Sergio Ferrari*, Prensa Latina employee
“A challenge of more than three years that has allowed me to discover the complex phase of a country – Argentina – that I already consider my own,” explains Todaro, a teacher with extensive experience in various schools in the Agrigento region in the south of Sicily. . Their associative commitment, like their intellectual endeavors, knows no limits. After a trip to Africa, he and his wife and other employees founded an animal shelter for AIDS orphans in Isimani, in the heart of Tanzania, which he continues to support. From Sicily today to dictatorial Argentina almost 50 years ago and through Tanzania, “the world is one, vast and diverse, in which new relationships of equality and justice must prevail.” Without systematic memory work, this new and essential planetary paradigm will be impossible to build up,” says Alberto Todaro at the beginning of this interview.
Question: It is not common for an Italian to develop a doctoral topic on Argentina at a Spanish university. How did you choose this topic for your thesis?
Alberto Todaro (AT): I think that the Italians should care much more about the Argentinians than they do, since Argentina is without a doubt a sister nation with common roots that especially bring us closer to each other. From the unification of Italy in 1861 until the years 1960-1970, almost three million Italians lived in Argentina. The writer Jorge Luis Borges once said that he believed he was not Argentine because he had neither Italian blood nor a surname.
In 2008 I visited this Latin American country for the first time with my wife and every Thursday we attended the Mothers’ Rounds in the Plaza de Mayo. From then on, my interest in the question of human rights in Argentina grew in its most general dimension. Then I learned that there were some Sicilians who disappeared there during this sad time. I had access to a report from the Italian consulate in Buenos Aires with a list of 45 Italians who disappeared at the time, including six Sicilians.
I became very curious to know more about her. The motivation was so great that I applied for a professional license at the school where I worked to study the topic.
trip to the past
Q: What are the main contents of your doctoral thesis in brief?
AT: The investigation essentially consists of three parts: the life stories of the missing Sicilians; the historical context in which the events took place and the interviews with people related to the topic. I develop the first two parts based on the statements of those who were contemporary witnesses. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate family members, relatives or friends of each of the six missing Sicilians. There is no news about any of them. To combat anonymity, I would like to mention their names: Salvatore Privitera, Claudio Di Rosa, Vincenzo Fiore, Giovanni Camiolo, Silvana Cambi and Giuseppe Vizzini. With great respect, in this process they became, as I always say, “my” disappeared people, i.e. my companions in the search for the truth.
Q: According to your statement, a central aspect of your study was the exchanges and meetings with the relatives of the missing Sicilians…
AT: Actually, it was all an essential experience. For example, meeting Ms. Josefa, the mother of Vincenzo Fiore, a Peugeot worker who disappeared in Quilmes, Buenos Aires. She is a member of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
I interviewed brothers and sisters, friends and fellow activists: they were very moving meetings. I found people with great kindness who were willing to tell me their stories. I tried to approach her very carefully, as I think that remembering certain dramatic life circumstances can be deeply painful. In fact, for example, despite several attempts, I was unable to speak to the daughter of Silvana Cambi, the only woman among the six missing Sicilians. Despite their willingness to talk about their experiences in detention centers, I noticed that some of the former detainees I interviewed were hesitant to discuss the topic of torture. At the end of 2022, in the middle of the World Cup, I visited Argentina again to conduct part of these interviews. It was a very special journey, into history and into the present… With all the magic and power that one can experience when, above all, it is about activating the memory.
Q: What aspects of this journey have challenged you the most?
AT: I could name dozens of facts. This trip represented a crucial moment in the investigation and represented the most emotional and least technical part of it. It was important to visit the places where the events occurred and to talk to the people who experienced them painfully first hand had experienced. I visited places and met people that not only provided essential material for my thesis, but also forced me to delve deeply into the history of those years. For example, just visiting the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), one of the largest secret detention centers, was an introduction to this narrative. I have been to other centers of the same type, including Garage Olimpo, Club Atlético, Automotores Orletti. I interviewed members of human rights organizations such as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Familiares, HIJOS and the National Commission for the Right to Identity. I spoke to experts from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). I went to Memory Park. In short, I walked a lot through the streets of Buenos Aires, where you can still feel the traces of this brutal history.
