Guillermo García Medina (Rafael Cuesta) and Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s friendship

The friendship between Guillermo García Medina, living as Rafael Cuesta, and Manuel Arroyo Benítez is built on reciprocal debts of survival and tested by the political failures that outlast their wartime struggle. Their reunion in Madrid in 1976 reveals two men still bound by the lives they saved for one another, but also by a shared defeat: both have used false names, both carry the consequences of violence, and both know that the justice they once hoped for has largely been denied.

A bond formed through rescue

The friendship’s defining premise is mutual obligation. The two men owe each other their lives, a debt that is not presented as a simple exchange concluded once danger has passed. At their reunion, the narrator describes their bodies as marked by scars and recalls that it was his hands that had stitched his friend. Their histories are physically and morally intertwined: each has been a rescuer, and each has depended on the other’s action to survive.

The same bond reaches back to the danger surrounding Rafael Cuesta’s identity. After a wounded man was mistaken for a corpse, the commander found a Public Order Council credential in his wallet and received instructions from a police commissioner who identified himself as Basilio Rodríguez. If Rafael was dead, he was to be buried as an unknown man without registration; if alive, he had to be kept alive while being kept out of any hospital under his own name, because someone might try to kill him again. The commissioner said the man was vital to the Republic. This account places the friendship within a larger chain of clandestine protection: Rafael’s continued life depended on others concealing both his condition and identity, while the later reunion makes clear that survival created obligations between the men themselves.

Reunion after shared defeat

On 30 December 1976, at the arrivals entrance of Barajas International Terminal, the friends embrace for the first time in years. The passage measures their separation through changes in age and appearance: Guillermo’s hair is grey, Manuel’s entirely white; Guillermo has grown heavier, while Manuel has become the thinner of the two. Guillermo is nearing sixty-two and Manuel has already turned sixty-six. Their children do not bear their father’s surnames, and they are old enough to be grandfathers to the youngest of them. These details make the reunion a meeting not of men returning to youth, but of fathers whose lives have continued under assumed identities and the weight of accumulated time.

Neither man is using his real name, yet each calls the other by his authentic one. That distinction captures the intimacy of their relationship: concealment remains necessary in public life, but between them the hidden person is recognized. They know they have sunk together and reached the bottom of a final defeat. For a moment, however, the embrace restores a sense of strength and youth, as if the faith and hope that once joined them had become present again. The moment does not undo their failure; it gives them a brief shared space in which its meaning can be acknowledged.

Manuel tells Guillermo that they must talk, and Guillermo answers that he has much to tell him. Their reunion is therefore more than an emotional recognition. It opens a long-delayed exchange of knowledge, including the account of Manuel’s work in Argentina and Guillermo’s own concealed past.

The report and the failure of justice

At the café, Manuel has brought a thick ring binder with blue covers, packed so full that it holds its shape at an obtuse angle. He pushes it across the table to Guillermo and explains that it is a copy of the document he wrote in Buenos Aires, known at the American embassy as the Pacheco Report. Its first section covers matters Guillermo partly knows already; from roughly page two hundred onward, it records what Manuel discovered in Argentina. The folder contains more than four hundred single-spaced typed pages and nearly a hundred photographs of buildings, interiors, documents, and people.

The report joins the men’s private friendship to a larger record of crimes and possible accountability. It contains false and authentic names, private and professional addresses, dates, locations, sea and air routes, and even the flight number on which Manuel arrived. Manuel tells Guillermo that the information could have enabled the arrest of a hundred war criminals in Madrid and Buenos Aires in a single night. The specificity of the file makes its unrealized potential concrete: it is not merely a record of what happened, but information that could have supported action.

Manuel has kept the copy despite believing for a time that it would never be useful. He feared that the original would be destroyed in a Washington office, so he retained his version rather than sending it to Pablo de Azcárate. After marrying Simona, he installed a safe in a wall and stored the report there for years. When Juan Perón fell in 1955 and Nazi fugitives in Argentina became less protected, Manuel was relieved that he had not destroyed it. The document’s survival thus depends on a private decision made amid distrust of institutions and fear of retaliation.

His reluctance to publish the information is also bound to the limits of what he believed it could accomplish. He considered sending the report to Simon Wiesenthal or another Nazi hunter, but by then he was married and had young children; the men he had investigated knew him, and exposure could have endangered his family. He also doubted that arrests abroad would lead to consequences in Spain, where Franco remained in power. Manuel explains that his sense of abandonment had turned against the prospect of universal justice: no one had intervened for people like them, and he could not persuade himself that publishing the evidence would change that. The report survives, but its preservation does not mean its author believed justice would follow.

Confession, trust, and the final image

As the friends talk, Guillermo discloses that Adrián Gallardo Ortega returned from Germany in late 1949, came to his office to ask questions, and was killed by Guillermo. Manuel initially responds without words, then asks whether Guillermo wants whisky; Guillermo agrees, and they order doubles. The confession is a decisive test of their intimacy. Manuel does not interrupt the relationship or turn the disclosure into a public judgment in that moment. Instead, the two remain together, facing what Guillermo has finally told him.

They are eventually turned out of Café Lion. Outside, they are too drunk to walk straight, but they embrace in the street knowing why they are doing so. Their concluding recognition is deliberately unsentimental: they are men whose lives were not a film, and the dead cannot get drunk. The remark does not absolve Guillermo of killing Adrián, nor does it erase the crimes documented in Manuel’s report. It places the friends’ shared act of drinking and embracing among the living, while the dead remain beyond consolation.

The friendship’s significance lies in this uneasy combination of loyalty and knowledge. The two men can recognize one another beneath false names, exchange evidence that institutions failed to use, and speak at last about a killing that has continued to haunt Guillermo. Their bond survives, but it offers neither a restoration of the lost political hope nor a guarantee of justice. It is instead a form of mutual witness: each knows what the other has endured, and their reunion gives that knowledge a human recipient.