“Stockholm. The Swedish Minister of Foreign Relations has released the name and photo of an Argentine diplomat stationed in South Africa who allegedly shot and wounded a young Swedish minor 3 years ago in Buenos Aires”.
The news cable, dated April 14th, 1980, comes from Cape Town. It reports the Swedish government’s unease with the Argentine government, who claims that “there is no reliable information about Ms. Hagelin being arrested by the authorities.” In that same document, a handwritten note reads “Inform the EOcc”, referring to the Department of Western Europe that dealt with Argentina’s relations with countries from that part of Europe. This note shows the Argentine government’s concern about the repercussions of the case in Europe. This document is one of many that were declassified by the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Relations Office until 2015.
The Ministry of Defense’s Surveying Group managed to reconstruct the repressive structure that operated within ESMA, the TF 3.3.2., and became a substantial piece of evidence for the trial of the ESMA Mega-Case. Yet in 2014 there was a big surprise when Minister Agustín Rossi issued the Ministerial Resolution 445/13 instructing the Chiefs of the Armed Forces to “thoroughly survey every facility operating within their departments and sites where there may be historic documents or information relevant for judicial processes, especially including those that were not submitted to archives, guard or storage” from the 1976-1983 period, and it was precisely a naval attaché who sent documents from Pretoria from the period when Chamorro and Astiz were attachés at the embassy. I still hope that one day, other documents and archives will reveal what were these marines doing in the South Africa of Apartheid.
The invisible thread Memory weaves goes through every possible form and today it transcends the pandemic and brings us to this Site, as commemoration and action, and the virtual becomes a real event that welcomes us. There is no distance when the horizon is celebrating life, and perhaps that is what Dagmar thought when she tried to run towards it. It is different from the narrow-minded distance that goes from the finger to the trigger, where only Astiz can fit in. That is how miserable he is.
So, here we are, anxious to know how it will work out. How many people are out there? Can you hear? We comb our hair, sit on the chair, pay attention to the screen, the image. A few minutes have passed after 5 pm and Luciano “Lucho” Donoso’s fingers signal the countdown when –in five, four, three, two, one…– on this May 30th, 2020, Alejandra Naftal inaugurates a new Five O’clock Tour, one that is different and in accordance with the times we are living in.
In her welcoming speech, she talks about the importance of being part of “a government administration and public policies that stand for the defense and advocacy of Human Rights”, as a way to introduce the Secretary of Human Rights Horacio Pietragalla, who in turn issues a special thank you to the Sweden ambassador for the solidary and welcoming attitude his country had with Argentine people back then: “We wish we could be there at the building, given the symbolic nature of this Site, and even if it’s not the same, it is important to keep building Memory (…) in a moment when the issue is being trivialized. Our history has Mothers who came to this country escaping the Holocaust in Europe when they were very young and lost their entire family. Thirty years later, their children were disappearing. And that teaches us something: we should never let our guard down, memory should always be active.”
In recognition of that struggle, he adds: “The fact that we are here today is the result of the fight that was put on by Mothers, Grandmothers, Relatives and all the organisms that were brave enough to fight”, and added: “we want to transform this Site into a UNESCO World Heritage, our region needs this, our country is a very important symbol of the resistance and fight against the impunity of crimes against humanity.”
Finally, Pietragalla acknowledged every survivor and particularly Mercedes and Silvia for their brave reports and for their firsthand stories about the fate of Dagmar.
Alejandra talks about the importance of being in the site and the significance of touring the areas where the lives, deaths and torture of thousands of people were decided: “This pandemic situation forces us to rethink and reinvent ourselves based on this Human Rights policies, and see what this new normal is going to be”.
We are more than 400 people now at the Five O’clock Tour, and at the request of Alejandra, Lucho shares a video that features the testimony of Ragnar Hagelin, Dagmar’s father. His voice is the testimony he gave at the Trial of the Juntas, and we hear it while watching images of her daughter at different ages, news clippings form international newspapers and campaigns organized abroad. A postcard of the 1978 World Cup features her name.
It’s the story of that day. That damned day: “Dagmar brought a note with an address to Susana Burgos’ home. When she got there, she was welcomed by Astiz and Corporal Peralta.“
And “The Swede” decided to run. “Neighbors heard a man shouting: Stop girl, stop or I’ll shoot. Then he put one knee on the ground and fired”.
The Swedish embassy in Argentina joined the search from the very first day, transmitting the government its presentations and initiatives. His father says: “And we always, always got the same answer: we are searching for her…”
We are behind the scenes, seeing her pictures on the screen, and from this virtuality we join in an emotional silence, because Dagmar was 17 years old and an activist in the West Column of the Montoneros organization, with a commitment driven by her solidary conscience.
