The call that gives the title to Leila Guerriero's new book came on March 14, 1977, to an Air Force major and civilian pilot about his only daughter. A year was just a few days away from the coup that established the dictatorship of the military junta in Argentina and unleashed severe repression. Silvia Labayru, the protagonist of the portrait that Guerriero creates in more than 400 pages, was a member of the intelligence sector of the Montoneros armed group, her whereabouts were unknown for almost three months and her father assumed that she was dead. But she was still alive, she was 20 years old, she was arrested when she was five months pregnant, and she was already eight months old when the phone rang. She remained imprisoned for more than a year, until mid-1978, in the dark premises of ESMA in Buenos Aires, the school of naval mechanics that became a center of imprisonment, death and torture through which about 5,000 people passed 200 came out alive.
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Silvia Labayru survived and more than 40 years later visited the ESMA, now converted into a museum of remembrance, together with the most prominent chronicler of her generation, columnist and contributor to EL PAÍS, author of books such as Los suicidas del fin del mundo (2005). the pandemic. . In 1977 Labayru was tortured, she gave birth in April in the ESMA to the first baby born in these facilities – her daughter Vera, who was given to her paternal grandparents – she worked alongside two Montonero bosses in a military office and one of them Lieutenant Alfredo Astiz , who had already been infiltrated into the Mothers of Mayo group and posed as a relative of a missing person, took her to the meetings. This operation, commanded by this dark “blonde angel”, led to the kidnapping and subsequent murder of eleven people, including three mothers and two French nuns, a case that raised alarm bells around the world.
Alberto Lennie, Silvia Labayru and their daughter Vera in Spain, 1978. The image taken by Dani Yako is included in the book “Exilio, 1976-1983”. Dani Yako
Labayru has testified against the military in every trial where she has been asked to do so, and in 2014 she was one of three women to press charges of sexual violence during her arrest (until 2010, rape was not recognized as a separate crime). The verdict in his favor was handed down in the summer of 2021 and by that point he had already been unraveling the story of his life with Guerriero for months.
The journalist came to Labayru through information about the rape trial and through a mutual friend, photographer Dani Yako. “I thought Leila might be interested,” she says on the phone from Buenos Aires, saying that these two women were “forces of nature” and that she saw it even though she was afraid of losing her friends if it didn’t go well that they understood each other. The call begins with a barbecue at Yako's house and in its pages appears, almost like a tributary, the book Exilio 1976-1983, published by the photographer and his group of friends from the prestigious National College, with the pictures Yako took of them all made in the late seventies, mainly in Spain. Photos – currently on display at the Olavide bookstore in Madrid – of Labayru with her daughter and other children; the group of friends that includes Martín Caparrós. In one of the texts accompanying the photos from the 1970s he writes: “Our games were not easy; Some have been imprisoned or disappeared, we have all had to endure the death of people very close to us. But we didn't want to sink into the swamp of victimhood, we wanted to look for a life.” Yako remembers that this group was “closed and solid,” and points out that perhaps now is a “phase of understanding what happened to us and what is happening to us” began.
Portrait of Silvia Labayru and her daughter Vera Lennie, born at ESMA, taken in Madrid in 1978. The image is included in Dani Yako's photo book “Exilio 1976-1983”.dani yako
The appeal, which Guerriero eventually wrote within four months, covers Labayru's life from his youth, marked by a precocious political commitment, to the present moment and his return to Argentina in recent years to continue a love story that began in the same School where he also worked came into contact with the radical left and met this group of friends there. Added to this are her years in Madrid after ESMA, her failed marriage to the father of her eldest daughter, the doctor Alberto Lennie, her later partners and the son she had more than a decade after leaving Argentina. “It was very difficult for me to find the structure because there were a lot of conversations with Silvia and all her friends, partners, ex-partners, etc. “I had an enormous amount of material,” explained Guerriero, who had just landed in Madrid since the southern summer, on Thursday afternoon. The key, he adds, came from Helgoland, a volume on physics that a friend had given him. “Every book,” says the editor and teacher, “requires a different texture to be told.”
