Operation Massacre Read Online Free PDF Page B

all feel ashamed, the judge seems to be moved, and I feel myself moved again by the tragedy that has befallen my cousin.
    That’s the story I write feverishly and in one sitting so that no one beats me to it, but that later gets more wrinkled every day in my pocket because I walk around all of Buenos Aires with it and hardly anyone wants to know about it, let alone publish it. You begin to believe in the crime novels you’ve read or written, and think that a story like this, with a talking dead man, is going to be fought over by the presses. You think you’re running a race against time, that at any given moment a big newspaper is going to send out a dozen reporters and photographers, just like in the movies. But instead you find that no one wants anything to do with it.
    It’s funny, really, to read through all the newspapers twelve years later and see that this story doesn’t exist and never did.
    So I wander into increasingly remote outskirts of journalism until finally I walk into a basement on Leandro Alem Avenue where they are putting out a union pamphlet, and I find a man who’s willing to take the risk. He is trembling and sweating because he’s no movie hero either, just a man who is willing to take the risk, and that’s worth more than a movie hero. And the story is printed, a flurry of little yellow leaflets in the kiosks: badly designed, with no signature, and with all the headings changed, but it’s printed. I look at it affectionately as it’s snatched up by ten thousand anonymous hands.
    But I’ve had even more luck than that. There is a young journalist named Enriqueta Muñiz who has been with me from the very beginning and has put herself entirely on the line. It is difficult to do her justice in just a few sentences. I simply want to say that if I have written “I did,” “I went,” “I discovered” anywhere in this book, it should all be read as “We did,” “We went,” “We discovered.” There were several important things that she got alone, like testimonies from Troxler, Benavídez, and Gavino, who were all in exile. At the time, I didn’t see the world as an ordered sequence of guarantees and certainties, but rather as the exact opposite. In Enriqueta Muñiz I found the security, bravery, and intelligence that seemed so hard to come by.
    So one afternoon we take the train to José León Suárez and bring a camera with us, along with a little map that Livraga has drawn up for us in pencil, a detailed bus driver’s map. He has marked the roads and rail crossings for us, as well as a grove and an X where it all happened. At dusk, we walk about eight blocks along a paved road, catch sight of the tall, dark row of eucalyptus trees that the executioner Rodríguez Moreno had deemed “an appropriate place for the task” (namely, the task of shooting them), and find ourselves in front of a sea of tin cans and delusions. One of the greatest delusions was the notion that a place like this cannot remain so calm, so quiet and forgotten beneath the setting sun, without someone keeping watch over the history imprisoned in the garbage that glistens with a false tide of thoughtfully gleaming dead metals. But Enriqueta says “It happened here,” and casually sits down on the ground so that I can take a picnic photo of her because, just at that moment, a tall sullen man with a big sullen dog walks by. I don’t know why one notices these things. But this was where it happened, and Livraga’s story feels more real now: here was the path, over there was the ditch, the garbage dump and the night all around us.
    The following day we go see the other survivor, Miguel Ángel Giunta, who greets us by slamming the door in our faces. He doesn’t believe us when we tell him we’re journalists and asks for credentials that we don’t have. I don’t know what it is that we say to him