The shot who lives, continues to live. And how! 91 years old is Juan Carlos Livraga, and looks lucid, loquacious, attentive, whole. “I never thought he was going to reach 90, but I got there and even passed it… I’m still close, as they say. Sometimes I even go for a little soccer game, and even though they operated on me seven times, huh?… they had to put me together again”, he smiles at Page 12comfortably seated in an armchair at the UOM hotel in Buenos Aires, shortly after meeting Cristina Fernández in the National Senate (Néstor Kirchner had already received him at Casa Rosada, in 2007).
Told to the broad stroke, The story of Livraga, who has lived in the United States for 58 years, is that of a man who escaped from being riddled with bullets from the “Libertadora” of Aramburu and Rojas, during the early morning of June 10, 1956, in the garbage dumps of José León Suárez. And his “survival” made it possible for Rodolfo Walsh to reconstruct that fateful journey through the nodal Operation Massacre. “I didn’t want to leave the country, but I had to do it anyway. Plainclothes policemen stopped me to threaten me, and I think if I didn’t leave, they would kill me. The persecution intensified when Walsh’s notes appeared in the CGT newspaper. So I left for Los Angeles, California, on June 26, 1965.. I suffered a lot, but I had to do it. Once settled there, I started working in construction, three months later my wife and daughter came, and I bought my first house”.
Nine years had passed since the executions in José León Suárez, La Plata, Lanús, the Army Mechanics School, the Federal Police Training Camp, the National Penitentiary and Campo de Mayo, which had ended outside the law. (Martial Law had entered into force when they had already arrested most of the victims) with the lives of 27 people in total, between military and civilians –including that of his friend Vicente Rodríguez, Carlos Lizaso, Nicolás Carranza, Francisco Garibotti and Mario Brión, in the garbage dumps—and yet Livraga was in danger. The fact was still fresh. Even those who thought of it, instigated it and executed it wanted to continue living in freedom, and it was not convenient for a direct witness to the massacre to be aroundcounting backstage.
Livraga had been one of the boys who arrested troops under the command of the Buenos Aires police chief Desiderio Fernández Suárez, in the famous house in Florida, while listening on the radio to the fight between Eduardo Lausse and the Chilean Humberto Loayza for the South American title at Luna Park. Some expected to hear Juan José Valle’s proclamation on the station, to then take action in the streets, in order to put an end to the dictatorial government.
Of course none of that happened. On the contrary, Part of the detainees in Florida (five) were shot after driving around in a truck all night, and the rest (seven) managed to escape. One way or another. Livraga’s escape was the most unusual because the policemen gave him up for dead, and they left.
–How had that terrible day started for you, Juan Carlos? Remember?
–But yes, how to forget it? At that time, I was not working as a bricklayer, the trade my father had taught me, but as a driver on line 10, which then linked Chacarita with Munro. That Saturday morning, the owners of the bus called me to go to work at 12 noon. So I had a drink and went to look for the bus, after passing through the hospital to see my mother, who was hospitalized. I remember that that exact day a game was being played between the Colegiales and All Boys, and I took fans to and from the field. Anyway, when I finished the work day, I got ready to go see a girl who was waiting for me at a ball in Munro. I left home at around 9:30 p.m. to take the bus at Yrigoyen and Tejedor. I crossed a puddle that was in the street, and someone whistled at me. It was my friend Vicente Rodríguez. He asked me where he was going, I told him, and he told me: “but today Lausse fights.” And well, since I really liked boxing, I stayed. That’s when he told me he was going to listen to the fight at the famous house in Florida with some friends, and I went with him.
— Were you a Peronist?
– I liked Perón, but he was not affiliated or militant. My father, who was an Italian bricklayer, was not a Peronist, but when he found out that Perón was going to speak on the radio, he would stop everything and listen to him. He liked Perón, nothing more… he was a man from home to work and from work to home, something he always said. And I am the same. I liked Peron. I even met him.
–How when where?
–One day in 1954, while I was watching a bicycle race at the KDT circuit in Palermo, I turned my head to one side, I saw a car stop on Avenida Libertador, and a man with his face covered inside it… it was the General. I realized it was Perón, but I kept quiet. He shook my hand, told me not to say anything, and he left. I have a great memory of that.
Q: Any other hindrance associated with those days of Peronism in government?
–Okay, yes. The day that Plaza de Mayo was bombed, June 16, 1955, I worked in a photographic company, where I met my future wife. One day they asked me to go to the Capital, near the square, to do some paperwork. And when I was there, the shelling started. Everything turned crazy. I had just parked the car four blocks away… I ran out, and it took me hours and hours until it got dark. I remember that I couldn’t cross General Paz, because it was closed, but I immediately found out that there were more than three hundred people dead. Days later I returned to the place, and I saw the marks of the bullets of the airplanes in the marble of several buildings. Those people were murderers, what was the point of killing people to scare Perón?
–An omen of what a year later you would suffer in person.
–Exact. We had arranged to meet when we arrived with Rodríguez at the house in Florida, right?
