by Caryl Ferey
But they did finally decide to act.
Since the junta controlled the kind of works that could be sent through the mail, Elena had had to move heaven and earth to get her father’s friends to help her obtain a visa for Daniel, who had been invited to participate in a lecture series at the Sorbonne on nineteenth-century Argentine poetry. After months of negotiations, the exit visa was finally granted. Daniel Calderón had left for France in early 1978 with his manuscripts hidden in the lining of his suitcase—a publisher in Paris had agreed to bring out his most recent collections of poems under a pseudonym, whereas Daniel would establish contacts with the groups opposing the dictatorship, most of them composed of political refugees who were trying to alert defenders of human rights to the reality of the country as the Mundial approached. France, the country that took in the Argentine exiles: Daniel had convinced Simone Signoret to become their spokesperson in the media—the actress had shown great generosity and paid for the banners and flyers out of her own pocket—and Danielle Mitterand to use her influence in political circles, whose secrets she knew, as a former member of the French Resistance.
Daniel Calderón was giving his lectures in Paris when he learned of the abduction of his children on their way to school.
Had someone betrayed him? Where, in Argentina or in France? In any case, he had to find them before they disappeared forever, sucked into the machinery of the state. He immediately returned to Buenos Aires, despite his wife’s fears, and was picked up by the agents of the SIDE before he even got out of the airport.
“Operation Return,” as the military called it, was a tactic consisting of setting a trap for exiles by infiltrating their associations abroad. Had the visa for France been granted with this end in mind? Elena Calderón had gone to great lengths to track down her family, had called upon people she thought were close to her, without result: “Your husband ran away,” they had dared to tell her. She had turned to Daniel’s supporters in France. The affair had been brought before the highest authorities, but if the country of the Rights of Man condemned Videla’s coup d’état, behind the scenes things were more complicated: the French intelligence service had been informed of the issuing of false papers for agents of the junta assigned to track down dissidents on French soil, but Poniatowski, the Minister of the Interior, had taken no steps to arrest them. Former members of the French Secret Army Organization were still found in the secret services, in France and in Argentina, where some secret agents returning from Algeria had become instructors in no-holds-barred interrogation. And it was not just the Secret Army Organization: from 1957 to 1983, regular army staff members and officers gave classes in Paris, via the “French mission,” training future torturers for war against insurrections and for the use of psychological terror in bringing the people into line. Were they playing a double game? Elena Calderón had met with the French ambassador in Buenos Aires, an affable and cultivated man who had proven more interested in improving his passing shot than in demanding information regarding the disappearance of a poet on his return from Paris.
Like other women and mothers of the desaparecidos, Elena had had to resign herself to the arbitrariness: the military men struck when and where they wanted, sarcastically throwing habeas corpus requests back in the faces of the humiliated plaintiffs.
Every day, there were dozens of these women in front of every police station in the neighborhood, asking for news of their loved ones; Elena Calderón joined these women eaten away by anxiety, most of them workers’ wives whose children had been kidnapped by police forces operating without badges or identities. Through her contact with them, Elena discovered with alarm the condition of her compatriots, some of whom were going out alone for the first time in their lives. Reduced to housekeeping and childcare, these women knew nothing. Politics did not concern them—at least they had ended up believing that—and any notion of rights was foreign to them. Few read, or if they did, they picked up by chance La Nación, which spoke for the Process. Women who above all did not understand what was happening: “they” must have made a mistake . . .
For hours, these mothers remained prostrate, powerless, sleepless in a pit of despair. The authorities laughed in their faces: “You son must have run away with a chick!” “Another case of terrorists settling accounts among themselves.” The most fortunate of them received a coffin containing the body of their son or husband, with armed soldiers present to forbid them to open it—then they would have seen the marks of torture, or that there was no body in the coffin.
The women decided to join the resistance.
There were only fourteen of them when they first gathered around the obelisk on the Plaza de Mayo, on April 30, 1977. There was no square in Argentina that was kept under closer surveillance: the Plaza de Mayo was the center of military power, the symbolic site of the country’s political memory, situated between the Cabildo, the seat of the former Spanish colonial government, and the Casa Rosada, through which had passed all the heads of state since the eviction of the last viceroy of Spain in 1810 and the proclamation of the Republic.
The women had assembled in front of the obelisk, wearing a cloth diaper—the pañuelo—on their heads like a scarf, as a symbol of their stolen children. Openly defying the government, the Mothers insisted that their loved ones must “reappear alive,” rejecting mourning on that principle: the children had been alive when they were taken away, and as long as the torturers had not admitted their crimes, these desaparecidos would remain alive. The police had quickly threatened them, and then ordered them to disperse, but the Mothers, locking arms, had started circling the square, clockwise and counter-clockwise, in an ultimate act of defiance. “Madwomen” had mocked the government’s power.
But they came back. Every Thursday.
