Today, Thursday, January 25, at 27 years since the murder of the photographer from NEWS magazine José Luis Cabezasthe Association of Graphic Reporters of the Argentine Republic (ARGRA), held a heartfelt tribute in his name at its headquarters in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.
So it was that at 11:30 in the morning, the president took the microphone Sebastian Vricella and gave a speech to the more than 50 photographers and members of the Association who were present. After an introduction in which she recalled dates and situations that marked the photographers’ union in Argentina, Vricella did not hesitate to reinforce “the tireless fight to identify and convict the murderers of our colleague”. And he continued: “We fought against a police that did not want to investigate, a political power that wanted the murderers unpunished, and a Justice that did not want to listen to us. That is why we must not forget that we photojournalists, with the support of our fellow press workers and with the help of a majority of the Argentine people, managed to put the material authors in the dock and unmask their principals.”
While some photographers kept their cameras up in a show of struggle and never forgetting what had happened, others listened attentively. Vricella alluded to the new political ideology that governs the country and on behalf of everyone he stated: “Today we say “Let’s not forget Cabezas” also in self-defense. The same impunity that murdered him returns in another guise, but with the same violence and the same contempt for our lives. “We do not forget Cabezas”, today, it also means fighting for the rights that he had in his work as a photojournalist.
It is worth remembering that the photographer Jose Luis Cabezas was murdered in the early morning of January 25, 1997 after a birthday party at the postal businessman’s house Oscar Andreaniin Pinamar, where the photographer was doing summer coverage for our magazine.
Many years later and after a tireless fight, Justice ruled that Cabezas was captured by the “Los Horneros Band” that took him to a cellar on a rural road in General Madariaga where they killed him with two shots. Businessman Alfredo Yabran He was declared the “mediate” intellectual author of the crime, because the reporter had managed to photograph him that last summer. However, the postal businessman was not tried since he committed suicide in 1998 and if they served effective prison Gustavo Prellezo, Aníbal Luna, Sergio Camaratta, Alberto “La Liebre” Gómez, Sergio González, José Luis Auge, Horacio Braga and Héctor Retanaall guilty of the photographer’s murder.
At the end of the event, Vricelli’s voice once again took over everyone’s attention. “27 years after his murder, we meet again, we mobilize again and march throughout the country to demand justice, memory and truth. Let the powerful know that we are going to fight for our rights as we fight for the memory of José Luis, which is ours, because we take care of it, we defend it and we will continue to claim it in self-defense.”
The closing was with the now classic but equally emotional “Heads, present!”, “Heads, present!”, “Heads, present!”.
