Signed Hueyo, Rodríguez Moreno, secretary Paladino, page 58 and following in criminal case number 3702 tried before the Eighth Criminal Court of First Instance in the city of La Plata.
This, then, is the document that the Liberating Revolution needs to answer to, and never will.
It proves everything that I claimed in my articles for Mayoría and in the first edition of this book: that a group of men were arrested before martial law was instated; that they were not given due process; that their identities were not verified; that they were not told what their crime was; and that they were massacred in an open field.
Judge Hueyo dives right into this gaping hole in the State’s disavowal. The ink of Rodríguez Moreno’s signature is still fresh when the court gives its orders:
1) To summon the second-in-command at the Mar del Plata District Police Department, Commissioner Benedicto Cuello, to offer a statement on Monday the 21st at 10:00 a.m.; 2) To summon the medic of the Moreno Police Precinct, Doctor Chiesa, to offer a statement that same Monday at 9:30 a.m.; 3) To establish the court on Tuesday the 22nd in the San Martín District Police Department to collect statements from the department staff; 4) To appear at the polyclinic of said city immediately to collect statements from the doctors, nurses, and other personnel, and to proceed to examine the institution’s books; 5) To authorize non-working days and non-working hours in order to continue with this investigation from the 22nd of the month onwards.
The judge’s urgency was justified. Fernández Suárez, feeling cornered because of Rodríguez Moreno’s confession and the rumor (which took La Plata by storm) that his preemptive incarceration was imminent, went looking for help at the highest echelons of the Liberating Revolution. On the morning of Monday, January 21, 1957, accompanied by Colonel Bonnecarrere—the Province authority appointed by the Liberating Revolution—he requested a hearing with General Aramburu and was received in the presence of General Quaranta. Once there, he asked for and received assistance from the President of the Nation.
That same night, Bonnecarrere called an emergency meeting, which Fernández Suárez attended. A special airplane was chartered to bring the president of the Supreme Court of the Province, Judge Amílcar Mercader, from the town of Ayacucho, which is where he was at that time. Discussed at length during this meeting were: the José León Suárez executions, the danger that the judge’s obvious determination to establish the truth posed to the Liberating Revolution, and the means that the Executive Power had at its disposal to avoid it.
The following information about these desperate maneuvers leaked to the papers:
Upon returning from our city, after interviewing the provisional president of the Nation in the early hours of the morning, State authority Colonel Bonnecarrere . . . is said to have met with his ministers and the Chief of Police around 8:30 p.m. in the Government House . . .
This coincided with a visit from the head of the Supreme Court of the Province, Judge Amílcar A. Mercader.
In both instances there was allegedly discussion of . . . issues connected to the workings of the Police Department of the Province of Buenos Aires, regarding recent events that are public knowledge, were discussed. (El Argentino from La Plata, January 22, 1957.)
The Buenos Aires periodical La Razón also alluded to the proceedings in a text box with the heading “A Meeting,” reporting a discussion of “the events that took place last year in the region of San Martín.” These euphemisms were the extent of the freedom of the press that the country so enjoyed: the public was never informed about the existence of the Livraga file.
It’s possible that the way things are going influences the tone of Commissioner Cuello, the ex-second-in-command of the San Martín District Police Department, when he gives his statement on Monday the twenty-first. His gives a defiant, at times furious testimony. It begins with a lie that, albeit easily disproven, shows that Fernández Suárez and his henchmen now understand what the core of the issue is: Cuello says that “at approximately 2300 hours on June 9, he was informed that the establishment of martial law had been broadcast over the radio.”