Valentín Arregui

Valentín Arregui is presented through brief but consequential exchanges: a prisoner difficult for the authorities to penetrate, a political organizer responsible for his comrades, and a man willing to enlist Molina in a carefully limited communication plan. His guardedness frustrates the Warden’s search for information, while his instructions turn Molina’s anticipated release into a possible line of contact with the organization. The plan’s consequences extend beyond the prison: the final surveillance report ends with Molina shot dead during an attempted arrest, leaving the proposed connection shadowed by violence and uncertainty.

Imprisonment and guardedness

In the Warden’s conversation with Molina, Arregui is described as almost impossible to approach. Molina says that Arregui is suspicious of everything and gives the authorities nothing; he refuses to invent information even though release is what he wants most. The Warden presses him to produce even the slightest clue, linking such cooperation to the signing of his papers and invoking Molina’s mother and the protection promised after release. Arregui’s silence, as reported by Molina, is therefore not simply a personal mannerism: it is the obstacle at the center of the authorities’ attempt to turn a cellmate into an informant.

The language of the exchange also exposes the coercive terms of that attempt. The Warden frames the conversation as a humane appeal between people, but pairs that appeal with the prospect of freedom and a promise of protection. Molina’s answer makes clear that release is a powerful inducement, yet he says that fabricating information would be worse. Arregui’s guardedness thus holds its ground indirectly: the authorities can question Molina, but cannot make him supply evidence that he does not possess.

A challenge about masculinity

In another conversation, Arregui asks Molina why, although physically a man like himself and not inferior to him, Molina does not act like a man, including with another man. He distinguishes the question from relations with women Molina may not find attractive, turning the exchange toward masculinity and same-sex intimacy. The question places their different understandings of gendered conduct directly between them, but the available exchange does not record Molina’s answer or establish what Arregui intends beyond asking.

That limit matters. Arregui’s words show him measuring conduct against a standard of manhood, but they do not settle his own desires or explain the question’s emotional purpose. Rather than supplying a full account of either man, the scene makes the tension explicit: physical maleness is treated as shared, while appropriate behavior is contested. It is one of the few glimpses of Arregui outside the language of prison security and revolutionary responsibility.

Trust, responsibility, and the coded plan

After Molina’s prospects of release become a source of excitement, Arregui tells him that he can do something important for him. He explains that a plan has occurred to him and that he has been unable to pass it to his comrades while confined. The opportunity depends on Molina’s position: Arregui does not ask him to gather intelligence or identify members of the organization. Instead, he asks for a narrow act of communication after a few days have passed.

Arregui explicitly accepts responsibility for his comrades and says that he would not ask Molina to act if he believed the task carried a risk. Molina, wary that interrogation might make him reveal everything, asks not to be given information about the comrades. Arregui’s proposed arrangement responds to that concern: Molina is to call from a public phone, not from home, and arrange a meeting at a false location. The place spoken over the telephone would function as a code for a different real destination. Arregui illustrates the method with examples: the Rio Coffee Shop would mean one place, while the Monumental Theater would stand for the home of one of his people; the Plaza Hotel would indicate a corner in the Boedo district.

This arrangement shows both the limits and the force of Arregui’s trust. He makes Molina a potential messenger without making him a repository of names or operational details, and presents the task as safe because he has judged its risks himself. The plan is practical rather than grand: delay, use a public telephone, disguise the meeting point. But those precautions reveal the danger surrounding any contact with the organization, including the possibility that telephone lines are tapped. Arregui’s political responsibility is expressed through the care with which he tries to protect others while asking for help.

Surveillance and the unresolved ending

The final report follows Molina through a day of work, a solitary lunch near Las Heras, and a series of calls from a public telephone. It records that he dialed three times and hung up immediately, as on a previous occasion, then ate only a bite or two before returning to work. In the evening he traveled by bus and subway to the area of Riglos and Formosa, where he waited for about thirty minutes. The report says that this was the interval allowed for contact before agents would take him for interrogation.

Two CISL agents moved to arrest Molina. When he demanded their credentials, shots were fired from a passing automobile. Molina and agent Joaquin Perrone were wounded; Molina died before the patrol unit arrived to give first aid. The report speculates that the attackers preferred to eliminate Molina to prevent a possible confession, but presents this as an impression, not a demonstrated fact. It also considers whether Molina knew he was being watched and had expected either to escape with the extremists or to be killed if caught in an incriminating position. These are the surveillance service’s conjectures, not confirmed knowledge of Arregui’s plan or the attackers’ identity.

Arregui’s significance in this ending lies in the connection the plot has established between his need to reach his comrades and Molina’s movements outside prison. The report does not establish that the coded plan caused the shooting, who fired the shots, or whether the intended contact took place. Instead, its bureaucratic detail records a fatal outcome while leaving the central political link unresolved. Arregui remains at the heart of that uncertainty: his guardedness had made communication difficult, and his attempt to create a careful channel reaches the reader through the surveillance of the man he trusted to carry it.