Welcome Avatar! At five o’clock in the morning on February 1, 1931, a man dressed in a brand-new, spotless blue mechanic’s jumpsuit entered the courtyard of the Palermo National Penitentiary. Today, that site is known as Las Heras Park, where porteños go jogging, walk their dogs, do some yoga stretches, and sip on their mates on the grass. Back then, however, it was the country’s main prison, and the courtyard contained a wooden post.
The man walking up to that post was Severino Di Giovanni, an Italian typographer from Chieti, aged 29. He had refused a priest three times. He had asked for a coffee with lots of sugar, taken one sip, and then pushed it away. When the officer tried to put the blindfold on, he shook it off: ¡Venda no! And when the rifles came up he got two words out before the volley: Evviva l'anarchia!
Eight bullets, then one more to the right temple, just to be sure.
Author Roberto Arlt (famous for his Los Siete Locos novel) was there as a reporter for El Mundo, and his chronicle is the reason we still talk about that morning. His editor cut the opening line, reportedly the only time Arlt was ever censored: "Today I have seen men put on white gloves to kill another man."1 What ran instead was a stopwatch: “Five minutes to. Anxious faces behind the bars. Four minutes fifty-eight seconds. The bolt screeches and the iron door opens.”
Severino Di Giovanni was the last man the Argentine state tried, convicted, and executed by firing squad through a procedure that at least purported to be a judicial process (his friend Paulino Scarfó met the same fate the following morning, whereas the 1956 firing squads under Aramburu’s command were something entirely different; we shall discuss both cases later). His body was placed in an unmarked grave at Chacarita Cemetery, with orders that its location be revealed to no one. The next day, the grave was found covered in red carnations. When it comes to graves in Argentina, there is always someone who knows where they are.
This story and that of anarchism in Argentina in general are essential to understand many of the problems that have plagued the country throughout much of the 20th century: the bombings and kidnappings carried out “in the name of the working class,” which would later bear the Peronist or Marxist stamp, have a documented origin. It all started in Buenos Aires around 1900, and the majority of the names associated with it were Italian. A virtually identical story unfolded in the United States during the same period, involving the same immigrants, the same ideas, and the same state response. The two stories even collided in 1927, resulting in numerous deaths in downtown Buenos Aires.
