Chapters (16)
The thing is that, unlike other operations in preparation for genocide—most notably, Operation Independence in Tucumán—the conflict here between the Liberation Army and the Argentine army had almost no reverberations outside the immediate locality, for many reasons—above all, because of how short-lived the actions of both groups were. The Liberation Army settled into Zañartú and its surroundings and tried to do too much: on the one hand, they tried to raise the consciousness of the historically exploited and abused yerba mate workers, and on the other, they tried to improve the living conditions of the Mbyá-Guaraní aborigine population. They did make some inroads with the province’s tareferos, or artisanal yerba harvesters. (As of this writing, 70% of tareferos make their living from off-the-books labor that in many cases could be considered slavery. They tend to inhabit precarious houses, have no access to basic services, and have high rates of child labor.) Most are employed by the Isondú company, property of the powerful Reyes Bradford family, and to a lesser extent by Obereña, owned by the Larraquy family. The extreme consolidation of property here meant that the army—which had a strong presence near the border and acted in cahoots with the companies; they had long-standing relationships with the families and even acted as their security—attacked the guerrillas quickly, though not efficiently. The young fighters were trained, which surprised the soldiers, and they resisted in the jungle for almost a week. In the end nearly all of them were wiped out, and except for the survivors, Agustín Pérez Rossi (twenty-two, from Béccar, Buenos Aires) and Mónica Lynch (twenty-three, from Martínez, Buenos Aires; almost none of the revolutionaries were native to the northern provinces), they all remain disappeared. Pérez Rossi and Lynch, who spoke with me from exile—they live in Paris and are still friends—are convinced that their comrades are buried in this mass grave that has just become public. Neither of them wants to return to Argentina; they say they will, though only to visit, once the bodies begin to be identified.
When we speak, what neither Lynch nor Pérez Rossi mentions, and I don’t either—sometimes it is hard to name the horror—is that the Liberation Army had twenty-two members in the jungle. And since thirty cadavers have already been recovered from the pit, that means the army used it as a cemetery for all of its clandestine operations on the border. That is: there are many more dead here than those who fell in Operation Itatí.