By ANDRE QUEIROZ*
A conversation with Pablo Verna, criminal lawyer and activist of the organization Asemblea Disobediente
1.
Moving beyond the personal story, beyond the private drama, of the imploded family in which the plot unfolds point by point, slowly and fragmentedly; it is not about taking charge of bedroom secrets that, so often, when brought to light, mobilize curiosity and a fuss of propaganda and media effects, this is a principle of conduct that is quite clear in the account of Pablo Verna, criminal lawyer, activist of the organization Disobedient Assembly.
Nor is it a matter of a Rodriguesian theatrical script; the dismantling before our eyes of the pieces that support the classic Oedipal triad – its characters put to the test and revealed to their entrails; or as if taken by fright and unawares by an untimely flag that snatched from their hands the text, meaning, verisimilitude and broke the agreements of the fourth wall; it is not a matter of the public exposure of the intimate ghosts that overwhelm a life and that return, and return, until they evolve who knows when and why; it is not a matter of evoking the dismantling of the institution of petit bourgeois origin driven by trauma or by any victimized condition, Paulo Verna immediately rejects this bias in what he is willing to testify in the complaint and trial against his father.
However, we advance, Pablo Verna does not hesitate to spell out, with the necessary emphasis, breath and courage, his primary condition, that of being the son of a genocidal, doctor and captain of the Argentine army, Julio Alejandro Verna, alive and unpunished, participant and accomplice of the systematic and planned policy of extermination applied by Argentine State terrorism during the last military corporate dictatorship, between the years of 1976 and 1983.
In Pablo's words: “My intention is that the fact of making my father's condition as a genocidal maniac visible and public, as well as his political and militant action for human rights as the son of a genocidal maniac, does not become a kind of family soap opera.”[I]
2.
It was Nora Patrich who had first told me about the disobedient, in February 2020. Nora Patrich is a fine artist, companion of Roberto Baschetti, and former militant of revolutionary Peronism in the Montoneros Political-Military Organization. At the time, we were talking about the experience she had during the years of preparation and execution of the Montonero counteroffensive in 1978-80.
Nora Patrich had remained in Cuba and worked as one of the social mothers responsible for Kindergarten of the sons and daughters of activists who, from abroad, had returned to Argentina to reorganize the armed struggle against the decadent dictatorship in a moment of resumption of massive union resistance since the end of 1977[ii]. I remember that Nora told me that a group of sons and daughters of genocidal perpetrators had recently formed and were bringing to the public very important and pertinent accounts of that historical moment that Argentina was experiencing.
After this, living in Buenos Aires again, on November 15, 2023, I will attend the presentation and launch of Nora's book, Jirones of my life – from Espartaco to Montoneros,[iii] And then, during the speeches of one of the book's foreword writers, Pablo Verna's statement caught my attention. Nora Patrich had mentioned that it was gratifying to have at that table, and in the pages of her book, the presence of someone who, without being aware of the fact, at some point in his life, was on the other side. I find myself overcome by doubt: what could Nora be saying that I don't know? What would this other side be to which Pablo Verna had been deposited without his knowledge?
Let's look at an excerpt from Pablo's preface: “It was during the 'Contraoffensiva Montonera' trial that Nora and I met. We hadn't exchanged a word until the day the verdict was read, and then there was a Zoom meeting in which we exchanged words and feelings with everyone who participated, and I received with emotion the very affectionate and valuable expressions of recognition from Nora, which I really didn't expect.
This story brings us together, but not by chance or simply by chance. She was a Montonera activist and I am the son of a genocidal man – and even more than that, today I feel like a human rights activist (which makes my life much fuller) – the truth is that we are on the same side contributing to more Memory, Truth and Justice.
(…) It will never be too much to point out who the genocidaires are. (…) Many genocidaires who carried out an extermination in total denial of their crimes or, at best, in the contradiction of not acknowledging these crimes or providing information, but repeating absurd justifications. Militants of extermination. In our country alone, there are more than a thousand convicted people, many of whom have been prosecuted, many of whom have gone unpunished. Alive or dead. None of them are at peace.”[iv]
A few days later, I asked Nora Patrich to give me Pablo Verna's contact details – I wanted to interview him, to learn more about the nature of the struggles waged by these people. disobedient. I mentioned to Nora and Roberto that it seemed important to me to contribute in some way so that these voices, and what they plead for and emphasize, would be known in a country like Brazil, a country where the extreme right remained organized and mobilized, even having circumstantially gained the traditional space of struggle of the left, the streets and public squares. But more than this, to this Brazil where the military remains shielded and still occupies numerous strategic sectors of Brazilian institutional politics.
