyone who stood in their way.

Arturo Jr., protective just as his father was, immediately warned his mother off by yelling: “Get down to the floor!” The mother ducked behind an armchair as the bullets passed over her. Her two most beloved men in the world did not have the same luck. Her husband was riddled with bullets on the spot and her son, who tried to repel the attack with a gun of his father’s, was hit and seriously wounded in the stomach.

Alicita was standing outside her house when the morgue’s ambulance arrived. They covered her father with newspaper and carried him away. That was the last image she had of her father.

“They carried him away covered with newspaper!” Alicia now recalls, with a mixture of grief, bottled up inside her for decades, and perplexity at an inexplicable country. She also recalls her Italian neighbor, who lived next door, and who was the one who had loaded her brother into the car and rushed him into the Morón Clinic. The neighbor later returned to the clinic with Alicia, while her mother, whose health condition had been poor for a long time, was being taken care of by the medical doctors.

Her brother’s fiancée was already at the clinic, waiting outside the room where Arturo was being operated on. Arturo was taken, unconscious, from the operating room to the intensive care unit. It was then that another neighbor arrived and told Alicia that her dad’s wake would be held at the Morón VII Air Brigade; he drove her to the home of a comrade-in-arms of her father’s, in Ituzaingó, who was the one who made all the funeral arrangements.

“I felt at a loss,” Alicia recalls, “above all I kept thinking about my mom.”

A lifetime friend of her mother’s also arrived; she lived in Belgrano, where Longinotti had met her. Her mother’s sister, who was also there, the friend and the Italian neighbor made the necessary arrangements so that the brigadier would be dressed up in his uniform, which they themselves ironed.

“When I arrived at the brigade,” Alicia recounts, “my knees went weak and I could not draw near my dad. I could not get close to him because I had just assimilated who it was that was lying there. Up to that moment, the whirl of events, mess and confusion had covered up reality, but he was actually there, he was dead there… ‘How do I come close to him?’, I wondered.”

The brigadier’s casket had been placed in one of the large rooms of the officer’s building, facing an internal street of the military air base. For a moment Alicia stayed in front of him, at a distance; she then stepped back and took a seat for two minutes.

“No, that was not actually happening!” she still insists today.

Meanwhile, her mother was seated, silent and stiff... Arturo Longinotti’s mates kept arriving to express their condolences. Alicia recalls that, at a given moment, the principal of Moron’s military air base came in. His name was Brigadier Orlando Capellini, and he was the one who two months later would revolt and rise up against Isabel’s government in an attempt that was finally crushed. Ninety days later, the March 24^th coup d’état took place, led by other military men from a radically different fraction of the Argentine Military Forces.

Those who believe that emotions and personal relationships have a bearing on the course of history may find it worthy to wonder if the image of a dead comrade-in-arms, murdered when he had been out of his military combat uniform for more than three years and who had no participation whatsoever in repression activities, could have any influence, to a larger or lesser extent, on the later revolt-inciting brigadier and his comrades-in-arms of the Morón air base.

But what was real were these women, who stood motionless, struck dumb by tragedy, waiting to take the body to the Cemetery of Chacarita, with police forces opening the way for the funeral procession to march down the streets. What was real was that young man struggling between life and death at the age of 24 at a clinic in Morón, until on October 31^st—six days after the attack—he could struggle no more and followed his beloved father. What was real was Alicita, who at the age of 19 was struck by “unutterable grief,” as she herself explains, trying in turn to support her mother. Fragments of a reality that History fails to acknowledge, because we are used to believing that History is made up of large collective events.

“My dad had always pampered my mother; she did not know how to pay bills at the bank, not because she couldn’t do it, but because dad had always overprotected her, preserved her, tried to shield her from any problems, particularly after she began having troubles with her health,” Alicia explains, as she allows us to catch a glimpse of the drama that unfolded during those months.

After Arturito’s death, mother and daughter went to spend some days to the beach in December, to try to mitigate the pain. “I can still see my mom, beside the sea. We were collecting seashells, but mom was very quiet, grieving intensely, and she would hide to cry; but I could hear her sobbing, sobbing, sobbing intensely,” Alicia recalls, and anyone could just see the anguish in her eyes. “After our trip to the beach,” she recounts, “mom travelled to Córdoba with her sister for a month and I stayed at my cousin’s place; I did not have a good time there, but one of us had to stay.”

Alicia found her mother unwell after her return from Córdoba. On the next day, she developed tachycardia and a doctor was summoned. It was Saturday night. On Sunday, an ambulance took her to the Aeronautical Hospital. “Don’t worry, everything is fine,” she comforted her daughter.

“Now this, I cannot believe that…,” and I thought about it, actually, I knew that she was dying, I saw the expression on her face, the shake in her body, and I cried, “Mom, my mom is dying!” They arrived at the hospital, Alicia recalls, where her aunt was already waiting for her. Her mother had a first heart stroke, and while they were taking her out of the room, she began calling her dad’s name: “Arturo, Arturo…” “No, please!” I said to myself, but then she had a second stroke, and then another one…

On that Sunday, February 8, 1976, a little more than three months after the death of her father and her brother, Alicia also lost her mother. “I was not allowed to see her. My aunt considered that it was too much for me. She placed a rosary around my mother’s hands—the rosary that she had begun to use when dad died... she was forty-seven years old...”

Alicia remembers her dad, her mom and her brother, who, given his age, could still be alive: “I miss him, I miss him so badly…,” she repeats.

The death of a relative is always devastating. The bereaved find mutual support among them by sharing memories and hope, but they also endure the loss and move on thanks to their mutual love in such time of grievance. But what happens when all but one die? That is the case in major natural disasters, wars or collective persecutions. It is true that this is what happened also on the other side of the confrontation. But the difference is that for thousands of victims, such as Alicia, not even the distant memory of public acknowledgment exists. Her tragedy has been erased from History; it does not exist, it does not exist for the others, it only exists for her. Alicia has been left alone once again.

While Alicia recounts her story, civil unrest surrounds the Kirchner administration. Massive popular demonstrations are held against the government’s encroachment on the free press and the judiciary. However, no opposition has been raised against the generalized practice of willingly erasing a portion of History.

