Portfolio at NYU

Posted 08.29.03
Desaparecido

By Carola Mandelbaum

"Desaparecido"
19/2/03

"I write to you today, seven months into our physical separation, but not our spiritual separation because our love is stronger than all that has blocked our way, so much more so in this moment"
-- from Ana Dorigo's diary

On a cold night in August of 1976, close to 11 o'clock, five members of the military dressed in civilian clothes, forcibly removed Pablo Dorigo from his bed. The arrest was made in presence of his wife and two-year old daughter. His wife, Ana, hysterically asked, "When will he be back?" The men said they would bring Pablo back in two or three days. He never returned.

Argentina has a history of oscillating between democratic governments and military regimes, but the military junta that governed the country between 1976 and 1981 was especially violent. An estimated 30,000 people disappeared. Many, it later emerged, were dropped alive from planes into the sea; thousands were tortured. Fear and silence engulfed the general population. Open opposition to the regime could resulted in death.

Maria Eva is the only child of Pablo and Ana Dorigo; she was a witness of her father's abduction, the night he became a desaparecido. Since that night, her mother kept a diary where she wrote to him her hope, her desperation. "Psychologists say that we can't remember anything before the age of five years old. I can't remember anything that happened that night," says Maria Eva. "But still today I wake up in the middle of the night, trembling because of a recurring nightmare that people come in the middle of the night and drag me out of my house."

"For most part of my life I didn't know exactly what had happened with my father," she says. Her mother wouldn't talk to her about what had happened that night, or what could have motivated his disappearance. "Her silence only added to my confusion and disappointment. She only gave me the basic facts but little more," Maria Eva explains, "The rest I found out myself once she passed away." The experience of never knowing exactly what happened to her father has scarred her as she is still looking for answers that will never come. Only when her mother died in 1993 did Maria Eva start actively searching for her past.

It was her mother's diary that enabled her to discover the truth. Every time Maria Eva opens it, it inexorably transports her back more than two decades to when her mother began to question the possibility of his return. "How much more will I have to lose? I think it has been too much. I feel very lonely and I'm slowly losing hope of seeing you again, maybe by the time the truth finally comes out, it will not be too hard for me to bear," states Ana's entry for April 21st, 1977.

Ana and Pablo were high school sweethearts who married in 1973. They were both devout Catholics, and worked on weekends doing social work in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires because they believed in social change promoted by the Church; she taught religion and he math. Eventually Ana y Pablo began to take part in political activities linked to Montoneros, a movement that was lead by middle-class catholic porteños (Argentines who live in Buenos Aires) that was considered subversive by the government. It was a dangerous time to be an activist in a dissident movement. The military junta had ordered a systematic and clandestine plan of annihilation of all guerrilla movements, including Montoneros. Extra-judicial executions, forced disappearances and torture became prevalent.

Ana Dorigo started the search for Pablo almost immediately after his disappearance. Being a devoted Catholic, she naturally thought she could get help from the Church. She met with numerous priests of the neighborhood churches and sent letters to the Archbishop pleading for help. But the Catholic Church was intimately coupled with the military junta and ignored the accusations of human rights violations by the government.

"At some point my mother found out that some of priests in our neighborhood were giving information from the confessions to the government," says Maria Eva, "When my mother found out about this it was just too much for her to handle. It was then that she broke completely with Catholicism, and with the same passion she had been a Catholic she became fervently agnostic" Maria Eva, an agnostic herself, recalls an incident when her grandmother gave her some books on Catholic teachings, when her mother found them she threw them out the window.

"One night, about four years after he disappeared," says Maria Eva, "she told me she would stop searching and that my father wasn't coming back." Maria Eva's early hunt for answers was a failure. Her mother kept silent. Yet once she had her mother's diary and the truth about her past was finally within her grasp, it took her three years to summon the courage to open it. Since then, the unraveling of this a tightly bound, undisclosed past has consumed the Dorigos' only child. There was her parents' political activism, their membership to Montoneros and the excruciating revelation of what happened in the final hours of her father's life. "She never got over it; I can see that now when I read her diary," she says, "I understand her pain more and, it's remarkable but I feel more connected to her now that she is dead and I know how she felt while she lived."

Maria Eva has laminated all of her parents' papers, including her father's university diploma, his work ID, their love letters, his lines from the school play, his spelling dictation and organized everything chronologically in neat plastic folders. As she goes through her mother's yellowing pictures, their wedding, her baptism and family vacations on the beach there's one that caught her eye "I don't know where we are here. My father had already been taken away, I was around six but I don't recognize who these people are, I have no idea who they are, these kids that are standing here with me," Maria Eva says. "This happens to me in other pictures, other than my immediate family I don't know who the people in them are, it's such a strange feeling, as if this story belonged to someone else."

Six years ago, Maria Eva went to a HIJOS meeting, an organization composed by sons and daughters of desaparecidos, exiles and victims of violence during the military junta. They not only receive counseling but they also demand memory of their loved ones and information about their fate. Maria Eva only went once and that day she met Camilo, the son of an Argentine human rights activist and political exile. Camilo was visiting Buenos Aires for the first time after living most of his life in the Washington DC. "We connected instantly; we talked for hours the first day we met," Camilo remembers, "there was a protest we were supposed to take part of, demanding truth and justice but we went to a pizza place and stayed there until well after dark. We have so much in common." They married six months later and now live in Hoboken, New Jersey. Today Maria Eva's life is still greatly defined by her experience. She is currently working with an editor on getting her mother's diary published. "It is important to me to show the humanity of my parents," says Maria Eva, "I've seen many movies and read books about the Dirty War in Argentina but I want people to know my parents not as activist, but as a family who was forcible dismembered."