Masacre en San Patricio

   / Massacre at San Patricio.

   On 4 July 1976 the parish of San Patricio, in Belgrano, Argentina, was the site of the assassination of five members of the Irish-Argentine Pallotine religious order. Three of the victims were priests—Pedro Duffau, 65, Alfredo Leaden, 57, and Alfredo Kelly, 40. The others were seminarians—Salvador Barbeito, 29, and Emilio Barletti, 23. Their bodies, riddled with bullets on that Sunday morning, were discovered by the church organist after parishioners found the church’s door closed at Mass time.

   According to the journalist Eduardo Kimel, the author of Masacre en San Patricio, witnesses reported slogans scrawled at the scene, including “Estos zurdos murieron por ser adoctrinadores de mentes vírgenes y son M.S.T.M.” (These lefties died because they indoctrinated virgin minds and because they belonged to the M.S.T.M. [the acronym for the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo/ Priests for the Third World]). Newspaper stories have revealed that over Barbeito’s body somebody had placed a poster, torn from the wall of one of the rooms in the rectory, showing a comic strip by the popular Argentine humorist Quino. The comic strip depicted the well-known character Malfada pointing to a policeman’s baton with the caption: “Este es el palito de abollar ideologías” (This is the little stick that dents ideologies). Although the murders remain unsolved, Kimel’s investigations and those of the documentarians Juan Pablo Young and Pablo Zubizarreta point to a death squad from the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA, Navy Mechanics School) as the perpetrators.

   On the evening before the killings, a young neighbor of the priests-the son of the military governor of Neuquén province—alarmed by the sight of a Peugeot 504 stationed near the church and fearing a guerrilla attack, called the police to report suspicious activities. A patrol car was dispatched, and after speaking to the occupants of the Peugeot, the officer in charge advised the policeman guarding the military-governor’s residence to ignore the situation—an operation was being conducted “para reventar a unos zurdos” (to bust up some lefties). Soon after, armed men were observed entering the church.

   The Pallotine priests and seminarians were counted among the more progressive members of the Buenos Aires clergy. Earlier in 1976, Father Kelly, the pastor of San Patricio—situated in one of Buenos Aires’s most prestigious neighborhoods—incurred the ire of his congregation by preaching against the alleged practice of profiting from the sale of possessions taken from desaparecidos (missing), a practice in which he implied members of his congregation were implicated. Soon after, a letter circulated, calling for his removal and accusing him of being a communist.

   On two occasions since 1976, Argentine legal authorities have investigated the case of the murdered Pallotines. In 1976 Guillermo Rivarola, the ruling judge, found no suspects in the case. In 1984, however, new declarations by people present at the scene the night of the murders demonstrated inconsistencies in the Rivarola investigation. Witnesses’ declarations—also gathered in the report Nunca más (Never Again), published in 1986 by the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP, National Commission on the Disappeared)—stated that Lieutenant Antonio Pernía, a member of GT-3/32, a notorious ESMA task force, had bragged about participating in the murders. According to Nunca más and the Movimiento Ecuménico por los Derechos Humanos (MEDH, Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights), 18 priests, 10 seminarians, two nuns, and 30 lay workers were assassinated during the years of the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone.

   After Masacre en San Patricio appeared in 1986, Judge Rivarola sued its author, Kimel, accusing the book of “libeling, slandering and dishonoring him,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a U.S. nongovernmental press-advocacy group. Argentine courts found for Rivarola under Argentina’s broad legal definition of slander and libel and fined Kimel. In May 2008 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in San José, Costa Rica, took up Kimel’s case, urging Argentina to void a criminal-defamation sentence against Kimel and to reform its defamation laws. To date, no members of the former ESMA or the Argentine military have been charged in the murder of the Pallotines. Meanwhile, the Vatican has initiated the process of canonization for all the slain. The Pallotine order maintains two sites—one in Rome and one in Buenos Aires—in their memory.