Alicia speaks about her outrage and impotence: “There is a sort of cruel practice of erasing and erasing; and it turns out that the youngsters are the victims and we are absolutely expendable... The aim is clear: to provoke and annul us at all costs,” she firmly assures.

Héctor Ricardo Leis, a former member of Montoneros and currently a writer, exercising honest and in-depth self-criticism, demands the whole truth and speaks out about the memory-oblivion dialectics in Argentina, whereby what one side remembers the other side forgets and “historical memories become more instrumental and less truthful,” posing a serious risk for the future of the community, according to his own words.⁸ The victims of the guerrilla movement and of terrorism have also gone missing.

In the 1970s, Juan Manuel Abal Medina was designated, by decision of Juan Domingo Perón, to hold office as General Secretary of the so-called Partido Justicialista. Juan Manuel Abal Medina was not a member of Montoneros, but his brother, Fernando, killed during a shootout, had been one of the founding members of Montoneros and a co-perpetrator of the murder of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. Perón assumed that the designation of Juan Manuel Abal Medina would calm down the Peronist youth.

The Montoneros chanted songs permanently reminding Abal Medina of his brother’s blood; either to praise him, while they idolized Perón (“Abal / Medina / The blood of your brother is a gun in Argentina”), or to revile him, when they confronted with him (“Abal / Medina / The blood of your brother is a walking business”). They had control over the blood of the brothers of others. And some still do today.

Brigadier Arturo Longinotti

Three murdered military men were buried yesterday

Quarantine

◆

On working days the City of San Justo, in the Province of Buenos Aires, resembled an ant colony. Especially on Mondays, when people seem to want to redeem themselves from the unjustified guilt they feel over their week-end rest. In this, industrial districts in the Greater Buenos Aires area, even the humblest ones, differ greatly from the cities and towns in the provinces of Argentina, which indulge in naps (siestas) that bring new life to them. But in the Greater Buenos Aires tumultuous neighborhoods, that squeeze alongside the General Paz Avenue, lunch is the time to take a rest, a one-hour break during which factory or office workers get together to talk about football, politics or the job, but in a more relaxed mood.

Arturo enjoyed his lunch breaks. Sociable, of simple habits, of pleasant and animated conversations, he would go out for lunch every day with his factory mates to the restaurant Rincón de Italia, at the corner of Provincias Unidas Avenue and Pichincha St., near the well known San Justo roundabout, on Camino de Cintura. The restaurant is still today located at the same spot, however larger in size and renamed Nuevo Rincón de Italia; and the streets have also been renamed: Brigadier General Juan Manuel de Rosas and Monseñor José Francisco Marcón.

Arturo always had the same menu for lunch: a steak and a boiled potato. He was a man of an ascetic discipline, both in his food habits and in many other aspects of his life. In spite of its name, the restaurant Rincón de Italia was at that time a typical suburban grill restaurant, a place where to have fast-cooking meals.

No one could have imagined that a man to whom Argentina owed so much for his services would be a regular at such restaurant. It was unthinkable, for those who were not aware of it, that a former minister of Argentina would go every day to have lunch at that clean and comfortable but not at all fancy restaurant, together with a couple of employees of a small local metallurgical plant where he was an advisor. However, Arturo was having lunch there together with a company manager and another member of the firm, sitting at a table in the center of the room.

What would they have been talking about? Politics was a probable topic. President Juan Domingo Perón had passed away only fifteen days before and on that Monday—July 15, 1974—Argentina had not yet recovered from the shock.

Arturo and his friends had just ordered their meals. It was 2:30 p.m. and several customers were at the restaurant at that moment. Two men who had been long waiting for them suddenly stood up from an adjoining table as two armed men stormed into the restaurant through the main door. The two customers in disguise who had been sitting at the adjoining table shot Arturo, who fell to the ground. Immediately, the other two armed men needlessly fired their Ithaca guns at the victim’s body. Then they all fled, taking advantage of the ensuing public shock.

It is said that at the moment of death people see their whole life unfold before them, as the pictures in a movie. If this happened in this case, the man who was bleeding to death on the floor of a restaurant—now already emptied in panic—must have seen himself, during the fraction of a second of his agony, arriving on a ship and walking hand in hand with his mother, Carmen Roig, when she, just divorced from her husband, Arturo Mor, left Catalonia with her son for Buenos Aires so that little Arturo would start primary school in Argentina.

The dying man would have recollected his first years in the city of Lérida, officially called Lleida in Catalan, today the second largest city in Catalonia. He probably would have seen images of his primary school teachers in the farming district of San Pedro, as well as those of his teachers and schoolmates at the Don Bosco school, in the industrial city of San Nicolás, where he made his first friends. And later, his years at Law School in the University of Buenos Aires, during which he worked as an employee at Halsey’s tailor shop to pay for his living costs while studying at university. There, in those classes (at such time, still given at the gothic building on Las Heras Avenue and Azcuénaga St.) he graduated as a lawyer and met Rubén Blanco, a politician member of the Radical Party (Unión Cívica Radical) who retained him to practice at his law firm in the City of Arrecifes, in the north of the Province of Buenos Aires.

Life is full of coincidences, and such was the way he connected with the Radical Party, the long-standing political party founded by Alem and Yrigoyen, and from where, during the administration of his namesake President Arturo Illia, he became president of the Federal House of Representatives in Argentina. But he remained unchanged. He had never changed throughout the public offices he held in his political career, starting as a municipal council member in San Nicolás and ultimately holding office as a senator for the Province of Buenos Aires and president of the Province of Buenos Aires Radical party senators’ group, as well as twice a member of the House of Representatives: during the administration of President Arturo Frondizi and during the administration of President Arturo Illia. He had not changed much either when, in 1964, at the peak of his political career, he had to borrow a loan to hospitalize his wife Odilia, who died at 49, following two months in a coma; or when, after the 1966 coup in Argentina, he fell into poverty but, with his Spanish tenacity, applied for and was awarded a PhD in Political Sciences at Universidad Católica Argentina, the highest academic degree one can earn anywhere in the world.

