“No one commented on anything,” Rafael Baron says in a resigned tone at the beginning of the documentary. “They couldn’t have been a witness. They were just a ticket.”“Archers’ Race”. The film is directed, written and produced Rodolfo Beatris Reconstructs the history of the six bodies found in Avellaneda During the early hours of February 22, 1977.
During Argentina’s last civilian-military dictatorship, four men and two women were unloaded from a truck and shot by the army near a wall at the Racing Club stadium. The massacre remained hidden for more than forty years To this day, the identity of the victims and the location of their remains remain unknown.
The documentary accompanies the journalistic investigation that later led to A Judicial complaint. “When I started filming, I didn’t know that I was going to file a complaint. You have an idea in your head that you want to say something, you want to investigate something, but the truth is that I didn’t know where it would end,” says the director.
During the two-hour film, Petris calls witnesses, walks through scenes of the event and reviews files to reconstruct what happened. Beatriz says: “It caught my attention to find people who did not want to talk about the issue or did not want to appear for fear of talking about matters related to the dictatorship. I did not expect this kind of fear.”
The first time anyone spoke about the incident was in May 2016, when Rafael Baron Daniel Ravecas testified in federal court about another shooting that occurred in Avellaneda. Baroni said after testifying about the Tamit massacre in Pinheiro: “I was walking with Omar Uresti Corbata, who was a former football player, and we saw several dead, outside the field, with gunshot wounds. I did not see military personnel, or any kind. The bodies were on the sidewalk of the ticket office on Colon Street.”
ex files Intelligence Directorate of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police (DIPPBA), checked the record recorded by the Buenos Aires Police at the time and, as expected, the incident was recorded in the context of a “false encounter with an extremist group.”
Created in 1956 and dissolved in 1998, DIPPBA integrated Buenos Aires’ repressive apparatus through the systematic production of political information and intelligence in the service of state terrorism. Since 2001, thanks to Law 12.642, its archives have been part of a collection Regional Memory Committee (Cost per thousand impressions).
For documentary filmmaking, the archive was key: “It allows you to find paper evidence of what one might only know orally. Evidence of the existence of the incident was when the intelligence report appeared in DIPPBABeatriz explains.
The idea for the documentary came from a memo the journalist published in 2018 Michaela PollackWhich reported this execution. “This was the first news I received,” says the director. “I immediately thought we should deepen the investigation I had started and make a documentary.”
One of the goals of the film was to publicize the issue so that new testimonies or people who could contribute data would emerge when it became public. The submitted complaint included evidence collected during the investigation and a series of required measures, including summoning witnesses and requests for information from various state institutions.
“I felt happy, on the one hand, because of relief that I had done everything in my power to investigate a case that had not been worked on. Even if justice cannot identify the victims, this is still a journalistic story that constitutes an Argentine judicial fact. It may or may not be resolved, but The testimony remains that this crime also existed during the dictatorship period“, concludes Beatriz.
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