San Patricio Church massacre

The San Patricio Church massacre was the murder of three priests and two seminarians of the Pallottine order on July 4, 1976, during the Dirty War, at St. Patrick’s Church, located in the Belgrano neighborhood in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The victims were priests Alfredo Leaden, Alfredo Kelly, and Pedro Duffau and seminarians Salvador Barbeito and Emilio Barletti.

At approximately 1:00 a.m. on July 4, 1976, three youths, Luis Pinasco, Guillermo Silva, and Julio Víctor Martínez, watched as two cars parked in front of the church of San Patricio. As Martínez was the son of a soldier and thought it might be part of an assassination attempt on his father, he went to Police Station No. 37 to make a complaint. Minutes later a police car arrived on the scene and officer Miguel Ángel Romano spoke with people who were suspects in the case. At 2 o'clock in the morning Silva and Pinasco saw a group of people with rifles get out of the cars and enter the church. The next morning, at the time of the first Mass, a group of worshippers waiting in front of the church found the door closed.

Surprised by the situation, the young Fernando Savino, organist of the parish decided to enter through a window and found on the first floor the bodies of the five religious riddled with bullets, and lined up face down in a huge puddle of blood on a red carpet. The murderers had written with chalk on a door:

Por los camaradas dinamitados en Seguridad Federal. Venceremos. Viva la Patria.
(For the comrades blown up at Federal Security. We will prevail. Long live the Fatherland.)

They also wrote on a carpet:

Estos zurdos murieron por ser adoctrinadores de mentes vírgenes y son M.S.T.M.
(These lefties were killed for being indoctrinators of innocent minds and M.S.T.M.)

The initials “M.S.T.M.” stand for Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (the Movement of Priests for the Third World), while the first sentence about “Federal Security” refers to the bomb attack the Montoneros (whose motto was “Venceremos” ) had set off two days before in the dining room of the Argentine Federal Police headquarters, killing 20 people.

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