Dogs had been unleashed on them, mounted police had charged them, mass arrests were made: after they were dispersed, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo returned every time, re-formed their ranks, which were soon increased by their sisters, daughters, and friends. They began making files on their aggressors, questioning the rare detainees who had been freed, and gathering a quantity of information for which they paid a high price: abandoned by the high clergy of the Church, infiltrated and then betrayed by Astiz (a military man so ferocious that his colleagues had given him the ironic nickname of “the blond angel”), overwhelmed by the abduction and disappearance of three founding Mothers and the two French nuns who supported them, the women continued to demand justice as they circled, every Thursday, in front of the Casa Rosada.
The fall of the dictatorship did not long calm their ardor. To the laws of “national pacification” issued by the military, Alfonsin, the new president elected by universal suffrage, had at first responded by abrogating the amnesty, with the result that the leading generals were indicted and half the officers were forced into early retirement, while at the same time he condemned the violent acts committed by the revolutionary army of the people and the Montoneros, whose leader was arrested. A theory of “the two demons” that proved fatal: the army threatening to call out the soldiers in the barracks, Alfonsin retreated and announced that trials for human rights violations would be held in military courts, abrogating the “duty to obey” clause and thus de facto disinculpating the perpetrators, except in the case of “proven atrocities.”
A commission on the desaparecidos, the CONADEP, was set up, but its role was more to provide a death certificate for the persons abducted than to prosecute the guilty. The “Full Stop” law11 soon gave plaintiffs no more than sixty days to indict accused members of the armed forces before Menem drove the point home by decreeing the indulto, a pardon. After fifteen years of legal proceedings, Videla, Galtieri, Viola, and Massera, the leading generals, got off with a few years in detention in comfortable prisons, while the pillagers, the torturers and their accomplices, everyone who had not attained the rank of colonel, was acquitted.
An insult to the Mothers and Grandmothers of t
he Plaza de Mayo, who became more than ever unbending. No exhumations of bones without investigating or judging the guilty, no posthumous homage or indemnities to clear the slate, no reconciliation with the Church.
Iglesia! Bassura!
Vos sos la dictatura!12
The Grandmothers would fight on to their last breath, not in a spirit of vengeance, but without pardoning, without forgetting. “They may have succeeded in killing our husbands and children, but they have not killed our love,” they repeated.
More than thirty years had gone by, and Elena Calderón was no longer the haughty, distinguished woman who handed out daiquiris to the Chilean refugees passing through her home, but her determination was as young as ever.
A furious wind was blowing over the Plaza de Mayo. Elena was preparing the display table where she would distribute the association’s latest information bulletins when her son appeared among the tourists in shorts suffering from the humidity. Rubén was wearing a pseudo-casual plum-colored shirt and impeccably cut black trousers, his walk was supple, alert, as if something in him wasn’t aging, either. Elena smiled at her partiality: she now had only her son, who reminded her so much of Daniel.
“Hi, Mama.”
“Hello, honey!”
Rubén hugged his mother, smelled her light perfume and felt her heart beating against his with a special emotion.
“You look tired,” she said, smiling as she looked at him.
“It could have been worse.”
Then Elena saw the terrible red welt around his neck, the bloody scab covered with a healing cream, and her beautiful blue eyes dimmed.
“What’s going on?”
“A body was found last night, washed up on a bank at the ecological preserve. The body of María Victoria Campallo, the daughter of Eduardo Campallo, a friend of the mayor. María had discovered that she was a child of desaparecidos. At least that seems plausible. And she was murdered before she talked.”
Elena forgot her son’s wounded neck, her information bulletins, her pañuelo.
“My God!”
“Yes. I also found a document, an ESMA internment form that traces the sequestration of María’s biological parents and the birth in detention of her brother. Eduardo Campallo is named as the apropriador.”
Rubén cast a hostile glance at the rows of overequipped cops keeping the square under surveillance. His mother was digesting the information, surprised and dismayed.
“The poor little thing,” the old lady said.
“Uh-huh. Especially since María was pregnant when she was kidnapped.”
“Ooh . . . But why didn’t she come see us? We would have helped her! Why contact Página?”
“She wasn’t going to call Clarín.”
The editor of the center-right newspaper was herself suspected of being an apropriadora. Elena conceded the point, still under the shock of the revelation. The affair reeked of sulfur and her son’s general tendency to stir up hornets’ nests. All this didn’t tell her anything worthwhile.
“I don’t know how far Campallo is involved,” Rubén continued, “and even if the papers I found accuse him, María remains his daughter. The whole thing is getting complicated. I need you to decipher the document and track down the murdered parents. I have their name, but they don’t appear in our files.”
The wrinkles on his mother’s face deepened. Elena no longer had the energy she’d had at the time of the first demonstrations, the first trials (when she thought about it—thirty years!—the bitterness of the fighting made her dizzy), her legs had grown heavier, her dresses hung loosely on a body that had become virgin again, but her thirst for truth and justice was still intact. She squinted in the direction of the square and the Grandmothers, who were closing ranks behind their banners: the vice president of the Grandmothers was beckoning to her from the obelisk, where the female warriors were about to begin their Thursday rounds, wearing a baby diaper instead of a helmet. Elena put a stone on the tracts being ruffled by the wind.