But this would not be just our specific case, it was essential to come together to evoke the strength of the testimony of disobedient to a historical time in which, even in Argentina, the advancement of serious and obscure characters such as Victoria Villarruel was witnessed. Less than a month later, amidst the fear and terror of the unbelievers, in the second round of the electoral process, the victory of the Javier Milei / Victoria Villarruel ticket for the presidency of the Republic was confirmed.
When I contacted Pablo Verna, his response was immediate. We scheduled the interview for March 8th at 16:XNUMX p.m. at his office, near the Tribunales metro station.
3.
I suggested to Pablo that we divide the interview into three parts: the personal story – because it was in this retreat that the young Pablo would put the pieces of a puzzle together; the political dimension of his activism; and the scenario of advancement represented by the rise of Javier Milei, but above all, that of Victoria Villarruel who is certainly more articulate with the project of reinserting the Armed Forces as a leading political actor in Argentina today, something that was unthinkable less than ten years ago.
In this sense, and as a strategic device for gradual and continuous advances, Victoria Villarruel resumed a certain debate about violence (in its generalist and abstract conception) of the 1970s, following the trail left by the theory of the two demons; roughly speaking, what is it other than that which evokes the condition of an excluded third party, the so-called civil society that would have suffered, victim and defenseless, from the excesses committed during a dirty war and by its armed actors split into two halves in a confrontation. In Victoria Villarruel's counterinsurgent perspective, the violence would be originated by the terrorist groups and, on the other hand, in a second hour and under the safe conduct of acting in reaction and response, the violence would be taken out of hand, the loss of control in excesses of the military sector; but this part of the process should be read as restorative violence, a kind of good violence that would be processed in an attempt to reorder the social fabric., that is, the violence exercised by the Armed Forces.
It is also important to highlight that Victoria Villarruel also operates in the gaps or cracks semantics of the agendas carried out by human rights organizations. If, in her view, on the one hand, and as revenge, it was a question, since the period of redemocratization, of the leftist activation of the criminal justice apparatus in its function of supposedly restoring truth and justice; it would now be a question, and as a countermeasure, of making it act indiscriminately and without ideology, resuming and turning around the thesis about crimes and offenses against humanity in the direction of the actions promoted by revolutionary organizations, treated by Victoria Villarruel as terrorists - even though they fought against an illegitimate government and for a political, social and economic project distinct from the dependent, peripheral and subordinate condition imposed on Argentina and executed by imperialism and its internal partners. And among these partners carrying out the dirty work of domesticating the organized working class and breaking the backbone of the Peronist unions, would be the Armed Forces – a kind of Victoria Villarruel-worshipping manipanso.
It is clear that Victoria Villarruel forgets this disproportion of meaning and the different valences of the forces involved in the violence of the 1970s; just as she also forgets and distorts the content and character of the project of subordination and surrender of national wealth that justified such disproportion on the part of these same Argentine Armed Forces. However, let us continue with Pablo Verna in his testimony. Let us see what Pablo will say about Victoria Villarruel.
Referring to researcher and sociologist Daniel Feierstein, Pablo evokes what would be the third stage of genocide, its last stage, silencing, concealment and denial.[v]
In the words of Pablo Verna: “If there are people building power and working politically, if these people work to hide, silence, confuse, deny, then they are part of the genocide. Not with criminal implications, but with sociological and historical implications, they are part of the genocide in sociological and historical terms. Based on this premise, Villarruel is a very important example in the sense of perpetuating the genocide, of fulfilling this objective. Victoria Villarruel is the project that best embodies this objective, and becoming vice president enhances it. However, it should be noted that they have been present for years with their website and in other spaces – which are several, including working in a group that I consider to be the most dangerous, called Bridges for Legality[vi] Because they act like the great innocents of history and say things like 'no, what's happening is that my father's case is poorly proven', and these are the battle horses to question the judgments. They would come in from this side, saying: 'the crimes were aberrant, but this judgment of this person is wrong' and they try to show, they try to mount several battle horses like this. What they wanted was to modify what is called the Evidential Standard - which, in Criminal Law, concerns the necessary rigor of evidence needed to prove something. And in different types of crimes the rigor of evidence is different.
Villarruel follows a very discursive path. However, the objective, far beyond the apparent, is always the same: freedom for the genocidal perpetrators, and as soon as possible. And if complete freedom is not achieved, we will advance in a wave of house arrests, temporary releases, benefits that are gradually being gained, of being able to be at home because being at home is much better than being in prison.
What they want is not just freedom or impunity, they want that after this impunity is achieved, they want to be considered heroes of the country, because that is their way of thinking.”[vii]
If we evoke here the terms of a duel of narratives – anchored, of course, in the rigorous recording of facts[viii], it should be highlighted that testimonies such as those of Pablo Verna and his companions Disobedient Assembly, as well as those of another group such as Disobedient Stories: family members of genocides for Memory, Truth and Justice are extremely important contributions to counterbalance, resist, oppose, neutralize and/or nullify the advances of the proto-fascist project supported by Victoria Villarruel and company. It is worth noting that in the desire to promote Confucianism and misrepresentation, there are entities such as the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (CELTYV), founded and chaired by Victoria Villarruel[ix].
And the urgent, extremely urgent condition of these counter-information and propaganda measures becomes absolutely imperative to us, as the ultra-liberal actions of the government of Javier Milei advance under the iron heel assured by the repressive protocol instituted by the Minister of Security Patrícia Bullrich.[X]We dare say that it is a race against the gravity of a time that never stops.
4.
What did your father, Pablo, do? - The question comes to me off the cuff during the long, hour-and-a-half interview. Nothing that was outside of a previously agreed script, but the way I asked him the question made me think of sharp objects, of incision devices.
"What my mother told me was that he participated in the kidnappings of his comrades, along with these gangs, in these operations. Even when they were on a kidnapping mission, there always had to be a doctor present in the vehicle, as well as the Intelligence personnel. For example, this happened in the kidnapping and murder of Armando Croatto and Horacio Mendizábal. My mother told one of my sisters everything. There was a kind of van-shaped pickup truck and there was the doctor, who could well have been my father.[xi].
Pablo Verna says he heard this case mentioned several times at home, and that his father had to save Mendizábal's life at the Campo de Mayo Military Hospital, where he worked. If we look for information about the case from that time, what we find is that it was a confrontation between state agents and 'subversives', and that both men were killed as a result of this exchange of gunfire. It is important to note that at the time of the murder, which took place on September 19, 1979, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was visiting Argentina, and its first delegation had arrived on Argentine soil on September 06, and was working until September 20, the day after the kidnapping and murder of the two Montoneros activists.[xii].
In summary and conclusively, we can say that at this point, it was a matter of making the disappeared disappear, or, in another aspect of this genocidal tactic, of constructing a scenario, a plot, and arranging the characters for such a narrative plot, in addition, of course, to an entire propaganda and dissemination device that was attended to in an integrated manner by the media affiliated with the political economic project carried out through the various actors and accomplices of state terrorism. There was Julio Alejandro Verna, doctor, army captain, genocidal.
At various moments in our conversation, Pablo Verna evokes the state of innocence that permeated him until, little by little, and over the years, the bits of information that he was gathering, here and there, began to come together like a plot in which consciousness is what awakens. And it is from this place of innocence that he will question his father, so many times, as when, still regarding the episode of the murder of Armando Croatto and Horacio Mendizábal, he asks him this question: But why save his life [referring to Mendizábal's situation] if they were going to kill him later?
And Pablo remembers his father's response: “- To get information out of him, of course, and what do you think you would do that for?
Let us continue with Pablo’s torrent of memories: “And another thing my mother told me is that my father had participated in two or three death flights. At least that’s how she began to tell my sister. She even told me that once she had to inject anesthetics into an entire family before they were thrown, alive, mid-flight into the Rio de la Plata.[xiii]. Most likely it was a mother, her two daughters and the boyfriend of one of them. The family name is Gofin, the case is recorded in the Counteroffensive judgments. My mother told this and imposed total silence on my sister.”
I ask Pablo how his mother reacted to this, what her position was in the face of this inventory of terror, and he highlights the perverse character that transcended at every moment in the scenario of his home, even naming her as a militant of extermination – something that can be attested through her testimony, for example, regarding the naturalization of what was simply aberrant.
“My mother would say things like, for example: ‘And what did you want to be done? If you did what you had to do, if you had to wipe them off the face of the earth [referring to the ‘subversives’], if you had to stop them somehow’. These terms are tremendous and that was what was transmitted to the children. I remember an innocent question I asked my mother: – Instead of killing them, why didn’t we just expel them from the country and be done with it? To which she replied: ‘But, my dear, they had already been expelled from the country, they came back with false documents, with weapons’. But I didn’t believe her, because we had traveled by car in the summer of 1982 to Brazil, and I knew how we were all searched at the borders. Maybe you could enter with false documents if they were very well made, but with weapons? That didn’t convince me. We were referring to the period of the Montoneros counteroffensive, and my mother knew everything that happened during the counteroffensive, something that a person with ordinary information would hardly know. My mother said that when my father felt remorse, he would confess to Father Néstor Sato.[xiv], in the San Rafael Church, in the Villarreal neighborhood. My mother used to say that the priest would respond to my father in the following way: – In such matters, you shouldn’t feel guilty, there’s no problem with that, it’s better to kill a few to save a hundred. (…) My father, once, in a conversation with my sister, among other things he said – things like: ‘I don’t regret anything!’ – he told me about an event that happened in 1979, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was in Argentina, and they simply couldn’t make people disappear anymore, and there were four ‘subversives’ that they had to eliminate, and so they decided to put the four of them in a car, fake an accident, and throw the car into the waters of a stream in Escobar, in the province of Buenos Aires; The detail is that my father had given these four the same anesthetic used in the death flights, and he explained to my sister that they were still breathing but that their muscles were paralyzed and that when they fell into the water they could not move, and the water would enter their lungs, which meant that the autopsies would show that they had drowned, death by drowning, and in fact that was the case. If they thought that, they did it that way. We know who these four victims are, it is the only case from 1979 with such characteristics, they were tried and convicted in the trials related to the Counteroffensive, however, my father was not tried in this process. However, he should have been. This is an outrage on the part of the justice system in San Martín for not advancing the investigation, for not charging him and summoning him to an inquest for this case. I would very much like the names of these four dead comrades to be written in large letters.”[xv]
A few days after our conversation, Pablo Verna sent me the following names via WhatsApp message: Alfredo José Berliner; Susana Haydée Solimano; Diana Schatz; Julio Everto Suárez.
Here they are arranged with the emphasis requested by Pablo[xvi].
5.
Let’s go back a little in the time frame explained in our interview. Pablo says that when he was born, his parents lived in a military neighborhood in the south of the country, in Colonia de Sacramento, 140 kilometers from Comodoro Rivadavia. When he was three years old, the whole family moved to Buenos Aires, initially in a building in Liniers. A year and a half later, in mid-1978, they bought an apartment in a very modest area, in San Fernando, a northern neighborhood, in an area of Monoblock buildings and with slums in the surrounding area.
He also says that his father, Julio Alejandro Verna, was the son of rural teachers who, when they came to Buenos Aires, became principals of primary schools while still very young and achieved a good economic situation, which allowed his father to pursue a career in medicine, specializing in traumatology. However, his father wanted to join the military from the start. In 1972, he joined the army. At that time, the country was already living under a corporate-military dictatorship governed by the national security strategy, implemented since 1966.
“Throughout my childhood [I was born in 1973] and adolescence, something that struck me was the almost ever-present theme of communists, terrorists and subversives. It wasn’t that it was omnipresent, but it was there, it was something that was becoming naturalized through what I understand to be the psychological action that was directed, in our environment, at children, at the children of the ‘military family’. It’s curious that it took me a long time to realize this. We would hear things like: ‘If the subversives manage to take power, there will be no more Christmas’. It was something like ‘don’t get involved with that!’, and they would continue with the reasoning: ‘because all subversives are communists and since communists are atheists, then there will be no more Christmas’. See – it was the kind of simple and schematic reasoning, however, the typical scheme that takes a child, it was a psychological operation for children of five, six, seven years old. And from that point on, you already have your enemies. Among the memories I have from that time, one that seems quite curious to me is about the suitcases that doctors usually carry, with stethoscopes, blood pressure monitors, etc. My father had two, one black and one brown. I liked the black one better. I remember asking him: “Dad, why do you have two suitcases?” And he replied that his work colleagues had given him the brown suitcase. It was much later that I realized that these work colleagues were the gang that carried out the kidnappings, the State Intelligence guys, and that they had stolen the brown suitcase – which I didn’t like – from a colleague who had been kidnapped and disappeared.”[xvii]
This will be the first of many times throughout our interview that Pablo Verna will refer to the political activists involved in the revolutionary struggle as comrades. I once asked him whether, at that time, his father was a doctor or a soldier, whether he wore a uniform or civilian clothes, and how this was reflected in his mind as a teenager in the midst of the redemocratization process.
Let’s follow Pablo’s flow of memories: “We were told to say that he was a doctor. Some children of police officers, for example, had to say that their parents were insurance salesmen, or some other profession. In other words, for their children it was as if it were an absolute distortion of reality. In our case, at least we had half of it that corresponded to the truth; he was in fact a doctor. Saying this was not exactly a lie; we simply had to tell part of the truth, and the other half we had to keep quiet about. And this began before the redemocratization, around 1977-78. Until then, my father came and went from the building in uniform, but it seems that there were some actions by the revolutionary comrades that transcended my family, and they were then told that, for security reasons, it would be better for him to change his civilian clothes for the uniform once inside the military headquarters. In 1984-85, I studied at a public school. At that time, the military was spoken of with great hatred and contempt. In general, among the common people, there was a lot of anger towards the military who had destroyed the country. For our part, we kept saying that the father was a doctor.[xviii].
