Two women visit a building on the banks of the River Plata in Buenos Aires. It is now a museum about memory and human rights. Years ago, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, it was a military torture centre for political dissidents of the regime. It was then called the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada. The Esma, four letters synonymous with terror in Argentina. One of the two women, Silvia Labayru, was imprisoned there between 1976 and 1978. She was tortured, systematically raped by an officer specifically designated for that purpose, enslaved. There she gave birth to a daughter whom she was not allowed to see until her release. The other woman, Leila Guerriero, is a journalist. She is writing her story.
Labayru is an “uncomfortable victim,” Guerriero explained on Friday from the stage of the Teatro de la Ciudad de Querétaro, as part of the Hay Festival, during a conversation with the director of EL PAÍS América, Jan Martínez Ahrens. Guerriero, a journalist, writer and columnist, began interviewing Labayru, and everyone around her, in 2021. She sought to unravel all the facets of the woman’s complex story: from a wealthy military family, but who joined the Montoneros, a leftist organization that believed in armed struggle. During her two years of captivity, Labayru was forced to play the role of the sister of Alfredo Astiz, a soldier who infiltrated the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo organization, determined to search for their missing children despite the brutal repression. That operation ended with the disappearance of five women. Labayru’s former colleagues saw her as a traitor.
Guerriero pieced together the story from 97 interviews—nearly 2,000 pages of transcripts—as well as court documents, videos, other testimony and evidence. What was originally intended to be a long article became his latest book, The call (Anagrama, 2024). Labayru, accused of collaborating with the regime, was repudiated for years. Guerriero says: “You have to be careful with words like collaboration or participation. My position is that there was no such thing, it was a situation of terror, she was kidnapped, with her daughter in the hands of the girl’s paternal grandparents, with the whole family under surveillance. There was no possibility of choice. Silvia was an absolute victim. Every day you wake up and don’t know if you’re going to be alive or with a bullet in your head, or if one of your relatives is going to die. The decisions of the military were arbitrary, just as she came out alive from a horrific situation, she could have been designated to go on the death flights.”
The military released Labayru in 1978. They put her and her daughter — “who was a stranger to her,” says Guerriero — on a plane bound for Madrid. During the flight, she thought that if she had managed to get out of the ESMA, she wanted to live a full life. There is a distance between words and actions, and the first years were difficult, with emotional and physical after-effects after two years of torture. The years passed and Labayru moved on, “she did not make her life the life of a victim.” One of Guerriero’s concerns when facing her story was to reduce the woman to her time in prison and in the Montoneros, just three years of a long life.
Returning to Argentina after the dictatorship was not much easier. Although the country held an unprecedented trial against the military responsible for the repression in 1985, people were still not ready to talk about certain things. The story was divided between “good guys and bad guys,” and people like Labayru, who to outsiders was somewhere between the two, were difficult to assimilate. “The voice of the survivors is not very present in public conversation, as is, and healthily, the voice of those who search for their missing. It is not there because there are these dark spots that are difficult to digest, issues that were not forgiven, were not discussed or were not managed,” says Guerriero. The popular slogan about the missing was “they took them alive, we want them alive.” “But when we came back alive, they didn’t want us,” exemplifies one of the survivors interviewed for the book.
Martínez Ahrens asks about one of the great taboos of journalism: using the first person when writing. Guerriero answers: “It was a bit essential to show the doubts about how far I was really able to tell Silvia’s story. When you compare testimonies from court cases, which in some years said one thing and years later another, I was interested in going in there with a I very strong and underlined, without hiding that underlining under the umbrella of the third person. Telling about an uncomfortable victim like Silvia also has its risks and I wanted to take it on in the first person.”
The book was well received in Argentina. “People from younger generations, born in democracy, wrote to me and found interesting this reading, full of greys and not so many blacks and whites, good and bad.” For the author, it is an antidote to the erasure of history, in a country where the story of the dictatorship is increasingly broken (partly due to a government, that of Javier Milei, which denies torture, disappearances, political assassinations). “My hope is that the vast majority of people agree that it was a government of terror, that there was state terrorism,” concludes Guerriero.
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