“After 44 Years Justice Will Be Done and We Will Have Them Back With Us”

By Adrián Camerano on September 4, 2020

Photo: Bill Hackwell

This story is very close to my heart. I left Argentina during the terrible years of the military dictatorship and for different reasons I stayed in the United States. My three children are named after the disappeared. Mabel, Jose Alberto, and Emma. I never imagined what was going to happen at the School of Information Sciences or that my best friends were going to disappear. I still remember them with much pain but with great admiration. I was one of the lucky ones that stayed alive to tell the story. What happened during the military dictatorship was nothing more than barbaric crimes against humanity, and changed our lives forever, but the memory of these young people and their example is always with me. To them, I dedicated my life and all the struggles I have been a part of from the moment I left my homeland. Until the victory my dear Mabel and Jose Alberto.

-Alicia Jrapko co-editor of Resumen Latinoamericano, English edition

In a new trial of crimes against humanity, the disappearance of two students from the School of Information Sciences (ECI) in Cordoba, Argentina will be brought up to justice along with their stories and the memories of their classmates.

Although there were still forty days left until winter, on the morning of May 11, 1976, the cold weather was pressing into Cordoba. The illegal repression, too: every night the operative cars plowed through the city in an organized hunt, kidnapping people to make them disappear in the hell of human degradation mounted in the clandestine detention centers.

That night, the raid on the family home and business would change Maria Ester Damora’s life forever. It had been two months since the 23-year-old had been married to José Alberto García, and although they lived in Unquillo, “we were in Córdoba more than anywhere else”. That dawn of terror, which María Ester still finds difficult to remember, a mob of about twenty people “blew up” up the door and broke into the house in Bedoya 66 to kidnap her husband and her 20-year-old sister Yolanda.

The young woman, the only survivor of that trio of ECI students (today’s Faculty of Communication Sciences), remembers that when the two groups of intruders burst through the front door and slid off the roof, her parents were sleeping in the back, her sister was resting in a room on the second floor, José was applying some medication in the bathroom and she was watching television.

That ordinary scene in any family home was abruptly interrupted by the repressors, who had come to the Alta Cordoba neighborhood in four Falcons and one Torino to steal everything they could grab and take the prey they had come after.

“I heard the noises and saw that there were about twenty of them. My dad wanted to get dressed, but they hooded him up by putting his pants on his head; my mom always said she could see uniforms. The whole operation lasted no more than half an hour and I could see how they even took a drawer from the dresser, to put the stolen things into”.

The following days, months, and years would be of inquiries, habeas corpus and testimonies. José García and Yolanda Damora were never heard from again.

“Remembering them is a way of telling ourselves that they and the dreams we share are still pending.”

The Little School

In the political effervescence of the first part of the seventies, the social pressure in Córdoba made it possible to open a School of Journalism that -in the student’s view- would fight for a Popular Communication for Liberation. “Our little school opened in the second semester of 1972, with great political participation; we students were a relatively small group in which we all knew each other, studied and worked in groups,” says Liliana Arraya, a member of that inaugural cohort.

“Community life was intense, and from the student center all kinds of discussions were stimulated, such as changing the curriculum or the type of journalism we wanted to do,” she added.

Maria Ester entered the school in 1973, and remembers that with her sister Yolanda “we were a quarter behind” regarding the first group, but that in university life, everyone was mixed up. “That’s where I met Jose Alberto,” she recalls.

The time became critical: it went from an event with two survivors of the Trelew massacre and naming the building of the little school located at Vélez Sarsfield and Caseros after them, to experiences of counter-information and activities in support of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. “Then in 1974, the betrayal took place”, recalls professor Julio Ataide, referring to the Navarrazo, the police coup that changed all the rules of the game. “The climate began to thicken”, agrees Arraya, and recalls “the mobilizations against the university policy of Ivanissevich and the crimes of the Triple-A and the Comandos Libertadores of America”.

Ester directly recalls, “for the officials, the Escuelita was a nest of communists”.

The lives that were taken

Garcia and Damora are remembered by their middle names, Mabel and Alberto (or Juan), and by their membership in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Eugenia Monti, also part of that founding group, remembers José as “tall, slightly hunched over, with his hair always neat, very short” and “he was always kind, a good man”. Arraya points out Jose Alberto was about to enter Ferrocarriles Argentinos as a signaler, the same job as his father had, ” he had the look of a serious, older boy, who did not dress fashionably, did not wear moccasins, long hair or olive green shirts. At most, he was a cowboy who couldn’t hide the fact that his job was a throwback from another time. Jose Alberto was a member of the PRT, and he didn’t hide it: he distributed the press; he leafleted at the factory gates, carried packages on his motorcycle he went up and down the streets of the city. Always busy, always ready”.

Yolanda was remembered by Monti as “radiant” and by Arraya as a young woman with very long hair who “seemed distant, but was a deep thinker”, and who “listened and knitted, knitted and spoke softly, shyly while transmitting serenity”.

Julio Ataide is a university professor but he does not remember them. A decade ago he faced a daunting task of rescuing the stories of 55 detained-disappeared former ECI students, depicted on a mural in the School of Communication Sciences. It was one of many tributes to those young people, such as the plaque placed in 1996 in the old building of Velez Sarsfield were the school once was, or the Memory Tile installed in 2012 in front of the Damora home where the kidnapping occurred.

Close to September 9, before the start of the trial in the Diedrichs-Herrera case, which has 18 people accused of these and other crimes against humanity, the friends and comrades of Damora and García stress that “after 44 years justice will be done and we will have them back with us.

“Remembering them is a way of telling ourselves that they and the dreams we share are still pending,” they said. One more step in the path of Memory, Truth and Justice, for that generation that gave everything, even their lives, for a different Argentina.

Source: La Nueva Manana, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau