‘We choose to die’: new trial set to investigate infamous dictatorship massacre

“You don’t kill us. We choose to die.”  María Victoria Walsh, daughter of famed author and journalist Rodolfo Walsh, famously uttered these words before taking her own life during a military operation in 1976 known as the Corro Street Massacre. In total, five members of armed guerrilla group Montoneros died during the assault.  The phrase, which has come to symbolize courage in the face of dictatorship horror, has also remained shrouded in mystery, as the military were the ones to relay the words, given that the victims did not survive.  Next Wednesday, almost 50 years after the killings, a trial will try to uncover the truth of what happened. Six former members of the Argentine army’s 101 Aerial Defense Artillery group stand accused of the attack: Carlos Alberto Orihuela, Ricardo Grisolía, Gustavo Antonio Montell, Guillermo César Viola, Héctor Eduardo Godoy, and Danilo Antonio González Ramos.  The prosecutor and the plaintiffs are also demanding that three other soldiers who were left out of the case over what is known as “lack of merit,” as well as an officer who was acquitted despite being involved in the operation, also be tried. The massacre On the morning of September 29, 1976, between 150 and 200 military officers, equipped with tanks and a helicopter, surrounded a house in the Villa Luro neighborhood of Buenos Aires City. María Victoria Walsh, better known as Vicki, was a member of Montoneros and carried out press tasks. She had arrived at the residence the day before with her one-year-old daughter, Victoria, to meet with four top Montoneros leaders: Alberto José Molina Benuzzi, Ignacio José Bertrán, Ismael Salame, and José Carlos Coronel. All of them spent the night.  The first shots rang out at around 7 a.m. Bertrán, Salame, and Coronel climbed to the first floor to fire back. Walsh and Molina went to the rooftop with their machine guns. The pair exchanged gunfire for close to two hours before running out of ammunition. Trapped and realizing that the men on the lower floor were already dead, Vicki stood on the rooftop, opened her arms, and calmly uttered her final words before killing herself. María Victoria Walsh Vicki’s daughter Victoria was locked in a room and survived the attack. The military returned her to the family of her father, Emiliano Costa. The man had been detained due to his political activity months before the girl was born in 1975 and would be released years later. The bodies of the victims were taken to the judicial morgue and later returned to their families amid several irregularities. There was no autopsy. Vicki’s father and fellow Montoneros member Rodolfo Walsh, who was also murdered by the dictatorship in 1977, spoke of his daughter’s life and death extensively in two open letters: “Letter to Vicki” and “Letter to my friends.” It was in the latter where, in true journalistic fashion, he revealed his daughter’s last moments after learning of the details of her death through one of the military officers present in the operation.  “All of a sudden — the soldier said —  there was a silence. The girl left the machine gun, stood above the parapet, and opened her arms. […] I don’t remember everything she said, but I remember the last sentence; it actually keeps me up at night. ‘You don’t kill us,’ she said. ‘We choose to die.’ Then, she and the man took a gun to their temple and killed themselves in front of us.” “Letter to my friends,” written three months after Vicki’s death, shows Rodolfo Walsh dealing with his grief. He lovingly writes about Vicki’s political activism to try and help her friends and loved ones understand why she killed herself. “Vicki could have chosen other paths that were different without being dishonorable, but she chose the most fair, generous, and reasonable one,” he wrote.  “Her lucid death is a synthesis of her short, beautiful life. She didn’t live for herself; she lived for others, and those others are millions.” Rodolfo Walsh The path to trial Vicki’s remains were exhumed in 1984 at the request of the Walsh family. The prestigious Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF, by its Spanish initials) conducted an analysis and concluded that her head injuries suggested a close shot to the head compatible with suicide. The case began in 2015 following the reopening of the dictatorship trials in 2006. The defendants have been in pre-trial house arrest since December 2021 but have not been required to wear ankle bracelets.  In the case of Vicki Walsh, the six officers are being charged with aggravated attempted murder. According to a memo from the prosecutors office the Herald has seen, the accusation is based on the fact that “the homicidal intention was present at all times” and that “the victim’s decision was due to the threat of imminent danger: kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and/or death.” The circumstances of Molina’s death, however, are less clear and something the trial intends to investigate. His death has been labeled as aggravated homicide, as well as those of Bertrán, Salame, and Coronel.  Image of a mural on the Corro streeet house that reads “Five heroes died here.” The defendants are considered secondary participants in the murders and could face life imprisonment if found guilty of the homicide charges. A federal chamber lowered the charges from primary perpetrators to accomplices because it considered their roles during the operation to be “expendable” given they were not high-ranking officials.  Prosecutors, however, say evidence suggests that they actually led the operation. The six are also accused of being secondary participants in the false imprisonment of four people who were staying at the house and survived the attack: Lucy Matilde Gómez de Mainer, her children Juan Cristóbal Mainer and Maricel Marta Mainer, and the latter’s husband, Ramón Alcides Baravalle. The Mainer family was also struck by tragedy. Previous trials have confirmed that the military knew of the Montoneros meeting at Corro Street because one of Lucy’s daughters, María Magdalena Mainer, was tortured into giving the location of the house while at the La Perla clandestine detention center in Córdoba.  María Magdalena’s remains were identified by the EAAF in a cemetery in 2013.