Ceferino Reato is, above all, a journalistic investigator. Choose a topic, interview, look for the evidence that corroborates or refutes his sayings and captures it in the form of a book. He does it almost with the coldness of a surgeon. No other manual applies than that of great Argentine researchers such as Tomas Eloy Martinez and Rodolfo Walsh. But in the Argentina of the crack, today that can be irritating or suspicious.
He did it again in his new book, “Massacre in the dining room. The Montoneros bomb in the Federal Police. The bloodiest attack of the 70s”. As in his other works, Reato writes in a stripped style what was an attack that shocked the country in its time. happened on July 2, 1976, one hundred days after the dictatorship was established. He left 23 dead and 110 wounded. Montoneros assumed the fact, which was never investigated by the Justice.
The book describes in detail the moment and the consequences of the explosion and tells some of the stories of those who died or survived the attack. Also the life of Jose Maria Salgado perpetrator of the attack, a young upper-middle class Catholic turned member of the IIntelligence of Montoneros and infiltrated in the police. Reato explains why the attack was decided, how it was carried out and who was responsible. At this point, he involves not only driving guerrilla but Walshfor its role within the Montonera structure.
As the researcher says, Walsh’s relationship with the attack is not too much addressed by other authors. Reato He attributes it to the fear of messing with the author of classics of the journalistic investigation genre (“Operation Massacre”, “Who killed Rosendo”) and refined narrator of black police and enigma, whom Reato relates directly to what happened.
The book has vertiginous passages in which it is difficult to stop reading and others that may seem too arduous the stories about the victims or the macabre detailed description of what the explosion left behind. But the result is a authentic reato: a deep investigation that does not go unnoticed because, among other things, he again challenges the political correctness of this time.
It is that this author does not fail to point out what a delirious attack meant in which, in addition, only lower-ranking non-commissioned officers died (the only two officers were also low-ranking) and civilian workers who passed by by chance. He also does not forget the atrocities of the dictatorship, the ordeal to which the material author of the attack was subjected, without the right to the slightest defense, nor what happened to other detained militants.
For Reato, “the history of the 70s is the history of all its victims”, emphasizing the word “all”. Which, rightly so, may offend the sensibilities of those who consider that the victims of armed organizations cannot be equated with those of the State apparatus. He accepts that risk, convinced that journalists must investigate beyond the sensitivities that their investigations provoke. That is why he is also uncomfortable for the defenders of the dictatorship, because he remembers at every step the system of violation of human rights and military cruelty during those years. But it is especially uncomfortable for those who think that journalistic investigation of the 1970s should be limited to what the dictators did.
Reato doesn’t think so. He looks for little hackneyed stories, interviewing anyone to get information, be they Videla or the guerrilla chiefs. It is a style that can be related to that of Marcelo Larraquy, another journalist specialized in that decade.
It can also be an uncomfortable book for the reader accustomed to crack texts, those that divide history and the present between good, very good, and bad, very bad.
It is not what is found in this text. There are victims here, but no heroes. There are people willing to give their lives for an ideal and unceremoniously kill someone they consider an enemy or even someone who inadvertently got in their way. There are soldiers who refuse to repress the left and They ask to exterminate all the “subversives” from the right. There are heads of the ESMA exposed in their atrocitiess and there are jailers with humanitarian gestures, according to the testimonies of their hostages. There are detainees who do what they can to survive and others who are tortured to death. And there is a debate between two ex-monteros and journalists like Horace Verbitsky and Miguel Bonassoabout why Walsh fell into a military ambush.
This book, like the 70s, is complex, fascinating and controversial. And it is a reminder of what a deranged country was. The Reported Account of a Nightmare in which life was worth nothing.
