By Eduardo Gurucharri *
On May 11, 1974, Father Carlos Mugica died in Buenos Aires. He was 43 years old. As a young man I met him and after his death I published an article pointing out where the authorship of the crime came from. For my generation, the fifties of the 70s are the last chance to return to facts and protagonists of the period. Last May, I could not finalize this text about the priest. That is why I present it now, 51 years after his death.
I write without fear of conclusions. I perceive an indefinite current of superficial interpreters of the political events of the 60s and 70s of the last century, leading to a pink, diluted, attenuated, conformist version of the history of Peronism, its social components, contradictions and protagonists. On such elusion, the current defenders of state terrorism have tried to strain their lies, auxiliary in the case of Mugica of a first lie that was used immediately after the crime. Successful lie. There are still believers in the authorship of Montoneros.
The crime
The crime occurred on Saturday 11/5/74 after 8 pm at the door of the Buenos Aires parish of San Francisco Solano. Amen of parish priest in Villa 31 de Retiro, Mujica was a vicar in the church of Villa Luro and was leaving Mass. Impunity was capitalized. Who shot with a machine gun on the priest and his friend Ricardo Capelli, was seen time before attending the ceremony. The priest knew him because in 1973 he had collaborated a few months in the Ministry of Social Welfare with José López Rega and there the subject led the custody of the minister.
Mugica arrived very serious but conscious to the near Salaberry hospital. He demanded that the surgeon that Capelli was operated first because he had more possibilities of survival. And so it happened. The friend saved his life and Mugica died. Dr Marcelo Larcade said that the hospitalization parties made disappeared from the hospital and that no judicial authority cited him to declare.
After three days, Capelli, even in therapy, was visited by Jorge Conti, the spokesman of the MBS, who offered the injured the protection of Minister López Rega. Capelli already knew the origin of the subject who had shot them and although nothing said to Conti, he understood that the visit was a threat. The Catholic Church knew from the first day who were the authors of the crime, but shut up.
Months before, in February of that year, 74, they had begun to circulate through the pressures of Libelos Anónímos threatening with the names of personalities of the popular field and the left, the famous lists of López Rega. They transcended without anyone denoting them. In one were, among others, Carlos Mujica and the union leaders Raimundo Ongaro and Agustín Tosco.
A terrorist organization emerged that was articulated in the back room of the government around López Rega and the commissioner Alberto Villar, famous repressor paradigm of the gorilla exonerated by Cámpora in May 1973, reincorporated to the active duty by the interim president Lastiri in September with the position of Federal Coordination Director -the hated political police -, and appointed chief of the Federal Police on April 10, 1974 Its Interior Minister Benito Llambí
The Argentine anti -communist alliance – which was not such, but an appendix of the national state superimposed on the MBS and the federal whose bosses succeeded, for now, spread its name – far from assuming authorship, did the opposite. Its virtual press organ, the weekly The leaderdirected by Felipe Romeo, with the contest of characters such as Julio Yesi, former member of the ultra -rightist CNU and leader of an alleged Peronist Youth of the Argentine Republic -La La whose perpetual– He accused Montoneros on his cover of having killed the priest.
The official Telam agency replied the content but saved the forms. He attributed the crime to groups responsible for what he called a horror campaign against the institutions, indicating that he had initially affected the unionism and the Armed Forces.
The Montoneros organization, which since May 25, 1973 had, like other revolutionary nuclei, of a conquered legality, issued a statement denying all
Relationship with crime. And Mario Firmenich, his main leader, published three successive notes in the newspaper Newsspokesman for the trend, ensuring the same and appealing to his personal knowledge of years with Mugica.
In the 70s I directed from the newspaper In strugglewhich was published as an organ of MR17, representative organization of the current of revolutionary Peronism founded by Gustavo Rearte, the great prematurely deceased leader. This we said in May 1974:
In struggle goes out when the murder of Father Carlos Mujica has already resulted in a public debate that readers surely know. Consequently, we will not turn here the arguments that make indisputable where the inspiration of the crime came from. (…) Those responsible must be sought among the fascist bands that since June 20 (1973) operate in our country blatantly and on a large scale.
This is not one more savage. He wanted to operate as a provocation against popular forces, promoting divisionism and suspicion. It is an obvious attempt to promote discord in the field of the town and isolate the revolutionaries to then try their physical liquidation on a large scale.
Father Mujica had at the time of being killed, a particularly erroneous political position, which was far from favoring the development of popular forces, even if that was not their intention. (…)
-But we cannot attribute to the murderers the stupidity of the reactionaries who see ghosts everywhere. On the other hand, this barbaric act, for its diabolical intention, by the chosen person transformed into a mere object of a provocation that transfers absolute contempt for human life, by the sickly cynicism that implies proof as far as the jurized enemies of the cause of the people are willing to arrive.
