"I am the son of a genocidal maniac," stories of Argentine disobedience

CECILIA VALDEZ

In May 2016, the story of the daughter of the genocidaire Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, a central piece in the dictatorship's terror machinery, strongly shook the memory of Argentine society. When it seemed that few things could cause great surprise on the path of Memory, Truth and Justice, Mariana Dopazo spoke and showed that there is always the possibility of going one step further. Mariana then spoke of her repudiation of her genocidal father, which even materialized in a change of last name. Mariana's story was the starting point for other children to feel called to do something with that heavy inheritance, and generated the meeting and organization of what was called Disobedient Stories.

"I am a lawyer, and I am the son of a genocide," who "has been able to become aware of the horror of the extermination carried out by these criminals against humanity." A few days ago, Pablo Verna, the son of a genocidaire from the last Argentine military dictatorship, testified for the first time in a trial against humanity. Verna is a lawyer and is part of a human rights legal team. His father, Julio Verna, a military doctor, told him that he anesthetized victims of the so-called death flights, but the law prevents him from reporting it.

Mariana and Rita Vagliati chose to change their last name. Mariana is the daughter of Etchecolatz, and Rita is the daughter of Valentín Milton Pretti, who, like Etchecolatz, held the title of commissioner. “These two cases of surname change cause a strong legal impact in the sense that they appeal to the law to remove the surname of their genocidal parents. This is interesting because it forces the State, and its administrative structures, to write sentences that give rise to this request, and there the judges have to argue the reasons why they agree to the request. And the reasons given by these daughters were precisely that their parents had been genocidal,” explains Fabiana Rousseaux, a psychoanalyst specialized in caring for victims of human rights violations. 

They say that at the first meeting of Disobedient Stories there were 6, and that it was held the same month as the 2×1 demonstration - when in 2017 a ruling by the Supreme Court enabled the reduction of sentences for those convicted of crimes against humanity -, but for the second, a month later, there were 30 and, paradoxically, it took place on the same day that Father's Day is celebrated in Argentina.

At first they debated whether to present themselves as children of repressors or children of genocidaires, although they finally opted for Disobedient Stories, and decided that the term that best defined them was children of genocidaires since “there are also repressors now.” They took this name from a Facebook page where at that time Analía Kalinec had begun to upload autobiographical material with the intention of calling on other children to tell their own stories. As time went by, they also stopped saying that they are children, since relatives with different degrees of affiliation began to participate; There are even cases in which children have taken on the genocidal history of their parents, due to the pressure that their grandchildren put on them.

Doctor K.

Analía is the daughter of Eduardo Emilio Kalinec, better known as Doctor K, a police officer who actively participated in the dictatorship in the circuit of clandestine centers known as ABO: Atlético-Banco-Olimpo, and who today is detained with a life sentence. But Analía only learned about this story when she started university and began to hear some things, and even more so, when her father was imprisoned and she herself began to investigate a little more into her own story.

“I am from a typical middle-class family and I had always lived without major problems. When in 2005, I received the news that my father was in prison, that changed my life forever,” says Analía. “I was going to visit him in prison, but I thought it was a mistake. Anyway, he had started college and was breaking out of his shell.” At that time, Analía had a vague vision of the dictatorship, she felt empathy with the struggle of the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, but she also continued to feel that it was something foreign to her history. 

"Nothing was talked about in my family. When they put my old man in prison, we went to visit him, but we didn't talk about it. The only thing he told us was that it was a mistake, and that the revanchist leftists who were in the government caused all that. I believed it, but the years went by and that version became diluted,” he reflects. In 2008, the case was brought to oral trial, the case began to gain public notoriety and Analía could no longer sustain her social life as she had until then. “I had an episode with a co-worker who came to question me, because she had her missing father who had been in a clandestine center where my father had been; and it was not something from another time, it was happening to me there.” 

It was then that he decided to take a stand, read the case and became convinced that his father was lying to him. Her family did not accompany her, nor does she accompany her, and after the death of her mother, she also lost contact with her three sisters.

“My mother never spoke, she was unconditional to my father, and she became sick with hatred. The last time I visited my father in prison, I asked him about things he had read in the case, and about which I knew he was lying. That time I asked him for some explanations, and he already told me that it was a war, that they were subversives who planted bombs and I don't know how many other things. It was the first time he had heard him speak in those terms, justifying and vindicating everything he had done. He confirmed it to me, and the doubt that I had was gone. After that I never went to see him again.”

Disobedient Stories

The first public appearance of the Historias Desobedientes collective was at the first “Ni una menos” march in June 2017. “That had a lot of public repercussion and made about 90 people approach them within a year with similar stories,” says Laura Delgadillo. Laura knew that her father, a policeman, had had some kind of participation in the dictatorship because a colleague told her that she had seen him in his kidnapping operation and that he had let her go. There she began to put two and two together and pull at the threads of memory. It struck her that her father never wore a uniform, and she learned from her older sister that he was in charge, among other things, of cross-checking information with the diaries and notebooks that they brought back from the raids. 

