From 1976 to 1983 a military dictatorship in Argentina, tacitly backed by the United States, waged a systematic criminal campaign against political dissidents deemed disloyal to “Western, Christian civilization”. Alicia Raboy, a young Argentinian journalist and political activist, was one of as many as 30,000 people murdered or “disappeared” by agents of the dictatorship. Alicia and her infant daughter, Ángela, were kidnapped by a police death squad in the city of Mendoza on June 17, 1976, in an ambush that also resulted in the cold-blooded murder of Alicia’s partner and father of Ángela, the celebrated Argentinian poet Francisco “Paco” Urondo. Ángela was eventually recovered by her family but Alicia was never heard from again. More than forty years later, Montreal writer and McGill University emeritus professor Marc Raboy – a distant relative and almost exact contemporary of Alicia – set out to establish the story of Alicia’s life and her tragic demise. The following is an edited excerpt from his new book, “Looking for Alicia: The Unfinished Life of an Argentinian Rebel” (©2022 Marc Raboy. Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com).
“Mendoza is the closest I can get to my mother,” Ángela says. “Every time I go there I learn something new.” It’s also the closest I can get to Alicia.
Mendoza is the sort of small city where one has the impression that nothing goes unnoticed, that everything that happens is connected to everything else, and everyone immediately knows it. Today, Mendoza is a pretty town, of some economic importance as a hub of tourism and the capital of Argentina’s premier wine-growing region. Most visitors to Mendoza are there to tour the wine country. I was there to visit a killing field.
Mendoza is the end of the line for anyone looking for Alicia. The house on calle Uruguay where she spent her final days of freedom, that she described in her last letter to her mother, is still there. The corner where she was last seen, struggling to escape, is unmarked and unremarkable. The supplies yard where she tried to seek refuge is gone, replaced by a Chinese grocery. The mural commemorating Alicia and Paco is gone as well. I couldn’t locate the tree Ángela planted on her first visit in 2001.
It was a challenge to find the former clandestine detention centre, known as “D2” (Departamento dos). It’s not on any tourist map of “important buildings.” It was a steamy November day, the heat clouds hanging over the city as it slouched at the bottom of a dust bowl between the mountains. We asked four or five armed guards around the courthouse with no success until, finally, two young traffic policewomen pointed us in the right direction.
D2, now officially designated a “Centre of Horror,” is exactly as it was in the 1970s. The building housing it is still the Mendoza police station. There is no hiding the eerie feeling of being within a working precinct and the stares of the cops follow you as you pass them by. What happened here is not contested, but those interested in its memory have to compete with a business-as-usual atmosphere.
To the human rights organizations that fought to have it recognized, D2 is a sacred reference point, floating as it does inside this bubble of law and order. The memory space, opened in 2013, is unadorned. I don’t know whether that is deliberate or from a lack of funds. It seems pretty much as it must have been when in active use.
A school visit was underway, and the centre’s reception area was packed with middle school students listening to a white-haired volunteer in comfortable shoes, describing what had happened here and its ongoing importance. The message was simple: the dictatorship persecuted people for social, political, and union activities. Photos of victims lined the wall, including the stilted school yearbook snapshot of the adolescent Alicia, looking as no one remembers her, not at all fitting the description people give when they talk about her.
After the presentation we were led across the hall to the prison area, a narrow corridor with six or eight small cells. Alicia might have spent a night in one of these cells, maybe more, maybe her last. A survivor of D2 then led everyone down a narrow staircase to the one-time torture area. On the way we passed through the active modern-day police station again. We were there legitimately, but those stares reminded us how fragile was the tolerance of our presence.
One has to struggle to imagine what exactly went on here. The torture room is now a bare basement space housing the centre’s computer server. But the survivor’s memory was vivid. Torture at D2 was systematic, we were told. Every new arrival was “softened up” with the picana (electric cattle prod) and other treatments— there is no way Alicia would have escaped this fate. The perpetrators were not merely carrying out orders, but personally applying a programme, an agenda of anti-human acts, and in some cases, enjoying it. What survivors remember most was the noise, the cries, the chaos. Next to the room where the treatments were applied there was a soundproofed chamber for the guards to relax and listen to classical music, drowning out the noise.
Which of these cubicles was Alicia’s last address? How did she make sense of these walls? Did she stumble on her way down the stairs, to the torture chamber? Did the guards relaxing in the next room hear her cries? Did she try to bargain with her captors? Reason with them? Offer information? Plead for her daughter?
The place belies its legacy— the commemorative areas, the explanations, the testimonies all bearing witness to a normalization of brutality. Those who survived, survived. Those who did not, disappeared. No one has said what they did with the bodies. Someone knows but they haven’t said.
In the end the most horrifying aspect of Alicia’s story is her absence. She left no trace whatsoever. Since the mid-1990s it has been well-known that the Argentine military carried out weekly “death flights” from a base in Buenos Aires, operated by naval officers who dumped drugged prisoners from airplanes over the Rio de la Plata. But Alicia disappeared in Mendoza, on the other side of the country. Some believe that there were death flights in Mendoza as well, over the Andes mountains. Or that many were drowned in the glacial waters of the Tunuyán River south of the city, stuffed into barrels filled with cement. Or maybe it wasn’t even that complicated; there was a second basement at D2, beneath the torture room, and in that basement there was an incinerator.