Regarding a certain experiment of 'clandestine' in this youthful universe, Pablo evokes a case that seems to us quite symptomatic of the perverse trait that he identifies in his mother.
“I remember that my best friend, from those years ago, I’m referring to the 5th, 6th and 7th grades of high school, had his father disappear. Something I found out many years later. He lived with his grandmother and his aunt, who were both grumpy old ladies, but they were good people who took great care of him, despite his manner, they were always the kind of people who complained. I asked him a few times about his father, and the fact was that my mother was the one who told me to ask him that, as if I were putting my finger in the open wound, she was always very perverse, I told her that I had already asked him that, and that, in fact, I had already told her what he had told me, that his father had a refrigerator factory, that he worked in Mar del Plata. That’s what he told me. And that was typical of children of missing parents, if they told things like that. I remember that my mother couldn’t accept it and told me to ask again. Years later, I think it was in 2016 or 2018, I don’t remember the date exactly, I contacted this friend and asked him: “If your father really was a missing person, he said yes. My mother always knew about it.”
“But going back in time, you asked me about the process of redemocratization. I was about 11 years old, and the topic of the disappeared was very present in the media. I remember one time when my sister had come home from school and her teacher had brought up this topic. My father reacted with insults, with hatred and with terrible violence. Against the teacher who, according to him, must have been a subversive leftist, but also against Alfonsín. In my house, the so-called ‘theory of excesses’ began to echo. My mother used to say that the matter had gotten out of hand of the military, it was as if she were saying that they had gone too far, but, once again, she would justify herself: ‘something had to be done with these guys, they were guys who denounced with the fingers of their own hands to their comrades, they would point out their houses. The worst, the most terrible ones were capable of dying under torture, but they would say nothing.’ This is the typical reasoning of the defenders of extermination in its basic contradiction. It was just a matter of justifying, and no matter what was done, the companions would be guilty if they acted in way A, in way B, in way C, they were all already condemned in advance.”[xx]
6.
It turns out that becoming aware of the truth of the facts, of what had happened in the recent history of his country, is something that he gradually uncovered, in small fragments, in conversations filled with unsaid things, subterfuges, and equivocations, between Pablo and his father; something that he picked out of his mother's words, something that was composed as if from a mosaic of data gathered here and there, and never as if governed by the instantaneity of a definitive gesture-word; nothing came to him all at once, abruptly, with a single blow. It was necessary to break the bonds of what, from an early age, had been tied to the commonplaces of those 'Christmas' narratives, that of the construction of the internal enemy that haunts the fantasies of childhood, the games of the children of the military neighborhood. It was necessary to enter, to get closer, to bring together this 'irreducible other', a strange foreigner, a dangerous metic, the subversives, the communists, those who come from outside, those who denounce their colleagues, to make them one of one's companions in a choreography that overcomes suspicions; on the other hand, as if in a dialectical reversal, it was necessary to detach oneself from what was intimate, too close, rooted in the contours of the body-house, this first triad of functions that generate identity and synonyms; it was essential to dismantle private history by embodying it in the plots that make up the historical-world arc. For there was a world screaming at the height of the hour of the jackals, and those around Pablo Verna served the role of executioners.
Pablo says: “Once I was able to know what my father did, I was able to know who my father is, and once I knew who my father was, I was able to choose what I was going to do with it, and once I know what I will do with it, I can come to know who I am. That is why I feel so good about reporting it. I could sweep the horror under the carpet, but no. In 2013, I had absolute certainty and knowledge of the crimes my father committed, so I asked myself the following question: What am I going to do with this? However, I did not know how to proceed and I needed to find a way (emotionally I knew I wanted to report it). How can someone do nothing if their father was part of the crimes against humanity? It would be like acting as if nothing had happened here. That was when I read a news article about the case of Vanina Falco[xx], and that triggered me, it was like the answer to everything, it hit me hard, and I decided that between loyalty to my father and loyalty to humanity, I would be loyal to humanity, and that from this resolution I would be loyal to myself. There are at least 30 thousand reasons and what you have to do is tell everything you know to the competent bodies. It may not be of any use, but it may be the missing key to putting together the pieces that complete a puzzle.”[xxx]
I ask Pablo why his complaint might not be of any use. Pablo talks about the internal constraints of a liberal-bourgeois penal code that exists, above all and first and foremost, to defend the integrity of the family and private property. He explains that in 2013, he filed a complaint with the Human Rights Secretariat, and that Secretariat forwarded his complaint to the San Martín Jury, and to this day nothing has come of it.