In the sometimes detailed description of his meetings with Labayru there are masks (“chins”), PCR, open windows, outdoor areas and safe distances that were not just metaphorical. “When I wrote the book, I was very surprised at how long we had endured this situation, months without seeing each other's faces and speaking with a mask. It didn't make the relationship weirder, it didn't make it less fluid, but it was very weird,” he says. “Silvia is a very articulate person. I asked and it was like a car where you press the accelerator and it goes, goes, goes… But we have always maintained a great distance in the relationship and that, in my opinion, is the only way to do certain things to ask. from a place that is very opaque, very absent, if you will. All her life, Silvia built an attitude that was not intended to be complacent, at least today it is impossible to know if this was the case when she was 22, 23, 24, 25, because with the time learns to have moderation.” Guerriero is currently refusing to have a public conversation or interview with Labayru. She read the book in December and was “very satisfied,” says the author.
Apart from the formal difficulties that Guerriero faced, there were thematic and substantive controversies such as the distrust and hostility that surrounded the survivors or the open criticism of the ideals of the radical left and armed struggle. “Perhaps one could speak of disgust more than a historical review,” points out the writer Rodrigo Fresán of the current moment, who will present The Call on Tuesday in Barcelona, calling this work of Guerriero in the sash “an In Hot Blood” . “ alluding to the famous book by Truman Capote.
Questions. During the course of your meetings with Labayru, were you afraid that this closeness would influence the way you told your story or viewed it?
Answer. No never. After almost two years of knowing everyone around you and talking to their children, some layers of safe prevention fall away from the person you're interviewing. He realizes that your work is serious. Silvia is a very intelligent woman and she always had the idea that I was a journalist. When he told me, “I'm going to tell you something, but don't tell me that,” of course I respected that; Things regarding his children, his family, internal stories that are not relevant, there is none of that. But I wasn't at all afraid to say, “I'm getting clingy.”
Q Has your view of Labayru not changed? Is what you thought about her the first time you met her the same as what you thought later?
R. When I visited her, I knew nothing more than what had been published in the newspapers at the time and a few old press releases in which her name was mentioned in passing on the topic of the nuns and the missing mothers Astiz. Then I learned a lot and watched a lot of others. And reporting so much means seeing things better and better. Each time I discovered a much more complex woman, much more labyrinthine and clueless.
Q Did you have any doubts?
R. They doubt it was a good story since Silvia was uncomfortable talking to me. But in a moment that I capture in the book, she tells me that she once got into a dog's cage, and I wondered if I wasn't, for all intents and purposes, that Neapolitan Mastiff: a Mastiff who would tear her to pieces could tear because she was blind and didn't know what to write. and that Great Dane in the cage who, she told me, ate ham out of her hand, which means she was being manipulated and I wasn't her vehicle to tell one version of the story. This doubt disappeared, otherwise I would not have written the book. The journalist who writes and doesn't doubt anything is a bit stupid.
Q She writes that Labayru is very nervous when people say about her story: “I'm not the one to judge.” Did you start from that position when you approached her?
R. I have no prior vision of anyone. I will never make a moral judgment, especially not about a person who has had what happened to her. I didn't feel like I wasn't the one judging, but rather that I was the one telling.
Leila Guerriero, last Friday, January 19, in the Las Letras neighborhood of Madrid.Samuel Sánchez
Q The book collects the critical visions that some of the left-wing militants, not only Silvia, have today about the meaning of this struggle. Are you worried this will affect the way the book is read?
R. Firstly, I'm not one to start a conversation, this is a conversation he should definitely have. All the people interviewed have something to do with Silvia's story. In the book, a situation emerges that has been kept quiet for years and has to do with this: What happens to the people who survived and who have a more disturbing story to tell, like Silvia's? There are different positions and I think you have to listen without raising your finger to point out whether one is right or the other is wrong.
