Operation Massacre(74)

            It was then and only then, with the case completely clear and resolved, that “Marcelo” came into the picture.





Regarding “Marcelo”


            At first, “Marcelo” was simply a voice on the telephone. A tense, nervous voice that would call the main office at the Revolución Nacional bureau and ask to speak to the author who wrote the articles on the José León Suárez executions. We set up an interview for February 22, 1957. “Marcelo” was devastated when he found out that he was taking a risk unnecessarily, since Torres had already provided me with all the information he brought me. The funny thing is, even if I had never met either of these two men, I still would have found out about the other survivors. Because on the twenty-third or the twenty-fourth of February, I received a third letter with a list of all the survivors from the informant who signed his name “Atilas.” “Atilas” arrived forty-eight hours late, but I still want to take the opportunity—if he happens to be reading this—to thank him for his valuable help.

            There is not one important piece of information in the text of Operation Massacre that hasn’t been matched and double-checked with the testimony of three or four people, sometimes more. With respect to the basic facts, I have ruthlessly thrown out any information that was not corroborated, as sensational as it might have been. It’s possible that some minor mistakes in detail have slipped, but the account is fundamentally accurate and I can prove it before any civil or military court.

            Returning now to “Marcelo”: his and Torres’s matching testimony was damaging to Livraga and benefited Fernández Suárez, which demonstrates conclusively that it was true. Based on Livraga’s formal accusation, I had assumed in my first articles for Revolución Nacional that Fernández Suárez arrested only five people at the house in Florida, and indiscriminately rounded up the rest in the surrounding area. Torres and “Marcelo” explained to me that this was not the case, that all the executed men had been arrested inside the house. From this perspective, the raid at least had a certain logic to it and Fernández Suárez’s behavior before the mass murder seemed easier to explain. I was completely honest about this and made it clear the first chance I got. Torres went further still: he admitted that he and Gavino were involved in the uprising, even though they did not get to act. These people were completely frank with me and told me who had been involved: Torres and Gavino. The ones who had simply known about it were Carranza and Lizaso. And those who knew absolutely nothing were Brión, Giunta, Di Chiano, Livraga, and Garibotti. For lack of concrete facts, I was still in the dark about the state of mind of men like Rodríguez and Díaz. All of this is stated very clearly in my account. As for Troxler and Benavídez, it doesn’t really matter if they were involved or whether they knew anything: they were taken to be executed for the sole crime of ringing a doorbell.

            “Marcelo” was a short man with olive skin, dark glasses, and a bitter, disdainful expression on his face. He was thirty-seven years old but looked older. His most valuable contributions to my book were the moving, faltering words he used to speak about Carlitos Lizaso. He remembered him with almost as much intensity as a father would his son: in his way of being, in his little anecdotes, in his youthful happiness. Over the course of the months I have spent digging around in this case, I have met women who weep every rotten day as a matter of habit; I have met small children with an unmistakably distant look in their eyes (“Do you miss your father very much?” “Oh, yes, you have no idea . . .”); and I have met brothers whose clenched fists on the table are a natural extension of the murderous look in their eyes. But I have seen few things like the dull, terrible, cutting pain of this man when he remembers that boy. He would try, uselessly, to recreate him with a gesture, to bring his smile back to life with an awkward grimace, “to bring him back and ungag him”; he, a ruined and unwell man.

            I am sorry that “Marcelo” decided to follow the fruitless road of terror to banish this ghost. But my question is: Have the high judges and rulers who are protecting his friend’s murderer given him any other way? I know that there is nothing more difficult than justifying a bomb-thrower, and I do not even plan to try. All I can say is that, at heart, that’s not who “Marcelo” was. At heart, he was a man who suffered terribly, constantly, sleeplessly. Every time he would think back on leaving the house in Florida ten minutes before the raid, he would say again: “If I had just stayed . . . If I had just . . .” A sense of male pride stopped him from saying that he, too, wished he were dead.