25 years ago, I was on vacation in Uruguay. In La Pedrera, to be exact, and convinced that luck had been on my side, because I played a few pesos at the raffle and won. Not much, but enough to alleviate the expenses of the summer in the unreality of 1 to 1. He had agreed to stop by, before turning around, by the house where the NEWS teams of the season stayed in east end. One of them had as a chronicler christian balbo. I called him to let him know that the next morning I would be there. I was speechless at the pay phone, sitting on the floor, groggy from the shock of the awful news. When I caught my breath, the call was the newsroom in Buenos Aires for instructions. I was told to join the operation in Punta to cover the repercussions of the murder of José Luis Cabezas among the politicians, businessmen and journalists who were resting there. It was all confusion. How to report a hurricane from the inside.
I came back two weeks later. Driving the magazine sent me to Pinamar to join the colleagues who were trying to tie the first loose ends. We confirm the links between tourism companies in Yabran and the local police station, beginning with its boss, the Commissioner Alberto Gomez. We work side by side with the lawyer Norm Pepe, coming and going to pains, where the judge and the prosecutor were. At breakfast, with Norma we reviewed the data, the doubts and the daily disappointments. Three rough years of investigation were missing to get to the truth.
Héctor D’Amico and Gustavo González, then director and head of Politics, they made me come back to lead the team assigned to the case: we became a dozen editors and photographers, plus the aforementioned Pepe and the criminal Oscar Pellicori, With whom I had to go to Mar del Plata in search of a crucial piece of evidence: a birthday card that Yabrán had sent to the sundicalist Oscar Lescano with a vase as a gift. The card said: “If you don’t like it, it’s for you to smash it over some indiscreet photographer’s head.”
Investigating the homicide of a coworker was a suffocating challenge, a permanent risk of confusing the role and losing the line, the axis, sanity. I only set one condition to accept the leadership of that unforgettable team: that I be relieved of contact with the Cabezas family. The unbearable pain of those good people filled me with hatred, partiality, subjectivism, powerful internal enemies of the professional journalist. I think we do our duty with dignity. The same, just in case, during this last decade I have been giving a workshop of the Case Heads in the Postgraduate Journalistic Investigation that Perfil develops with the Universidad del Salvador. While I reconstruct in class that emblematic case to describe the violent and corrupt backroom of our country, I literally submit our work to the scrutiny of eager future journalists. The idea is that they judge with a critical eye whether “The trial diary” that we did while still feeling the smell of burnt meat was done with professionalism. It is usually a great experience. And a way for José Luis to be substance.
