in his book Meet Peronrecently published, Juan Manuel Abal Medina narrates the following scene: circa 1972, Philip Sapagthe caudillo of Neuquén, offers to person, in Puerta de Hierro, in his exile in Madrid, four million dollars so that he doesn’t return to Argentina. According to Abal Medina, Sapag is the go-between for Argentina’s de facto military leader, Agustín Lanusse.
Perón has Sapag sign each page of the agreement, Abal Medina points out. He does not clarify whether or not Sapag granted Perón the four million dollars. I leave it to the reader to calculate what those four million dollars of 1972 would represent today..
Barely 3 years later, the television series we know here as nuclear manit was originally titledThe Six Million Dollar Man: The cost of rebuilding crashed astronaut Steve Austin.
Perón was definitely not the man with the $4 million; at least, they did not prevent his return to Argentina. They didn’t even occupy a relevant place in their recorded history. Because, having read dozens of books about it, I have never come across this incident before. Googling, I discover that Felipe Sapag’s daughter, Silvia Sapag, denies it. Her father, she claims, never met Perón in Madrid, nor in any direct conversation.
In an edition of Rio Negro Diary This March, Abal Medina was reported to have apologized to Silvia Sapag and “promised to correct the mistake.” The accusation against Felipe Sapag, in the book, is not limited to the description of the Puerta de Hierro event: on at least two other occasions, Abal Medina reiterates that Perón excludes Sapag from the Peronist lists for this attempted corruption.
The error to correct is abundant. People willing to “give their lives for the motherland” have always caught my eye, but not to support or deny a species. Like when Firmenich, in the report by Llamas de Madariaga in the 1990s, denied everything: from his participation in the kidnapping of Born, to several other of the bloodiest crimes that he commanded.
Both of Felipe Sapag’s sons, Ricardo and Enrique, died violently as members of Montoneros in 1977, three months apart. According to Anguita and Cecchini’s Infobae note from 2021: Ricardo was indicated by another member, a prisoner, of Montoneros, from a car, and “The car passed by there, they had the information and Ricardo was indicated . They killed him.”
While Enrique, about to leave the country after Felipe Sapag (now in Madrid, confirmed by Silvia Sapag herself) asks Firmenich to order his exile, to save him, he chooses to participate in the Montnero support a railway strike, on 17 October 1977 and, the authors repeat in the Infobae note, “in that activity in support of a railway conflict they had killed him”.
In the improbable territory of reality, I reflect on the thesis of Héctor Ricardo Leis, a repentant montonero, now deceased, according to which the clash between guerrillas and soldiers in Argentina was in part a bloody intra-family conflict. Not like that of the Montagues against the Capulets, or the Corleones against the Tattaglias, but within the Alsogaray or Guzzetti, Astiz or Camps families, there were relatives on both sides, who killed each other, and who were not saved the life. , as Sapag tried with his son Enrique.
They gave the order: from both sides, to kill the relative. Also, in the case of Montoneros, to use the closest friendly relationships to assassinate within the family of the “enemy”, as when they used the terrorist “friend” of the daughter of the federal police chief, Cardozo, to place a bomb under the bed, in June 1976.
Felipe Sapag, according to Abal Medina, offers Perón 4 million dollars so that he doesn’t return and, at the other end of the narrative and family parable, real, with his disquisitions, Felipe Sapag’s sons lay down their lives for Perón, who was already dead, that he wouldn’t come back even if they were dead. Because it all began, the assassination of Aramburu in 1970, for having given his life, and killed with madness, by Perón, who from 1973 disavowed them, killed and expelled them, in that order; but they continued to give their lives for Perón, whatever that means. And kill with vesania.
Here I want to interrupt this horrible review of reality – which, as we have seen, has its disquisitions, I repeat the term on purpose, denials, apologies, nuanced descriptions (“they killed him” “they killed him”)-, and move on to the narrative, also with a briefcase full of dollars, or as Sergio Leone says in his spaghetti western foundation, For a bunch of dollars (1963).
Even if in my favorite film, always by Leone, Once upon a time in America (1985), is a briefcase full of a million dollars: Robert De Niro, Noodles, goes looking for it in the locker at the train station, that million dollars they collected during the years of Prohibition – together with his accomplices, Max, Patsy, Cockeye, who just saw dead, cremated – and it’s empty. I want to follow that blood dollar trail, which builds up through smuggling, murder, kidnapping, bribery, and reuniting with characters with an empty briefcase.
But 30 years later, when Noodles returns to the same train station, same train locker, the million dollars are back in the briefcase as well. Even if he doesn’t fight, he comes back. (When asked by Fat Moe what he’s been doing for the past 30 years, Noodles replies, “Go to bed early.”)
Last year, in this same section It makes me a storyI share an event from my trip to Korea in 2006 (I actually traveled to Seoul, Korea in 2006 to present my book Stories of married men in Korean): I receive an email in which they propose me to direct a newspaper that will be written exclusively by the dead. I publish that story the voice of the dead, in two parts. This column will also have two parts.
In the account of my real trip to Korea in 2006, my interlocutor from the world of the dead tells me that I must go to the 38th parallel, the war division between the two Koreas, Seoul and Pyongyang, and receive a briefcase full of dollars to finance the newspaper of Buenos Aires (the newspaper the voice of the dead will be based in Buenos Aires, of course).
At that time, I am not aware of the episode of Felipe Sapag’s offer to Perón described by Abal Medina in his book with the suggestive title Meet Peron (I never know him), and I am unaware of another episode, sent to me by Pablo Anzaldi, doctor in Political Sciences: in a testimony given by a member of an armed Maoist organization in the 1970s in Argentina, in trial underway on suspects of illegal coercion in the La Perla clandestine detention center, the witness stated that “the PCLM[1] received financial aid from China”, around 1973-1975 (with Mao in power).
According to his captors, who want to know where the loot is, a briefcase from Maoist China enters the country with three million dollars. So when I write Voice of the Dead I AND II, evoking a wholly unverifiable cartoon, I am not aware that a briefcase with three million dollars entered the country from Maoist China around 1973/75, not to finance a newspaper written by the dead, but to kill people, to carry out the long-lasting people’s war, with the peasants and workers, and perpetrate the Maoist revolution in Argentina, starting from the province of Córdoba. And here we start, and continue next week.
Source: Clarin