On January 27, 1977, she was kidnapped by a Navy task force at the home of Susana Burgos –already kidnapped since the day before– where they positioned themselves to wait for Antonia Berger, her direct superior. Dagmar was seen the next day at ESMA, with a bandage on her head and serious problems to maintain her balance and control.
Alejandra tells this story to all the Visitors, and says that in the Museum, the story of our recent past is being written in the present day, and in Dagmar’s case in particular, over the years the different narratives erased her past as an activist, but on this Tour we will see this story again and enable new dimensions and aspects in the construction of our Memories, always with the goal of “more Truth and Justice”.
Dagmar has three siblings. She shared a mother and father with Cristian, a mother with Laura, and a father with Jonathan.
Laura sent a letter. Her writing speaks of the process endured by most of the families who were decimated by State Terrorism. In May 1976, Laura’s father Edgardo Waisman had been murdered, also in El Palomar, which forced her mother Susana Bucciardi to go underground with her, a young baby. Laura describes how her mother wasn’t able to search for her other daughter “Dague”, as they call her, and how her grandparents had to do it. On that path Margarita joined the fight of the Mothers, and Grandmothers in the reconstruction of Justice they achieved many years later. Laura describes her grandmother with pride, honoring both her and everyone who joined the search coming from different places, Caledonio Berrondo, Emilio Mignone and Luis Zamora.
Laura says she regrets having no memories of her father and sister, “they stole me the chance of growing up together with them”. And those words are a sting on us all, and we can feel that in Alejandra’s faltering voice.
Anders Carlsson, the Swedish ambassador in Argentina, has an extended career in diplomacy. In an impeccable Spanish, he thanks everyone present and extends that thank you to the memory of Ragnar, whom he met during his first stay in Argentina in the late 1990s, when he was in charge of Dagmar’s case and worked closely with him in a very different context with the laws of impunity still in force.
Carlsson says: “I got to understand the Argentina of the dictatorship and democracy through Ragnar’s story, which moved me deeply. That is why when I returned 20 years later, one of the most shocking moments was learning that the ESMA had become a Site of Memory…The fact that we can gather for this event, even if it is in a virtual way, is not just a commemoration of Dagmar but also a celebration of Human Rights”.
It’s time to listen to a pre-recorded audio from her brother Cristian. He doesn’t know what happened to her sister, he thinks she might have been executed at ESMA or transferred on a death flight. Whatever happened to her deprived him of the chance to say goodbye and have a place where he could have a symbolic meeting when necessary. He says, then, that “this is the macabre side of it and I don’t want to talk about what is part of Argentina’s worst history”. Disappearance is the landmark of unresolved mourning.
Jonathan never met her sister because he was born many years later, in 1983, when the dictatorship was ending here. He lives 30,000 km away in Sweden, and all she knows about her she learned it from his father’s story and struggle. The sound turns metallic and interrupted, and we make an effort to understand what he is saying: “she was a sociable, collaborative young woman. I know she enjoyed the opera and she went to the Colon theater to see some shows and her hands got red from clapping because she was so happy to be there. I know she liked to sing and travel around the country and the ocean.” Jonathan’s voice falters when she says Dague had written a letter to his mother that said “I don’t know if I love life because it is beautiful or if it is beautiful because I love it”. “I carry those words on my body, in a tattoo I have close to my heart”.
The three siblings share another pain: none of their parents were alive when, on November 29, 2017, Astiz, Acosta and other repressors were convicted for the forced disappearance of Dagmar Ingrid Hagelin, because Justice was too slow.
Mercedes “Cuky” Carazo was kidnapped at ESMA and forced into slave labor. This is the first time she joined an ESMA Tour. She testified in Dagmar’s case at the request of her father. She is not clear about on which day in 1977, one of the guards took her to the bathroom without her hood on, because she used to teach him physics and math. Then, she says that “When we walked by the room where Laurita, Norma Burgos, was, I tried to get in and say hi and a girl came out of the bathroom with a bandage on her head. I asked her who she was and she said my name is Dagmar. Then an officer showed up, yelled to the guard, and took me out to the bathroom …afterwards I talked about this with Astiz, and he said: I wanted to shoot the Berger woman, and we didn’t know the kind of trouble we were getting into because now the Swedish embassy is protesting not just here but everywhere around the world”. For Cuky, this event was a turning point inside ESMA due to the international repercussion. From then on, the Navy wanted to find out what was being said around the world about the human rights violations that took place in Argentina and forced some of the prisoners, including her, to read, translate and analyze reports from international media outlets.
