At approximately 1:00 a.m. on Sunday 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.
Minutes later, a police car arrived on the scene and officer Miguel Ángel Romano spoke with people who were suspects in the case.
Surprised by the situation, Fernando Savino, an organist from 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 pool of blood on a red carpet.
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 a bomb attack perpetrated by Montoneros (whose motto was "Venceremos" ) two days prior in the dining room of the Argentine Federal Police headquarters, killing 23 people.
[1] On the body of Salvador Barbeito the murderers placed a cartoon by Quino, taken from one of the rooms, in which Mafalda appears pointing to a policeman's baton saying: «Este es el palito de abollar ideologías» ("This is the ideology-denting stick").
[2] The following day, the newspaper La Nación published a story about the slaughter which included the text of a communiqué from Area Command I of the Army that read: Elementos subversivos asesinaron cobardemente a los sacerdotes y seminaristas.