“I’ll tell Susana and be right back,” she said to her son.
*
At the age of seventy-six, Susana Arguan wore springlike polka-dot dresses on a body that was still lively (she was the only one who wore her pañuelo like Marilyn Monroe) and wielded irony with the false levity of a bitter despair. The daughter of a communist worker, Susana had lost everything when her daughter was kidnapped at dawn, along with her little boy, one day in April 1977. A portrait of her looking like a damned angel hung in a place of honor near her desk, a darling in black and white as intact as her faith in their quest.
Elena Calderón, known as “the Duchess,” wondered whether this little old woman was a force of nature or a congenital worker like a red ant: a friend, that was sure.
Specializing in searching for children who had disappeared during the dictatorship, the Abuelas learned of their existence through letters, anonymous appeals, or when victims tormented by doubts presented themselves at the association’s office in Virrey Cevallos Street. This office, more a town house than a bureau of investigation, was where the Abuelas had established their headquarters, a veritable war machine directed against the state’s lies. A secretariat, accounting office, press bureau, a reception desk for people who showed up spontaneously, with a psychological team, an investigative bureau and another for attorneys who came on Fridays to offer their advice, a kitchen, and the head office near the entrance, shared by the president and the vice president: the headquarters accommodated forty persons working permanently or episodically for the Abuelas. Here they received witnesses, supporters, journalists, and schoolchildren, wrote to judges, and harassed politicians, military men, and retired policemen. Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with whom they worked hand in hand, the Abuelas had experienced everything: intimidation, sacking, and disappearances of important files or computers. Their time was limited, and that made each victory all the more precious.
They were getting ready for the celebration of the one hundred and sixtieth baby reunited with its true family when the association’s vice president arrived at the headquarters with Elena Calderón and her detective son in tow.
On the way, Rubén had told them what he knew: Ossario’s revelations before he died, the killers in Colonia waiting in front of the house, Miguel’s abduction, and the copy of the document held by Miguel’s mother, her death by strangulation, the call he made to Anita to ask her to pick up the corpse, the transvestite’s hair that he had taken that morning from a wig in her “dressing room,” and deposited at the Center for Forensic Medicine, and then his visit to the Duran hospital, where the desaparecidos’ DNA was stored. If María Victoria had doubts regarding her origins, the only way to track down her biological parents consisted of asking for DNA tests, which would amount to launching legal proceedings against Eduardo and Isabel Campallo. And that she had not done.
“She probably didn’t have time,” he said.
“Yes, but if Miguel’s DNA matches that of María Victoria, that would prove that the Campallos stole the children!”
“They’ll never agree to have the tests unless an official complaint forces them to.”
“What about her so-called brother, Rodolfo?”
“His big ass is sitting on a pile of gold; he won’t budge.”
“Great attitude,” Susana commented. “All right, let’s get started.”
The office was minuscule. They sat down without even taking time to drink a cup of tea. The Grandmothers adjusted their glasses while Rubén spread out his fragments: three sheets like jigsaw puzzles, made of torn up paper that was sometimes illegible, and that the detective had Scotch-taped together. Several pieces were missing in the triptych, but the whole left the Grandmothers speechless.
Identified by numbers, each detainee imprisoned in the clandestine centers had a “strictly confidential and secret” file. Indicating identity, background, acti
vity, level of dangerousness, this file was known only to the interrogating officers. That was the kind of document the Grandmothers had before their eyes. The writing was small, typed, and the photocopy was poor in quality, but it was possible to decipher the different places where the desaparecidos had been transferred, the names of some of the interrogators, the date and time of the torture sessions, the prisoners’ condition afterward—“normal” or dead . . . A document of a very administrative precision that elicited vengeful growls from the old women: Samuel and Gabriella Verón had been kidnapped on August 13, 1976, and taken to the Navy Engineering School along with their little girl, aged one and a half. At that time, Gabriella Verón was eight months pregnant. They had not tortured her, but they had tortured her husband, every day. The girl who was to be renamed María Victoria had been taken away and put with other children of the desaparecidos while waiting to be adopted by people close to the government. On September 19, Gabriella had given birth to a boy in the clandestine maternity ward at the ESMA (the name of the military doctor involved had been eaten away). Since the infant suffered from a cardiac insufficiency, his appointed apropriadores, the Campallo family, had exchanged him for another baby born to desaparecidos ten days earlier, “Rodolfo,” who was then in the possession of Javier Michellini, a noncommissioned naval officer, and his wife Rosa.
The Grandmothers’ hearts beat faster. The identity of the child-stealers was not the only information on these forms: they also contained the names of the torturers, their accomplices, the places, the dates . . . An exceptional document, of which they had only a partial copy.