The third world cures
Among the four hundred Catholic priests of Argentina who in 1968 proclaimed the movement of priests for the Third World- Putal next to the CGT of the Argentines and the student movement, in the fight against the dictatorship of the Catholic Onganía- the Buenos Aires Carlos Mugica was the most popular. Even Perón visited his Christ Obrero parish in Villa 31 de Retiro, when the former former president could return to the country, still proscribed, in November 1972,
Héctor Cámpora, the presidential candidate of Peronism, offered the priest to lead the list of national deputies by the federal capital for the general elections of March 1973. The man did not accept because Archbishop Aramburu prohibited the prosecutors to accept candidacies and because the MSTM did not remember either. Part of the third world were cautious against Mugica’s enthusiasm with Perón. He had traveled on the charter flight of the first return.
Reducing MSTM to a group of priests villeros just pushed by extreme poverty would mean a rude reductionism. The MSTM denounced the unfair system that oppressed society and fought it. Promoted a change of structures, not a change of government. And identified it with a Christian root socialism. Its members were considered pastors of the people of God and for that reason they acted within their bosom, not only in Villas, also working as workers, raising awareness and promoting their claims. In addition, the priests were not saints, they were men. The movement internally discussed the question of celibacy.
In revolutionary Peronism, Mugica’s death caused great pain. For many of us he was a beloved partner. Under the previous dictatorship – he must reiterate that there were several before Videla – Mugica came out in defense of any militant who fell imprisoned, tortured and not talk if dead. He was very brave in front of the bodies of his disciples Ramus and Abal Medina, on September 10, 1970 in the San Francisco Solano parish in the Buenos Aires neighborhood Villa Luro. The young people were accused of the execution of the former Aramburu, in turn responsible for the shooting of 28 Peronist military and civilians in June 1956 and the disappearance of the Evita body.
“I can only pronounce some farewell words for those who were my brothers Carlos Gustavo and Fernando Luis, who chose the hardest and hardest path for the cause of the dignity of man. We cannot continue with indefinition and fear, without compromising us.”
The priests Jorge Vernazza, Rodolfo Ricciardelli and Hernán Benítez, the confessor of Evita, a precursor of the cures of the Third World also participated in the funeral ceremonies. The bishop sanctioned them for the apology of violence, although not so much: thirty days without saying mass.
On May 25, 1973, when Peronism recovered the Government, Mujica accepted an ad honorem position for the issue of Emergency Villas in the Ministry of Social Welfare, where at the request of Perón, President Cámpora had appointed José López Rega minister. The priest lasted 90 days in his position. He resigned at the end of August. He defended the self -construction of housing – many villeros masons had – and the other building through private companies
Mugica had another concern. The conditions for the use of violence as a political weapon. Personally, he refused to use it; He considered him incompatible with his priestly condition. But it wasn’t a pacifist. He justified those who used it to combat the military dictatorship without a term established in 1966, dictatorship whose typicity may fit into the wiring writing of the revolution of the encyclical Populorum Progressio. Pope Paul VI document justified, in extreme cases, the appeal to violence to resist tyranny.
In Latin America, the case of Colombian priest and sociologist Camilo Torres, which became a guerrilla and killed in combat in his country in 1965, was famous. Here, the young cure Gerardo María Ferrari died in 1970 as a combatant of the Peronist Armed Forces, the FAP.
At the end of May 1973 the dictatorship that Ferrari had fought was defeated. And established a constitutional government whose president – which – mounted in a great popular mobilization pardoned and released in less than 24 hours all political prisoners, including guerrillas. It was followed by the National Congress, which sanctioned in just five days, with just a vote against deputies and unanimity of the Senate, a very broad amnesty law for the sake of national pacification. The text covered any crime committed by the guerrillas and also covered crimes committed by military, such as sedition.
If the law could be interpreted exculpatory of crimes such as the Trelew massacre, forced disappearances or torments followed by death – which all that had already committed the defeated dictatorship – could only be verified in the hypothetical case that some accused of such facts appeared before a judge and asked.
The main thing about amnesty was something else. What the text in fact recognized the legitimacy of the use of violence as a resource of resistance to a military dictatorship. That were actually three. They had overthrown Perón, Frondizi and Illia. What else?
“Here in Argentina, if there had been no armed insurrection we would still have it in the government, that is the reality” – Mugica will say.
“With the non -violent we would continue with Lanusse. Here the one who precipitated the process was the guerrillas. I think that every person who has two fingers warns it. Neither the cures of the Third World, nor the CGT. That all those factors also contributed, yes, but the trigger was the guerrillas”
The future was a blank page.
- Journalist, researcher. Author of the book A military between workers and guerrillas.
