Carlos Carrizo Salvadores

Carlos Eduardo del Valle Carrizo Salvadores is a retired Argentine Army middle-rank officer and former police chief of Jujuy Province in Argentina.

In 2016, an Argentine High Court overturned his life sentence for his role in the so-called Massacre of Capilla del Rosario (Rosario Chapel Massacre), acquitting him of all charges for which he had served prison time.

Carrizo Salvadores was born on 7 August 1942 in San Miguel de Tucumán. His parents resettled in Catamarca soon after his birth. As a child, he spent his formative years at Colegio Belgrano.^[1]

Carlos Carrizo Salvadores enrolled in the Colegio Militar de la Nación in 1959 as an officer cadet and entered the Argentine Army in 1962, as an infantry second lieutenant. Before being promoted to captain in 1974, he passed paratroop qualification as a full lieutenant and was transferred to the 4th Airborne Infantry Brigade where he served as a company commander with the 17th Airborne Infantry Regiment.

Between 10 and 12 August 1974, Carrizo Salvadores was accused of being in command of the Argentine Army and police forces that took part in the Capilla del Rosario Massacre, where he was serving as a company commander in the 17th Airborne Infantry Regiment. Some 16 rural guerrillas of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP-PRT) who were preparing to attack the airborne infantry barrack in order to seize the armoury were captured after a gunfight with the local Army garrison near Capilla del Rosario. A local man alerted the police and fighting soon broke out with the police and army reinforcements. Some of the ERP guerrillas managed to escape into the woods. Others were captured nearby. The remainder attempted to resist in the Capilla del Rosario area but were soon surrounded by 300 Army paratroopers and policemen and forced to surrender.

According to the authors of Detenidos-Aparecidos: Presas y Presos Políticos desde Trelew a la Dictadura (Santiago Garaño & Werner Pertot, Editorial Biblos, 2007) the guerrillas fought until they ran out of ammunition, at which point they surrendered. They were soon beaten up by the parachute soldiers and subsequently shot dead. The ERP guerrillas were executed under orders from chief-of-staff of the 3rd Army Corps, Brigadier-General José Antonio Vaquero, who claimed the captured guerrillas had forfeited their rights as prisoners-of-war for not complying with the Geneva Convention by wearing Argentine Army uniforms captured in earlier raids.

Major Carlos Carrizo Salvadores distinguished himself in the Battle of Mount Longdon, during the Falklands War, when as Second-in-Command of the 7th Mechanized Infantry Regiment, he defended the Argentine stronghold overlooking Murrel River and later led a hastily formed platoon of conscripts from the remnants of his rifle companies to recover the lost positions on Wireless Ridge. He had earlier personally taken part in the construction of his command bunker, according to one of his soldiers, Private Guillermo Velez who was interviewed in the book 'Los Chicos de la Guerra: Hablan los soldados que estuvieron en Malvinas' (Daniel Kon, Editorial Galerna, 1982). While commanding his troops on Mount Longdon prior to the final battles in the ground war, he received the unwelcome news of his father's passing in Catamarca Province but kept this to himself, not wanting to elicit attention from his brigade commander and be given compassionate reassignment elsewhere or worse still, sent back to Argentina.^[2]

During the battle for Mount Longdon and Wireless Ridge, the attacking British Paratroopers had to several times take part in close quarter combat and fight off counterattacks, taking heavy casualties in the process in what is still regarded as the bloodiest British ground action since the Korean War. Major Carrizo Salvadores had proven reluctant to abandon the feature and only did so only when the attacking British Paratroopers got within 100 metres from his command bunker^[3] and only after a near-miss from a MILAN anti-tank missile.^[4]

In September 2022, thanks to the assistance provided by the Argentine Embassy in London, British veteran Mark Eyles-Thomas, author of the book on the battle, Sod That for a Game of Soldiers (Kenton Publishing, 2007), who had fought in the Falklands as a 17-year-old paratrooper with 3 PARA, traveled to Argentina with his wife Patricia to return to his family the helmet of an Argentine soldier (Daniel Francisco Sirtori) who had committed suicide during the post-war period and to the daughter he left behind Virginia Sirtori. He then got a chance to meet retired Colonel Carlos Carrizo Salvadores and his wife Norma, and several other Argentine veterans. Carrizo and his wife were able to take the British couple out to a gala dinner twice at the exclusive Círculo Militar and then on the museum ship ARA Presidente Sarmiento, where both veterans were able to recount their experiences during the fierce battle that was Mount Longdon.^[5]