“Because history is the prologue to the world that our children will inherit”, was the introductory phrase of “The Journal of Judgment”; a Number Zero that explained why Publisher Profile he had decided to produce that unique document, to record an exceptional event.
From the May 27, 1985 until January 28, 1986, “El Diario…” covered in 36 copies the hearings of the Trial to the Boards. The proposal was to collect the content of the hearings in stenographic version, compare them with the official records and put the main testimonies of each session on paper.
Each issue contained a central sheet of 24 pages with the declarations of the Trial and eight more pages with relevant current notes, in relation to the events that occurred in the Courts. The journalistic pages of “El Diario…” collected opinions, columns and interviews of the most important personalities of the moment. Until a very young Alberto Fernandez He was a columnist for the publication.
The experience inside
The editorial staff was made up of Marcelo Pichel (Chief Editor), Alberto Amato (Editorial Secretary) and journalists Carlos Cabeza Miñarro and Rodolfo Zibell.
“When they told me I had to cover the trial, I didn’t have too many expectations, because they took me out of my role as Editorial Secretary of La Semana,” Alberto Amato, a journalist with a long career at Clarín, told NEWS after his participation In the diary…”.
“But after the second hearing I didn’t want to do anything else. Seeing the judiciary operating in a courtroom, with witnesses, with prosecutors, defense attorneys, secretaries, was a very hopeful spectacle, at a time when hopes had nested strongly in Argentine society”.
The daily work in the hearings was not easy for the newsroom. Many times the companions were replaced when what they had seen or read that day, had penetrated deep into the spirit of one of them.
“The testimony of Adriana Calvo deLaborde, who is forced to give birth in a patrol car and then forced to clean everything (the testimony is in the film) was dramatic, extraordinary; she made Strassera say ‘I just won the trial’ ”-says Amato about those moments in which the witnesses moved everyone-.
Also strong was the testimony of Claudio Tamburrini, which survived the Seré Mansion, in Ituzaingó. He was in exile in Stockholm, doing a doctorate in Ethics. I think part of his ideas appeared in prosecutor Strassera’s statement. Or the word of Victor Melchor Basterrawho took the photographs of all the repressors of the Esma, secretly, in his underpants and at the risk of his life”.
The four members of the newsroom wrote, in the last number, their own testimony about the Trial and their opinion about the sentence. “Become aware, collectively, that all this happened, that those nine gentlemen really had that power, and exercised it, that terror was the system applied against all and, finally, that this never has to happen again, is the transcendent thing”, said the Editor-in-Chief, Marcelo Pichel, in that final text entitled “Only justice, please”.
“The trial made me change my conception of journalism -concludes Amato today-. In the note that we wrote in the last issue, I already declared that, after what had happened in the country and what I had heard, the journalism that I did (although I did it truthfully and honestly) had no more place in my professional life. Despite the horror, that is a debt that I owe to the Commanders’ Trial”.
You may also like
Image gallery
