In the early 70s, Antonio Leiva was a film student and lecturer at Argentina’s University of La Plata and a student representative for the School of Fine Arts, where he actively participated in the Grupo Cine Peronista de La Plata: an underground collective of filmmakers dedicated to documenting and supporting social upheaval in the Latin American country.
Because of his activities, Argentinian authorities arrested him as a political prisoner—even before the military coup of 1976 that would see tens of thousands disappeared and summarily executed.
Before the coup, Leiva remembers, “detention was the worst [time] for most of us because that’s when the torture happened—and in my case, there was a period of a couple of days where I really lost sense of time.”
“But after that, they’d send you to prison, and the conditions were okay…not that bad.”
“After the coup, though, things changed dramatically. Even the legal prisons… the regime treated those more like concentration camps. We were in cells 23 hours a day, we only had half an hour in the morning…[and] some days that didn’t even happen. Many people were tortured, even the legal political prisoners recognised by the regime.”
Leiva ultimately spent four and a half years as a political prisoner before he was forced to go into exile and settle in the US as a refugee, part of a regime bargain following growing international and regional pressure over the escalating rights abuses in Argentina.
As a refugee in the US, Leiva continued his activism: co-founding the Solidarity Committee for the Argentine People (COSPAR), and sharing his testimony as an advocacy and awareness-raising tool at a time when many among the American public still didn’t know the scale of the human rights abuses unfolding in Argentina and across Latin America at the time.
“After we were released and started doing this work connecting with human rights organisations, telling people what was happening [in Argentina]…the one thing we realised really early on was about the treatment,” he explains. “We were there, as survivors, but our points-of-view were not being taken into consideration in terms of policymaking. I could go there and tell my story, my torture sessions…but then there had to be an expert or an academic explaining the social and political issues. And a lot of times, they were wrong.”
Buenos Aires – mural dedicated to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
“We were the people that really knew what was going on, and why it happened. So our idea was to always have the victims’ testimony at the forefront, not at the back.”
It made Leiva acutely aware of the pitfalls of transitional justice: “Everything became a bureaucracy of experts, professionals and academics. They were deciding for me.”
With this in mind, Leiva later co-founded the Proyecto VOS-Voices of Survivors, which aims to put victims and survivors’ at the forefront of discussions about the crimes they have suffered.
It’s an idea that has guided Leiva’s participation in the INOVAS network.
“To us, the idea is to empower the victims and survivors in creating an organisation that is not just run by victims and survivors, but where we decide the policies as well.”
“The idea is to create an organisation that can bring together more victims and survivors, individuals and organisations, and empower us to go into the different international fields and fight to make change, to make us heard, to be part of the process,” he concludes.