Arturo Mor Roig did not need death as the leveler of social classes; the destiny whereby “they are all equal, side by side the poor man and the son of pride,” in the words of Jorge Manrique’s classical stanzas written on the death of his father Don Rodrigo Manrique “loved by the people, for his virtue.” Arturo Mor Roig did not need to die to know that power is but loaned. He felt himself an equal and lived as an equal of all. As millions of poor immigrants had done, he had proved that social mobility was still possible in Argentina. “Raise your son as a rich man and you will make him poor, raise him as poor and you will make him rich,” was one of the many anonymous sayings with which he raised his family, recalls her daughter Ana María. That is why he did not change either when, already holding office as minister of the interior, he would receive the usual monthly envelopes with secret payments, and would consistently return them, unopened.

Were the assassins aware of who they were killing? Did they know they were killing the Argentina of the honest and decent efforts, the Argentina that afforded legitimate opportunities? Of course they knew! But that Argentina was not an opportunity for their hate. They needed two opposite sides, one containing the oligarchy, and the other one, just themselves: the heroes, proclaimed as such only by their criminal narcissism.

Arturo Mor Roig’s actions as minister of the interior during the government of General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse were precisely the cause of his death. He had twice lost his office as a federal representative in Congress—the first time as a consequence of the military movement against President Arturo Frondizi, and the last one, as a consequence of the coup staged by Juan Carlos Onganía that removed President Arturo Illia from office, as Mor Roig had previously warned him.

“Illia wanted to send my father as his representative to Costa Rica’s presidential inauguration ceremony, but my dad did not want to go; he wanted to stay beside his president, because he was convinced that the military were plotting to topple the president, in spite of the fact that they had assured my father, at a meeting he held with them, that there would be no revolution,” Ana María recounts.

Anyhow, in May 1966 President Illia sent Mor Roig to the inauguration ceremony of the president of Costa Rica, José Joaquín Trejos Fernández. The following month President Illia was overthrown. He went back to Córdoba, his home province, and died in poverty years later.

The so-called Argentine Revolution was an agitated period, marked by events such as the assassination of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu the development of urban guerrilla, the outbreak of the Cordobazo, the toppling of the de facto president, Juan Carlos Onganía by a fraction of the military leaders, and later, of general Roberto Marcelo Levingston, until General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse took office in 1971 with the aim of putting an end to the military cycle.

Lanusse had met Mor Roig through some friends in common. On the one hand, Ricardo Yofre, a Radical party member, and on the other, the Braun Menéndez family. Arturo Mor Roig was a friend of priest Rafael Braun’s, who later became the director of the Catholic journal Criterio.

When Lanusse offered Mor Roig the office of minister of the interior, Mor Roig warned him that his acceptance of office was subject to the absolute certainty that democratic rule would be shortly reinstated and that his job, in that case, would be exclusively oriented towards such goal. In spite of the assurances he received as to such condition, things did not turn to be easy. Paradoxically, problems did not come this time from the military sector, but from fellow members in the Radical party. Raúl Alfonsín, a political opponent of Ricardo Balbín, who was at that time the president of the party, demanded that Mor Roig be expelled from the party. Waters divided within the Radical Party. Some, as Rubén Blanco and Juan Carlos Pugliese, among others, supported Mor Roig because they trusted that he would successfully lead Argentina through the institutionalization process. They recall that even Balbín said: “Well…the Catalan himself is convinced that he will be able to do so.”

The issue was closed by Mor Roig himself, who requested leave of absence from the Radical Party; but the whole business with the Radical party left his daughters with a bitter aftertaste. “In my opinion, the Radicals treated him very badly, they stabbed him in the back. He did not deserve such treatment,” says his daughter Ana María, who recounts that, so far, no homage has ever been paid to her father’s memory by his political party. And she adds, as an anecdote, that her dad and other three civilians held a valuable piece of property of the Radical Party registered in their name in order to preserve it from de facto governments’ potential confiscations. Under consolidated democratic rule, the party asked the heirs of the former minister for restitution of the house, and they immediately obliged; however, they never received any letter thanking them for those services rendered by their father.

* * *

Carmen Mor Roig, another of Arturo’s daughters, was born on July 9^th, Independence Day in Argentina. She was named Carmen because her birthday was very close to the festivity of Virgen del Carmen (Our Lady of Carmel) on July 16^th. Her father was a fervent Catholic who attended mass at the Church Patrocinio de San José, located at Ayacucho 1000, between Santa Fe Avenue and Marcelo T. de Alvear Street, very near his apartment. However, on the feast of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, he would attend the church of Our Lady of Carmel on Rodríguez Peña Street, between Córdoba and Paraguay Streets. There he would buy the classic ring-shaped orange-flavor doughnuts prepared following the Spanish festivity tradition, and he would take them to his daughters.

On July 9, 1964, Carmen had turned twenty and that was the saddest birthday of her life. Her mother had died on July 1, 1964. Therefore, ten years later, when she turned thirty, her father dropped by to wish her a happy birthday, and giving her a kiss he said: “I really wish you happiness in this change of decade, all the happiness that you could not have when you turned twenty.”

On Monday, July 15, 1974, six days after Carmen’s birthday and before leaving for the plant in San Justo, Arturo Mor Roig left the doughnuts in his apartment, so that his daughter could come and pick them up in the afternoon. Most probably, he had bought them after Sunday mass. At midday that same Monday he was murdered. As he always had, Arturo Mor Roig remained mindful of and loving to his daughters even on the day of his death. His daughters recall that he never forgot any birthday or anniversary, whether of his children or grandchildren.

In the meantime, Carmen had left her children at the cinema and, making the most of her spare time, she was window shopping on Santa Fe Avenue. It was the first day of the winter holidays. Hardly had she moved away some steps from Theatre América, which at that time was located at Santa Fe and Callao, when she overheard two men on the street saying: “Have you heard what happened to Mor Roig?” Carmen tried to follow them and listen in on their dialogue, but she couldn’t. Her father lived two blocks away, on Ayacucho St. between Santa Fe Ave. and Arenales St., so she headed towards his home so as to learn what had actually happened to him. When she got to the corner, she saw that the block had been cut off by the police.

“It did not occur to me that he had been killed. I assumed that he had made some public political statement. Perón had died a few days ago and everything was very agitated with the presidency of Isabelita. He had promised us that he had given up on politics, but I thought to myself, “Oh dear, I wonder what he might have said!” Carmen recalls her logical and comprehensible attempts at denying reality. However, the most common reality during those years was death. The day after Mor Roig’s murder, David Kraiselburd was assassinated; he was the director of the newspaper El Día, of the City of La Plata, for which, coincidentally, Mor Roig used to write a weekly column.

