The meeting at the Argentine Embassy in Cuba was a special tribute to one of these victims, journalist and revolutionary Rodolfo Walsh, who was one of the founders of Prensa Latina.
The act came on the 45th anniversary of his posthumous document, a writer’s Open Letter to the Military Junta, a historic indictment of the horrors of the dictatorship established in his country after the 1976 coup.
This was recalled by the Argentine Ambassador Luis Ilarregui, who was also imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by this regime.
The diplomat pointed out that Walsh’s letter constituted a testimony and an indictment of torture, enforced disappearances and flagrant human rights abuses at this tragic period in the Southern nation’s history.
“They have overcrowded the prisons and created concentration camps where no judge, lawyer, journalist, international observer enters. The military secrecy of procedures cited as a necessity for investigations turns most arrests into kidnappings, allowing for unlimited torture and summary executions,” he commented.
Forty-five years ago, Walsh signed what the Prensa Latina journalist José Bodes saw as the Argentine intellectual’s political testament.
For his part, former diplomat and former deputy director of the Latin American Information Agency, Jesús Cruz, conjured up the revolutionary Walsh, whose political commitments prevented him from developing the literary body of work that could have made him one of the most important and prolific writers on the continent .
Argentine activist Graciela Ramírez, who heads the Latin American Summary Office in Cuba, paid tribute to many of her compatriots, mothers, fathers, children, relatives and friends who were murdered by the dictatorship.
Ramírez praised the opening of a reflection room at the embassy dedicated to cultivating the historical memory of these tragic events “so that the terror does not return,” he said.
The mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the efforts to find those who have disappeared and bring justice were the words of Graciela Ramírez, who also recalled former President Néstor Kirchner and his commitment to the victims.
A plaque commemorating Rodolfo Walsh was unveiled in the Reflection Room.
Members of the Argentine community living in Cuba, from other Latin American countries, the wife of the President of the Republic, Lis Cuesta, representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Casa de las Américas, Prensa Latina and other institutions attended the tribute.
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