Q Is it time to listen to survivors?
R. There's a whole conversation there that's not so obvious that has to do with the rejection of some of the identified survivors, I would almost say using the same language that the right has used to justify the kidnapping of the identified survivors who disappeared , saying, “You must have done something.” That you had to be held accountable for what you did or didn't do in order to survive surprised me enormously, from the perspective of human existence, which is feeling sorry for someone to have someone who wants to live. Of course you then say that there are limits, because to what extent do you become such a vile person who does everything, who has no limits whatsoever, and to what extent is that justifiable? It's a complex discussion, an interesting conversation.
Q One of the interviewees pointed out that among the many that exist for victims of the dictatorship, there is no association of survivors.
R. What Norma Susana Burgos says is very symptomatic. There are things that are very unpleasant to hear. You also have to understand other people's sides. They were different times, times when certain concepts were not refined. For example, today we talk about consent, but in the 70s, 80s, 90s no one thought about it. Over the years there are also concepts that can be thought of, hopefully better, although sometimes that is not the case. I can understand that many people whose relatives, husbands or children have disappeared react more emotionally.
Q Burgos herself says how can she not understand that a relative of a missing person would look at her like that because she is alive?
R. Obviously, but we envy or are jealous of much smaller things, stupid things! We feel resentment and resentment towards much simpler things. It is very difficult to put yourself in other people's shoes.
Silvia Labayru, survivor of the Argentine dictatorship, in her home the day after the conviction of two former intelligence officers. With kind approval
Q Your book It comes at a special time in Argentina's political history. There was a political about-face and a campaign in which the issue of dictatorship was raised by Milei's vice president Villarruel, who in the CONADEP report only wants to count the dead and not the previous 30,000 civil servants, and that of “war”.
R. The book will be published in Argentina in March. The Call is the story of a woman who survived, and has far more complexities and nuances than those typically brought to the forefront. He is a victim, although he does not live his life as if he were an eternal victim. If this somehow opens up a discussion about reviewing some things, I don't think that's wrong. Since when is talking not better than talking? It's still an issue. Argentina has done a very impressive job of remembering and of course I don't like at all that these ideas were floated by Milei and the Vice President. To me it seems catastrophic.
Q Why did Labayru decide to file his complaint in 2014?
R. An NGO lawyer or a prosecutor calls her and asks her if she wants to file a lawsuit, and as soon as she suggests it, she says yes. This woman experienced many years of rejection and it was something extremely personal.
Q The rape by convicted soldier Alberto González and his wife with two babies in the next room is macabre.
R. Silvia says it several times in the book: Her aim was to show and make it clear that these people who presented themselves as defenders of morality, that is, Christians who went to mass, were also ordinary criminals: they were thieves, they were rapists . In the name of which Christian God do you bring a woman into your home and rape her in the room where your daughter and that woman's daughter are sleeping?
Q How did coming from a high-ranking military family help Labayru?
R. It's impossible to answer because I don't know what saved her. But there is something even more perverse, and it has to do with survival. No one knows why he was saved in the first place, and that is terrible for the one who was also saved without knowing what it was. If you were blonde, if you were the daughter of soldiers, if you weren't Jewish, if a soldier took a liking to you, if someone woke up and said what a shame… it's not known, nobody knows, and it's an insane question.
Q The most famous point in Labayru's story so far was that Astiz, who had already infiltrated with the Mothers of Mai, took her as a companion. There is an insistence that she was silent in meetings.
R. Whether she was silent or not is said with some insistence to somewhat refute the idea that “she accompanied him.” He didn't accompany him, damn it! What could I have done? You forced her, put her in a terrible situation, in this case you have no choice.
Q She writes that she enters the stories with a desire to complicate her life and believe she can win. Expired?
R. What do I know? In the sense that I was able to gather information, transcribed 1937 pages, read I don't know how many books and not be inferior, yes. Win narratively.
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