María and Mercedes Campiglia were two and four years old when their mother returned to their grandparents' house one day and took them from Buenos Aires to Madrid. She spent the late 70s in Argentina, during the military dictatorship. The girls had gone years without seeing their parents, Pilar Calveiro and Horacio Campiglia, who were militants of the Montoneros guerrilla. She was missing for a year and a half in the Navy Military School, the largest torture center in Argentina, and in the meantime he escaped into hiding. In Madrid, after years of hearing from her grandparents that their parents were working, Pilar Calveiro sat her daughters down and told them the truth: “I was not working, I was in a concentration camp, disappeared against my will, that's why I couldn't to be with you”.
“It was a childhood very marked by absence,” says María Campiglia, today a visual artist and university professor, “but my mother always told this story with absolute truthfulness. She was careful not to go into gruesome details for us who were girls, but she always told what had happened. “We always speak naturally.” “Our family always opted to build from memory and with the truth, understanding that the truth can be very hard, but, nevertheless, it is something that can be processed,” says her sister Mercedes, a psychologist, anthropologist and birth companion “From lies there is no way to capture the story, what you feel is a pain that you don't know where it is, that has no name.”
The last time the three saw Horacio Campiglia was in the early eighties, in Mexico, where the three have lived since then. Pilar had left militancy after her kidnapping, she knew that Montoneros was already a defeated experience, and exile was the opportunity to see her family grow. Horacio, however, had decided to return to Argentina during the group's counteroffensives. He was kidnapped on a plane on March 11, 1980 while stopping in Brazil with a false passport. He remains missing to this day.
The story of the Campiglias, a family affected by violence in Argentina during the last military dictatorship, has been written by the three women in Petrus and us (Siglo Veintiuno Editores), the personal story of the wife and daughters of a man who disappeared during those years of militancy, violence and dreams of armed struggle. With six hands, between memories, family photographs, letters and the anonymous testimonies of friends from the time, mother and daughters build an intimate story about the history of the most turbulent years of their country.
“Our political understanding then barely managed to conceive that it was necessary to build a more just society, which we called 'socialist', and that in a country where the military had overthrown five governments in less than forty years that change would have to be made by via armed means and it had to be a revolution,” writes Pilar Calveiro, a political scientist and university professor who previously wrote and reconstructed the history of the torture camps in her country, at the beginning of this memoir, in an intimate account of the awakening of her militancy and the beginnings of the love that formed their family.
Calveiro reconstructs his political awakening in adolescence, the first insurgent meetings in public school and the process of clandestine organization and militarization of a group of militants that was an actor and victim of a bloody period in Argentina. “Violence was installed in unjust societies and the idea that predominated in leftist groups at that time was to move to another society by force. This transit was not going to be peaceful. The experience culminated in a political defeat, but it was also achieved through a brutal and unprecedented use of force. There was something disproportionate and a political decision to annihilate those organizations,” says Calveiro. “I make a de-idealization of that practice, but I also make some recovery of the political meanings it had then. Today's society, after these defeats, has led us to greater violence and more unjust societies. Today we have a much more acute polarization of income. In neoliberalism, all the characteristics that were already present in the seventies and are established from neoliberal experiences, lead to more polarized, more unjust and more exclusive societies.
The book was a work of years that the family matured between visits to Argentina, the grandparents' photographic archive and the memories shared since María and Mercedes were children. In Petrus and us tells the story of a complicated period for the country, which today with a Government that denies the crimes of the dictatorship has returned to polarized public discussion, but which the authors present as a personal chronicle that talks about a father and a husband and his testimony about his time.
“Just as at that time people thought about the guerrilla, now there are different ways to access politics,” says Mercedes. “I am left with the courage to think collectively and go beyond the interests of a single subject. My dad was a middle-class person, who had no difficulties, and he risked his life – and lost it – in a bet that had nothing to do with anything personal. In the face of all the current structures that tend to want to convince us that we are individual subjects fighting for our own benefits, for our salary, our car, our house or our children, this reminds me that the heart must be for collective bets, for aspiring to build something that includes us all.”
“Each Government tries to create its own story of what the past is based on how it presents the present. Milei's Government represents the neoliberal model that began with the dictatorship of '76, and attacks everything that calls that model into question,” says Calveiro regarding the question of how to tell this story at a time like this. “But you don't have to exhaust yourself. Politics is a constant, persistent struggle. You have to return again and again to where you have to return. And you have to have all the debates that have to happen. There are processes that were carried out and are not just reversed. But if there are sectors of society that are not clear about it, we must return. We must continue having that debate. And we must recognize that there are things that have not been clear and we must continue working on them. Memory is like that. But just as it has those ebbs, it is incredibly persistent.”
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