In the early hours of March 9, 1977hundreds of men from City Bell Communications Battalion 601 and of 7th Infantry Regiment of La Plata they reached the Foecyt neighborhood of Villa Elisa, where they lived in a duplex Griselda Betelu -which was three months pregnant– and his partner Raul Martin Alonso. the two were militants of the Peronist Youth-Montoneros. The military ordered the neighbors to leave their homes and gave notice at the station that the trains would not be able to pass. All this was the preamble to a brutal operative in which they even reached use a bazooka against the house in order to start a fire and extinguish any possible resistance to the attack. For the murders of the two militants, the federal judge of La Plata Alejo Ramos Padilla ordered the arrest of five retired soldiers.
The arrest warrant initially also included Alvaro Marcos Carles, who in 1977 officiated as section chief of Company A of the Communications Battalion 601 of City Bell. Carlés apparently died years ago in Venezuela, but at the moment there are no official records of his death. Carlés is, in some way, a central protagonist in the plot which allowed the Human Rights Prosecutor Unit of La Plata and the court to reconstruct the Villa Elisa operation.
Carlés was wounded in the early hours of March 9, 1977. Both for the treatment they had to give him and for the decoration they later awarded him for “value in combat” Records remained that allow us to reconstruct how the soldiers arrived at that little house where Betelú and Alonso lived, where everything indicates there was prior intelligence before the military units and police reinforcements arrived.
According to those documents, an operative group of the Information Gathering Center (CRI) of Area 113 He arrived after 12 midnight at the Communications Battalion to request support for a raid. The units of the Battalion and the Regiment went there. Once in Villa Elisa, they surrounded the building in which the couple lived, evicted the neighbors and interrupted the passage of the trains. Carlés was ordered to occupy the building. That’s where he was when he was wounded – it’s not clear that he wasn’t friendly fire, investigators say. Later, they activated larger weapons and ended up setting the house on fire. That was around 3:30 in the morning.
The Buenos Aires Police learned at 0.45 that there was a shooting in the Villa Elisa neighborhood and was also present: they ordered six patrol cars, two “anti-subversive” groups and an ambulance. The information comes from a news book of the Intelligence Directorate of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires (DIPPBA) that the Provincial Commission for Memory (CPM) contributed to the investigation. Due to the deployment, the damage and the excessive violence, the Villa Elisa operation is reminiscent of that of the house on 30th Streetwhere the son and daughter-in-law lived Maria Isabel “Chicha” Chorobik de Mariani and from where they stole her granddaughter Clara Anahi.
After calling the firefighters, the repressors took out the two bodies of the militants – according to the version that appeared in the military documents but was also given by a neighbor from the neighborhood. Griselda Betelú was 29 years old, she was a psychologist and worked at the General Tax Directorate (DGI) of La Plata. She was three months pregnant. her partner, Raul Martin Alonso, was 26 years old and he was from Bolivar. He had moved to La Plata to study Economic Sciences and worked in the courts of that city.
Although his remains could never be recovered, the prosecution was able to reconstruct –thanks to the work of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)– that the bodies were buried a week later in the La Plata cemetery. The death certificates stated that they had died from bullet wounds to their heads. In May 1982, the remains of Griselda and her partner were transferred to the ossuary –which made their identification impossible–.
Arrested repressors
for their murders, Ramos Padilla stopped August Edmundo Caselli Gracés -who was the head of Company B of the 7th Infantry Regiment- Carlos Felipe Maisonnave –who was the personnel officer of the Communications Battalion–. The two were free, they were arrested in an operation that was in charge of the Prefecture and they were already investigated by the judge. Only Caselli Gracés agreed to testify: he acknowledged having been in the operation that March 9as he was able to reconstruct Page 12 through judicial sources.
The judge also ordered the arrest of other members of the City Bell Communications Battalion: Carlos Bazan -who was his second boss-, Francisco Fleba –who was the intelligence officer of the Plana Mayor– and Edward Laciar -which was the operations officer-. The three were already detained at the disposal of the Federal Oral Court (TOF) 2 of La Plata. The last to be investigated will be Bazán, who will testify on October 4 because he is under house arrest in Córdoba.
Bazán, Fleba and Laciar were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 for an operation – commanded by the Communications Battalion – in which another family was wiped out. On September 6, 1977, they arrived at a prefabricated house in the Villa España neighborhood of Berazategui where María Nicosia Rodríguez, her three children – Marcela, Sergio and Marina – and a fellow activist, Arturo Alejandro Jaimez, lived. After an initial resistance, the military killed the two Montoneros members. When they entered the house, one of them bellowed when he saw the boys: “There are chicks in the nest”. Sergio and Marina ended up being returned to the family, but Marcela – who was twelve years old – was kidnapped. She went through clandestine centers such as Vesuvius, Sheraton and the La Tablada Regiment – where she suffered torture and abuse.