On March 14, 1977, a call brought Silvia Labayru back to life when her family believed she was dead. Of the 5,000 people who were kidnapped and tortured at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) during the military dictatorship in Argentina, Labayru was one of the 200 who survived. What was it that saved her? “There is no clear reason and ultimately it ends up being the worst response, it is the arbitrariness of terror,” journalist Leila Guerriero responds to La Vanguardia.
In her new book, The Call (Anagrama), Guerriero portrays with shocking precision the story of the former member of the Peronist group Montoneros. She was humiliated, raped and enslaved by the military in one of the largest clandestine detention centers in the country. There, under the music that she tried to cover up the screams of her companions, she gave birth to her first daughter, Vera.
More than forty years after the horror, Guerriero makes Labayru speak, who “retells, dressed in refined fabrics, the year and a half during which she dressed in the clothes of dead women.”
Has Silvia already read the book?
Yes, you already read it in December. He was very satisfied.
Hadn't I read anything in the process?
No, I never let anyone read anything. If that is the condition I prefer not to do it.
It says in the book that Silvia expressed some distrust towards you at one point. Was she afraid that she would back out?
It only happened that one time, in one of our first talks. A month and a half of conversations had passed, but I wasn't afraid. She never seemed hesitant.
“One can tell the facts but what is difficult is to relate the affection linked to memories,” says Silvia Labayru. Did she notice it when listening to her story?
I didn't feel her cold, I felt her as she was. Some have a preconception of how a person who has gone through something like this has to tell their story. I don't have it, or I try not to have it. I try not to have a prejudice about how the other should tell me her story. There is no should be in that sense. There is no unequivocal way to be as a writer, as a victim, as a person. You are not listening to the person and judging them. You are listening to a person who sounds. Your job is to listen to that sound.
There is a very harsh view on survivors like Silvia, considered “traitors” who handed over their companions to save themselves. To what extent can you judge what a person does to survive?
One can imagine some things to a certain extent, but nothing at all close to what it is like to be in a situation as extreme as the one this woman was in. Added to the torture and giving birth to her daughter on a table and having to hand her over, being in captivity of indeterminate duration and the possibility of death every day. There is no moment when you can feel relief. For one, who had such a different life, it is impossible to establish any type of judgment about how a person behaves in that situation. Establishing a moral judgment about what could have been done and should have been done, it does not seem to me that it can be done. Anyway, that is my vision, that of someone who did not go through that situation. I understand that there are people with family members involved, missing people and so on, who may have a different position.
At one point during the investigation, she discovers that Silvia's in-laws hid from her father, Jorge Labayru, that she was alive. Her action was never justified. What was it like to confront that situation?
It was almost at the end, I was already writing the book. Silvia was a little disoriented. It was a fact that I had not noticed and she did not highlight it and it is very significant that she had not done so.
But she knew
Yes, of course he knew that, but I think it was erased from his record. It was something he had decided to turn the page on. The answer she gave me is “I don't know why they didn't tell you.” I suppose it was a cause of conflict between the families. They are very extreme situations. She also talks about the confusion, the horror and the fear of opening her mouth at that moment.
Hebe de Bonafini, the former president of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, dies in the middle of her investigation, just as she tries to contact her, and the Mothers refused to testify. Was it something that was pending for you?
We wrote to each other many times until they finally denied the interview. Hebe wasn't the only person who could speak. I would have liked to talk to them but well, it was not possible. Let's say that the insistence reaches a point. I was hoping you could tell me something.
There are details that are repeated over and over again at different times in the book. For example, to cover up the screams of torture at the ESMA, they played Si Adelita Se Va con otro, by Nat King Cole.
Yeah. There is a part of Silvia's speech that I was interested in being reflected in the book. She tells her story, goes over and over the same things and, somehow, she doesn't register that she has already told them to you. It seemed to me that this had to be reflected. It is a remarkable personality trait when someone repeats the same thing again as if they had never told it to you.
Their meetings in themselves are repetitive.
Yes, it was very strange during the first months when you couldn't do anything but sit at home because of the pandemic. The confinement in Argentina was very strict and lasted many months. It was very strange to have so little movement, in this kind of ritual, a little bit of hamsters. Until later we started to be able to do things but it was delayed quite a bit, until well into 2022.
Did you find many contradictions in the stories of the people you interviewed?