He explains: “The criminal procedural code, articles 178 and 242, prohibits reporting and declaring against a relative of one’s own, unless the crime was committed against the same person or another relative of the same degree or closer than the person reporting or declaring. Let me explain better: no one can report their father for a crime unless it was committed against their own son or another relative of a closer degree, for example, a brother. If one is a son and the crime is committed against a cousin, then one cannot report. Now, for example, if one is a cousin and the crime is committed against a son, yes, one can report because this is a closer degree of kinship than a cousin. This is based on the fact that the National Constitution also establishes the protection of the family in a constitutional manner. And such prohibitions end up functioning as an impediment, an obstacle to fulfilling the obligation to prevent, investigate and punish serious crimes against humanity. And then the report is withdrawn.”[xxiii]
– So, Pablo, did your father remain free, safe, calm?
“Yes, I will be free, but not safe and peaceful. When in 2017 the group of sons, daughters and relatives of genocidal perpetrators was formed, a story was published on the Telefe channel that generated a lot of publicity, and then, after about three days, my father (with whom I had not been in contact for several years) threatened me, in fact, a series of threats, and so I reported him in 2018, I reported all these threats.”
– What kind of threats did your father make to you?
“Threats to my family. There were phone calls in which he said, ‘Look, you’re a lawyer, everything you’re doing is bothering a lot of people, there are a lot of people who are pissed off at you, people who don’t know how this could end.’ In other words, a threat almost as if he didn’t want to show that he was making a threat, a very subtle and disguised threat. However, what was really a very clear threat was made through a series of WhatsApp messages, a series of chats that he sent to my mother, and in a certain part of these messages, amidst a lot of ignorance and barbarity that he says, he states: ‘You, him, his wife and his daughter are my enemies, on the other hand, I am his only enemy, you can draw your own conclusions from that if you want.’ That was a clear threat, it was his threat. My daughter was 7 years old at the time. If this enmity he was referring to was ideological, my daughter could not be his enemy, therefore, what he was doing was in fact a threat. I said this in my complaint and the judge, in her sentence, reaffirmed the same. At the time, he was sentenced to one year in prison for these threats.”[xxiii]
And since Julio Alejandro Verna was a first-time offender (sic) and the sentence was less than three years, the sentence was commuted to community service. Julio Alejandro Verna remained free, walking among the people on the streets.
7.
From the companions…[xxv]
Pablo Verna dared to cross the desert of the unsaid, he dared to face the distrust of those who, perhaps, at first, associated him with the burden of an ungrateful and uncomfortable past of filiations. A past history against which Pablo never tired of fighting, questioning his own, making the monsters deposited in the false bottom of closets and comfort zones emerge. We mentioned that it was from innocence that this questioning was being assembled, until the weight of the conscience of the facts and the guilt, the inventory of the executioners present on the scene, was catapulted upon him. Symbolically, it was about deaths that were involved, at least for Pablo, the symbolic dimension of his father's death, the deep incision, without repair or return, in the body of his first family; Pablo was at this time and in these gestures, always ahead, always treading new horizons. But it was not enough.
The other side of the coin was missing, bringing to oneself what had been shaped for oneself, against one’s will, under the guise of the metic, the strange other, the irreducible enemy who constructs himself and slanders with words of the lowest possible slang, the subversives. Pablo unlocked the reverse side of the psychological action device that had shaped him as a child. It was necessary to empty of meaning that machinery of fables that made horror and arbitrariness a naturalized current flow; it was necessary to look deeply into these others. Pablo brought them to himself; Pablo gave himself to this approach – in a gesture that emphasizes the political dimension of his undertaking. To become a companion, to be present in this work of rebuilding the social fabric that is based on the evocation of memory, the demand for justice, and the paving of the truth of what was lived, no matter who it hurts.
These are Pablo’s words: “I began to be interested in knowing what the comrades did, why they did what they did, how they fought, what their goals were, what they sought to build, and then I realized that it was truly the most wonderful thing we have ever had in our country. And if these goals had been achieved – with all the breadth of ambition of the comrades, we would undoubtedly have a better world, much better. Somehow, the history of this struggle, regardless of the tragic outcome that took it by storm, the legacy of this struggle is present in us in the best that we have and experience.”[xxiv]
I would also like to highlight two points.
The first, which clearly demarcates the professional but also political meaning of his activism, and which concerns his work as a criminal lawyer: Pablo Verna has been working on the team of Pablo Llonto, a journalist, writer, and lawyer specializing in human rights who, since 1985, has been involved in the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for crimes against humanity in Argentina. Llonto was part of the team that collaborated with the Center for Legal and Social Studies in the trial of the Military Juntas. In the case of Pablo Verna, he acted in the third stage of the trial for the crimes committed in the Puente 12 clandestine detention, torture, and extermination center, and this was the first time in a trial of genocidal perpetrators that a lawyer, the son of repressors, participated in the judicial interrogation, in an oral and public debate, for crimes against humanity.[xxv].
