On June 12, General Valle turns himself in to put a stop to the killings. They execute him that same night.
That makes for twenty-seven executions in less than seventy-two hours at six locations.
They all fall under Article 18 of the National Constitution, active in that moment, which says: “The death penalty for political reasons is hereafter abolished.”
In certain cases, martial law is applied retroactively. In others, res judicata is invoked over and over again in an abusive cycle. In yet others, the fact that the accused abandoned their weapons at the first opportunity is not taken into account. In short, it is a massive, arbitrary, illegal murder whose greatest culprits are the men who signed the decrees designed to validate it: Generals Aramburu and Ossorio Arana, Admirals Rojas and Hartung, and Brigadier General Krause.
37. Aramburu and the Historical Trial
On May 29, 1970, a Montonero commando kidnapped Lieutenant General Aramburu from his home. Two days later, they condemned him to death and listed the charges that the Peronists had against him. The first two included “the killing of twenty-seven Argentines without trial or just cause” on June 9, 1956.
The commando bore the name of the executed General Valle. Aramburu was executed on June 1 at seven o’clock in the morning and his body turned up forty-five days later in the south of the Province of Buenos Aires.
The incident shook the country in a number of different ways. The people did not cry over the death of Aramburu. The Army, the institutions, and the oligarchy raised an angry outcry. Among the hundreds of protests and statements that were made, there is one worth recalling. It classifies the event as a “monstrous and cowardly crime for which there is no precedent in the history of the Republic.” One of the signatories is General Bonnecarrere, Governor of the Province at the time of Operation Massacre. Another is General Leguizamón Martínez, who had executed Colonel Cogorno in the La Plata barracks. A third is Colonel Fernández Suárez himself. They did not seem like the best people to be talking about precedents.
The execution of Aramburu provoked the fall of General Onganía one week later, whose dictatorship had already been damaged on a different May 29 (of the previous year) by the saga of the popular uprising known as Cordobazo;35 it also momentarily set back the plans of Liberal groups who saw in the executed general a second chance for the failed Argentine Revolution.36
The dramatic nature of this death accelerated a process that usually takes years to accomplish: the creation of a national hero. In a matter of months, Liberal doctors, the press, and Aramburu’s political heirs canonized him in an unending stream of praise and elegy. Champion of democracy, soldier of liberty, beloved son of the fatherland, a military man cast in the classic mold of the San Martín tradition, an honest and unassuming ruler whose temperament did not allow him to overstep his authority, these are some of the incantations that hide the true portrait of Aramburu from history. Two years later he had his mausoleum, decorated with Virtues.
Not all of Aramburu’s supporters were so foolish as to buy the image of him that was crafted in that language. Those who were smart enough to understand why the people hated him maintained that “the Aramburu of 1970 was not the Aramburu of 1956” and that the Aramburu of 1970, put in the same circumstances, would not have ordered executions, persecutions, or proscriptions. You could say the same for Lavalle, Dorrego’s murderer, that he only committed the terrible acts he committed because he was under the influence of devious advisers: all you had to do was switch Salvador del Carril’s name for Américo Ghioldi’s.37 Both of them would have regretted what they had done and, at the very last moment, come together in a puzzling union with their land and their people. From this perspective, one can see how Aramburu would come to warrant, in addition to the anti-Peronist memorial he received, an expiatory cantata written by some future Sábato.38
In a less partial trial, this kind of transformation would not matter, even if it had truly happened. Here was an executor of a class policy whose foundation—exploitation—is in itself inhuman and whose acts of cruelty derive from this foundation like branches from a tree trunk: Aramburu’s perplexing turns, when he was already far removed from power, just barely illuminate the discrepancy between the abstract ideals and the concrete acts of the members of that class. The evil that he perpetrated was in his acts, and whatever goodness he had in his thoughts was a belated tremor of the bourgeois consciousness. Aramburu was obliged to execute and ban in the same way that his successors to this day have been forced to torture and murder: for the simple fact that they represent a usurping minority that can only stay in power through deceit and violence.