If I had to recall some of the most shocking moments in this almost three-year process, I would mention the first mothers’ round I attended, where I cried the entire time. Also the meeting with Vera Vigevani Jarach, mother of the Plaza de Mayo Línea Foundadora, or the visit to the house of Vincenzo Fiores and the meeting with his mother, Doña Josefa, who told me the details of the kidnapping of her son in the same room where she was took place.
No to forgetting!
Q: What are the main conclusions you draw at the conclusion of your doctoral thesis?
AT: The most important thing: it is necessary, almost a duty, not to forget what happened. Of course, it is also necessary to move on, but remembering these events can help ensure that they never happen again. “Never again,” as the 1984 report of the National Commission on Enforced Disappearances was titled, or as prosecutor Julio Straßera emphasized in the 1985 trial of the juntas. It became a phrase that today belongs to the entire Argentine people. . In this South American country there continues to be a broad movement that claims the three key words: memory, truth, justice. The places of horror have now become places of remembrance.
I was also impressed by the analysis of the different paths and paths in the integration process of Sicilians in particular and Italians in general, who emigrated to Argentina with their families in search of work and a decent life (many, in desperate economic situations). Some were caught in the clutches of the dictatorship as victims of repression. Others became oppressors: many of the “chiefs” of the National Reorganization Process, as the dictatorship was called, had Italian surnames.
Q: Despite the necessary and compelling distance that any scientific study requires, this particular topic confronted you with a human drama. To what extent has this almost completed work changed your personal vision?
AT: I’ll tell you something. On one of my first days in Buenos Aires, I met Ricardo and Mirta, two friends of Claudio Di Rosa, one of “my” missing Sicilians. We were sitting in a bar near Plaza de Mayo and then Ricardo and Mirta started talking to each other. Just like we do in Italy when we meet our old friends from school, childhood or university. We talk about our other classmates and say that one lived outside the city, that another married his girlfriend at the time, etc. Ricardo and Mirta began to remember that one was killed by the military, that another is still missing , that another was kidnapped and thrown into the sea… At that moment, in that bar in the Plaza de Mayo, I was confronted with the revelation What was the military dictatorship for the Argentine youth of that time? And that had a huge impact on me.
Refresh memory, military solidarity
Q: In parallel to your research, have you been involved in other activities related to memory in Argentina?
AT: In these last years I have also discovered the world of prisoners who spent time in official, duly recognized prisons during the dictatorship, which is rarely talked about. In May of this year, with a group of Sicilian colleagues, we organized the presentation of the book “Grand Hotel Coronda”, published in Italian, about this maximum security prison in Argentina. A microcosm of life stories, of suffering, of struggles, of unified resistance and of contributions to memory, truth and justice that I honestly could not have imagined.
Q: Almost parallel to the last phase of your dissertation, denying ideas and discourses are increasing in Argentina. Your opinion on this?
AT: I live in a country where there are people who say, “Mussolini did good things too,” so it doesn’t surprise me that there are forms of revisionism or denial in other places in the world. However, I have the feeling that a large part of the people in Argentina have acquired memory, truth and justice. These words were sown in the hearts of wide circles, many of whom suffered on a personal and family level from the events of the 1970s. While there may be some setbacks, I have no doubt that these deeply rooted concepts will return to their roots on and on. Germinate
Q: I understand that after so many months of research, you have also taken part in an active solidarity campaign.
AT: Of course. I started a kind of “remembrance campaign” in Sicily. I wrote to the mayors of the places of origin of “my” disappeared people; I told them in a few words the story of their fellow citizens – first emigrants and then disappeared people – and invited them to dedicate a street in the city to them. So far only one of these mayors has accepted my invitation: the mayor of San Mauro Castelverde, the hometown of Vincenzo Fiore. In fact, I was there last August at the invitation of the mayor himself to attend the inauguration of a memorial plaque for Vincenzo and to give my testimony. Now I will write again to the other mayors to tell them about the event in San Mauro Castelverde and I hope that this experience will multiply even more.
rmh/sf
*Argentinian journalist residing in Switzerland
(Taken from selected signatures)