Silvia Labayru was also kidnapped at ESMA. She was 20 years old and pregnant, and her daughter was born there. She met Dagmar before her kidnapping, both of them were teenagers. One night she brought her home because she didn’t have a place to sleep, and she remembers they talked all night, and that she was very mature. Silvia says: “I don’t know if she realized the situation we were living in, I don’t know if I myself realized the precarious situation we were in (…) Every day we were being kidnapped, killed in shootings and tortured, we went through horrible moments. We made an effort to resist because we didn’t have a single chance to defeat an army, a police force, a military police, in sum, all the State terrorism apparatus. The will was there and we were willing to die heroically, and many of us did. We were easy prey, and on that night (Dagmar) was the very picture of hopelessness. I saw her again at the ESMA basement. I don’t know if she was able to recognize me. Afterwards, they took her up to what was called the Pregnant Women’s Room, where I would later give birth to my child,”
Silvia asks everyone to pay tribute to Ragnar Hagelin for his relentless, worldwide search for Justice. In his name she asks to pay tribute to all the fathers, like hers: “Jorge Labayru or José María Carazo, they were fathers that looked out for us together with the Organisms, they searched for us, took care of us, even often accepting, in the case of survivors, to be subjected to the orders and whims of repressors”.
Finally, Silvia wants to extend the tribute to “every teenager who, like Dagmar, gave their life for their ideas when they were almost children. You are never ready to die or to be tortured, and certainly not when you are 17 or 19. We weren’t ready for the horror we had to endure, their lives were completely shuttered, the lives they had ahead of them and didn’t”.
The Tour is coming to an end, and it is my turn, they ask me to deliver some closure for this day and connect it with the archive work. For a while now I’ve been thinking about memory, archives, history and time. In Western culture time is linear, there is something ahead, the future, and something behind, the past. It is simple, yet unfinished. If it was a thread you could say it is a chain with one single stitch.
Several native peoples, including ours, believe the past lies ahead and the future is behind us, and they also include the complexity of cyclical time. If it was a thread, it would be the weft and the warp.
I choose this notion of time to reflect on my job and, somehow, on the entire politics of Memory. Because only by looking at history in the face, the future will undoubtedly follow us.
Working with archive documents has the complexity of the weft and the warp. You manage to get the warp, those longitudinal and parallel threads, a person’s unique experience, the testimonies of the victims themselves, their relatives, their fellow activists, witnesses, anyway, different yarns that tense the thread and somehow run parallel together. But when you move forward the documents provide the thread, the weft, the filling. It is what allows you to use a design on that fabric.
For decades, recent history was told through the documents provided by the victims, their testimonies, their documents that certified processes, requests for whereabouts requests, habeas corpus, international denounces.
Although Argentina assumed a commitment regarding human rights violations by state terrorism after the return of democracy, it wasn’t until 2000 that a true state policy regarding Memory was enabled, with a progressive declassification process in different areas of government that was joined by the US declassifying documents at the request of the CELS. Truth is, though, that Argentina didn’t have then and still doesn’t have today an actual declassifying policy, although there is a very strong movement advocating for the treatment of archive materials.
So, following this thread, we could say that in this potential warp we have Dagmar, Ragnar Hagelin, Susana Buccicardi, Cristian, Laura and Jonathan, Grandma Margarita and Grandpa Valentin, Edgardo Waissmann, Norma Burgos, Mercedes Carazo, Silvia Labayru, and every survivor who became her voice to bring her fate back.
And in the weft that weaves the fabric we have the documents that prove the illegal plot that operated within a school that was transformed into a mechanism of torture and death. Documents that show what was being said in the US about the Hagelin case in Argentina, documents that demonstrate a father’s tireless search and the sustained and solid support of the Swedish government, who denounced and challenged the Argentine government. And in this crossing we are weaving memory, that is why this Tour that wasn’t an action actually became tangible in our encounter.
Lastly, I would like to say here that unlike dystopian tales alerting about the dangers of technology, here the affectaction has been nothing but loving.
Chronicler: Stella Segado
Public Policies Management major specialized in Human Rights archives. Her work as a researcher for the Secretary of Human Rights enabled the identification of both victims and repressors. She led teams that reconstructed different repressive circuits and those reports are now substantial evidence in different trials for crimes against humanity. She set up and coordinated the Special Survey and Analysis Group for the AMIA Case. Today, she works in a historical archive under the Office of the President and coordinates the Area of Memory and the Archives of Clinical Territories of Memory.