The person who broke the news to Carmen was Eugenio Inchausti, a lawyer who had been Mor Roig’s secretary both when he held office at the House of Representatives and as minister of the interior. Eugenio Inchausti had arrived before Carmen and was at the lobby of her father’s building, waiting for Marta, the youngest of the daughters. He wanted to prevent her being alone when she received the tragic news. But news spread through unimaginable means. Marta, who had already graduated as a psychologist, worked as a social worker at the Municipal Housing Commission. She was conducting a survey at a shanty town, and while she was filling out some forms, she overheard on the TV in the shack what she wished she had never heard.

The devastating news was no different for Ana María. That day she was taking the train scheduled to leave San Nicolás at 7:00 pm and to arrive at Buenos Aires at 10:00 pm and her father was going to pick her up at the station. At 4:00 pm, that is to say three hours before taking the train, Ana María went by a supermarket that was located one block from her home and overheard someone saying: “Turn off the radio! Turn off the radio!”

“We all know each other in San Nicolás, and that day it was all in turmoil,” Ana María recalls. “I assumed that something had happened to my children and went running back home. As I arrived, a lot of people came to embrace me, and I saw my husband coming towards me, saying ‘There was an attack against don Arturo…’” Ana María gets emotional as she recalls that precise instant in time, after decades during which she must have remembered those gloomy moments one thousand times.

As to Raúl Arturo, the oldest son of the former minister, her sisters assure that he could never overcome his father’s death during the twenty-four years he survived him. His wife learned about the attack at a shop when she overheard customers’ comments, and tried to find her husband to break the news to him. When she finally did find him, he already knew.

* * *

The democratization process to which minister Mor Roig had committed himself was properly implemented. In the March 1973 elections, Héctor Cámpora won, representing the Peronist party. The members of terrorist organizations who at that time were serving jail sentences for homicides and other crimes were pardoned and released on the same day the new government took office.

Arturo Mor Roig was one of the many victims of the repeat crimes perpetrated by the released convicts. It was paradoxical, however, that he was shot by Montoneros, when all his efforts had been targeted precisely at driving the military out of politics. But Montoneros and their supporters among the Peronist Youth left their coarse, grotesque, repulsive hallmark when they celebrated their criminal feat by singing this song: “Today, today / how happy I am, / Hurray for Montoneros, who have killed Mor Roig” (“Hoy, hoy / ¡qué contento que estoy! / Vivan los montoneros que mataron a Mor Roig”). Nobody seemed to be ashamed of cheering for death; nobody seemed to be shocked when the death of an enemy was announced.

During the last days of December 1973, the Argentine Congress, controlled by Peronism, paid homage to the life of Arturo Mor Roig for his work in furtherance of democracy. On January 3, 1974, the publication Militancia Peronista para la Liberación harshly criticized such homage by stating: “The honors that Mor Roig deserves are those of mob justice, which, coming from the people, makes no concessions.”

People were already aware of the meaning of the term “mob justice” used in the writings of Eduardo Luis Duhalde and Rodolfo Ortega Peña, the directors of such publication. Whenever somebody was mentioned in the pages of the publication Militancia as deserving such “justice.” it would not take long for such person to be murdered in some kind of terrorist operation. Such was the case of CGT secretary general José Ignacio Rucci; of the priest Carlos Mujica; of Admiral Hermes Quijada, and certainly of Arturo Mor Roig, among others. Militancia in the end became a pamphlet featuring the thoughts of apologists for the crimes perpetrated and a mafia-like proclamation of the murders to come. Its editorial pages were combined with explicit publicity, framed as such, of the terrorist organizations.

Rodolfo Ortega Peña, one of the directors of the publication, was murdered in 1974 by the so-called Triple A, a far-right terrorist organization that acted in the context of the confrontation between the far-left and far-right wings of Peronism. The other director, Eduardo Luis Duhalde, was appointed Human Rights Secretary by President Néstor Kirchner in 2003, and held such office under the two successive administrations of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, until his death.

When Eduardo Luis Duhalde died, a significant number of Argentine intellectuals found it inadequate to merely express their formal condolences, and rather pronounced on his demise as if it were Mahatma Gandhi’s. Duhalde was praised as a “tireless advocate of human rights,” Amazingly enough, the Radical Party, which had been so reluctant to acknowledge the contribution made by Arturo Mor Roig—a pacifist, a democrat, a true supporter of the principles that shape a republic and an austere man—, highlighted the “human quality” of the former director of Militancia, as well as the “consistent pursuit of his principles.”

The front page of the newspaper Mayoría, published at that time and representing historical Peronism, reflected on the assassination of Arturo Mor Roig as follows:

“Actually, this incident would suffice to declare the whole of Argentina insane, to put Argentina in psychic quarantine, to painfully give up and to bleakly forgo what we always had a surplus of: confidence in the large moral reserves of our beloved country.”⁹ 

Argentina is still in quarantine.

Mr. Mor Roig assassinated

Anthology of Nonsense - Mor Roig in Congress
Journal Militancia - published by Eduardo Luis Duhalde

Mor Roig buried yesterday in San Nicolás

Paranoia

◆

In the first hours of April 2, 2013 heavy rain began to hit the City of Buenos Aires with an unprecedented fury. Portions of the city had been flooded several times in the past; but its citizens had no memory record of such an intense or prolonged rainfall. Water ran through the streets causing flash flooding both in the city and its nearby suburban areas, even as far as the city of La Plata, where the storm had devastating effects, killing more than forty people. The water current, which flowed as a mountain river dragging vehicles, plucking furniture from dwellings, carrying wood and debris and flooding into houses, left dwellers isolated and panic-stricken in their own homes.

At the community center of Municipal Division No. 13, which encompasses the neighborhoods of Belgrano, Núñez and Colegiales in the City of Buenos Aires, neighbors held a meeting to demand solutions. Some were protesting against the local administration and others against the federal government for lack of foresight to cope with natural disasters. In the middle of a terrible racket, a woman raised her hand to propose: “Why don’t we get organized to lend a helping hand?” The question, posed with the composure of someone who is sure of what must be done, had the effect of a lion tamer’s leash; the room immediately fell silent. The purpose behind such question was clearly different. While most of the neighbors attending the meeting were trying to find out who was to blame, a woman in her sixties was showing them that the primary focus should be on helping out those who were in so much suffering at that time. The quiet and calm tone of her proposal, coupled by her foreign, somewhat British accent, seemed to endow her approach with a level of objectivity and impartiality, the perspective of someone who is looking things from the outside, even when she felt herself more involved that any other neighbor in the room.

