Fernando must have known the priest Carlos Mugica. Everything now really began to change. The Tacuara Nationalist Movement breaks off from the Tacuara Revolutionary Nationalist Movement. The demoniacal priest Menvielle becomes infuriated and creates the Nationalist Restorational Guard, which is like Tacuara or worse. Its acronym, because these things are important, was ingenious and cruel: GRN. It’s a grunt. Menvielle and his Guard are rabid felines ready to hunt down communists, Jews, and Masons. Not Fernando. No one meets Carlos Mugica and remains the same. Mugica has turned Jesus and social justice into brothers. He was a man of limpid eyes; on the blond side; medium stature, not tall; intelligent; sensible. The revolution did not mean for him a shortcut to get rid of his habit. He believed that Jesus had come to bring the sword and not just the cross. Not only love, but love that expresses itself through struggle . The only love: that which leads us to love the dispossessed. He imagined a Christ like the one imagined by Evita in a text he will never know, My Message. He would have liked this sentence: “We must convince ourselves once and for all: the world will belong to the people if we the people decide to allow ourselves to burn with the sacred fire of fanaticism. Burn ourselves in order to burn, without listening to the siren song of the mediocre and the josé pablo feinmann 50 | | imbeciles who speak to us of prudence. They forget what Christ said: ‘I have come to bring fire to the earth and I want nothing more than for it to burn.’” These words would have been dizzying for Fernando. Mugica embodied them less. The essential decision of revolutionary Catholicism was not alien to him. The one that Evita expressed better than anyone else: Burn ourselves in order to burn. But Fernando embodied it to the end. That was his life. He was destined for it to be that way, and that’s the way it was. Fernando Abal Medina burned himself in order to inflame others. Mugica passed on to him what he failed to seek in the great theorists of socialism. Because it was not enough for him to burn himself in order to burn. You’ve got to know how to burn yourself. And, especially, what to burn. Mugica spoke to him of the Colombian guerrilla priest Camilo Torres. He talked to him about the armed struggle. He introduced him to the Third World Priests. He talked to him of Peronismo. The Cuban Revolution. He even talked to him about John William Cooke. He pulled him away from the violent nationalism of Tacuara. And even from the splinter group, the Tacuara Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, that infuriated Menvielle so much. Carlos Mugica talked to him about the people and about love for those who are desperate. He told him that a revolutionary is not a man who hates, but a man who loves. And who loves, above all else, the people. To be a revolutionary is to love the poor, to choose for the poor. He also told him something decisive: the poor in our country are Peronistas. Fernando is now part of Mugica’s flock. Years later, Mugica will be assassinated. The information services will attempt to make accusations against the organization he founded, along with [18.206.12.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:24 GMT) t i m o t e| | 51 his friends (those who are about to kidnap Aramburu), Fernando and the Montoneros. They will put up posters in the business district. They contain an image of Mugica surrounded by lambs. Among the latter are wolves. There is one sentence on the poster. The sentence says, “There were wolves among your flock.” Fernando would never have been able to be a wolf for Mugica. Not him nor anyone else among his friends. Mugica was probably killed by those who put up the posters around Buenos Aires. But that’s later. Much later. So much so that perhaps it’s better not to deal with it because it would take us too much astray. Let’s make a note of this: Mugica’s influence is decisive. Love before hatred. Love for the people, fight for them and even kill for them. But no killing out of hatred, kill out of an excess of love and because one has no other choice. Because an illegal country, one that is antidemocratic, which slips from...