The Blue Line by Ingrid Betancourt Read Free Book Online Page A

there that Gabriel had made friends with Carlos Gustavo Ramus, a classmate who would later meet a tragic fate. In 1964, at just seventeen, Ramus had become the leader of the Catholic students’ organization in Buenos Aires. At twenty-three he had helped to launch a revolutionary movement opposed to the military dictatorship: the Montoneros, named after the guerrillas who had fought against Spanish rule in the nineteenth century. He was killed a few months later during a confrontation with police. It was through Ramus that Gabriel, aged barely eighteen, had become an activist within the Catholic Student Youth, the JEC. It was also through Ramus that Gabriel had made the acquaintance of the young priest Carlos Mugica, the movement’s spiritual adviser.
    Gabriel had gotten involved in politics in 1966 while studying for his entrance exams to the faculty of medicine. Theo assumed that his involvement in politics simply consisted of a few meetings with friends. Gabriel’s circle was made up of young nationalists, most of them conservative and Catholic, who were also attracted, paradoxically enough, to the ideas of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. They viewed Father Mugica as a mentor because he talked about social justice and worked on the ground in the
villas miserias
of Buenos Aires. He had taken his young followers there several times on vaccination campaigns and similar missions. The brush with poverty had put some of them off but encouraged the hardier ones to get more involved. Hence why young people from the Mataderos neighborhood, where the d’Uccello brothers lived, read PierreTeilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar, and René Laurentin before they read Marx’s
Capital
.
    Young Theo’s room reflected the influence of his older brother. Instead of the posters of Ursula Andress that held pride of place in his friends’ bedrooms, his room was decked out with photographs of Che Guevara and Perón in full dress uniform. It didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest that his heroes embodied contradictory ideals. At the foot of his bed lay piles of
Christianity and Revolution
salvaged after they’d been read from cover to cover by his brother’s political circle. One of the shelves behind the door held a dusty copy of a book that had once been required reading in school:
La Razón de mi vida
, with a picture of Evita Perón on the cover. The book had recently been banned by the military junta.
    Theo was an eager participant in the meetings Gabriel organized at their house, especially when Father Mugica was present. The young priest argued that the temptation of armed struggle was a trap and that only democratic action could break the military’s stranglehold. Although he admired the success of the Cuban experience, he refused to justify revolutionary violence. He liked to remind them of the biblical reference to turning swords into plowshares, although that hadn’t stopped him from clashing with Cardinal Caggiano, the archbishop of Buenos Aires and the head of the Argentine church, who openly supported the military dictatorship.
    Gabriel had briefly nursed the idea of entering the seminary. He had been tempted to follow in Mugica’s footstepsand become involved in the antiestablishment Movement of Priests for the Third World, an organization of young Argentine clerics that had become extremely popular because of its outspoken criticism of the abuses of the military junta.
    Perhaps that was why Gabriel hadn’t joined his friend Ramus when the Montoneros formed their first armed unit in the early 1970s. Gabriel believed subversion would exacerbate the country’s social malaise, not remedy it. Nor did he approve of Operation Pindapoy, the kidnapping of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. The former head of the military junta had been hauled before a people’s court. Charged with multiple crimes, particularly that of stealing Evita Perón’s body, he had been killed by a