Julieta, a young officer working at that Municipal Division and who was responsible for receiving the neighbors, called the lady aside and recorded her particulars. The young officer was probably relieved to hear a proposal that had managed to channel the neighbors’ rage towards positive action.

“What is your name, please?” she asked.

“Pamela Ferguson.” On hearing such last and first name, pronounced “Pámela,” with the accent on the “a,” the community center officer clearly realized that the lady was of English stock. This sparked her curiosity. Both were agreeing upon the best way to organize help and prepare a list of volunteers. At some stage, unable to restrain her curiosity any longer, Julieta inquired:

“Why are you doing this?”

“A long time ago, something very serious happened to me and my family and we received a lot of support and solidarity from the people,” Pamela answered.

“Wow! What happened to you?” inquired the community center employee, her interest aroused. At this stage Pamela began telling her story and recalling, with the speed of lightning, a thousand indescribable details.

* * *

Water was cascading very near Marina; so close that it nearly touched her face. The gush was not very intense but it poured uninterruptedly and she could not even try to move away from it because her legs and body were trapped in the rubble that crushed her as a press of limestone, cement and dampness. She could perceive a dim light reflection, but she had been entombed head-down in the rubble and she could not straighten up to find out where the light was coming from. The only thing she knew—or thought she knew—was that, in the chaotic prison that trapped her after the disaster, air would last only for some more hours. Close to her, but higher above, were her brothers, but Marina could not hear them.

Marina, who had just turned thirteen, was the eldest and only sister out of four siblings, all of which had been trapped in the collapse. Matías, aged six, the youngest child, began calling for his mother: “Mom, I can see you, your finger is bleeding! It’s me, Matías.”

Matías had a large cut in his leg—a wound that would later become infected; but at least he could perceive more light than Marina. He was close to an exit that was blocked by a sheet of wire mesh, such as those used in building sites, usually termed “expanded metal.” It was precisely such expanded metal sheet that had caught and held back the debris of the collapse and caused Matías to end up seated on a quite broad hollow gap, from where he could catch sight of the outside.

It was not long since Matías had been able to walk again. The prior summer he had undergone femur surgery to remove cysts and fill the space with bone graft material. After surgery his leg was placed in an orthopedic plaster cast for three months. Consequently, he attended his first grade classes on a wheelchair and well after the school year had started. Shortly before getting trapped behind the expanded metal sheet, Matías had already been able to run, thanks to his intense kinesiology rehab treatment. But now he was trapped there, disoriented and immobile under that pile of rubble.

Following Matías’s call, she heard Esteban’s voice, his son aged 11:

“Mom, I am OK! It’s me, Esteban.”

“Can you come out?” her mother got back to him.

“Yes…Should I come out?” asked Esteban, scared and hesitant.

“Of course!” yelled his mother firmly.

Once Esteban’s steps could be heard, he posed a new question:

“Mom, I just found the book History of the World lying here! Shall I pick it up?”

“Of course” his mother answered, with the same conviction.

Esteban was also injured in his arm and head.

As to his mother, she could see wooden beams above her and managed to catch sight of the sky through the gaps between the beams. She could not move much because she had fractured her spine as well as one of the fingers on her hand. At that moment, she said to herself that “a sepulchral silence reigned; everything was silent, a deathly silence as if everybody had been killed.” She recalled that some neighbors were British, so she yelled asking for help both in Spanish and in English. After her children’s calls she heard steps again and men in uniform arrived; she could see their boots. They walked in and she cried out: “Sir, I can see your boots.”

“But I cannot see you,” the police officer answered.

“Bend down on the spot where you are,” she replied.

“Ah, now I can see you! There is a small son of yours, just close to where you are, do I pull him out first?” the police officer asked her.

“Absolutely!” the mother answered, and that was how Matías came out, once the expanded metal sheet that blocked the exit was removed.

Then, the same police officer asked again: “There is a badly injured boy who is unconscious. Do we pull him out first?”

“Of course,” was her obvious answer. Peter, aged nine, had fractured his femur and had a cut in his scalp. He was the one who suffered the most because of the injuries he sustained, both before and after the rescue. He had fainted and was removed from the rubble on a stretcher. Before fainting, he had realized that he had a space to crawl out, but with a broken femur it was impossible for him to move. He probably passed out from severe pain.

Simultaneously with the arrival of the police, several neighbors had arrived at the blast scene and were actually walking through the debris.

“Please Sir, tell them not to walk about, because when they walk they crush me,” she yelled again.

“What do you suggest we do? was the astounding question posed by the police officer.

“Tell the people not to walk about and to pull out the piece of wood that is on the left side of the beam,” was the advice given by the injured victim herself.

Many of those who were walking around were just looking on, but others had arrived willing to lend a helping hand. Among them were two medical doctors who lived in two houses located one block from the site and who assisted some of the rescue team members. Others were helping out by gathering things that had survived the tragedy to hand them over to the family, so that they would not lose contact with their past. And, as always happens in similar circumstances, there were some that were there to loot.

Not far away from the place where the lady was rescued, the rescuers found her husband, also trapped in the rubble, with a wound in his stomach and a wooden beam that was squeezing his arm—which would become immobilized for many months. The beam had fortunately been held back by an antique writing desk that the lady had inherited from her great grandmother and that had prevented the heavy wooden beam from crushing him.

The last victim to be pulled out was Marina, who had been trapped very deep in the rubble and was hard to find. When they finally managed to find her, after being buried in the rubble for four hours, the excavating machines had already arrived and had begun to operate, posing a serious risk for the girl. They had to stop them and provide the victim with drinking water and a bag to cover her face, as she was choking on the dust. Her legs looked purple and everybody feared that she would develop gangrene or some kind of kidney trouble as a result of the locked-in syndrome, one that is common among soldiers at war.

Finally, and after long rescue efforts, the husband and wife (Walter and Pamela) together with their four children (Marina, Esteban, Peter and Matías) were pulled from the large pile of rubble of what used to be their home.

