It is still strange that in a country with inflation of 94.8 percent per year, in which four out of ten children go hungry, all the media are pending hours and hours of a criminal trial. Although it does not judge any fact: eight young people kicked another young man to death at the exit of a nightclub. Meanwhile, in just three weeks, a million people went to a cinema to see Argentina, 1985, a film that reconstructs a process filed and sentenced… forty years ago.
Why this Argentine obsession with justice? When some feverish mind decided to self-christen the dictatorship implanted on March 24, 1976 as the National Reorganization Process, they surely did not foresee the Kafkaesque repercussions that it would open. It is that Franz Kafka’s posthumous novel published in 1925 had an echo in these lands. The protagonist of The Trial, Joseph K., is put on trial by nameless gentlemen, convicted of charges that no one formulates once morest him through a sentence that no one reads to him, and executed in a ghostly suburban setting. Joseph K. reflects on his own murder: “Like a dog!” And the last sentence of the book says: “It was as if the shame should survive him.”
The equivalence of these Kafkaesque nightmares with the Argentina of our Process overwhelmed me at the beginning of the 80s, in Barcelona. I wrote regarding it and took my ramblings to the office where El Viejo Topo was published. I brought it together in my first book, which I titled Carnivore Power (1985).
Everything is different today, the courts have light and sound, clear rules, the accused know their rights, society practices free criticism. And yet, that image of the court to which we must all submit, the values it embodies, the symbols that surround it still disturb us, and behind the blindfolded figure of the goddess the burning question appears once more and once more: what is justice?
Hypothesis: the heart of life in society is the monopoly of the use of violence by the State and its exercise subject to rules. The way in which the State judges crime treats politics. From there society is formed. A crime violates that absolute law, disturbs that primary notion simply because someone assumes the power to dispose of the life of another. Sometimes, the border between the police chronicle of the newspaper and the political chronicle is fluid. Crime, Foucault postulated, is degenerate mimesis of history.
Literature knows of such darkness. They were summoned by that Shakespeare whose works cry out for crimes or harbingers of crimes. Also Dante who narrates in Song V of Hell the end of Francesca de Rimini at the hands of an uxoricide who is also a fratricide! Not to mention the glacial, torrential confession of a murderer that Albert Camus composed in The Stranger or the adventures of the homicidal duo that Truman Capote rescued in the pages of the New Yorker. In Villa Gesell something very disturbing happened at dawn, three years ago. The process revives it. It is true that television spectacularizes legality, sometimes in a crude way, promoting, for example, a media lynching of the accused. But the fascination exerted by crime is greater than the degradation of its treatment.
How did Argentina resolve the profound disturbance caused by crimes? When, in 1906, Petiso Orejudo broke out (Cayetano Santos Godino, 10, murdered babies by piercing their skulls with a nail), society was faced with a hitherto unknown notion: a child might be a perverse murderer. We were not prepared for that. There were no child psychiatric institutions (not even for adults), the legislation did not cover crimes committed by minors. The precocious monster risked violent revenge. One way or another, society resolved the challenge, and following twists and turns Godino died of old age in the End of the World Prison. In 1909, a Russian immigrant named Simón Radowitzky assassinated the police chief, Ramón Falcón, in the middle of Callao avenue. The murderer, caught, was saved from the death penalty for being a minor. A reclusive man, he survived abuse for more than two decades and eventually received a presidential pardon. In 1922 the State did not know how to resolve a social issue, the protests of rural workers in Patagonia. A colonel from the nation shot fifteen hundred of them without trial. This uniformed killer was in turn killed on the street and the killer of the killer was killed in jail.
The State left unpunished the bombing of Plaza de Mayo in 1955, done perhaps without comparison in the world (many cities were bombed and some destroyed from the air, but in wars, and none by aviators of the same nationality). Those naval pilots, never tried, were promoted in their force. One of them, perhaps the last survivor, died during the pandemic. Although he had achieved high ranks in the weapon, he was only fired in the press by a story from the Yacht Club of San Isidro. Society’s rejection of the massacre had reached him, making him invisible. It is that that crime penetrated deep into the conscience of a country that during the following decades was bathed in blood.
After the Malvinas War, the company tried to solve the crimes once morest humanity committed once morest thousands of men and women by the coup leaders of 1976. It did so by appealing to jurists who had been jurists of the regime they condemned. Santiago Miter’s film regarding that process released multiple perspectives that today review what happened.
The Villa Gesell crime is paradigmatic of the world of the omniscient image: the murder of Fernando Báez Sosa was filmed so many times and from so many angles that more than legal experts, the court needs film editors to put together the fatal chronology.
We are all filmed at all times. Perhaps the precedent for cinematographic forensics was the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy sixty years ago. The footage of the president being shot while walking the streets of Dallas unleashed thousands of forensics and reconstructions to determine where the murderous bullet had come from and thus identify the killer.
The homicidal paroxysm of the fanatical groups has been staining football for many years. The statistics compiled by the NGO Salvemos el Fútbol indicate the figure of 342 deaths on the pitches. The martyrdom of Fernando Báez Sosa reminded me of that of Emanuel Bono, the Belgrano fan who, during the Cordovan classic played at the Kempes stadium in Córdoba on April 17, 2017, was accused of being a Talleres fan. They threw him into the void from the top of the grandstand. The stadium cameras recorded the event in which there were also multiple culprits. The principal, Sapito Gómez, was sentenced to 15 years, and four others to lesser sentences. The corpse of Emanuel Bono, stretched out in the gallery below, had his shoes stolen. The game was played normally.
Pain is only useful if it allows understanding. The fact that crime is naturalized as a banality of summer media tedium does not add anything to the pedagogical purpose of justice. Both the endless repetition of unconnected scenes regarding the dawn of the crime as well as the verbal condemnations once morest the murderers of Villa Gesell formulated by opinion-makers or presenters are irrelevant as conscience builders. For pedagogy, article 79 of the Penal Code is sufficient: “A prison term of eight to twenty-five years will be applied to anyone who kills another.” While the events in Gesell are relived over and over once more on the screens, other young people have already been kicked to death at the exit of nightclubs.
*Argentine writer.
You may also like
