No matarás / You will not kill
Ethics and politics in Argentina
In this write-up, I want to share a debate regarding the use of deadly violence in liberatory struggle that occurred among old leftists in Argentina. The debate concerns the execution of two revolutionaries by fellow revolutionaries in Argentina in the 1960s. I draw mainly and extensively from two sources, found at the bottom via footnotes. TW: violence, description of an execution.
Héctor Jouvé, an Argentinan revolutionary, was part of the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (People’s Guerilla Army; EGP), which was involved in a brief attempt to create a Guevarist guerrilla foco in the north-western mountains of Salta in 1964. The plan was to establish a local platform that would later link up with the Bolivian guerilla force which Guevara wanted to set up and would eventually die leading in 1967. The EGP’s effort was a complete failure. In 2004, a long interview with Héctor Jouvé was published.
In the interview, Jouvé reminisces about his militant experiences: falling-out with the Communist Party in his native Córdoba, his subsequent recruitment into the guerilla group, and the latter’s rapid defeat by hunger and exhaustion before even entering into combat; the tortures suffered during a prison odyssey through Tucumán, Salta and Rawson, before the amnesty proclaimed by Cámpora in 1973, and the shared experiences with inmates from other political factions. Most importantly, Jouvé also relates the most infamous episodes of his guerilla experience, the ‘trial’ and execution of two of his companions, Adolfo Rotblat and Bernardo Groswald, accused of treason for having ‘broken down’ (quebrarse), in Jouvé’s own words. On learning of the death sentence against Rotblat, Jouvé says, he protested to their leader, Jorge Masetti, only to be threatened with having to carry out the shooting himself (which he refused).
Quebrarse here translates to having broken down, and as Jouvé describes it, Rotblat and Groswald were two men who were simply not ready for the difficult trek through the mountains required of the group. Masetti was reputed to have developed a frightening authoritarian streak, and very possibly assigned particularly punishing assignments to those he was suspicious of or else despised.1 According to Henry Lerner, one of the members of Masetti’s group who was himself targeted for suspicion, said of the eventually executed Groswald that:
“[Groswald] was frightened of going down slopes, and he began animalizing. It was truly repellent, and as the days went by he began physically to look more like an animal. To go down a hill he went down on his ass, walked on all fours. … He was dirty, unclean, and he was punished, given the hardest jobs, that kind of thing.”
In Lerner’s commentary of the doomed Groswald, I am struck by the disgust generated by his appearance. Groswald, in seeming to become an animal, seems to lose any sympathy from the group. It is as though the commitment to revolutionary action is betrayed in Groswald by no more treasonous an act than appearing weak, filthy, embarassing.
Rotblat, the other executed revolutionary, was a 20-year old Jewish man from Buenos Aires who had the nickname ‘Pupi.’ He was asthmatic, and would fall behind in marches. By the time Rotblat joined the group, Masetti had fully developed a reptuation for meanness and a preference for toughness. He was said to be fond of Jouvé, who was a tall, physically fit ex-military man. Masetti was frustrated with the slowness of their actions, and he constantly took his anger out on the group newcomers, including Rotblat and Groswald.
Rotblat’s mental state deteriorated until he was “completely broken.” He was said to live in a state of terror, constantly weeping, falling behind, and had to be dragged along by others. At one point, the group became lost and needed to cross a river. Rotblat refused and begged to be killed instead of being made to cross. A member of the group, Ciro Bustos, drew a gun and placed it to Rotblat’s head, at which point he walked, being kicked in the butt with a gun leveled at him the whole walk back to camp.
In the days leading up to the execution, Masetti said: “Look, this situation is becoming unbearable. No one can stand it anymore. Nobody wants to carry him, and so a measure has to be taken that sanitizes the group’s psychology, that liberates it from this thing that is corroding it.” Masetti decided that Rotblat needed to be executed, and he chose a new member, Pirincho (a student from a wealthy Buenos Aires family) to do the deed, ostensibly to harden his new member in a manner reminiscent of the “binding violence” described by Moira Fradinger.2
Pirincho went into the night with Rotblat, and the group heard the shot. Pirincho returned to the group, saying desperately “He won’t die.” Bustos walked to the failed scene of the execution with Pirincho and saw Rotblat on the ground with a bullet in his head, convulsing. Bustos drew his gun, fired another bullet into Rotblat, and returned to camp. Upon returning to camp, Bustos reported the strange scene: Pirincho’s face was devastated, but everyone else was in high spirits. “Suddenly there was euphoria. It reminded me of when someone dies and everyone feels the necessity to have a lunch and drink toasts. Masetti handed out promotions and began making plans about moving to another zone.”
Groswald was partly a victim of breaking the law brought into being by Rotblat’s execution: to appear weak. Like Rotblat, Groswald fell apart in the jungle. Lerner recalled that Groswald, a 19-year old Jewish bank clerk from Córdoba, asked if the group gave talks, if they had meetings, “as if he was coming to some kind of flower show.” Bustos, concerned for Groswald’s fate following Rotblat’s judgement, begged Masetti not do anything until arrangements for Groswald’s evacuation could be made: he would be left with some people who could be trusted on a farm until it was safe to release him. An ostensible part of the calculation for Groswald and Rotblat’s fate was the inability to trust them, broken as they were, not to reveal their military plans to the enemy. Masetti promised he would wait. Around the same time, Pirincho told Bustos that he was leaving the group: he had his own breakdown, he’d lost faith because of the murder of Rotblat, and despite this knew that “the guerilla thing went beyond the personality of [Masetti], and that that was what he respected and would maintain loyal to.”
