The new commissioner of Moreno, in turn, responds with a cryptic dispatch: “Regarding report 3702 made by Juan Carlos Livraga I inform you Your Honor these premises no record books exist marking detention of aforementioned.” Signed F. Ferrairone.
The judge’s reply:
As the police commissioner of Moreno has failed to report on whether prisoner Juan Carlos Livraga stayed or did not stay in that precinct, I am issuing a new letter to ask as a matter of urgency that you report specifically on whether the aforementioned Juan Carlos Livraga was detained on the premises in the middle of last June, if affirmative, then dates of intake and release and the name of the judge who was in charge of his case.
The Moreno precinct insists on its ignorance: “Regarding detention Juan Carlos Livraga I inform Your Honor these premises no record books exist his detention. Ferrairone.”
Was the allegedly executed man’s story then false? Doubt begins to dissipate on page 29 when Doctor Marcelo Méndez Casariego, from the San Martín polyclinic, responds with a note:
In reference to your telegram dated the 24th of this month requesting records of Mr. Juan Carlos Livraga, this administration communicates to Your Honor that the aforementioned man was brought to the emergency room on June 10 of this year, at 7:45 a.m., under the custody of the San Martín District Police Department of the Province of Buenos Aires, who took him away at 9:00 p.m. on the same day.
But De Bellis and Ferrairone weren’t lying either. The arrest of Livraga and the others did not appear in the San Martín and Moreno books for the simple reason that the formality of recording their intake was not carried out. Without a record, an arrest becomes a simple abduction. So the entire operation bore the indelible stamp of secrecy.
On behalf of Aramburu and in response to one of the desperate letters that Livraga’s father sent when he didn’t know the whereabouts of his son, the general secretary of the presidency, Colonel Víctor Arribau, had informed him by telegram on June 29, 1956 that: “The investigation is being taken up with urgency.” Now Judge Hueyo, on page 32, orders that a subpoena be issued to Colonel Arribau to report on “the result of the investigation that he refers to in the telegram that appears on page 8 and, if possible, to remit a summary so that the Court may see it.”
The reply, of course, never came. But in the meantime, the press campaign that I had just set in motion produced its first results. Livraga’s accusation had landed in my hands on December 20. I submitted it to Leónidas Barletta, who published it in Propósitos on the twenty-third. The governing authority of the Province, newly appointed by the Liberating Revolution, and the Chief of Police considered themselves obligated to issue an explosive press release that was published in the papers on the twenty-seventh and the twenty-eighth. Judge Hueyo would not let the opportunity pass him by. On page 33 he stipulates: “In response to the declaration made by the Chief of Police, as it appears in the December 28 edition of the newspaper El Plata, wherein he claims that the man himself (Juan Carlos Livraga) was arrested in San Martín for his participation in the subversive acts of June 9 and that it was proven that he was part of the group of people who were receiving orders from ex-General Tanco, and who were subjected to martial law regulations; the Chief of Police is requested to make known which judge oversaw the investigation in question.”
Fernández Suárez did not reply. There had been no other judge than him.
On page 35, for the first time, the police of the Province respond to a request made by the court. The Documents Division releases Livraga’s file, which states that he was arrested on June 9, 1956, one day before martial law was instated.
Meanwhile, Colonel Aniceto Casco, the general manager of penal institutions, provides new confirmation of Livraga’s story by reporting that “he entered Unit 1 (the penitentiary in Olmos) on July 3, 1956.”
On January 8, 1957, Commissioner Ovidio R. de Bellis appears before the court. As successor to Rodríguez Moreno for the San Martín District Police Department, he states that he knows nothing about what happened because he was not there on that date, and reasserts that Livraga’s arrest is not listed in the Department’s books.