* * *

Pamela Ferguson had first met Guillermo Walter Klein when she was fourteen years old. They used to go out for walks together; she would play hockey on Saturdays and he would play rugby on Sundays. When Pamela was 19, her boyfriend’s father, who bore his same name, was Minister of Economy under the administration of President Arturo Frondizi and later a member of the board of the International Monetary Fund.

Pamela used to go to Walter’s home for tea on Sundays, and there she would run into well-known people such as Álvaro Alsogaray and Federico Pinedo, who had been Minister of Economy during the presidency of Agustín Justo.

Pamela’s father, who had already noticed his future son-in-law’s political vocation, did not hide his annoyance and pressed on his daughter so that she would dissuade her boyfriend from going into politics. However, Klein was already preparing for that, and with that goal in mind, he first obtained an LLM in Law and then sought a master’s degree in public administration, specializing in Economics, at Harvard.

When José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, as Minister of Economy, offered Klein to serve as Secretary of Economic Coordination and Planning in 1976, the couple had been married for several years and Klein had already held office as undersecretary of minister Adalbert Krieger Vassena and of minister José María Dagnino Pastore. But by 1976, Klein was in private practice, first as a solo practitioner in his law firm and later in partnership with Héctor Mairal.

Later the law firm became very prestigious, but during the first years it only incurred expenses and required large investments. When Martínez de Hoz made him the offer, Pamela was not fully convinced that such perspective would be beneficial for his husband and his family, particularly because the law firm had already started to reap profits, and remuneration in public office was not good.

“The salary was really low; I could not even pay for the drugstore and would keep borrowing dress attires from my mother whenever we were invited to social events,” Pamela complains, as she assures that they no longer received any profit distribution from the law firm except for those her husband had agreed upon before accepting his new public office. He had calculated the investment he had made in the law firm fittings and equipment, and while he held office as Secretary of State, he would receive interest accrued on the principal of such investment and, according to Pamela, such monthly interest paid her children’s school fees.

The only condition that Pamela had imposed upon her husband before he accepted public office was that he would take out insurance against explosive attacks on their home. Her request arose from a rally of attacks perpetrated by terrorist groups just a few months earlier on Avenida del Libertador, in the suburb of San Isidro, during the last months of Isabel Perón’s administration. In their raid the terrorists had hurled bombs on a large number of luxury shops in the area, and as a result of such attacks many closed down for good because they did not carry insurance. Moreover, before Klein came into public office in 1976, on a visit to Uruguay he and Pamela were invited to lunch at a friend’s in Punta del Este. One of the guests there mentioned that he had been Minister of Economy of Uruguay and that the Uruguayan terrorist group Tupamaros had planted a bomb in his home, which was not covered by insurance, and that a portion of the building had been destroyed.

“All our savings are invested in our home; if we lose our home, we lose everything,” Pamela told her husband. Their home was located in Olivos, at 2740 Catamarca Street, between Alberdi and Sáenz Peña Streets, very close to the Presidential Residence and six blocks away from a police station. The house had belonged to Guillermo Walter Klein’s grandmother. When she died, he bought from his uncles and his brother the interests they held in the property. In turn, his father gifted him the interest he held in such property, and thus the married couple acquired the property.

The home was finally insured, but in order to also cover its contents, the insurance company demanded a full home inventory of personal property. Pamela prepared a detailed list and handed it over to her husband, who reluctantly agreed to contact the insurance company. In the end, Klein decided not to take out the home contents coverage because the insurance company was requesting a very burdensome appraisal proceeding and the insurance premium was very expensive.

Apart from such concerns, the couple led a happy life; they would walk along the beach in Olivos with their labrador retriever, have barbecues on Saturday, and Klein’s father would bring cold cuts on Sundays and they would all have high tea with the children. The children would go bike riding along the streets of their neighborhood without any fear. However, Pamela’s worries would resurface from time to time. In early 1977, groups of fifteen to twenty youngsters began to arrive daily at a square located only one block away from her home, where they would be playing football, chatting, strolling babies in prams; none of them lived in the neighborhood.

Pamela regularly attended book club meetings with some friends. Once, one of them took the book People’s Prison by Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay who had been kidnapped by Tupamaros. Pamela read the book during the holidays they spent in Mar del Sur. The author recounted that before he was kidnapped the terrorists had been keeping a close watch on him disguised as young couples strolling around the vicinity.

In addition to the regular visits paid by extra muros youngsters, another occurrence draw her attention: a white station wagon regularly parked at the back of the Kleins’ house, from where they had a good view of the garden and of a wire door, quite unprotected, that was the only element blocking the way from the front to the back of the house. The station wagon would stay parked for two or three hours every day, with its occupants sitting inside the cabin, but each time that Pamela would call the police and even before the police station would answer her call, the vehicle would leave in a hurry. The place where the telephone was located could not be seen from the outside.

Just to worsen her worries, when Klein went on a trip to Venezuela, a young couple moved to a house at the corner from the Kleins’. The man had a beard, a sloppy appearance and was apparently without a job because he would spend the day roaming around the block. Each time Pamela went into a shop, the new neighbor would be standing behind her in the queue.

“Once, while I was having tea with a friend,” recalls Pamela, “the wife of the lawyer Delfín Fernández Huergo, who used to live on the same block, phoned and told me: ‘Pamela: be careful, because the new neighbors are asking about you!’”

Pamela thanked her. Hardly had she resumed her conversation when the phone rang again conveying the same warning; this time it was René Mefano, another neighbor who lived next door. A couple of minutes later, the bell rang and Pamela answered the door. The suspicious man and woman made a move to enter and said that they had a dog to give away. “I already have a dog!” said Pamela as she banged the door on their face.

“I began to ring the doors of the houses on my block warning neighbors to be wary of that couple,” Pamela remembers.

When Klein returned from his trip, his wife told him all about such occurrence, but he dismissed it saying that one should avoid slipping into paranoia.

However, alarming events continued occurring. One afternoon two people dressed in police uniforms arrived at the door of the Kleins’ home. They knocked nervously on the door and asked after her husband: “Where is Klein, where is Klein?” they repeated. Pamela did not open the door, although the men in uniform said they were officers from the Martinez police station. She phoned her husband at the ministry and they sent a security guard. The identity of the fake police officers was never discovered.

