Analia Kalinec was a model little girl. Here she has become a “disobedient” (disobedient, in Spanish), in other words a woman ready to challenge the family order. It took her years to accept that her father, this loving man who, in the evenings, tickled her by calling her “my little hare”, was the same person who, during the day, kidnapped and tortured. “The father figure is so structuring that my mental schema exploded, confides this 44-year-old woman, teacher and psychologist. To think that I might have something abnormal in my blood and that I could pass it on to my children terrified me. »
This father is Eduardo Emilio Kalinec, a former police officer sentenced in 2010 to life in prison for his actions during the military dictatorship (1976-1983) in the clandestine detention centers known as Atlético- Banco-Olimpo.
Analia only learned the truth about herself after her father’s arrest in 2005. Before that, those dark years, marked by the disappearance of some 30,000 people, according to human rights organizations, were in his eyes just a vague period in Argentina’s history.
After the first trials of the torturers, in 1985, the country decided to draw a line under this era, to grant amnesty to the few convicted and hide everything under the cloak of impunity. The arrival to power of the Peronist Nestor Kirchner in 2003 changed the situation: he asked for forgiveness in the name of the State, made “memory, truth and justice” a national policy and allows the reopening of trials for crimes against humanity. To date, 1,204 people have been tried and convicted.
In 2005, Analia Kalinec lived the first months of her father’s detention – during the investigation – in a sort of haze of ignorance. “I went to visit him in prison, and we talked about everything and nothing, but neither about the dictatorship nor about what he had done. » His mother and two younger sisters, police officers, support him. “It’s all a mistake, dad will be released soon”, assures his mother. Analia starts looking for answers elsewhere, in books, documentaries, conferences. Because the country is gradually recovering its memory…
” Treason “
By reading her father’s indictment in 2008, the young woman measured the extent of the horror. “It’s an inflection point in my life, I’ve read horrible testimonies there, she says in the office of her house in the working-class district of Flores, in Buenos Aires.. He was accused of having participated in torture, under the pseudonym “Doctor K”. He was involved in 181 kidnappings. » The victims, real or supposed opponents of the regime, were “arrested” outside of any judicial context, tortured in clandestine places of detention, before disappearing, most of them forever.
You have 80% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.