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Graciela

2023-03-02T21:46:53.812Z


A round trip from a column published in this same space by Martín Fernández Meijide, son of Graciela, a former member of CONADEP.


Why is so much effort being made for foreigners to distinguish us for our pain and shame, to make ESMA a World Heritage Site,

instead of distinguishing our compatriots

who, at the risk of their lives, were the ones who opened the doors to the truth in order to do justice to our tragic past?

This is what I ask out loud after reading, moved in this very space, the tribute that Martín Fernández Meijide pays to his mother, Graciela.

He grew up with the absence of his brother Pablo, a disappeared prisoner, he saw his mother cry daily "somewhere in the house", however, he does

not hide from the victim's place, he avoids the intimacy of pain to restore the truth history

around his mother and the ignored work that together with other people, in the middle of the dictatorship, they did from the Assembly for the Rights of Man, APDH, to reconstruct what they deliberately tried to hide.

With enormous political intuition, Graciela knew that she could be more useful by collecting the testimonies of others than by presenting herself as the testimony of the mother who has seen her adolescent son disappear one night in 1976. An almost child.

As a family, she divided with her husband what so many fathers did: for them, the domestic rearguard, so that they, the mothers, could rebuke the power from the Plaza de Mayo, or like Graciela who joined a plural organization, the Assembly for the Rights of Man, APDH, made up of different people who did not ask themselves about party affiliation, political ideas, or to which saints they prayed to receive testimonies, present habeas corpus, appeal to international solidarity to dismantle and denounce the terror strategy of the dictatorship that kidnapped, killed,

Martín is correct in describing the members of the APDH as "progressives", the true meaning of the word, those people for whom differences are irrelevant because respect for others, benevolence, reasonableness and solidarity are the principles that the Declaration Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines from its first article: equal because we are born free, and as beings of reason we are obliged to act in a fraternal manner.

Thus, one who does not respect the equality of the other,

nor accepts the plurality that lives in universality,

cannot be considered progressive .

Martín's text is modest as happens with people who do not make suffering a political flag.

It is moving to imagine that then adolescent who some days accompanied his mother and was given the task of filling in the squares of a grid “with lines grouped by five as in the trick to facilitate counting, according to a list of names and dates.

The grid was a rustic calendar;

the dashes represented missing

.

The information was stored in files and graphs, there was no computing”.

The Argentina of 1983 began in the most auspicious way.

Only five days after using his pen as the first president of democracy, Raúl Alfonsín created the Conadep, a commission of notables, which not all wanted to integrate, chaired by the writer Ernesto Sábato, another denied in the history of human

rights

.

A commission that formalized the work of compiling and organizing the testimonies of the survivors in which Graciela played a fundamental role since she contributed the sad experience acquired in the APDH that served as the basis for the now remembered accusation of the prosecutor Julio Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo ,

that Argentina of 1985 that today is evoked globally.

A film that moves us within the country and excites those outside, especially Europe, where the return of autocrats and threats to democracy are feared.

Now that 2023 has just begun and in which there is a risk of new appropriations for the commemoration of the fourth democratic decade, we should remember that

democracy is plural, it belongs to all of us,

heroes do not boast, no one owns even the pain or our lives.

Those who invoke memory and the truth, now that the courts have condemned the leaders of death, cannot commit the injustice of depriving the new generations of the complete truth.

If we really understand the moral force of human rights, which are so easily invoked, it is time for us to announce the moral truth of a philosophy that makes us free, equal, and in solidarity, and it is the obligation of the State to guarantee human rights. to form citizens capable of thinking for themselves.

To these new generations, as in Bertold Brecht's poem to the future, we should remind them of the hell from which they were saved.

That hell that Martín also alludes to when paying homage to his mother.

That adolescent who made lines on a form to register the disappeared, one of them his brother Pablo,

who saw his mother cry and grow over that suffering,

and that in an inexplicable way, those who appropriate the tragic memory, freely infringed new pains.

Without imagining requests for forgiveness because as the character in the novel Patria, the imprisoned ETA member, reflected, "it is easier to pick up a weapon than to ask for forgiveness."

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-03-02

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