On April 11, 1978, the lawyer Miguel Tobías Padilla, who served as state undersecretary under the orders of Guillermo Walter Klein, was murdered. After such incident, security guards were allocated to all state secretaries and undersecretaries—up to then only ministers had been afforded such protection.

Coincidentally, at the same time that a permanent security guard was posted at the Klein family home, the youngsters stopped visiting the adjacent square. But on September 27, 1979, Pamela’s worst premonitions were awfully confirmed.

It was 7.30 a.m. Pamela had got up and was still in her nightgown. Her husband, Walter, was also awake, in his pajamas, and they were about to have breakfast. Actually, they were not sure yet whether they would have breakfast in their room or change and have breakfast downstairs. Their two younger children, Peter and Matías, were also upstairs; they had not changed into their school uniform yet. Instead, Marina and Esteban had already gone down. Every day they used to compete to see who would arrive first at the rocking chair in the living room and enjoy rocking until the rest of the family came down. That day Esteban had won the race and was sitting on the rocking chair, when he and his sister heard a shot that went through the window and lodged into one of the walls. Immediately, a furious attack was waged against the house, with long arms bullets and explosives being hurled with grenade launchers. All the walls and windows began tearing apart, “as in the movies,” the family recalls.

Esteban ducked to the floor and managed to crawl out through the kitchen. Marina entered the maid’s room and ran into María Rosa, one of the maids, who was running away towards the street. Marina stayed alone.

The maid reached the sidewalk and Esteban tried to follow her, but they did not let him; they fired against him, either to kill him or to make him return indoors and suffer the same fate as his parents and siblings. Wounded and screaming, he ran up the stairs and was received by his dad, who picked him up and took him to his room. They placed him on the bed and checked his condition. Pamela noticed blood in his neck and thought that his son was about to die, but then she realized that it was blood sprinkling from the wound in the arm.

Matías, who was in another room, tried to peep out of the window to see what was happening, but his brother Peter stopped him. Pamela and Walter fetched the boys and hurried them to their bedroom.

“The two boys plunged their heads under the covers with their bottoms sticking out, they looked like two small rabbits,” Pamela recalls with motherly tenderness, so as to mitigate, even if to a very small extent, so much horror.

In the meantime, Marina sought shelter in the maid quarter’s bathroom at the ground floor and remained there.

The two police guards, Hugo Cardaci and Julio César Moreno, had tried to repel the attack, but since they quickly ran out of bullets they decided to lock up in the garage. Actually, they were very brave in their attempt and it would have been impossible for them to stop the attack given that the gunmen greatly outnumbered them. As a matter of fact, the perpetrators were more than twenty members of Montoneros who had been trained in Lebanon, Syria and Libya, some by the Palestinian Liberation Organization and others by the government of Muammar Khadafi under an agreement that Montoneros had entered into with the Islamic terrorist movement.

Meanwhile, María Rosa, the maid, returned inside the house to fetch her baby. As she was going out again, one of the terrorist women tried to make her go back inside, so that she would also die with the family “for rendering services to an oligarchic family,” he told her, but another terrorist allowed her to escape. Fortunately, both house maids managed to escape.

Once Klein had finished taking care of his younger children, he decided that he would go down the stairs to rescue Marina. Pamela told him not to go down yet.

“The attack was ferocious and bullets were riddling the house, it would have been impossible for him to survive such an attack,” Pamela recalls.

In spite of her warnings, Klein started to climb down the stairs, but at that precise moment there was a huge blast, much louder than all they had heard before.

“The upper floor began to tear apart and I said to myself, “We won’t survive this!˝ recounts Pamela.

The terrorists had planted an explosive load somewhere on the ground floor, beside the stairs, where they had detected the pillar that was the major support of the building. For such purpose, some days earlier, when the owners were not at home, an expert of Montoneros, invoking the name of a plumber who worked for the family and pretending to be his assistant, convinced one of the maids to let him examine the plumbing. In this manner, he took notice of the feeble and strong points of the property.

The house collapsed with all the family inside and the perpetrators fled away. The two security guards died of asphyxia inside the garage. “They were the best security guards, decent people, good family men,” regrets Pamela, who still feels remorse for their fate.

The explosion was of such magnitude that it caused significant creeks in all the houses around the neighborhood and turned the Kleins’ into a pile of rubble. Today, only the bare piece of land remains, joint to an adjacent house, since it was purchased by one of the neighbors and became part of its garden.

The whole family survived and both the parents and their children were rushed to the Military Hospital and others to the Vicente López Hospital, were they remained hospitalized for different time periods, depending on the seriousness of their wounds.

* * *

Currently, the Klein couple has separated and the terrorist attack is an indelible memory, not only for them, but also for all of their family, friends and former neighbors.

Pamela Ferguson recounts that one day, years after the horror, she passed along the bakery she would regularly go to, on Rawson St. between Roma and Borges Streets, and saw the baker opening the shop’s shutters.

“It was a sunny day, the sun illuminated the entrance and I saw that happy man and I thought to myself, ‘He seems to be in a state of innocence, but as for myself, from the day of the attack, I see shadows everywhere, everything is dark!’” Pamela admits in tears. This is the only time she breaks down. There is no resentment whatsoever in her story, only sadness.

“In my family, they would talk about the attack as if it had been a car accident,” says Marina, now a lawyer, with a cheerfulness and freshness that are worthy of admiration, bearing in mind that she was trapped by a pile of bricks in the most absolute darkness for more than four hours without knowing what her family’s or her own fate would be.

“At home, the issue was tackled from a religious perspective. They told us that the attack had been perpetrated by a group that had erred and they made us pray for them, so that they would understand their error,” recounts Matías at his consultation room, as he is currently a psychiatrist. And he adds a professional remark: “Sometimes people believe that a disease is caused by someone else; similarly, some people believe that poverty is caused by someone; this is registered in different manners and in different pathologies, for example, in paranoia,” he explains, without losing his smile.

* * *

While she was recalling all this, in part to herself and in part recounting it to Julieta, the public official at the offices of Municipal Division No. 13, Pamela noticed that the girl was no longer paying attention to her, and that instead she was typing, somewhat indifferently, on her computer.

“Are you still listening to me, Miss? Are you not interested in what I’m saying?” Pamela asked her, astounded at the girl’s sudden change of mood, since she had appeared to be very interested at first.