The second point, more mundane, perhaps trivial, but which is a small indication of this obstinate immersion in unveiling and getting to know this 'other', the companions Pablo talks about. Over the course of these days in which I found myself involved in the task of writing this essay, after a week of cutting up the interview we conducted – I wrote to Pablo's WhatsApp several times to ask a few questions here and there. In addition to the kindness and promptness of his answers, in one of these consultations, Pablo told me that he was reading Fernandez Long's book, a book of memoirs about the Montoneros. Nothing that could be surprising, after all, let us remember Pablo's preface to Nora Patrich's book, Jirones of my life – from Espartaco to Montoneros. Finally, I would like to highlight this excerpt from the aforementioned preface.
These are the words of Pablo Verna: “Nora speaks to me as an equal, she is like that, she does not impose any superiority. Whoever reads the book, or who knows her in any other way knows this well, or will know. However, we are not equal. Nora – and with her the entire Human Rights movement –, with her message of truth – in all its aspects – has given us the opportunity to get closer to her and free ourselves from the numbing psychological action and influences received by the disobedient men and women of our families of origin. That this immense truth has been received by the disobedient men and women is something that – I suppose – we could never have imagined and it has provoked a very strong emotion in us. This meeting unites us today not under any absurd idea of reconciliation, nor of forgiveness, but under a common will and commitment to fight for Human Rights.”[xxviii]
*Andre Queiroz, writer and filmmaker, he is a professor at the Institute of Arts and Social Communication at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Author, among other books by Cinema and class struggle in Latin America (Insular).
Notes
[I] Cf. Interview given by Pablo Verna to André Queiroz, on March 8, 2024, in Buenos Aires. This essay-article was originally published in the newspaper A Nova Democracia, on July 29, 2024.
[ii] On the political and social situation in Argentina when the Montoneros counteroffensive was being prepared, see BASCHETTI, R. Documents – 1978-1980: from the world to the counteroffensive vol. 1. Buenos Aires: De la campana editorial, 2005. On the Guardería experience, see the documentary of the same name by Virginia Croatto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64dxdZZdfj0&t=647s
[iii] PATRICH, N. Jirones de mi vida – from Espartaco to Montoneros – memories. Buenos Aires: Jirones de mi vida editorial, 2023.
[iv] Same, p.14 and 16.
[v] Let us highlight here an excerpt from the book The Two Demons (Reloaded), by Daniel Feierstein: “There were also certain political errors that added to the conceptual problems and that opened the door to a certain 'revisionist climate of the time'. Errors of evaluation, focus on petty disputes or on the 'narcissism of small differences' that increasingly led Kirchnerism and the anti-Kirchnerist left to speak only to themselves, to increasingly disconnect themselves from common sense, to transform a discourse that questioned multitudes into a closed club that required several assumptions from anyone who wanted to be a member, to abandon politically significant spaces (in this case, the hearings of the trials of the genocidal perpetrators) prioritizing other struggles considered more important, to empty certain slogans by partisanizing them in a sectarian way and thus losing the power that gave them their multiple and plural character”. Cf. FEIERSTEIN, D. Los dos demonios (recargados). Buenos Aires: Marea Editorial, 2018 (p.47).
[vi] On the organization's Facebook page, they introduce themselves as follows: “Who are we? We are a group of family members of those convicted in cases of treason who formed the civil association Puentes para la Legalidad”. Regarding the group's activities in what we said were: cracks, or the gaps, or the fissures in Human Rights, let us see this very enlightening post dated October 3, 2018: “The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will receive the children and grandchildren of those convicted of crimes against humanity who denounce violations of Human Rights in the proceedings. The civil association Puentes para la Legalidad, which brings together the children and grandchildren of those accused of crimes against humanity in Argentina, was invited, together with the civil association Abogados por la Justicia y la Concordia, to participate in a working meeting with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which also invited the national State, within the 169th period of sessions to be held in the city of Boulder, Colorado, United States, between October 1 and 5 of this year. (…) Mainly, the denial of house arrest for convicts over 65 years of age will be denounced, in accordance with the Inter-American Convention for the Protection of Older Adults. However, there are 365 convicts who are over this age and remain in prisons throughout the country, 219 of whom are over 70 years old. (…) We are convinced that in the search for Truth and Justice, legality and due process cannot be set aside. We hope that this situation of neglect that compromises the Argentine State before this Commission will end.” And a little further on in this same post: “The family members of those convicted in cases of crimes against humanity in Argentina, grouped together in the Civil Association Bridges for Legality – founded in 2008 – have reported to national and international organizations various human rights violations suffered by their parents and grandparents during the legal proceedings promoted by the Argentine State. (…) Puentes para la Legalidad has documented and denounced the discriminatory treatment that a large number of Argentines are subjected to without evidence to prove their alleged guilt, preventive detentions that can last up to 6 years and have reached the extreme of being extended to 14 and a half years or prisoners over 70 years old, as well as sick people who cannot exercise their right to house arrest, among other breaches of the Law and international Human Rights treaties to which Argentina has adhered and which have constitutional hierarchy according to the 1994 reform. According to its own records, 2140 people have been deprived of their liberty to date in proceedings against them for crimes against humanity, of which 825 have been in preventive detention for more than three years and 431 have died while deprived of liberty, the vast majority without conviction.” Regarding the aforementioned civil association Abogados por la Justicia y la Concordia, here is the link to the association's page where a quick search of its posts and editorial clearly demarcates the character of the organization: https://justiciayconcordia.org/category/editorial/
[vii] Cf. Interview with Pablo Verna, by André Queiroz.
