Operation Massacre

1. Carranza


            Nicolás Carranza was not a happy man on the night of June 9, 1956. Protected by the shadows, he had just come into his house, and something might have been gnawing at him on the inside. We’ll never really know. A man carries so many heavy thoughts with him to the grave, and the earth at the bottom of Nicolás Carranza’s grave has already dried up.

            For a moment, though, he could forget his worries. After an initial, surprising silence, a chorus of shrill voices rose to receive him. Nicolás Carranza had six children. The smaller ones might have hung on to his knees. The oldest, Elena, probably put her head just at her father’s arm’s reach. Tiny Julia Renée—barely forty days old—was asleep in her crib.

            His wife, Berta Figueroa, lifted her gaze from the sewing machine. She smiled at him with a mix of sadness and joy. It was always the same. Her man always came in like this: on the run, in the night, like a flash. Sometimes he stayed the night and then disappeared for weeks. Every so often he would have messages sent her way: at so-and-so’s house. And then she would be the one going to her meeting, leaving the children with a neighbor to be with him for a few hours racked with fear, anxiety, and the bitterness that came with having to leave him and wait for time to pass slowly without any word.

            Nicolás Carranza was a Peronist. And a fugitive.

            That’s why, whenever he would be coming home secretly like he was that night and some kid from the neighborhood yelled “Hello, Mr. Carranza!”, he would quicken his step and not answer.

            —Hey, Mr. Carranza! —curiosity was always following him.

            But Mr. Carranza—a short and stocky silhouette in the night—would walk away quickly on the dirt road, raising the lapels of his overcoat to meet his eyes.

            Now he was sitting in the armchair in the dining room bouncing his two-year-old, Berta Josefa, his three-year-old, Carlos Alberto, and maybe even his four-year-old, Juan Nicolás—he had a whole staircase worth of children, Mr. Carranza—on his knees. He rocked them back and forth, imitating the roar and whistle of trains run by the men who lived in that railroad suburban town, men like him.

            Next he talked to his favorite, eleven-year-old Elena—she was tall and slim for her age with big grey-brown eyes—and shared only some of his adventures, with a bit of happy fairytale mixed in. He asked her questions out of a sense of concern, fear, and tenderness, because the truth was that he felt a knot form in his heart whenever he looked at her, ever since the time she was put in jail.

            It’s hard to believe, but on January 26, 1956, she was locked up for a few hours in Frías (in Santiago del Estero). Her father had dropped her off there on the twenty-fifth with his wife’s family and continued on along his regular Belgrano line trip to the North, where he worked as a waiter. In Simoca, in the province of Tucumán, he was arrested for distributing pamphlets, a charge that was never proven.

            At eight o’clock the following morning, Elena was taken from her relatives’ home, brought to the police station, and interrogated for four hours. Was her father handing out pamphlets? Was her father a Peronist? Was her father a criminal?

            Mr. Carranza lost his mind when he heard the news.

            —Let them do what they want to me, but to a child . . .

            He howled and wept.

            And fled the police in Tucumán.

            It was probably from that moment on that a dangerous glaze washed over the eyes of this man whose features were clear and firm, who used to be a happy nature, the fun-loving best friend to his own kids and to everyone’s kids in the neighborhood.

            They all ate together on the night of June 9 in that working-class neighborhood of Boulogne. Afterward, they put the kids to bed and it was just the two of them, he and Berta.