Thousands of Uruguayans marched this Saturday through the main avenue of Montevideo to ask for truth and justice for the disappeared detainees during the last dictatorship (1973-1985). As every year since 1996, the March of Silence was called by mothers and relatives of the victims and was headed by the question that they have repeated for half a century: Where are they? A silent crowd of children, young people, adults and the elderly walked under a cloudy sky with the images of the 197 disappeared. “Never again State terrorism” was the slogan that crossed the day, with a month to go before the 50th anniversary of the civic-military coup.
“The March of Silence is the most rewarding thing that has existed and that continues to exist; it has allowed us to sustain a struggle that only grows,” says Elena Zaffaroni, widow of Luis Eduardo González, detained and disappeared in 1974. That year, Zaffaroni and González were taken to the 6th Cavalry Regiment, where she ―24 years old and pregnant four months – was forced to witness the torture inflicted on her 22-year-old husband. González, a medical student, a trade union activist and a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, died as a result of torture, according to the 2003 Peace Commission report. His body is still missing.
Since the democratic recovery in 1985, mothers and relatives have denounced the silence and denial of the military commanders regarding the disappeared. In this context, they sought information inside and outside the country, without being received by former presidents Julio Sanguinetti (1985-1990 and 1995-2000) and Luis Lacalle Herrera (1990-1995). It was not until the year 2000, Zaffaroni stressed, that then-president Jorge Batlle (Colorado Party) recognized the problem and marked a milestone with the establishment of the Commission for Peace. In 2005, under the first government of the Broad Front (centre-left), the search for the disappeared began in Uruguayan territory. Since then, six cases have been cleared up.
“The direct perpetrators do not speak. There is a pact of silence and they have fully respected it”, explains Wilder Tayler, in charge of the search for disappeared persons at the National Human Rights Institution. When there were, most of the versions about the fate of the bodies have been contradictory and denied by the facts, he points out. Tayler believes a public appeal from the top of the State is necessary for all the information to be delivered. “A public gesture from the highest hierarchies would be very important because it would give confidence to those who have something to say,” he adds.
This institutional gesture, Tayler continues, would be in tune with the social consensus that exists around the disappeared and that has its “most lively expression” in this march, with the massive presence of the new generations. “It’s a phenomenon mostly of young people,” he points out. In this participation of young people, the claim for the disappeared is alive, Zaffaroni notes, but also the “never again” State terrorism. In Uruguay there were 6,000 political prisoners prosecuted by military justice, he recalls, of whom the vast majority were tortured. In addition, the repressive apparatus of the Uruguayan State coordinated its actions with the dictatorships of the region within the framework of the Condor Plan. In fact, most of the cases of detained-disappeared Uruguayans occurred in Argentina.
“Uruguayan society does not tolerate this kind of thing. It cannot be that in Uruguay there are families that do not know what happened to their children, their uncles, their brothers, their cousins, their parents”, says Santiago Gutiérrez, 28, present at the march. Gutiérrez is the grandson of Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, a Uruguayan politician assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1976. May 20 is special for Santiago, because that day in the year 1976 the body of his grandfather was found next to the bodies of Uruguayans Zelmar Michellini, Rosario Barredo and William Whitelaw. In homage to his memory, Uruguayans began to march in silence on May 20, 1996.
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“The fact of keeping the flame alive is the only way that we can build a memory that is faithful to the facts and that this can allow us to learn and that it never happens again,” Gutiérrez remarks. Like his grandfather, the young man is part of the National Party (now in government), although he assures that this citizen mobilization is above party colors. The militancy of the new generations is greater in significant causes like this, he believes, than within political parties. “I think that young people have been changing our way of expressing ourselves politically,” he adds.
Gutiérrez believes that the current government (formed by a center-right coalition) has continued with the investigations into the disappeared detainees and believes it likely that more people responsible for crimes committed during the dictatorship will end up in jail, along with the 24 repressors, especially the military and police. , who are currently in prison. However, he acknowledges: “Of course I would love for the president (Luis Lacalle Pou) to speak publicly and openly about the cause, and for the National Party that I am part of to be much more emphatic, due to its history of resistance and democratic sacrifice ”.
Elena Zaffaroni is much more skeptical regarding what may happen during this Government and the possibility that the military break the silence. She bases her forecast on what happened in the past, but also on the actions of the Cabildo Abierto, the partner of the ruling coalition that has publicly questioned the Justice for the prosecution of the military and police. In this sense, she warns against the revisionist bills promoted by that party and the repetition of speeches that seek to equate state violence with that exercised by the leftist guerrillas.
“Hopefully we will get from this government the political will to find the disappeared and give us back the truth of what happened. As mothers have always said: we want the whole truth, we can bear it. We want to know what they did, who, how and why they did it”, concludes Zaffaroni.
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