–That’s how it is…
— Well, when we entered we didn’t see anything “abnormal”. There were five of us inside the house, and not fourteen as Walsh had written. I never got to talk to him to tell him. But, well, the thing is that we listened to the entire fight, which ended with Lausse’s victory by knockout and then, when I wanted to open the door to leave the house and go see the girl at Munro’s “La Hostería”, they hit me in the chest with a rifle butt that threw me under the table where the others were playing chinchón. Everyone stopped, I was stunned, the policemen came in, they made a mess. They picked me up and took me outside.
–According to your account, there were five inside, and where were the rest?
–Outside. The rest were outside. The fact is that they put us all on the line 19 bus.
–And the odyssey began
–I was grabbed by Fernández Suárez – then police chief of the province of Buenos Aires – with a .45, and he gave me some tremendous blows, which caused blood clots that over the years became a ball. I have photos of that. The fact is that they beat us and then took us to the San Martín Regional, where they put us in a large room, facing out. We would be about 15 people there, until it was time to declare. First my friend Vicente did it, then I did it. I asked him if he was into the thing, and he told me no, that he only distributed pamphlets. I believed him, because I saw his statement, I was able to read it backwards, because I know how to read backwards.
–What was Vicente Rodríguez like?
–Strong and good. He was a Peronist. I jokingly called him “fat pamphleteer” because he sometimes distributed pamphlets, but innocently, and he had once been a union delegate at the port, where he worked manning bags. Well, I go back to the above, the truth is that after the section they made us go around a lot, until we reached the garbage dumps, where they made us walk with the policemen behind us. We didn’t know what was going to happen until we began to hear those crank blows that are heard when rifles are loaded. Then they all started screaming.
–And you?
–No. I don’t. I kept quiet. Since I have military training because I had been in the aeronautics, I would look at what was happening around me so I could escape. The desperation of some was great, they asked please not to be killed for their children and their families. I don’t. I sought to calm down to save myself. I stayed in a corner, I heard my friend Vicente yelling “sons of bitches, kill me!” And they put eleven shots at him. When I saw him fall, I also saw Miguel Angel Giunta, whom I did not know.
–Another “shotgun” who lived.
–Giunta, yes, who hid behind me. At that moment I also saw the weapons pointed at me, I threw myself on the ground, and they began to shoot. Giunta ran away, I remained prone to the ground, while they gave the coup de grace to the others. In that I heard something like “he breathes, shoot him.” Then I closed my eyes, I felt a shot that took a piece out of my nose. Another one that pierced my jaw from side to side and the third one that hit me in the arm, that one was hit by Commissioner Rodríguez Moreno. But the one on his face brought me mouthfuls of blood as if he were dead. And then they left me and left.
–How was the moment immediately after? What did you manage to do?
–I stopped and escaped from the place. I wanted to get to the train station, and take one to San Andres, but I got to the barriers, I saw a police jeep, I fainted, and a police officer who was in a booth saved me. When he asked me what had happened to me, I wanted to speak and I released a mouthful of blood from my mouth. In addition to his teeth and part of his throat, he was losing a lot of blood. Then I was transferred by the police to the Perón hospital, where the nurses, after the first treatment, called my house and told my father that I was decompensated. My father came to the hospital with his cousin and later, other police officers took me out, disappeared me and erased my name from the hospital admission records. But luckily the nurses had left my father the paper that proved that what they said was not true. They hadn’t killed me, of course. But they did try to make me die alone.
–What happened after the hospital? Where did they take him?
–I would say that my true ordeal began here. After wandering around for hours, they took me to a cell in Moreno, where they put me in jail, completely naked, with a temperature of five degrees below zero. I was locked up there for almost a month… I lost 20 kilos because I didn’t eat and, when they came to take me out because my lawyer Von Kotsch knew I was alive and started the campaign for me, I had long hair, a long beard, my face completely swollen, and speechless… beckoned with her fingers.
Livraga’s next destination was the Olmos prison, where there were some three thousand political prisoners. It was there that Walsh interviewed him. “I got scared again there. The truth is that she was waiting for me to be killed, because she was a person who had seen everything in the dumps. In fact they wanted to kill me, but they didn’t know how. In short, in Olmos they cut my hair, shaved me, I was able to bathe well, remove the scabs with soap, and dress in prison clothes. I was able to do that because one of the prisoners said that I was there for having killed four police officers, a fallacy that changed my life inside, because they began to respect me.”
Already clean, serene, and fed, Livraga was reunited to his surprise with Miguel Angel Giunta -also imprisoned in Olmos– whom he believed to be dead. “Giunta told me that she had played dead, that she had thrown herself to the ground, with the bullets passing her by,” she recalls.
–And relief came not only when his parents visited him, but also the lawyer Von Kotsch…
–That the first thing he asked me was about the piece of paper he was counting on, and I told him that my father had it. It was the test that led to my release on August 17. So we left the jail with Giunta, took the bus to Retiro, then the train to Florida. Then he got sick, and I didn’t see him anymore. They were looking for him.
Q: What happened to you after you were released?
–I got married in 1959, at the Florida Soccer Club. Two years later my daughter was born and I had to move to Villa Adelina because they were following me. When I went to see my parents, I remember, I would jump over the dividing wall and enter from behind, like when I was young and came late from dancing. I couldn’t live like that and, as I mentioned before, I ended up going to live in the United States.
