I’m a stolen child of Argentina’s dirty war

[Judi Lynn]

From The Sunday Times February 21, 2010
I’m a stolen child of Argentina’s dirty war

http://www.timesonline.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/multimedia/archive/00687/Victoria385_687687a.jpg

Victoria Donda has no memory of her mother who was
murdered by the military

Matthew Campbell

HER dark eyes well up with tears when she is asked about her family. Victoria Donda never knew her parents, who were tortured and killed by Argentina’s brutal military in 1977.

Worse than that, the man she knew as a doting father turned out to be one of the torturers.

He bought her clothes, gave her pocket money and tolerated her tantrums: “I was the apple of his eye, his little princess,” she said of Juan Antonio Azic, one of several former military officers on trial in Buenos Aires for the kidnapping, torture and murder of thousands of political prisoners in the 1970s. “I knew his weak points, how to charm him into forgiving my adolescent escapades.”

She was taken from her mother’s arms shortly after being born in a clandestine detention centre during the so-called “dirty war”.

“My mother never saw me again,” said Donda in an interview last week in Paris, where she is promoting her memoir, My Name is Victoria. “She was ‘transferred’,” she added.

In the innocuous-sounding military jargon of the 1970s, this meant that she was dropped alive from a plane at night into the Atlantic.

More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7034897.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093

[rabs]

1. Judi, "The Official Story" all over again but this time for real .

(For those who have not seen the award-winning Argentine movie, a brief description.)

A thoroughly humanistic tale, which only tangentially makes political points, the power of The Official Story arises from its basis in reality. Thousands of people really were murdered in Argentina and although this movie is a piece of fiction, it represents a situation which is almost horrific beyond belief.

The acting is generally excellent, illustrating the fluidity of the times and the difficulties facing each character, yet never descending into melodrama. Aleandro is superb as a typical middle-class woman who finds that her viewpoint is based upon fallacies and becomes compelled to force a situation which she knows will be destructive.

To uncover the fate of Gaby's mother serves no solid purpose yet Alicia must do this, for peace of mind. The cumulative impact of small details and incidents is devastating, slowly building to a climax and still ending in ambiguity, such is the control of the script.

However, The Official Story is so good that it introduces far more questions than it can hope to answer (some of which simply can't be solved), leaving us desperate for further information (see Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo for further insights).

http://www.film.u-net.com/Movies/Reviews/Official_Story.html

(Google has more)

[Judi Lynn]

2. True. "The Official Story" got an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, too.

After reading your reference to it, I was able to get a copy from Amazon. It was wonderful seeing a tremendous film created to deal with this subject.

The movie covered so much ground, socially, psychologically, historically. It was an important creation, and well worth sharing with others.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Absolutely great movie!

The main character's search for the truth is riveting. And every character is well acted, well conceived and deeply penetrated with tragic conflict. It is a stunner.

[Peace Patriot]

4. I can't imagine what it must be like to know that your parents were tortured and your mother

was thrown out of airplane shortly after giving birth to you.

I hope Victoria's book does a lot of good, in spreading the word about these vile crimes in Argentina--and U.S. complicity in them. And I hope to God that it helps to prevent them from ever happening again. But I have to say that such crimes are ON-GOING in Honduras and in Colombia, with U.S. complicity and possibly direct participation in Colombia.

The La Macarena (Colombia) massacre--recent grave with 2,000 bodies of local 'disappeareds' (includes a description of, and links to docs about, U.S. ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303

The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/