That same night, the lawyer took them to La Plata’s Police Headquarters to get their release papers approved. In Giunta’s box for “Grounds,” there was an expressive line of typed dashes.
There had been, in fact, no grounds for trying to execute him. No grounds for torturing him psychologically to the limits of what a person can endure. No grounds for condemning him to hunger and thirst. No grounds for shackling and handcuffing him. And now, there were no grounds—only by virtue of a simple decree, No. 14.975—for restoring him to the world.
***
Giunta and Livraga owed their freedom and even their lives not only to the efforts of von Kotsch, Esq., but to a happy circumstance. They were not, as they previously thought, the only surviving witnesses of “Operation Massacre.” The Province of Buenos Aires Police had tried to catch the other fugitives and recover all the evidence, mainly the receipts issued by the San Martín District Police Department. If they had accomplished that, it is likely that everything—both people and things—would have disappeared in one final, silent act of carnage. But their attempt had failed and “Operation Massacre,” even without Giunta and Livraga, was going to be widely publicized both here and abroad.
Gavino sought asylum in the Bolivian embassy before the last echoes of the executions had stopped ringing out. He was carrying the receipt with him when he left for that country.
Julio Troxler and Reinaldo Benavídez could not be arrested either. In mid-October, they took refuge in the same embassy, and on November 3, an airplane took them to La Paz. On October 17, a tall and dark-skinned man walked calmly to the entrance of the embassy at 500 Corrientes Street. Two policemen dressed as civilians hurtled themselves onto him and even got a hand on him. But they were too late: Juan Carlos Torres, the tenant of the apartment in back, had just escaped Fernández Suárez’s clutches and was now on foreign ground. In June 1957 he, too, left for Bolivia.
Mr. Horacio di Chiano was in hiding for four months before returning timidly to his house in Florida. The terrifying experience had left him deeply scarred. They had wanted to kill him at close range. For countless seconds, beneath the headlights of the police van, he had waited for the coup de grâce that never came. He had not committed a crime, but he was on the run. He had lost his job after seventeen years of service and now he was squandering his savings to support his family. He will never understand anything about what happened.
Livraga and Giunta went back to work. Livraga helped his father laying bricks; Giunta returned to his old job.
Sergeant Díaz was not completely spared the fury that was unleashed that night in June. He was held prisoner for many months in Olmos.
In the cemeteries of Boulogne, San Martín, Olivos, and Chacarita, modest crosses serve as reminders of the fallen: Nicolás Carranza, Francisco Garibotti, Vicente Rodríguez, Carlos Lizaso, Mario Brión.
In Montevideo, soon after hearing the news, Mr. Pedro Lizaso, Carlitos’s father, passed away. In his final days he was heard repeating, over and over again:
—It’s my fault . . . It’s my fault . . .
At the end of 1956, Vicente Damián Rodríguez would have fathered his fourth child. His wife, hopeless and consumed by misery, resigned herself to his loss.
The massacre left sixteen children without fathers: Carranza’s six, Garibotti’s six, Rodríguez’s three, and Brión’s one. These little children who, for the most part, were doomed to a life of poverty and resentment, will know one day—they already know—that the “liberating” and “democratic” Argentina of June 1956 was on a par with Nazi hell.
That is where the ledger stands.
In my view, though, what best symbolizes the irresponsibility, the blindness, and the disgrace of “Operation Massacre” is a little piece of paper. A rectangle of official paper, twenty-five centimeters long by fifteen centimeters wide. It is dated several months after June 9, 1956, and, after being run by all the local province police stations—including that of the Province of Buenos Aires—it is issued in the name of Miguel Ángel Giunta, the surviving executed man. His name and ID number appear over the background of a white and light-blue-colored shield. Above, it reads: Argentine Republic – Ministry of Interior – Federal Police. And then, in larger letters, four words: “Certificate of Good Conduct.”