“Everything you are telling me is just the same to me,” said Julieta, and cutting her off sharply, she added, “I don’t feel sorry for what happened to you; I have a neighbor whose son went missing during the military government, so I don’t care a damn about your story,” she said.

“Julieta, I feel sorry for what happened to your neighbor and many others. I can easily put myself in the shoes of those mothers...,” answered Pamela, even more surprised.

“But I couldn’t care less about your story,” Julieta abruptly interrupted her, “I cannot forget.”

Some of those who lived through those times and were victims, regardless of the side they were on, were able to forgive. Julieta was not.

Into the Dark

◆

Oscar Potrone is the grandson of an Italian immigrant, Don Felipe, who, as hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived in Argentina with the immigration wave in the period encompassed between the late 19^th century and World War II, contributed, through their creative talent, to the growth of Argentina. It was not uncommon for Europeans, on leaving Europe seeking for better opportunities, to choose between Argentina and the United States as their final destination. Immigrants—and particularly Italians—built thousands of Parisian-style buildings that turned Buenos Aires into a city worldwide renowned for distinction, with their finely decorated Greek-style moldings, their meanderings, rosettes, arabesques, bow-shaped decorations, cornucopia, gargoyles and paintings, among many other decorations that seemed molded by those who carried a Buonarotti in their blood. They were immigrants who had left their towns of origin ravaged by shortages and madness to settle in the land of wheat and cattle, in the heart of a peaceful nation, and who repaid such a warm welcome by offering the fruits of their Romanesque talent without reservation.

No one can say that immigrants had an easy life at the beginning, but compared with the war and the desolated land which they had left behind, Argentina was an oasis. At any event, their initial poverty was dignified, dwellings were clean and well painted, and they progressively grew with the work of their owners, to finally become, in some cases, as sumptuous as those they built for their customers.

No country developed without effort, and when the industry began to take off, Argentina had the best-paid workers in Latin America. Argentina had a distinctly significant edge over her neighbors in the hemisphere: the contribution of European immigration and free education, which was among the best in the world at that time, had made the difference.

Felipe Potrone did not engage in the building or agricultural sectors, but in the metalwork industry instead, with a humble workshop in his beginnings. He had six children: four boys and two girls. The eldest of them, Oscar—as he himself would then name his first son—continued with his father’s workshop.

At the outset, Don Felipe decided to manufacture mechanical parts for oil refineries. For such purpose, he would rise in the early hours of morning and commute from his home in the neighborhood of Remedios de Escalada to Avellaneda; from there, he would walk up to the premises of the company Shell, located in Dock Sud, were he would install parts and pipelines. Later, he decided to broaden his activities into the manufacturing of bread-making machines and shoe-making machines. Thus, he managed to save up and set up out of such savings an iron forgery—something to which he had long been giving a thought. However, he was unable to witness his company’s success: he died before the forgery commenced to prosper in the hands of one of his sons. One of them, Oscar, anticipated the opportunities arising as a result of the nationalization of the railroads during the presidency of Juan Domingo Perón.

The railroads had been built and operated by the British, who, after the war, were fully engaged in the restoration of their own country, shattered by bombs and by the economic hardships that followed. There was no space to dedicate to manufacturing the spare parts needed by another nation which, moreover, had already taken over the operation of railroad services.

“My father was always a visionary businessman; he spotted the chance to develop products that were not manufactured in Argentina, and always said that what a man could do anywhere in the world, any other man could do as well,” recalls his son Oscar Potrone.

As from 1948, Don Oscar started manufacturing steel parts for train wagons and railroad tracks. Later he manufactured the first cast-steel bogie, a key part in the development of the railroads. As his manufacturing plant (located in Avellaneda between García St. and Avenida Perón and two blocks away from the Avellaneda station) progressed, it kept incorporating new technology. Don Oscar installed a well-equipped quality control laboratory and several electrical ovens.

“Each time a child was born he would add a new oven,” says Oscar, his son, tenderly recalling his father’s progress. And he had four children: Mirta, Oscar himself, Rubén and Hugo.

Oscar started working in his father’s foundry plant in 1958. He got excited about “the machines,” as he puts it, and also about the business productivity, so he dropped out of university where he was studying Business Administration. His brother Rubén also joined the company some time later. When the turn came to his brother Hugo, the youngest, they did not allow him to start working at the plant; it was a prohibition for his own benefit, so that he would not drop out of university, as Oscar himself had done.

Hugo, five years younger than Oscar, followed in his footsteps and was attending the Business Administration School at UADE University. He would have time to start working in the foundry plant once he obtained his university degree. In the meantime, the foundry plant was increasing its sales and its personnel, which by then totaled 250 employees.

Delighted with the foundry plant’s growth, Oscar Potrone (senior) built a new house for his family, which was also becoming larger.

“The architect was a friend of my father’s, but the problem was that since he lived alone he was accustomed to small spaces, while my father, coming from an Italian family, was always arguing with the architect so that he would expand spaces,” recounts Oscar, who adds that when the house was completed in 1951, it invited curiosity and comments from the neighbors. Some said that the house belonged to Eva Duarte de Perón; others to the actress Mirtha Legrand; and later, others said that the owner was the famous Argentine singer Sandro.

“As my father was very local, he built the house in Banfield; he did not wish to build it in San Isidro, where it would have gone unnoticed,” explains Oscar, who says that the house was really impressive for such location—and that this could have marked the beginning of his family’s misfortunes.

One spring night in September 1973, Hugo, the youngest of the brothers, was riding his car in Avellaneda. A pretty girl made signs at him asking for a ride and he pulled over. Shortly afterwards, his brother Oscar received a call. A man on the other end of the line was asking either for him or for his brother Rubén, but he then hung up. Some minutes later, the call was repeated. When they finally managed to communicate, he told Oscar: “We have your brother Hugo and we are demanding ransom.” Oscar answered that he needed to go to his father’s home, so that decisions could be taken by the family as a whole. “No problem,” he was told, and a few minutes later, they called his father’s home.

Oscar remembers that the person who made the call seemed to be educated; he told him that he was putting himself in the shoes of the family, but that he was a member of a subversive group and that they needed money to support their units and keep them on the move. He told them that his name was “Red” and warned them t