Operation Massacre(6)

            State Radio, the official voice of the Nation, is playing Haydn.





4. Giunta


            Giunta, or Mr. Lito as they call him in the neighborhood, comes back from Villa Martelli, where he has spent the afternoon with his parents.

            Giunta is not even thirty years old. He’s a tall man, elegant, blond, and clear-eyed. Effusive and expressive in his gestures and his language, he has a healthy dose of wit to him, skeptical irony, even. But what you come away with is a sense of solid honor, of sincerity. Of all the witnesses who survive this tragedy, no one else will be as convincing or have as easy and natural a time proving his innocence, showing it to be concrete and almost tangible. Talking to him for an hour, hearing him remember, seeing the indignation and the memories of horror gradually emerging from inside him, making themselves visible in his eyes and even making his hair stand on end, is enough to set aside any skepticism.

            For fifteen years Giunta has been working as a shoe salesman in Buenos Aires. He picked up two minor skills at his job that are worth mentioning. First, he practices a certain “psychology” method that sometimes lets him guess his clients’—and by extension others’—wishes and intentions, which are not always obvious. Second, he has an enviable memory for faces, sharpened over the years.

            He does not suspect—as he is dining in the peaceful house that he bought with his own sweat, as he is surrounded by the affection of his loved ones—that hours later these skills will help him escape the grimmest experience of his life.





5. Díaz: Two Snapshots


            Meanwhile, people are filing into the apartment in back. There will be up to fifteen men there at one point, playing cards around two tables while talking or listening to the radio. Some will leave and others will join. In some instances it will be difficult to determine the precise chronology of these comings and goings. And not just the chronology. Even the identity of one or two of them will ultimately remain blurry or unknown.

            We know, for example, that at around 9:00 p.m. a man named Rogelio Díaz shows up, but we don’t know exactly who brings him or why he comes at all. We know he is an NCO (a sergeant who served as a tailor, according to some) who retired from the Navy, but we don’t know why he retired—or why he was retired. We know he lives very nearby, in Munro, but we don’t know if it is just proximity that explains his presence here. We know he is married with two or three children, but later on no one will be able to tell us his family’s exact whereabouts. Is he involved with the revolutionary movement? Maybe. But maybe not.

            The one exact detail, the only one that everyone who remembers seeing him can agree upon, is his physical appearance: a burly man from the provinces, very dark-skinned, of unidentifiable age (“You know, with darker people, it’s hard to tell a person’s age . . .”). He is a cheerful, chatty guy who gets all worked up playing Rummy one minute, and then, once everyone’s already afraid of him, will be completely different the next, snoring happily and loudly on a bench in the San Martín Regional Office, as though he didn’t have the smallest care in the world. A man’s entire life can be summed up in these two snapshots.9

            Footnotes:

                                                  9    When I first mentioned Díaz in my articles for Revolución Nacional, his existence and survival were more of a conjecture, which later I could fortunately prove true. The person who had mentioned him to me could only remember his last name, and wasn’t even sure of that much. After questioning a rather sizable number of secondary witnesses, I deduced that a Sergeant Díaz did indeed exist. Curiously, no one could remember his first name and nearly everyone thought he was dead. That was until I found a list of Olmos prisoners in a weekly magazine where a certain “Díaz Rogelio” appeared. My informants then remembered that Rogelio was his Christian name. While this book was being published in the magazine Mayoría, I gathered the following additional information about him: he was in fact a sergeant from Santiago del Estero who served as a tailor and was in the Navy’s Fourth Infantry Battalion (in the North Basin) in 1952, before being transferred to Santiago River’s Naval Academy.