On June 9, 1956, shortly before midnight, police arrested 12 people at a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where they had gathered to watch a boxing match. He took them to the police station and from there to an open field where he shot them. Five died; seven managed to escape. —died in 1977 by the dictatorship—reconstructed those murders in one of the pioneering non-fiction books, Operation Massacrewhen pulling on the thread that an acquaintance threw at him in a bar:
—There is a shot who lives.
That person who was shot was Juan Carlos Livraga. Today he lives in the United States, where he went into exile more than six decades ago. At 96 years old, his recorded testimony was the first heard in the truth trial that began this Wednesday in José León Suárez, a few hundred meters from where the crimes occurred.
The Argentine Justice is thus preparing to repair a historical debt: to shed light on the massacre that was one of the darkest events of the dictatorship calling itself the Liberating Revolution, responsible for the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955. “It is a historic day,” said plaintiff lawyer Alberto Palacio in a packed auditorium. “It is a fundamental reparatory act,” he added in front of victims, relatives, authorities, students and journalists.
The police murdered five of the detainees: Carlos Lizaso, Nicolás Carranza, Francisco Garibotti, Mario Brion and Vicente Rodríguez. The others—Livraga, Reinaldo Benavídez, Horacio Di Chiano, Miguel Ángel Giunta, Norberto Gavino, Rogelio Díaz and Julio Troxler—were saved.
***
—Where is Tanco?
During his testimony, Livraga remembers that question asked by one of the police officers who went to look for them on the night of June 9, 1956. They believed that among them was General Raúl Tanco, one of the ideologues—along with General Juan José Valle—of the frustrated coup against the regime of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. Although they didn’t find him or prove any link, they took them anyway. Livraga was hit with the butt of a rifle which left him unconscious. He regained consciousness when they were dragging him across the ground towards a military truck, and one of the uniformed men mocked him. “With this look, were you thinking of making the revolution?’, he asked me,” he adds in his story.
The person who yells at him that night, it will be known later, is the head of the Police of the province of Buenos Aires at that time, Lieutenant Colonel Desiderio Fernández Suárez. He was never held accountable before civil justice. He died in 2001.
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Livraga says that that night they were taken to a police station and, hours later, to a vacant lot in José León Suárez. “I fell to the ground,” says Livraga. “I heard screams, shots, and I was not moving on my back, breathing slowly,” he continues. “This guy is breathing, shoot him,” he heard shortly before a bullet hit him in the face and passed through his jaw. It faded away. When he woke up, very sore and very cold, he got up and started walking until he found help and was taken to a hospital. He received medical attention, but was then imprisoned for two months.
Half a year had passed when Walsh met him and, shortly after, other survivors. , began to investigate the massacre of José León Suárez, which occurred shortly before the regime imposed martial law to abort the Valle and Tanco uprising. Livraga also went to court, but his complaint was unsuccessful.
Seven decades later, the trial for truth carried out by the federal court number two of San Martín, under the leadership of Judge Alicia Vence, does not contemplate convictions, but rather aims to reconstruct the crimes and obtain historical reparation for the victims and their families. “There are facts whose prosecution retains legal and institutional relevance, even when a criminal response is no longer possible,” said Vence. “The judicial examination of certain events is important for society as a whole. This is why we are summoned today to examine the events that occurred between the night of June 9 and the early morning of June 10, 1956,” he stressed.
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—When she found out, my mom started crying. He screamed and screamed and screamed. I have that ugly moment recorded for a lifetime. My childhood shot, my youth shot; I hope this ends once and for all.
The voice of Alicia Rodríguez, daughter of Vicente Rodríguez, breaks when remembering the moment when her mother, five months pregnant, found out that her husband was dead. She was 10 years old. That day they forgot their younger brother, six, at the police station where they were told the news. His mother lost the baby she was expecting. I was terrified. He forced them to remain silent about what happened, remembers Rodríguez, now 81 years old, proud of being able to appear in court for the first time in her life.
Delia Garibotti tells the court that she has not been able to forget the last image of her father, Francisco Garibotti:
—I saw my dad in the drawer. He had a shot in the heart.
Berta Carranza, on the other hand, admits that she has no memories of him, of Nicolás Carranza, because he was only two years old when he was shot, but she does have memories of the difficult life that her family faced from that moment on and of the wound that is still open:
—I want justice to be done. That, even though the murderers are not there, this is known, that they are declared crimes against humanity.
This trial gained momentum after the precedent of the trial by , held in 2022, where the justice system recognized the death in 1924 of 500 Qom and Mocoví indigenous people at the hands of the police in the northern province of Chaco. Over there .
