Screenshot of the Guerrieri IV trial, broadcast live. Zoom
On April 18, 1978, former Argentine priest Santiago Mac Guire picked up his five-year-old son Lucas from kindergarten and put him on his bicycle.
When they were a few blocks from home, in the city of Rosario, a car cut them off and threw them to the ground.
Four or five soldiers in civilian clothes got out of it and jumped on Mac Guire, hooded him and took him lying on the floor of the car, while they left the boy abandoned in the middle of the street.
Lucas is 49 years old today and is preparing to testify as a witness in the trial for crimes against humanity that began last Monday in Rosario.
The case of his father is one of the 116 included in the Guerrieri IV case - by Pascual Guerrieri, former Army intelligence officer - for which 17 former soldiers and policemen are accused.
However, it is a unique case due to the unprecedented accusation that accompanies it: the lawsuit maintains that Mac Guire was kidnapped and tortured along with two other detainees in the Salesian house Ceferino Namuncurá, on the outskirts of Rosario.
If confirmed, it would be the first time that it is proven that an ecclesiastical dependency functioned as a clandestine detention center during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983).
“I was hearing airplane noises, so I knew I was more or less close to the airport, which is in the Funes area.
When they send for him to legalize him [to transfer him from a clandestine detention center to a legal one] two soldiers take him and when he asks them where they were, they tell him that they come from Ceferino Namuncurá.
There he understands that it is the spiritual retreat of the Salesians where he had gone many times and establishes the relationship, "says Lucas by phone.
Mac Guire cannot testify because he died in 2001, but he had declared in 1984 before the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Conadep), the body created by Ricardo Alfonsin after Argentina's return to democracy with the aim of investigating the crimes perpetrated by state terrorism between 1976 and 1983. His son relies on that testimony to respond, which is also part of the court file.
Lucas was too young to remember precisely the day his father was beaten and kidnapped in front of him, but he retains the feeling of cold and emptiness of the first minutes, when everyone had hidden in their houses out of fear.
“First the kiosk appeared and then a woman with a little girl who went to my school.
She approached me, who was crying uncontrollably, and she took me to my house, ”she reconstructs.
Like the other families of the disappeared during the dictatorship, Mac Guire's wife, María Magdalena Carey, began looking everywhere for him.
One of the doors that she knocked on was that of the Diocese of Rosario.
She came to ask for help with her four children and did not leave until they received it.
Although Mac Guire, who was a prominent Third World priest until he hung up the habit in 1972, his family believes his ties to the Church were essential in saving his life.
“Approximately 15 days later they call my mother from the Bishopric to tell her to go to Battalion 121 because my father has appeared there.
When he arrives he finds an unrecognizable person due to the number of injuries and blows and his thinness, ”says Lucas.
In his testimony before Conadep, Mac Guire recounted that when he was transferred to that battalion, [Eugenio] Zitelli, the Rosario police chaplain, received him “having coffee and smoking a cigarette with [Gendarmerie commander Adolfo] Kusidonchi ”.
Kusidonchi was sentenced in 2018 to 22 years in prison for crimes against humanity, but Zitelli died before being tried.
"Zitelli was prosecuted for acts of deprivation, application of torture and for integrating the illicit association of the state repressive apparatus in Rosario, but he was not convicted because he died a few days before the start of the trial in which he was prosecuted," says the plaintiff attorney. Gabriela Durruti.
"The Mac Guire case puts the issue of the Church's co-responsibility with the dictatorship back on the agenda," Durruty continues.
According to the complaint, Mac Guire was detained at the Ceferino Namuncurá Salesian house along with Roberto Pistacchia - kidnapped the same day as him and also a survivor - and Eduardo Garat, who remains missing.
The land where he was staying was sold in 1979 to the Air Force, an operation reminiscent of the one carried out that same year in the delta del Tigre in what is known as the El Silencio farm.
That church property was sold to the military and shortly afterwards housed some detainees from the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) to circumvent the inspection that the delegates of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights were going to carry out during their visit to Argentina.
Lucas regrets that the trial has taken so long to arrive and that there is only one weekly hearing in Federal Oral Court 1, which will lengthen the process even more.
“On the one hand it is a liberating sensation [the beginning of the trial], but on the other hand there are many nuances, because many defendants died, or due to illness or old age were not in the courtroom,” he criticizes.
Friends and human rights activists accompanied relatives to the courthouse on Monday.
They all expect exemplary sentences, but remember that, in addition, each new trial is a new opportunity to remember the crimes perpetrated and that they will not be repeated.
Since Argentina resumed trials for crimes against humanity in 2006, more than a thousand people have been convicted.
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