People are advised that as of today, the country is under the operational control of the Joint Chiefs General of the Armed Forces. We recommend to all inhabitants strict compliance with the provisions and directives emanating from the military, security or police authorities, and to be extremely careful to avoid individual or group actions and attitudes that may require drastic intervention from the operating personnel…
Alicia Partnoy
Alicia Partnoy was a student active in the left-wing Peronist Youth Movement when the Argentinian army broadcast that message on March 24, 1976 and seized power by coup.
Quickly after the coup, the armed forces and the police started disappearing thousands of women, men, and their small children. Rounded up for alleged “subversive activities” and disappeared into horrific secret detention camps, 30,000 people are believed to have been tortured, summarily executed and buried in unknown locations, or dropped into the ocean from helicopters.
“I knew what was happening because I was collecting information on what the dictatorship was doing,” Partnoy remembers. “We in the resistance were not openly doing things because the military were already forcibly disappearing people, taking them to secret detention camps and even killing them. But I was gathering and disseminating information, disseminating leaflets…with other young people who were against the dictatorship.”
Her activities attracted the enmity of the new regime. On January 12, 1977, Partnoy remembers, “military trucks came to my house at around noon; my daughter was left in the house.”
Partnoy was taken to the headquarters of the army “and, from there, to a secret detention place” where she was blindfolded, beaten and held in inhumane conditions. “I was not tortured with electricity, which was something that puzzled us at that time, because we thought that everyone would be, but my biggest torture was that I didn’t know what they had done to my daughter,” she says. “They kept saying they were going to kill her.”
Alicia Partnoy with Evangelina Arce, mother of Ciudad Juárez
After being forcibly disappeared for several months and then held in an official prison as a political prisoner, without charges, for another two-and-a-half years, Partnoy was given the option of continued detention or resettlement to the United States. She chose the latter, reuniting with her husband and daughter abroad in December 1979.
Since then, Partnoy has devoted much of her life and work to the rights of the forcibly disappeared, testifying before the United Nations, Organisation of American States and the Argentine Human Rights Commission. Her book about her time as a political prisoner, The Little School, has become a regular fixture on reading lists about prison literature from Latin America and the rest of the world. A professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Partnoy presides over Proyecto VOS-Voices of Survivors, which she founded with her husband Antonio Leiva.
“All of these experiences shaped my understanding of good practices in fighting against human rights abuses and crimes against humanity.” In Argentina, Partnoy explains, “the motor in all of this was the relatives of the disappeared, the relatives of those killed, the relatives of the political prisoners. They were at the forefront.”
“Often, survivors are not listened to. Human rights organisations have their regulations and bureaucracies; they also have an approach that, at times, under-estimates the skills of the survivors.”
It’s that belief that led Partnoy to INOVAS—a network that, because it is by and for victims and survivors of serious rights violations, reflects the best hope for achieving justice and accountability around the world.
“As survivors, we are not bound to respect bureaucracies. We have this urgency, because of our own experience.”