Laura, unlike Mariana, did not need to change her last name, but like Analía, she is the only one in her family who echoes the issue. For the rest, Laura has a missing aunt, who was a midwife - her father's sister - and makes distinctions regarding her personal stories and decisions.

"Not all of us change our last name. First, because I have relatives with that last name who have nothing to do with what my father did, so I am going to appropriate that last name and resignify it; and second, because in the case of my old man he is not a public figure, as in the case of Etchecolatz or other genocidaires.” Laura's father was not imprisoned because there was no testimony or evidence against him.

Pablo Verna

For many years, and progressively, Pablo had - from things he heard from his family of origin - more and more suspicions, and then almost irrefutable presumptions, that his father, the military doctor, Julio Verna, had participated in the genocide. Already in 2013, due to a conflict between her mother and father, she told one of her sisters about the crimes committed by her father during the dictatorship, that is, that he had participated in kidnappings and injected the victims of the airline flights. death, which were then thrown alive from airplanes into the sea or river.

“My sister tells me that, then I meet with my father, and he admits it. The talk we had then was in a bar, very tense, and lasted about three and a half hours. He began by denying everything, then he told me that if he wanted me to stay with my mother's version, and finally he admitted everything and began to give me details. Around that same time, Verna (father) also confessed to one of Pablo's sisters that he had participated in the murder of four people who were put in a car and thrown into a river to simulate an accident. “As these people were anesthetized, but alive, the idea was that the autopsies would show that they drowned when water entered their lungs.”

After confirming his father's actions as part of the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship, Pablo met with the lawyer specialized in human rights, Pablo Llonto, and together they filed a complaint at the Human Rights Secretariat, which was sent to the Federal Court No. ° 2 of San Martín by Dr. Alicia Vence. Although the complaint was added to the investigation case, Julio Verna was never summoned to give an investigative statement, much less prosecuted. 

"For me his confession was very important because I had been assuming that my father was going to die one day, and he was not going to say more than what he had already said, and I was more than uncomfortable with that,” Pablo remembers. But at some point, around 2008 or 2009, the situation went from bothering him to worrying him: “I began to understand the criminality of his participation in the genocide, and that's when I looked for that talk. I needed to know what events he had participated in, and what exactly he had done.

Already in 2009, when his participation had become clear to me, I remember that, in response to my continuous questions, he called me one day very irritated and said to me: “Why are you asking so many questions? Don't ask me anything else, because I'm not going to give you a date or places, or information about anything or anyone, not even if they torture me or kill me.” Faced with that, Pablo no longer had any doubts. “From an individual point of view, his confession was very important, but this is a collective fight for Memory, Truth and Justice. Everything that happened before, with the Mothers, Grandmothers and Relatives (of the disappeared), was fundamental so that the children and relatives of genocidaires could become aware of the magnitude of their crimes, and repudiate them.” 

As a lawyer, Pablo joined the team led by Llonto. “I graduated at the end of 2013, and the will to do what I felt I had to do was very strong. It is difficult for me to put into words what it means for me to be working with Pablo Llonto, and for the victims, survivors and relatives of the Vesubio and Puente 12 Commission, which is a historical commission that works and investigates the cases of these clandestine detention centers and extermination. But in relation to this trial, something that was very shocking for me was working with the testimonies of what the children of the disappeared had had to go through, that impacted me in a very particular way.” 

The law

Although Pablo was part of Historias Desobedientes, some internal differences led him and another part of the group to form the collective Asociación Desobediente. “Both groups work for Memory, Truth and Justice, but with very different concepts and objectives,” he clarifies. One of the issues that relatives of genocide victims have been working on the most has to do with the modification of the law that prevents reporting and testifying against direct relatives and descendants. Pablo has been studying the penal code for years, and, together with his colleagues, they prepared and presented a bill that has not yet been passed. 

"At the time, we presented the project to change these prohibitions because we believe that they should not apply to war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. These are crimes that affect all of humanity, and the children of genocidaires should be able to testify in court because we are affected by crimes against humanity, otherwise we would consider ourselves outside of humanity,” says Pablo.

The other two pillars on which the project is based maintain that the prohibitions were made in a context in which they were intended as a constitutional mandate, which is the protection of the family, and that, between the realization of justice and the protection of the family, the legislator decides to protect the family.

"We believe that this prohibition does not make sense when family ties are already broken, that is, the bond that the law wants to protect - between us and the genocidaire - no longer exists." Finally, and what they highlight as the main reason, is that international human rights law mandates that states have the obligation to prevent, prosecute and punish serious crimes against humanity, and, when the internal regulations of the states create obstacles To achieve these objectives, in some way, it is failing to comply with its international obligations. 

The project lost parliamentary status - this happens when a bill submitted to Congress for consideration does not obtain sanction in one of its Chambers during the parliamentary year - and although the current context of Argentina, with a far-right government that claims terrorism of State, does not seem to be the most conducive for a project of this magnitude, the relatives trust that, at some point, there will be political will to carry it out.

“Today, when the executive branch seeks to deny, and even vindicate, the genocide, we have to insist that neither from the State, nor from any sphere, can an extermination be endorsed, not even with silence,” Pablo concludes. .

Cecilia Valdez She is an Argentine journalist