On July 18, 1994, a car bomb blew up the AMIA, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The most serious attack in the history of Argentina caused 86 fatalities. Or so it was believed. An investigation discovered that one of the deceased, Paraguayan Patricio Irala, was alive. He had actually never moved from his native country.
Irala's false death was a ruse by his wife, Castorina Amarilla Estigarribia, also Paraguayan, to collect the 55,000 pesos (at that time equivalent to $55,000) that the Argentine State gave as compensation to the relatives of those who died in the attack. With that money he crossed the border to evade Justice. Now, Netflix just released the movie 'Rest in Peace', which narrates the life of Sergio Dayán, another false victim of the same attack, imagined by the writer Martín Baintrub. Fiction and reality share the same vanishing point: Paraguay.
“I found out about Patricio Irala's story after publishing Rest in peace because related stories began to rain on me,” Baintrub tells EL PAÍS. “I felt somewhat guilty about writing about a false victim and discovering that there was a real one seemed amazing to me,” he adds, a few months before the 30th anniversary of an attack that remains unpunished.
According to this Argentine writer and publicist, the germ of the novel that has just hit the screens was the September 11, 2001 attack against the Twin Towers in New York. “That day I had to come to Corrientes for work and everything came to a standstill, the airports were closed. “I was looking at the images and I thought: what an opportunity for someone who has the need to fake their death,” he says. “A friend convinced me to move the action to Buenos Aires, in the context of the AMIA, which I know better,” he continues when talking about his debut in fiction. Had the original setting been maintained, his story would have had a great similarity to the story by Hernán Iglesias Illia, The two lives of Maxi Kaplan.
Unlike the fictional protagonists of Baintrub and Iglesias Illia, who take advantage of the chaos after a terrorist attack to disappear, the fake real victim of the AMIA was not even there. His wife, Estigarribia, told the police that Irala had started working that day as a driver for the Jewish mutual benefit, hired by someone who had also died in the attack. Two witnesses attested to her version and in August 1995, Castorina received the compensation established by law, according to journalist Hugo Martín in this reconstruction carried out on the Infobae web portal.
Irala was considered a victim until 2000, when the truth began to emerge. The AMIA security chief, Aarón Edry, declared in court that the mutual did not have drivers and that no one with the name Patricio Irala ever worked there. When pulling this thread, the investigators' first suspicion was that the deceased had been an accomplice of the terrorists or that they had posed as employers to make him take the car that exploded there. Both hypotheses collapsed when the Anti-Terrorist Investigations Unit of the Federal Police found the alleged victim in a town 14 kilometers from the capital of Asunción. He was alive, he was 48 years old and had six children and worked as a baker in an Army unit.
The accused managed to confirm that he had never left Paraguay. His wife invented the whole story from Buenos Aires, where she had gone to look for work. Justice found out that the two witness statements that confirmed Irala's presence at the scene of the attack were false: they believe that Estigarribia managed to convince two people he found in the Immigration queue by telling them that he needed their signatures to collect the pension.
Estigarribia tried to evade justice and pleaded not guilty. According to his incredible version, the Patricio Irala located by the police and the man he lived with were two different people but with identical names. “Only God and the Virgin will know how two men with the same name appeared. I ran from one Patricio and went out to another Patricio. What is happening is all a confusion,” he said. “Doña Castorina and her two husbands,” headlined the Paraguayan newspaper on April 21, 2001. The nation when telling the story, in a play on words with the famous novel by Jorge Amado.
The Argentine justice system did not believe her for the second time. In 2001 he opened a case against her for “defrauding the Administration of Justice” and requested her extradition. But the Paraguayan Justice, in September 2002, denied it. The Paraguayan judges rejoice that “the criminal action in relation to the punishable act for which the extradition of Castorina Amarilla is requested is statute-barred.” The couple remained in Paraguay, while in Buenos Aires Patricio Irala's name was erased from all the official lists of AMIA victims, which became 85 and not 86.
In the neighboring country, reality and fiction intersect again: there the two false victims escape. “There is something magical about Paraguay, which attracts great historical figures to come here to take refuge and close the cycles of their lives,” said the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, during one of his visits in the nineties. “Paraguay not only offered a refuge to our great heroes in history, but it changed their lives, redeemed them, gave them a new meaning,” wrote Galeano, as recalled by the Paraguayan journalist Andrés Colman. Among those names are the Uruguayan general Gervasio Artigas, the Spanish writer Rafael Barrett and the Swiss scientist Moisés Bertoni. But disgraced politicians, such as former Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón, also sought refuge there, and criminals such as Nazi doctor Josef Mengele hid.
“I chose Paraguay because it is associated with a place with little law,” says Baintrub. In that country “they have found and continue to find here a territory of impunity, a place where they found and find the complicity and protection of corrupt rulers, partners in authoritarian adventures and illicit businesses,” writes Colman. For all of them, as well as for the false victim 86 of the AMIA, Paraguay is a paradise where they can rest in peace.
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