In 1966, Argentina experienced yet another military coup, this time led by General Juan Carlos Onganía, marking the beginning of escalating civil violence. This violence peaked in the following decade, claiming the lives of thousands who were in search of an elusive utopia. This unreachable ideal was emblematic of a revolutionary, nonconformist world that believed in societal models that ultimately crumbled within a few decades. By saying “thousands of people,” we dilute the true tragedy; it was thousands of youths, many in their twenties, some teenagers, others just pubescent. These young men and women zealously pursued an Eden that was doomed when they entered the fray. The fall of Che Guevara in Bolivia was a warning they failed to heed. This path had already been trodden throughout the 20th century by millions who also placed their lives at death’s door, and time and again, it was death that prevailed.
Enmeshed in such a fantastical venture where pain and pleasure melded into an extravagant mortar, it wasn’t easy to walk away. As Albert Camus warned, the life of action is extraordinary, anchored in the primitive notion of personal sacrifice for an absolute ideology and the inhumane belief that rationality is built on the enemy’s corpse.
While justifying armed struggle against military dictatorships might have been plausible, using bullets against a democratically elected government was a provocation to the workers and the society that chose ballots and trusted in peace.
Authoritarians don’t like this
Professional, critical journalism is a cornerstone of democracy. It bothers those who consider themselves the sole possessors of the truth.
But Che Guevara had charted a course that couldn’t be abandoned: welcoming death wherever it may find us, as long as our battle cry reached a receptive ear and another hand picked up our weapons, ready to sing the mournful tunes with the chatter of machine guns and new war cries and victories. This was the prayer recited by thousands of youths—a battlefield where dying seemed glorious and desirable.
Killing or dying should never be desirable. Workers were the first to understand this, stepping aside and abandoning those they once admired. Workers losing enthusiasm for revolution was not significant; the liberating awakening of men did not depend on themselves. A politically active generation was ready to build the vanguard tool that history had assigned them with courage and tenacity.
It took just eight years for society to transition from initial sympathy to popular rejection, from heroic songs to the grim certainty of defeat. An insignificant period in any society’s history, yet paradoxically, it left a scar that spans generations.
The prolonged agony of armed organizations resulted in countless preventable deaths. Appeals for combat and the glorification of the dead attempted to reverse a process that was powerful in its advance and criminal in its methods.
Those years were filled with joy, intense fears, deep pains, and wounds that remain unhealed. Years filled with reckless actions that left survivors immersed in a cemetery of friends and loved ones. The frenetic, transgressive activity allowed no time for reflection, making any feeling of anguish brief and quickly exhausted. For the most tenacious, anguish was a petty bourgeois sentiment.
The dead became a legion—admirable, enthusiastic, noble, but also, some abominable; because not all are redeemed by death. Survivors remain fixed over thousands of graves, in a wasteland covered with the bodies of those unlucky enough not to dodge death. The dead are submerged in an endless night of laments, voiceless.
Only a few left tangible voices—in letters, printed texts, chronicles, articles, novels, or short stories. Also, in paintings, with oils on canvas allowing us to know the artist’s inner life and obsessions reflected in color or the brushstroke.
In musical scores or celluloid, because music and cinema continuously convey the creator’s emotions to future generations who will always listen and watch the chords and scenes they created. This heritage gives us the enduring voices of the dead.
What do we do with those who left no testimony? The anonymous, the ignored, those who are just a name with a photo among thousands of names and photos?
Is it legitimate to appropriate the voice of those who vanished in a silent wilderness, leaving no tangible evidence to guide us through their hypothetical reflections of the present? Can we give voice to someone who no longer exists, capturing their absent voice without crossing moral and ethical boundaries?
And by what right do we do this?
I believe the answer lies in fiction. It provides the tool, the sovereign right, allowing the writer the freedom to create characters as they wish. Literature grants the writer the right to put words in the mouths of imaginative creatures, sometimes only slightly imaginative. To rewrite history with the arbitrariness and whim that their imagination and conjectures afford them.
This is not a book for the champions of exemplary memory. It is a text in which the lives, deaths, and history of a handful of men and women blend with the narrator’s subjectivity, who claims the right to rescue them from hidden graves and give them voice. A voice that can be challenging, desperate, sometimes cynical—because they were beings with all the virtues and all the shadows that make us human.
*Journalist and writer. Excerpts from his recently published book, “The Ballad of the Dead.”
The Voices
Emilce Coria
I still taste the cloying blood in my mouth; not even the salty sea has managed to erase it from my memory. Here, the ocean is transparent and greenish, perhaps amber. The salt is sharp, bitter, and although it has permeated this inert body for so many years, it yields to the sweetness of the plasma, now liquefied in the depths. I am not alone; a legion lies down here with me. Other skeletons accompany me on the soft bed among curious fish and algae, gazing at us, wondering, “What are you doing here?”
Hugo and Ariel
Why didn’t they warn us when we were recruited in the cloister? Why didn’t they let us return home? Revolutionary ethics and morale fill their mouths while we, from here, watch the jungle grow over our bodies buried more than sixty years ago; the trees block the sun during the day, turning this place into a damp, sticky cloth. We were executed by our companions because we weren’t fit for the fight. Was it necessary? Our graves are side by side, and no one will ever find them. No one is looking for us. We were 21 when they summoned us, when they killed us, when bullets stopped our enthusiastic, credulous hearts.
Iván Pitol
The end was inevitable. It wasn’t the time to start a war like they did. They tried to emulate Che Guevara and disregarded our lives. Irresponsible! They caused a massacre. Adventurers filled cemeteries with the bodies of gullible youths. I was a worker and a victim of theirs. Look at the result: my companions are defenseless before their bosses. You are responsible for my death and the despair that has spread among the workers like a pandemic.
*Excerpts from “The Ballad of the Dead.”