[viii] Pablo Verna told us that the Intelligence Sector was like the central nervous system that controlled everything during the genocidal military government. In Pablo’s words: “All the forces were involved with their connected Intelligence Sector. With the DIPBA, which was the Intelligence Directorate of the Buenos Aires Police, all this information was accumulated that was not destroyed, or much of it was not, and the Provincial Memory Commission declassified, prepared and organized all these files and from there emerged an immense amount of information, not only from the Buenos Aires police – because there was information that came from the entire Intelligence structure. All of this has served for countless processes and trials.”
[ix] Regarding this association, follow the link to this study by Roberto Manuel Noguera, carried out at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento: https://www.aletheia.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/ALEe031/12008.
[X] It is important to highlight that when she was also Minister of Security in the government of Mauricio Macri, Patricia Bullrich had filed such a repressive protocol seeking not only to criminalize social protests and their organized agents, but also to make possible under the weight of the law the act of repression by the State. See. here. And Cf. here.
[xi] We provide here the important testimony of documentary filmmaker Virginia Croatto, daughter of Armando Croatto, who describes various aspects of her father's militant participation; first as a grassroots activist in the union space, and later when he was already in Montoneros, in Córdoba, the beginning of the clandestinity during the government of Isabel Perón under threats from the fascist death squad Triple A, her father's participation in the actions of the Montonero Counteroffensive, the kidnapping and murder of her father by agents of the dictatorship - among whom Julio Alejandro Verna, Pablo's father, could well have been present, and finally, the experience of exile shared with her mother, also a Montonero activist in Cuba: https://www.bn.gov.ar/micrositios/multimedia/ddhh/testimonio-de-virginia-croatto
[xii] Cf. “The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Argentina – a testimony of the truth”. IN: Revista Caras y Caretas, dossier Los argentinos Somos derechos y humanos. 40 years after the visit of the IACHR: memories of the night. Buenos Aires, n.2.357, September 2019 (p.9-21).
[xiii] Excerpt from the interview with Pablo Verna, by André Queiroz. The emphasis is mine.
[xiv] On priests implicated in state terrorism in Argentina, see this note: https://www.letrap.com.ar/judiciales/un-bautismo-tardio-la-cupula-la-iglesia-visito-la-esma-primera-vez-n5399097
[xv] Excerpt from the interview with Pablo Verna, by André Queiroz. The emphasis is mine.
[xvi] Below are links to information about each of these murdered political activists. About Alfredo José Berliner: https://robertobaschetti.com/berliner-alfredo-jose/; About Susana Haydée Solimano: https://robertobaschetti.com/solimano-susana-haydee/; About Diana Schatz: https://robertobaschetti.com/schatz-diana/; About Julio Everto Suarez: https://robertobaschetti.com/suarez-julio-everto/
[xvii] Idem.
[xviii] Idem.
[xx] Idem.
[xx] See https://www.elpatagonico.com/vanina-falco-declaro-contra-su-propio-padre-el-apropiador-juan-cabandie-n1371687#google_vignette
[xxx] Excerpt from the interview with Pablo Verna, by André Queiroz.
[xxiii] Idem. With regard to the aforementioned articles of the Penal Code, the disobedient will present a reform bill that would incorporate into articles 178 and 242 the aspect of exception with regard to crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.
[xxiii] Idem.
[xxv] In the photograph below, Pablo Verna is with Virginia Croatto and Martin Mendizábal, the latter children of the Montoneros militants who were kidnapped and disappeared in one of the operations in which Julio Alejandro Verna participated.
[xxiv] Idem.
[xxviii] IN: PATRICH, N. Jirones de mi vida – from Espartaco to Montoneros. Op.cit. p.22.
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