Editor’s note: This column reflects the true story of an Argentine women who “disappeared” between 1978 and 1982 as part of Argentina’s Dirty War. It is part one of a two-part series.
The soldiers flooded the streets like savage dogs.
As Ana Silva exited the barbershop, she scanned the street for a way out, desperate to escape, if only toguarantee the safety of her baby, Paula.
The government cars continued to arrive in pairs until she was surrounded. They descended upon her — their eyes brainwashed with anti-communist motives.
Thoughts of her mother flooded Ana’s mind. Her mother was right. She had insisted Ana bring Paula so she would be out of harm’s way. Harm turned out to be inescapable.
She pushed and screamed for her baby. She told them they could never be separated. But the more she struggled, the more her fate fell into the hands of the dictatorship.
A soldier savagely wrenched the infant from her arms. She yelled for Paula one last time — until one of the soldiers threw Ana in the backseat of a sedan.
He used his foot to mask her screams.
“We still don’t have a grasp of how people disappeared. We knew disappearing meant abduction, torture and death,” said Graciela Daleo, an ex-Montonero. “I don’t know. It was like the earth had swallowed you … I came to understand it when the earth actually swallowed me.”
The earth coughed Ana Silva into a ruthless navy detention center.
As the soldiers walked her through the corridors, helpless and terrified, she saw four detainees. They were standing stark naked with their hands pressed against the cement walls. Two men in suits strutted back and forth, smoking cigarettes and referring to each other as
“Geronimo” and “Hatchet.”
“They were the bad guys. One guy would pat my head and say ‘everything will be all right.’ The other would call me a bitch and a liar and beat me with a stick. Then he would use an electric prod on my mouth, my eyes, my ears, everywhere,” Ana said.
The first two days, the men tortured her without interruption. They knew nothing about her except that her husband, Juan, was in exile. He was deeply involved with the Montoneros, an armed, left-wing, Peronist organization of guerilla rebels who were fighting against the dictatorship for Argentine civil rights. While conventional wars are enemy against enemy, this was a war against the people, a war waged by the military government. The torturers expected Ana to divulge Montonero secrets, yet she knew nothing. So the torture continued.
“I had scars for years on my wrists and ankles. I thought it was the electric prod. They were actually caused by the ropes they used to tie me down to the bed. I would try to free myself. And then I’d scream like crazy. After one minute of being tortured, I shit and peed all over myself. This made those guys go crazy,” she said.
If she acted too smart, they would torture her more. If she acted too dumb, they would think she had something to hide. She was walking a tightrope with her fate and sanity alike. She could be herself and die or she could pretend to be someone else and drive herself mad.
“When we knew they wanted to turn us inside out, we decided to act as if we were the way they wanted us to be,” she said.
Almost 3,000 others were captured and brought to the navy concentration camp. Many were Montoneros, but others were nothing. The mere possession of books about Juan Peron or any type of leftist thought could get you kidnapped.
And it wasn’t just the detainees who suffered.
There was a handyman in town who did odd jobs for the navy camp. Often they called upon him to repair a pump, fix a radio or unclog a sink. He was forced to collaborate with the navy to ensure his own survival.
One day a torturer brought him a broken electric prod.
He asked the handyman to fix it, but he refused. So the torturers started using a Variac, an autotransformer that can be used to administer electric shocks. Every day the handyman would see the tortured leave their detainment almost in a coma, burned all over. He knew the soldiers would kill more with the Variac than with the prod. So he had no choice but to repair it.
“You are just waiting to die when you are taken in there. You want it to happen as soon as possible. The first day you want to die, the second day you want to die, and on the third day when you see you haven’t died, you find out that dying is not that simple. You start to search for a reason to live … and to defend what you believe in,” Ana said.
After months of torture, she was brought home in a blindfold to her mother’s house. The soldiers demanded food, wine and a place to sleep. When they finally left, she set out to find her husband.
Now she was in a new dilemma, a sort of “leper” whom no one could trust, because, in the eyes of the public, a survivor of the navy camp could be none other than a traitor.
Her own husband would never see her the same.
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