March 1 – 31, 2007
I went down about twenty or thirty steps and I heard big iron doors being shut. I imagined that the place was underground, that it was big, because you could hear people’s voices echoing and the airplanes taxiing overhead or nearby. The noise drove you mad. One of the men said to me: so you’re a psychologist? Well bitch, like all the psychologists, here you’re really going to find out what’s good. And he began to punch me in the stomach.
Marta Candeloro was abducted on June 7, 1977 in Neuquen. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “La Cueva.”
It is very hard to describe the terror of the minutes, hours, days, months, spent there. At first when you’ve been kidnapped you have no idea about the place around you. Some of us imagined it to be round, others like a football stadium with the guards walking above us. We didn’t know which direction our bodies were facing, where our head was, where our feet were pointing. I remember clinging to the mat with all my strength so as not to fall even though I knew I was on the floor.
Liliana Callizo was abducted on September 1, 1976 in Cordoba. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “La Perla.”
They said we were going to a place where we’d meet lots of people who had disappeared and about whom nothing more would ever be known, that we too had disappeared and no longer existed in the eyes of the world, that not even our names existed and that we should answer with the name they gave us. They left me handcuffed and blindfolded in a sort of courtyard, where they searched me and asked me about any metal objects I might be carrying, even if I had an IUD fitted. Later I found out that this routine was what they did before giving you electric shocks, to check that there was no other conductor on you.
Hebe Caceres was abducted on June, 1978 in La Plata. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “El Banco.”
There were no cotton wads, no cloth; nothing. They didn’t give you anything. When we had our period we would drip blood, and I’ll never forget how they would drag us out into the corridor and beat our legs with sticks, saying: look how they drip and lose blood, just like dogs, just like bitches, leaving a trail of blood behind them.
Marta Candeloro was abducted on June 7, 1977 in Neuquen. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “La Cueva.”
They put us women in a tiny cell; there was a window in the door and to the right there was a concrete seat. I remember this because when they came for us for another session I used to grab hold of the bench like a child, so as not to go.
Emilce Moler was abducted on September 17, 1976 in La Plata. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “Pozo de Arana.”
Something strange used to happen at night, the screams of torture were different than those during the day. Even if the screams of torture are always the same they sound different at night. And it’s also different when they come to get you at night. The noises and the screams are not with me always, but when I do remember them, it makes me very sad. I am paralyzed by those screams, I’m back in that time and place. As somebody once said—and I’ve given this some thought and I think it’s right—although life goes on, although some of us were freed, you never get out of the pit.
Isabel Cerruti was abducted on July 12, 1978 in Buenos Aires. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “El Olimpo.”
I can’t be closed in anywhere. For example, I go to the bathroom and leave the door open, I’ve always got the door open; it’s no big deal if my dogs come in, but I can’t bear being closed in. That it’s also to do with the business of the hood, the feeling of suffocating and the rape… Rape is always accompanied by a lot of guilt, and also a lot of shame, an awful lot of shame. It’s one of the most degrading forms of torture, for a woman, and I think it’s to do with that, because it’s terrible having to acknowledge you were raped. I think there are many things which don’t get said, that we don’t get round to saying, that private world we conceal, we don’t let it out.
Maria Luz Pierola was abducted on february 25, 1977 in Concordia. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “La Casita de Paracao.”
Immediately after my arrival at La Perla I was taken to the torture room. They striped me and tied my feet and hands with ropes to the bars of a bed, so that I was hanging from them. They attached a wire to one of the toes of my right foot. Torture was applied gradually, by means of electric prods of two different intensities: one of 125 volts which caused involuntary muscle movements and pain all over the body, and another of 220 volts called La margarita (the daisy), which caused a violent contraction—as if they were ripping off all your limbs at the same time. I tried to kill myself by drinking the filthy water from this can they used for another kind of torture called ‘ducking,’ but I didn’t manage it.
Teresa Meschiati was abducted in the town of Cordoba on 25 de September 1976, in Cordoba She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center ‘La Perla.’
Ants used to come in and out, and I would watch these ants because they were coming in and then going out into the world. They were walking across the earth, the outside world, and then coming back in again, and watching them I didn’t feel so alone.
Ledda Barreiro was abducted on January 12, 1978 in Mar del Plata. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “La Cueva.”
Light from outside? No, it was a basement, we only ever had artificial light, which itself went off from time to time as the light bulbs exploded from being on day and night. Whenever the light went off they went crazy and hurried to replace the bulb because then things were reversed, it was they who couldn’t see us.
Marta Candeloro was abducted on June 7, 1977 in Neuquen. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “La Cueva.”
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was not unusual to see in Cabinets de Curiosités stones on which strange patterns were created when the stones absorbed imprints of violence which had taken place nearby. I have a collection of these stones because they provide me with a metaphor for the marks I feel are inscribed in my own body and in the bodies of the other Argentine women who, like me, suffered enforced disappearance and torture during Argentina’s Dirty War thirty years ago. We lived through a cstorm of history that changed our lives. We have built our lives on the scars of that trauma, scars that left recognizable patterns on our lives and the lives of our children and loved ones. Since 2000, I have been going back to Argentina, returning to the secret detention centres and photographing walls that still bear witness to the violence enacted on our bodies, searching for other women who lived through enforced disappearance, asking them to talk with me about memories that have lasted for thirty years. My project, called El Lamento de los Muros [The Wailing of the Walls], is the result.