Our Bodies, Their Battlefields by Christina Lamb

Author:Christina Lamb [Lamb, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

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Among the survivors of ESMA was Graciela García Romero. With brown eyes and feathery brown hair, dressed in black jeans and boots and a blue down jacket, she looked younger than the late sixties I knew her to be, and managed to seem both feisty and wounded. In November 2018 she came to meet me at a café in my hotel on Calle San Martín at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.

A young Graciela before her abduction

Before we started talking, she took me outside. “Look,” she said. Two doors down, outside number 700, she stopped at a blue door next to the entrance to the Teatro Payró. “This is where I was kidnapped,” she said. “It was also 3 p.m. on a Friday.

“It was October 15, 1976, and I was walking with my friend Diana Garcia when suddenly I felt arms around my neck and body. I shouted out but no one did anything. Six or seven men in plain clothes with pistols had grabbed us and dragged us onto the main street, Avenida Córdoba. They threw me into a white car and took me to ESMA. I never saw Diana again.”

I stared at her. Of all the places in Buenos Aires I could have asked her to come, what a horrible coincidence.

She laughed off my apologies and we went back in and ordered cappuccinos. She told me she had just read Nadia Murad’s book about being a Yazidi sex slave. “I realized that’s what happened to us,” she said. “We too were sex slaves.”

She began to tell me her story. Nicknamed la Negrita, Graciela had been a militant with the Montoneros, a leftist urban guerrilla group, initially created to bring back the exiled former President Juan Perón. In the early 1970s when he disowned them, they focused on attacking international business interests, bombing the Buenos Aires Sheraton, and kidnapping executives—they still retain the record for the world’s highest ransom, $60 million for the Born brothers. When the military seized power, the Montoneros switched to armed struggle to try to overthrow the regime.

Graciela had joined the movement through a boyfriend and was provided a pistol, though she never used it. She was in her mid-twenties when she was picked up by the secret police and taken to ESMA. There she was hooded and taken to the Capucha where they were guarded by what she calls the Verdes, after the color of their uniform and because they were young students at the college. “We had to pee and defecate into a foul-smelling bucket and if we managed to use the real bathroom there was always one of the Verdes watching, commenting on our bodies.”

She was taken to the basement where there were a number of cells off a passageway they referred to as “the Avenue of Happiness.” There she was interrogated, stripped naked, and slapped in the face. Sometimes she was tied to a stretcher and they carried out a mock execution. It was no empty threat—piles of inert bodies were stacked up on the floor.

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