I don't know if many. More than contradictions, I would tell you that what I found were different visions about the same things. But hey, 40 years had passed. Plus, everyone had a bad time. Everyone suffered. There is no person in this book who had a good time. Memory is a machine for editing bad moments, you begin to regulate it over time.
What was it like going to ESMA with Silvia?
I had a very camera-recorder look the whole time. I saw her standing well and doing a kind of Cicerone to me all over that place. As a journalist I found everything very interesting, I was not recording what was happening to me. I recorded how she was, took notes about the light there was, what the place was like, the sound. Seeing her confusion. She suddenly started looking for a staircase that was no longer there, a door that was no longer there. She said, “but how can it be, if they put us on the little train here, with shackles and hoods.” She was rather surprised. It seems that the site has changed a lot in recent times. It was like, I don't know, more careful, more polished.
I think she uses the word “sanitized.”
Yes, she says that. Since there are no traces of the mattresses, the crowding, the human overcrowding. The windows are no longer boarded up so daylight comes in, something that didn't happen when she was there. Well, I could say that it was a very interesting visit from a journalistic point of view. Everything she did and said seemed super relevant to me.
The book arrives at a particular moment in Argentine political history. 40 years of democracy were celebrated and at the same time a denialist vice president was elected who proposed dismantling the ESMA Memory Museum to create a property for “enjoyment for all Argentines.”
I find it horrifying and very alarming. Not only are these ideas circulating from a place of power such as the presidency and vice presidency, but they also apparently have some social support. I do not believe that 56% of the people voted for Milei and Villarruel because they are denialists, but that they voted for them despite that seems very alarming to me. Not only the ESMA thing, there are other very horrible ideas also floating around. But transforming a place where 5,000 people passed through, 200 survived, into “a place of enjoyment for all Argentines”… What are they going to do there? roasted? Are they going to put up balloons? inflatable castles? It seems horrible to me. Anyway, I have a lot of faith that this kind of thing is not going to happen. The work that was done with memory in Argentina is a very strong work that has been going on for 40 years, almost from the trials to the meetings to now, and it seems to me that this is not going to be allowed in any way.
Does your book come to provide memory at a necessary moment?
I couldn't take it upon myself to say 'my book is going to...' but let's say, at a time when people are trying to cover up all that, reviving a conversation in relation to those years doesn't seem wrong to me. The film Argentina, 1985 last year generated an enormous amount of interest, it was seen a lot, many young people saw it. One later wonders how it can be that in the same country the following year a president of this ideology wins.
After your exhaustive analysis of Silvia's story, do you find any explanation as to why she was saved? Was it because of the pregnancy? Because she is the daughter of a military man? Purely by chance?
You can't know that and not being able to know it is one of the most perverse things about the military. Beyond all the perversions they did. It is the arbitrariness of terror. You don't know if they are going to kill you, if you were saved or if they let you free one day. You don't know what it was. All of these things may come together or it may not be because of any of them. It can be on a whim or to continue playing with the life of a human being. They continued to control Silvia and many people once she was released. Tigre Acosta (the soldier who tortured her) appeared at her house in Madrid. There is no clear reason and ultimately it ends up being the worst response: "I don't know why I'm alive." One can do analysis but ultimately it is something completely arbitrary. Once they used everything they could use from her, why didn't they just shoot her? There is no way to know why these crazed, deformed minds decided to free some and massacre almost everyone else.
Is it a question she asks herself?
No, no so much. Silvia has other topics that she returns to and reflects on. But that question is not so installed in her.
When addressing torture and rape, how far did you decide to delve into this very delicate aspect of your story?
We talked about the torture a lot until one day he finally told me everything in great detail. I think it's more of a common sense thing. She tells me how they ran an electric prod all over her body. That they destroyed her nipples, etc. I think it's a bit of common sense and keeping track of the entire time you are with a person, not with a machine, even though they have a lot of temperance and fortitude. I have limits to what I can do in the name of practicing my profession and that is not just anything.
What did you feel when you finished the book?
Always when you finish writing you feel relief and then an important emptiness comes. When you spend so much time with your head and your agenda occupied by something like this, a kind of emptiness arises. It always happens to me, with all books.
Don't you plan to do fiction?
No, it's not in my plans. I don't have that vocation. When I started writing, I wrote dozens of stories. I started writing fiction until I was 21 or 22 years old. Then I started being a journalist and never went back to that again. When I saw that in reality you could get into the lives of so many people and ask and delve and pry… it is clear that the path of my curiosity is infinite and I found a vein there.
