Introduction
(to the first edition, March 1957)
News of the massacre in José León Suárez first came to my ears by pure chance, on December 18, 1956. The news was not quite accurate, which was only fitting for the place where I heard it—a café. It suggested that a man who was allegedly executed during the Peronist uprising of June 9 and 10 of that year had survived and was not in jail.
The story sounded like a movie to me, primed for all sorts of exercises in disbelief. (It had the same effect on many people, which was unfortunate. An official of the armed forces, for example, whom I told about the events before publishing anything, described them in all sincerity as “a serialized novel.”)
But this kind of disbelief can be thinly disguised wisdom. The absolute nonbeliever can be as naïve as he who believes everything; at bottom, the two fall under the same psychological category.
I asked for more information. And the following day I met the first key player of the drama: Jorge Doglia, Esq. The interview with him left a strong impression on me. It may be that Doglia, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, had his nerves shredded from waging a battle without respite for a number of months against the police “methods” he had witnessed as head of the Judicial Division of the Police Department for the Province. But he sounded utterly sincere to me. He told me about horrific cases of torture using the picana and burning cigarettes, of rubber and wire whips, of common criminals—usually “drifters” and pickpockets with no families to come looking for them—beaten to death in various precincts throughout the Province. And all of this under the regime of a “liberating revolution” that many Argentines received with hope because they believed it would put an end to abuses of police authority.
Doglia had fought valiantly against all of this, but now he was starting to feel defeated. Two months earlier, he had reported the illegal executions and the torture to a branch of Intelligence Services. But a bureaucrat there who could easily have spent the rest of his days looking up rules in basic textbooks for how to handle an informant—an ethical principle that we assume is basic knowledge for every branch of this kind—could think of nothing better than to expose him. Instead of protecting him, they put his life in danger, and he has received unequivocal death threats ever since.
Doglia presented a similar report to the Ministry of the Government of the Province that generated a stack of abstruse documents. Within this file—the prose worthy of Gracián in his weakest moments—a certain undersecretary comes to the conclusion that there is something there, but he isn’t sure what it is.43 At this juncture, the file keeps expanding, accumulating pages, dust, and rhetorical phrases. But, in short, nothing. In short, sloth and ineptitude when it is obvious how important it is for the matter to be resolved quickly and completely. This is what some of today’s public servants have to offer.
Doglia did not put too much faith in journalism. He assumed the official newspapers were not going to take on such a prickly issue, and on the other hand he didn’t want the voices of the opposition to exploit it for political reasons. He didn’t expect very much from the same justice system that had just been presented with the surviving executed man as a plaintiff. From the very start, Doglia predicted: 1) that the case would be claimed by a Military Court and 2) that this motion would be approved. (The first happened promptly at the start of February 1957. The second remained to be seen. Everything depended on what the ruling of the National Supreme Court would be on the jurisdictional conflict. By the time this book was being published, Doglia’s second prediction had also come true.)
As for the surviving executed man, I acquired the first piece of concrete evidence that night: his name was Juan Carlos Livraga. On the morning of December 20, I had in my hands a copy of the report that Livraga had filed. Later on, I was able to verify that his account of events was essentially accurate, though it contained a few significant omissions and inaccuracies when it came to details. But it was still too cinematic. Seemed as though it’d been pulled straight out of a movie.