In the last days of April, a group of old Peronists met in Avellaneda, a political mythist with a view to the Buenos Aires election. It could have been one of many more meetings if it were not for a detail: among those present was Julio Yesssi, the once leader of the fearsome “Jotaperra” and the last convicted of crimes of the triple to which he is alive. The news ran quickly among human rights militants, especially among relatives of the victims of the Pacheco massacre, the crime of three PTS militants that had Yesssi as the main point. And on Friday 13 more than 300 people concentrated in front of the house of who was the right hand of the “sorcerer” López scolds to express his repudiation.
History. News readers may remember Yesssi’s name. At the start of 2018 the man reached the lid of this medium, where he spoke, for the first time, in a long six -hour interview. He had been a key man in López Rega’s assembly. In early 1974, “El Brujo” appointed him director of the National Institute of Cooperative Action, within the fearsome Ministry of Social Welfare. That position gave him power and also a box, as documented in the trial that condemned him to life imprisonment for an illicit association and in which among so many evidence was the purchase of ten machine guns from him. The previous year he had become López Rega advisor and it had been the one who had anointed him as the maximum leader of the Peronist Youth of the Argentine Republic, who went down in history under the turbulent name of the “Jotaperra.” The appearance of Lopezrreguista Youth had been one of the watershed in the relationship between Perón with Montoneros: Yesssi’s empowerment, an open affront to the Firmenich space, was the beginning of the end of that link. “You can’t have contact with people who systematically deny you. I invited Montoneros, but they didn’t want to recognize me. They made internal provocation,” said the “sorcerer” chief in that interview.
Yesssi had also been sentenced in the first instance for the murder of three PST militants (Oscar Meza, Mario Zidda and Antonio Moses) in Pacheco. But at the end of 2020, Chamber I of the Criminal and Correctional Chamber of the Federal Capital revoked the sentence. “And if there is no justice, there will be escrache,” says Gabriela del Pino, meza’s niece.