Masetti broke his promise about Groswald while Bustos was away. Groswald’s behavior had ostensibly worsened: Lerner recalled that he was “totally broken, he didn’t talk. He got down on all fours, he dragged himself, poor thing, he wept, he masturbated. That was how he cleaned himself, like a primitive form of hygiene.” Masetti ordered a trial that lasted ten or fifteen minutes according to Lerner. Groswald had allegedly decided to inculpate himself by saying nothing to rebut the charge that if he was freed and caught by police, he would tell all he knew. Groswald was condemned to death by firing squad for not complying with the revolutionary laws, and the newest members would take part in the execution.
Groswald was shot next to his grave. Lerner says of that day: At the last minute, when the order to fire came, he saw Groswald swell out his chest. “He looked straight ahead, he didn’t tremble, he didn’t fall on his knees, he didn’t ask for anything. Afterward, nobody said a word. We all tried to hide from ourselves. Masetti acted as if nothing had happened. Groswald was buried, his grave covered over, life went on.
Jouvé was also in attendance at the execution, and said: ‘We were all there when he was shot. It really seemed incredible to me. I thought it was a crime, because he was destroyed, a psychiatric case. I think we are all somehow responsible, because we have all been in it, making the revolution.’
In response to Jouvé’s published interview, the philosopher Oscar del Barco, himself a former member of the Communist Party and, like José Aricó (also mentioned by Jouvé), of the radical left network in Córdoba from which Jouvé and other fighters of the EGP had been recruited, sent a letter to the editors of La Intemperie, which centres on the character of the ‘responsibility’ invoked by Jouvé. Del Barco’s intervention rapidly sparked a debate that spread far beyond the pages of La Intemperie, on being taken up by other journals such as Conjetural, Pensamiento de los Confines and El Ojo Mocho.
In his initial letter, del Barco takes responsibility. Although leaving the precise character of his peripheral involvement in the guerrilla venture unclear (Jouvé mentions him in passing in his account), he nevertheless assumes responsibility for the execution (or ‘murder’) of its two victims, Rotblat and Groswald, which, he says, he felt personally and deeply. He goes on to suggest that others on the Left may follow suit, that is, assume their own responsibilities too. In this respect, del Barco appears to particularly address well-known participants in the armed struggle such as the ‘national poet’ Juan Gelman, active in the upper echelons of the apparatus of the Left-Peronist Montoneros and who, himself, lost a son to military repression. Del Barco, therefore, also reintroduces the debate over the ‘two demons’, but now from the Left. He insists that the forces of revolution in Argentina and beyond (he mentions Lenin, Trotsky, Castro and Guevara) have infringed the fundamental and transcendental ethical tenet on which all societies must be founded: that of no matarás – ‘thou shalt not kill.’3
I do not have too much more too add here, for this write-up is already long. Del Barco drew a number of responses, many of them critical. The publication of his letter and its responses can be considered an instantiation of the “ethics vs. politics” debate in Latin America, although ostensibly a late iteration.4 In a more general sense, ethics and politics can be opposed in the form of a question: does ethics always trump the means and ends logic of politics, or does a commitment to ethics over politics end up subverting the very ethics claimed to be primary in the first place precisely by disclaiming politics?
In addition to agreeing with Alberto Moreiras that something other than an iteration of a debate between ethics and politics is announced in the injunction no matarás, I would rather read the declarative in the register of a commandment understood as a guideline, as Walter Benjamin puts it in "Toward the Critique of Violence."5 I am struck by the difficulty in any mere assertion of revolutionary violence without thereby being convinced one must be either "for" or "against" the use of violence towards liberation.
More than anything else though, I am filled with sadness when I read this history. I do not think it was right that Rotblat and Groswald were executed by their companions. I recognize the issue of tactics, the conditions of war, the stresses all of those men might have been in while waging revolutionary combat. I think of Rotblat and Groswald leaving their families for a cause, and being so mentally and physically destroyed by their exertions that they may have at times wished for death. In this depressed, mentally anguished way in particular, I empathize with them. I do not think any utilitarian calculations on behalf of the revolutionary executioners can make it right, and in this sense insofar as I think liberation is meaningful, I think del Barco is right that we are all responsible.
Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. First revised edition. New York, Grove Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2010, 611.
Fradinger, Moira. Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Andermann, Jens, Philip Derbyshire, and John Kraniauskas. “No Matarás (‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’): An Introduction.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (August 1, 2007): 111–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569320701449926.
Dove, Patrick. “Memory between Politics and Ethics: Del Barco’s Letter.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17, no. 3 (December 1, 2008): 279–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569320802543999.
Moreiras, Alberto. Infrapolitics: A Handbook, 2021, 88-113.