All of the Things I Refuse to Forget
All of the things I refuse to forget
by Lucía Cholakian Herrera・May 1, 2020・20 minutes
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo - Website: https://www.abuelas.org.ar/caso/waisberg-belaustegui-herrera-163
My sharpest recollection of Valeria is that she was nice and chatty. Although I never met her, that’s what my mom tells me every time I ask her to remind me what happened the only time she saw her.
The only time Mariana saw her cousin was during an impromptu lunch at her grandmother’s sometime between late 1976 and the beginning of 1977. As she recalls, Valeria was with her newborn baby Tania and was very chatty with her. But that day, my grandfather Alberto—Valeria’s uncle—was aloof. He seemed uncomfortable.
Valeria was already a part of the ERP, Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army), one of the biggest guerrilla movements in the resistance against the military dictatorship that started in 1976. My mom wouldn’t find out about this ‘side’ of Valeria’s life until decades later, but some people in my family already knew that Matilde’s sons and daughter—Martín, José, and Valeria—were part of la lucha armada against the regime. Hence, they barely communicated throughout those years. And they never met again after what happened.
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March 24, 1976 marks the day in which the third and last dictatorship in Argentina was established. The military commander Jorge Rafael Videla was declared President by a junta militar. The self-proclaimed National Reorganization Process was the result of complex political tensions at a global level in response to the “communist threat” in Latin America. It was the third coup in our history. The armies had a clear goal, and it was to eliminate all traces of revolutionary and left-wing practices and ideas. The intervention was coordinated regionally, and Operación Cóndor tied together the power domes of the southern cone dictatorships. The authorities were united in their mission to identify, capture, and murder the subversive individuals and, along with them, their ideological heritage.
In order to make the Argentinian dictatorship enduring, censorship and political oppression were part of daily life during those sinister seven years. The regime took 30,000 lives through a systematic method: the abduction, torture, killing, and disappearance of the “internal enemy,” as they were called, a group mostly composed of young students and political activists that organized themselves around the country and networked with anti-right resistance collectives across the region.
A few years ago, through a book by Matilde Herrera my dad bought me, I discovered that three of those 30,000 disappeared people came from my family.
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It’s true: my mom bears a huge resemblance to Matilde. That’s what Estela de Carlotto—chairwoman of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo—told my mother the first time she visited the organization. During that time, my mom was working as a scientific expert in an investigation that involved the Abuelas, so she paid them a visit. “I thought it was Matilde walking into the room”, Estela told her. Matilde had died years before that. It was the day of that visit when my mother found out about everything.
Matilde Herrera and her three children: José, Martín and Valeria
I read through the long sentence that holds the cases of kidnapping and disappearance of Valeria, Martín, and José, among many others, in the Centro Clandestino de Campo de Mayo, one of the over 500 Clandestine Centers in Argentina. The Centros Clandestinos de Detención (CCD) were places where those illegally detained by the military were subject to different crimes against humanity including torture, sexual abuse, starvation, slave work, and one of the most characteristic of the Argentinian case: the appropriation of children born in captivity. Valeria was one of these many victims.
“Subversive criminal.” I look at her photo trying to find a trail of that description. It’s the face of a 24-year-old girl. They took her and her two brothers, along with their partners. Tania, her first child, was 18 months old. The day they kidnapped Valeria and her partner Roberto Waisberg, their baby was left on the streets in the suburban neighborhood of Padua, with a sign that said her name and the name of her grandmother Matilde Herrera. Due to her desperate search, Matilde would become one of the many Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and, by inverse heritage from her three children, a relentless fighter for human rights.
Matilde Herrera, wearing the symbol of the struggle for the search of her children: a white pañuelo
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo is an organization born as a reaction to one of the most terrible crimes of the past dictatorship: the appropriation by the military of children born inside the CCDs. Their struggle through diverse strategies, which included the development of the ‘índice de abuelidad’ (grandmotherhood index), a statistical formula that allows to people to establish grandmother-grandson/daughter relationships based on genetic material, helped to identify 130 of these children, who are now adults over 40 years old, and who have had their identities restored after being raised under different names and mostly in military families. But many of them, over 300, have not yet been identified.
