español italiano
Buenos Aires, May 4th, 1995
I was a desaparecida for 92 days. My place was the Club Atletico, where I lost many things: my name and surname, replaced by a number and a letter; the view, hidden by a curtain; my silent pace, by chains around my feet; the ability to communicate, as I wasn't allowed to talk; I lost my husband, a vocal activist; I lived through this and with the fear, with the uncertainty of not knowing, with the impotence of not being and the strength to resist; I lived with hundreds of companions, in similar condition, denied life and condemned to resist; I lived with the repressors, I lived through Julian the Turk and his recordings of Hitler's speeches, his beatings, his shoutings, with all this brutality which I relive once again now, eighteen years later, when I see him, totally unpunished, cynically telling the world of his deeds, with irony, without a trace of repentance and with the unabashed arrogance of saying "I would do it all again".
And I ask myself why? What gives him the right to bring terror back into my life; what right has he got to enter my house, to enter everybody's house; what gives him the right to frighten, through a screen, those who did not get to know him personally ... with what right? With all the right given him by the impunity we are experiencing; with the right of the law that leaves him free and today to speak of his crimes; with the right given him by people unable to shout ENOUGH, a right given by a governement that allows him to live in freedom among us, his victims, in this society, among a people who declared NEVER AGAIN, a NEVER AGAIN that remains unspoken, and which does not exist.
[Delia Barrera, Email communication, August 1995]
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