Apr. 22.- The void left by the disappearance in April 1964 of Argentine journalist and guerrilla Jorge Ricardo Masetti in the jungle of Orán, in the northern province of Salta, remains open today among those who knew him and shared revolutionary work and ideas.
A shrewd reporter and founder of the Latin American News Agency Prensa Latina—on June 16, 1959, in Havana—Masetti entered the Salta jungle while serving as a leader of the People's Guerrilla Army (EGP) in the face of repression from the Gendarmerie, and there was never any news of him again, nor were his remains found, despite persistent searches.
Although the exact date of his death is unknown, April 21 is taken as the day of the disappearance of the man who was called “Comandante Segundo” at the head of the first Guevarist guerrilla movement in Argentina.
Forty years after that fatal outcome, a mission of Argentines and Cubans attempted to find the remains of the EGP leader, an organization devised by Ernesto Che Guevara with which he intended to establish a guerrilla focus in Argentina. But the search was in vain.
Biographical collections recount that one of the members of the guerrilla group, Héctor Jouvet, nicknamed “El Cordobés,” remembers seeing Masetti and another guerrilla, Atilio Altamira, for the last time, both lying very weak in improvised hammocks on one of the banks of the Río de las Piedras, in Salta.
“They could hardly move,” Jouvet told the Cuban physician and forensic anthropologist Alfredo J. Tamames Camargo, one of the main members of the mission that tracked and searched for Masetti's remains.
In April 1964, what little remained of the EGP—which initially consisted of about thirty fighters—was surrounded by the Gendarmerie, had lost men and weapons, and lacked food.
Jouvet and other guerrillas were captured; the Cuban Hermes Peña—head of Che's security in Cuba—fell along with other comrades in a clash with gendarmes north of the confluence of the Piedras and Pantanoso rivers, and no further word was heard of Masetti and Altamira. They were presumed missing in the jungle.
In 2006, at the request of the Cuban government to the Argentine Foreign Ministry, a search for the remains of the two guerrillas was undertaken.
To do so, a team was formed consisting of Cuban anthropologist Tamames Camargo, two park rangers, and five Argentine gendarmes, whose mission was to traverse the almost inaccessible sites where the bodies of Masetti and Altamira might be, thereby bringing an end to the most unfathomable mystery in the history of the guerrilla movement in Argentina.
A long time had passed, the topography of the area had changed, and very little data was available: some information gathered from Gendarmerie archives by Gabriel Rot for his book “The Lost Origins of the Guerrilla” and Jouvet's description of the place where he last saw Masetti.
That search took place less than 10 years after, in 1997, the remains of Ernesto Guevara were found by a team of forensic anthropologists in Bolivia.
It was an almost impossible mission due to the scant information available, the time that had elapsed, and the characteristics of the territory through which the EGP guerrilla movement moved.
There was a second attempt; the team was the same; they steered the search further up the Río las Piedras, although the experts only had additional topographical data. They returned without achieving their objective.
Third and fourth expeditions were carried out in 2007 to find the remains, or at least some trace, of Masetti and Altamira, but to no avail.
The Cuban anthropologist Tamames Camargo conducted new searches in the following months, not in the river, but in cemeteries of nearby towns.
He believed that the Gendarmerie had found the bodies in the 1960s and that, as in the case of Hermes Peña, they had buried them as unidentified persons (NN) in some cemetery in the area, but he found nothing either. Those were the final attempts.
There remains the farewell written by Rodolfo Walsh, his colleague in the founding of Prensa Latina: “Masetti never appears. He has dissolved into the jungle, into the rain, into time. In some unknown place, the corpse of Comandante Segundo wields a rusted rifle.”
