In an interview carried out by journalist Luciana Bertoia published on August 15 in this newspaper, former Air Force Chief of Staff Omar Graffigna — in custody for crimes against humanity, denies something that I never asserted in my book, Doble agente, la biografía inesperada de Horacio Verbitsky (Double agent, the unexpected biography of Horacio Verbitsky).
Graffigna is under house arrest, a privilege that few military officials enjoy as it depends on a discretional decision by a Judge — in this case a magistrate very close to Verbitsky, Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas, who became famous for his text messages to Vice-President Amado Boudou’s defense lawyer. He told the Herald journalist that he never met Horacio Verbitsky and that nobody wrote his speeches.
Both in the book and on the news website plazademayo.com there is abundant documentation that proves that Commodore Juan José Güiraldes was at the head of a team that wrote the brigadier’s speeches.
To demonstrate this it suffices to examine a letter sent by Commodore Güiraldes to Brigadier General Graffigna on June 11, 1980: “It is not necessary that I inform you of my total identification and complete agreement with your leadership in the same way as I did with brigadier general Agosti’s leadership. If that had not been the case I could not have provided my input into the drafting of speeches and other documents. In tasks of this nature, as you are aware, if the identification is not total, the laying out of coherent and clear ideas at the service of principles and definitions established by those who lead those who must think and write for that leadership.”
It has also been proven with public documents held in various public and private libraries that Verbitsky received funds from the Air Force by way of the Instituto Argentino de Historia Aeronáutica Jorge Newbery and that the payments were carried out by way of the Sociedad Militar Seguro de Vida.
Two forensic handwriting experts have found that a 34-page manuscript used as the foundation for one of Graffigna’s speeches was written by Horacio Verbitsky, whom in his crude attempt to discredit the analysis only confirmed them by way of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) Twitter account, which published an image of the notes taken by the journalist during the Trial of the Juntas. A second handwriting analysis of that material indicated ‘formal matches‘ between the sample provided by Verbitsky himself and the manuscripts that we have in our possession.
Finally, even if it is clear that the repressor Graffigna is lying when he argues that nobody wrote his speeches, we never stated that he had a personal or direct relationship with Verbitsky even if there are documents provided by the Air Force itself that indicate that the copies of the records of payments and contracts agreed with the journalist, today converted into a human rights leader, were sent to the Air Force’s Chief of Staff (Graffigna at the time) as well as to the two other armed forces in 1979. Graffigna may not have read the material that was on his desk. Odd, but possible.
The former Air Force chief is lying and Verbitsky used his statements in his Sunday column in Página12 to invent a media plot against him.
In addition, in his manouevres and false denials, Verbitsky insists on portraying Güiraldes in a certain fashion: a personal friend, retired military officer with gaucho habits and totally unconnected to the dictatorship. In Doble agente and articles in plazademayo.com we have demonstrated with irrefutable documentation the falsity of that self-justifying discourse. As if that were not enough, Verbitsky himself wrote in his book La última batalla de la Tercera Guerra Mundial (The last battle of the Third World War) that Güiraldes was an advisor to three Air Force chiefs during the dictatorship, which he defended participating in international campaigns. That information was cut from subsequent editions of the same book in 2002 and 2006. It is difficult to erase the tracks of one’s own history.
It is time for Horacio Verbitsky to give explanations for those contracts, for his relationship with the force and the motives for why he insists on denying irrefutable documentation instead of sheltering himself once again behind the uniform of an Air Force repressor to deny a work investigative journalism that adheres to the strictest norms of our profession.