Unidentified remains are still being discovered in unmarked graves in Argentina. Using DNA samples collected from family members, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense — EAAF), an NGO established in 1984, has been able to identify eight hundred people, out of some fourteen hundred sets of remains that it has recovered. Alicia’s brother Gabriel and daughter Ángela have contributed DNA samples to the EAAF genetic data base, but so far with no results.
Mendoza, as we see, is a microcosm and Alicia Raboy remains one of 126 documented desaparecidxs in Mendoza province, 112 of them in the Greater Mendoza metropolitan area, whose final destinies remain unknown.
*
Argentinian courts, in several waves of groundbreaking trials since the restoration of democracy in the 1980s, have established that the dictatorship undertook and carried out a criminal plan to exterminate political dissidents. Acts such as the murder of Paco Urondo and disappearance of Alicia Raboy – for which four perpetrators were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2011 – are now considered “crimes against humanity committed in the context of the international crime of genocide”.
My partner Lucie and I had arranged to meet the federal prosecutor of the Raboy/Urondo case, Dante Marcelo Vega — whom everyone calls Dante — but it was proving difficult to pin down a time.
We crossed paths in midair, as Dante had meetings in Buenos Aires the day we flew to Mendoza. To complicate things further, there were labour disruptions at Aerolineas Argentinas and flight schedules were meaningless. You arrived when you arrived.
Finally, at 10 o’clock on our second night in Mendoza, I got an email: “Tomorrow at 10 a.m. in my office.” I fired back a reply: “Excellent. Where is your office?”
When Dante hadn’t answered by 9 or 9:15 the next morning, there was no choice but to improvise. We had seen the courthouse in the civic administrative area while looking for D2 the day before, so at least we knew where it was, fifteen or twenty minutes on foot from our hotel.
It was a busy weekday morning, and there was a lot of coming and going. As we approached the building, a police officer with a machine gun politely motioned to us to wait while two of his colleagues brought in a notionally dangerous criminal in shackles. Inside, stating our business, we were directed to Dante’s office on the fourth floor. We waited for the elevator along with a young man in handcuffs, his lawyer, and a uniformed guard.
The prosecutor was finishing a meeting and greeted us warmly while his office emptied as we arrived. He motioned us to two green leather chairs and offered cups of mate, the traditional Argentine infusion, which we declined. Dante Vega reminded me instantly of the magistrate in the Costa-Gavras film Z, wound up like a spring and running on adrenaline, not a gram of fat on his body and looking as though he never slept.
In 2017, Dante successfully prosecuted four former federal judges in Mendoza for their part in the “civico-military dictatorship”— a twenty-first century term that underscores the role of nonmilitary collaborators of the regime. The magistrates received the maximum sentence, life in prison, for crimes against humanity including failure to investigate petitions of habeas corpus such as the one submitted on behalf of Alicia and Ángela in 1976. The judges’ prosecution is considered an exemplary instance of an attempt to address complicity between the judiciary and the military.
Dante was now working on a child appropriation case: no. 117 of the five hundred missing children who have been identified by the Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo. They’re numbered like that. As of 2019, the number of appropriated children who have been found stood at 130. It never ends.
Dante’s life was a tremendous drama, he told us. He’s been doing this job since joining the human rights division of the federal prosecutor’s office in Mendoza in 2010, soon after finishing law school. The Raboy/Urondo case was part of his second trial. He had now done twelve.
“How do you live with it?” Lucie asked him. “Me?” he replied, shaking his head, as if the question were absurd and there was no answer. It does get easier, he added with a shrug, as an afterthought.
Dante shook his head a lot while he talked, rehashing the details of the Raboy/Urondo case down to the last iota, all of which I had heard before. The case attracted national attention because Paco was so famous, he said, and what happened to him was not complicated to prove because there were eyewitnesses. Alicia’s fate was another story, he said, shaking his head again.
“We can’t reconstruct what happened to Alicia.”
“In general, putting the cases together is a kind of mechanical process,” Dante told us. “The hard part is dealing with the accused.” That was what kept him awake at night.
“The accused never say anything. They just sit there, sometimes sleeping in court. If they do say something, it’s usually just to justify what they did politically: ‘It was a war . . .’ and so on.” Why don’t they talk? I asked. He shook his head. “There have been hundreds of trials since 2005 and no one has ever talked.”
Of the four perpetrators convicted in the Raboy/Urondo case, two are still serving their life sentences under house arrest and the other two have died. The house arrests are not policed and the convicts are often seen wandering around town, in restaurants and barber shops. They’re taking a calculated risk, of course, because they can be arrested and sent to a real jail. But that doesn’t happen.
It’s the “transcendental value” of the trials that keeps him going, Dante said.
More so than in the original trials of the generals in 1985, it is the Argentine state that is now on trial. The perpetrators who pulled the triggers, appropriated the children, applied the picana and piloted the death flights were proxies for the state. Dante Vega’s principled virtue and integrity models Argentina’s unique approach to dealing with state abuses of human rights. Comparisons don’t stand up.
Alicia’s story is a timeless, global story. It’s a story of Argentina, of course, but it’s also part of the story of a generation that thought it could change the world and did, but didn’t, not in the way or to the extent it thought it could. For a North American, this is a boomer’s conceit: the 1970s are clearly in the past. In Argentina the ’70s are still the present. There are many contested facts in Alicia’s story, missing details, multiple versions of every episode. But the reality is incontestable: Alicia was disappeared that day in June 1976. It didn’t just happen. Hers was one of tens of thousands of lives extinguished purposefully in a deliberate process of state terrorism. That is the reality.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