The baby Valeria gave birth to during her kidnapping in the Campo de Mayo Military Hospital is one of these unidentified grandchildren.
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Sometime between the day they were kidnapped and December 1977, Valeria and Roberto were taken to Campo de Mayo. Testimonies suggest that she carried her whole pregnancy in spite of the tortures they all received in Campo de Mayo, which was one of the cruelest concentration camps in the country. They say Roberto would beg the man in charge of distributing the food—one of the prisoners—to give his breakfast to Valeria. I take a deep breath: This is what I want to remember: the mutual solidarity amidst the horror. The figure of compañeros—comrades—is a popular abstraction that exists in our history; the figure inspires a sense of loyalty in the context of horror. Rather than being a solely moral act, loyalty was political.
According to a recent testimony in the trial of Campo de Mayo, a nurse declared that she was there during the birth of the boy that Valeria Beláustegui Herrera was carrying. She was 2 months into her pregnancy when she was kidnapped on May 13th, 1977. She gave birth some time in December. The nurse recalled that right after the birth, the militares inside the room discussed who would take this baby. As she begged them not to take him, they beat her to death.
After contacting the lawyer of the megacausa that contains Valeria’s case, I sat down and read all of the related files without a pause. That’s all there is about their time detained at Campo de Mayo, and that’s all there is about the baby’s birth and Valeria’s fate. When I was done—and after taking very few notes—I closed the files and promised myself that I’d never, ever, read them again.
While browsing the files and putting my notes together, I asked myself many times about the prospect of telling this story. Every now and then I find myself googling Valeria, Martin or Jose’s names and looking at their images, or scrolling through all of the people I can find on social media that I think might be somehow related to them—Tania, Valeria’s surviving daughter, for example, has lived in California for years now. We’ve exchanged some messages, and there wasn’t much to say beyond the nice to meet you’s and let me know if you ever come over here’s. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t get over the hope I feel whenever a new photo pops up in my search or I find a new trace of someone that might have known them. I keep searching for some sort of complicity, because there’s a strange sort of hope that comes from trying to get to know someone who’s missing. Desaparecida. My main character is missing, and this makes it very different from all of the stories I’ve written about in the past.
After the tsunami of uncertainties, I always reach the same conclusion: It’s not going away, and all of the people who have gone through this have reached this conclusion too. And they’ve also found a way of telling these stories without getting torn apart. This strength lies in the very core of the stories: the first time I learned about Valeria I was 18 years old and she was already frozen in her eternal 24. I saw her as an epic, wild woman that had given her life for her ideals. Now I’m almost three years older than she’ll ever be, and all I could think about is the need to be clear: no one, not even the most epic hero, should ever go through this again. That’s why “Nunca Más” became the country’s motto after our democracy was restored in 1983. And though this might sound obvious, there’s a personal process that needs to reach this collective point in order to make these stories worth telling.
Every March 24th since the return of democracy in 1983, over a million people march in the plazas of Argentina with the Abuelas and the Madres. This year was the first time was canceled, due to COVID-19. The sense of loneliness and despair that marked the first days of our compulsory lockdown was increased by the desolation many of us felt: most of us have marched every single “veinticuatro” of our lives, even as babies, held by our parents. In order to express support, people made their own “pañuelos”, the classic handkerchief that the Abuelas and Madres made a worldwide symbol, and hung them in their balconies and windows. That day, at the time of the speech, our friend Gino called us through Zoom. We saw the speech together with friends, as we always do. It was the first time since the lockdown had begun when I actually felt at home.
It all goes around in a loop. It must be a part of the process: the sense of loneliness when faced with a story too hard to be told, the massive encounter with others, the certainty of remembrance: a nice and chatty girl who had just had a child. A fearless warrior fleeing a genocide. A woman from a family. Someone I might have gotten along great with. I refuse to forget. ❖
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