In the previous chapter, we unfolded a zig-zag story between reality and fiction, between history and imagination: Juan Manuel Abel Medinain his book Meet Peronaccuses the caudillo of Neuquén Philip Sapagmandated by the de facto military president Agostino Lanusein 1972, of having tried to bribe Perón with four million dollars, not to return to the country.
Sapag’s daughter Silvia, this year 2023, denies the episode; and Abal Medina clarifies, on an online site from Neuquén, that he has mistaken his brother, he meant Elías Sapag. [1]
From there I follow the trail of briefcases overflowing with dollars in 1970s Argentina (like the patacones that oozed from Patoruzú’s suitcases), and I go back to a story that I published in this same section, about a real trip I made to Korea, in 2006, during which, by mail, they would offer me to direct a newspaper to call the voice of the deadin which only the dead will write, and to finance it I have to go and collect a briefcase full of dollars that someone will give me at the 38th parallel, the warlike division between the two Koreas, the liberal one from the south and the bizarre one from the north, Seoul and Pyongyang.
But when I publish that column, I am unaware that, sometime between 1972 and 1975, a suitcase from Maoist China entered Argentina, in real life, with authorization from Mao himself, with three million dollars, to finance a tiny Argentine Maoist group, in Córdoba, which calls itself PCML (Communist Marxist Leninist Party), which I discovered because I had access to the testimony of one of its militants, in the illegal coercion trial that is being followed against the their kidnappers, in the case relating to the clandestine detention center La Perla, located in the same Mediterranean province, during the period of the notorious military dictatorship 76/83. All this last paragraph strictly real, dated, dated, verified.
Throughout 1982, the Montonera leaders in exile, Firmenich, Perdía, Vaca Narvaja, planned the publication of a newspaper in Argentina: The voice. The morning newspaper will be commanded for practical purposes by an unlikely ally: the Catamarcan caudillo Vicente Leónidas Saadi, who in 1947, to obtain personal advantages, imitated Perón’s voice on the telephone; and was eventually tried and convicted of crimes related to fraud and corruption. It’s the perfect combination.
But the conspiracies don’t end there: in the first issue of The voicedistributed to the public in September 1982, it counts among its adherents Emilio Eduardo Massera, the atrocious admiral who was a member of the Military Junta in 1976 and responsible for the clandestine center for the detention, torture and appropriation of minors, ESMA.
His son, Eduardo Enrique Massera, attends the “party” for the inauguration of the newspaper. “There is nothing more beautiful than a united family”, sang the Campanellis. Both the ram faction of the dissidents Gelman and Galimberti, and that of the still in this world Perdía, Narvaja and Firmenich, during the schism on the 1979 counter-offensive, accused each other of working for the dictatorship. But in the first issue of The voicethe bosses in charge openly confess their alliance with Massera [2].
Chapter 8 of the book La voz, the other newspaper of the montoneros, by Mariano Mancuso, is entitled: What was spent on the newspaper was enormous. That money could only have a traceable origin, since neither Perdía, Firmenich nor Vaca Narvaja ever collected significant amounts of foreign currency through legal means: the booty from the kidnapping of Born’s children, $60 million.
The occasion in which Firmenich, Perdía and Vaca Narvaja, the Montoneros as an armed organization, inaugurated, in Argentina, the crime of kidnapping the children of an ideological enemy for political purposes. Extort, through the appropriation of children, an “enemy”, declared as such by the kidnappers, with a “political” purpose. Here, sadly, tragically, ruining what little remained of coexistence and democracy in the country, when the criminals committed that nameless and abominable kidnapping in 1974, we interrupted our story of reality and slipped into fiction.
In my thriller, I want to assume that in that diary, The voice, the other newspaper of the Montoneros, two very different men work, with a secret connection: a wire cutter of the news agencies, what is called a cabler, a former member of the Argentine Maoist group PCML; and editor of a section X, it can be Shows, Politics or Territory, but what is relevant is that this editor is a sailor, more precisely an agent of Massera who, as we have just reviewed, has adhered to the physiognomy of the first issue of the newspaper in the morning and whose son attended the opening “party”. Everyone’s party
The editor in Massera’s service knows -because the kidnappers of the militant who gave the testimony worked for the Navy- that in Córdoba, somewhere in Córdoba, a suitcase is buried with three million dollars that entered the country between 1972 and 1975, from Mao’s China, to finance the MLCP; a suitcase that the two main leaders of the PCML have buried. Subsequently, without digging up the suitcase, they disappeared and were murdered.
But Massera’s agent, director of The voice he discovers that the cable operator has clues as to where the Chinese suitcase with the three million dollars might be buried. This conjunction unleashes a sentimental political plot, detective story and pathos, between two unlikely allies such as Montoneros and Saadi: the agent Massera and the ex Maoist, must evade their former allies and their own relationships to march together in pursuit of the suitcase of three million dollars buried in, say, Villa María.
The other option is The Skirt. The two accomplices, in fact, hesitate between one city and another. Finally, the suitcase will be buried in a farm in Villa María, near a stream of crystalline water. The villa is inhabited by a widow, and what begins as a need to seduce the widow out of greed, so that she can guide them like Ariadne to her suitcase, ends as a passionate battle between Massera’s agent and the former Maoist teleoperator, for that same woman.
The widow has been romantically related, for decades and in secret, to one of the two top leaders of the PCML, who may himself have some affiliation with the former Maoist cableman. Behind this scandal of lust and green money, in the background, the thousand-year-old mainland China blurs, slipping into capitalism, with something to say on the suitcase, some agent like Fu Man Chu, for or against Deng Xiaoping, we’ll see, one of the few aware of Mao’s decision to send money to Argentina between ’72 and ’75.
One might think that the development of the story begins at this crossroads, but I prefer to stop. After all, one of a storyteller’s few privileges is, within the Story, to decide where his story begins and ends.
[1] “I mixed the brothers. I mentioned Don Felipe Sapag traveling to Madrid to interview the general on behalf of Lanusse. It’s not true, it’s a mistake (…) It was Elías Sapag who went to Madrid”. Vaconfirma.com.ar 03.12.2023. Interview with Juan Manuel Abal Medina.
[2] La voce, the other newspaper of the montonerosMariano Mancuso, p. 60. Editorial Punto de Encuentro (2015).
WD/POS
Source: Clarin
