Pursuant to this statement, the judge considered it an opportune moment to communicate to Fernández Suárez “the reason why the present case is being tried in this court, asking at the same time for you to please make known by way of a written report as much information as you deem appropriate.”
Fernández Suárez, who had proffered thirty thousand words in his defense before the Advisory Board, now cannot muster one sentence in response.
The judge: “As no response has been received from the Chief of Police, let the official letter sent on p. 26 be reissued.”
Silence.
On page 51, the aforementioned new commissioner of Moreno, Francisco Ferrairone, appears before the court on January 11, 1957. He confirms that Livraga’s arrest does not appear in his precinct’s books, but that “given the requests that were sent and resent from the Court, as well as similar requests for a response that came in from Police Headquarters, he asked among the department’s staff to find out whether the books were a faithful reflection of the truth, and was able to ascertain that this was not the case. He was told that one Juan Carlos Livraga had indeed been detained in that station, or at least had stayed there, and neither his intake nor his release had been recorded in the books . . .”
The police front begins to crumble. “The witness received this unofficial information,” Commissioner Ferrairone cautiously clarifies, “after submitting his answers in response to the request for information issued by the Court; had it been any other way he would have reported the information not in the way that he did, but otherwise.”
—Who was in Moreno in the month of June? —asks Judge Hueyo.
—Commissioner Gregorio de Paula —Ferrairone says.
On page 53, Principal Officer Boris Vucetich of the Moreno precinct gives a statement. The judge asks him if he saw Livraga there:
—Yes —the officer says.— He had two gunshot wounds, one with an entry wound beneath his jaw and an exit wound in his cheek, and the other in his arm.
The story that Livraga told Vucetich is the same one he will tell months later: “[T]hat he was at his friend’s house listening to the Lausse match when they were caught off-guard by the police, dressed in civilian clothes, and taken to the San Martín District Police Department, that after being interrogated, he and other arrested individuals were loaded onto a vehicle and relocated to a place he cannot identify, that they made them get off there, ordered them to walk, he felt a few shots, threw himself to the ground, and then lost consciousness . . .”
Regarding other details, Vucetich seems to differ from Livraga. He says that the police medic Doctor Carlos Chiesa tended to him daily. It is a rare doctor, you have to admit, who lets a man with a serious gunshot wound recover in a prison cell.
Next in line to give his statement is Deputy Inspector Antonio Barbieri of the Moreno precinct. His testimony is a repeat of the last. The basic idea is that Livraga was very well attended in Moreno, that he was given a special diet and so many blankets to cover himself with that he couldn’t move. The surviving executed man kept insisting that they had him in the cell half-naked and that his bandage was falling off in pieces . . .
Commissioner Gregorio de Paula, on page 55 and following, admits that Livraga was held prisoner in Moreno, that he arrived wounded, and that his intake was not recorded in the books.
—Is that normal? —asks the judge.
The commissioner acknowledges that it is not normal, but that in “this exceptional case,” he understood that his intake had already been recorded at the San Martín District Police Department.
Was Livraga well cared for? Splendidly, says the commissioner. They even gave him “food that didn’t need to be chewed.”