Testimony from Argentina

Bright sunlight shines into the former cell of the Rosario police station in the Santa Fe province. An illegal detention center was located here in the late 1970s. Relatives of the victims turned it into a memorial in 2002. Patricia Isasa describes how, in 1976, as an organizer of a student union in Santa Fe, she was abducted by security forces and held in a secret prison for two and a half years.

On the day of July 30, 1976, I was only 16 years old.

At 12:30 p.m., joined forces of the Argentine army, the Argentine federal police, the Santa Fe Provincial Police and civil personnel of the State Intelligence Services (S.I.D.E.) burst into my house, located at Moreno Street 27141, Apartment 3, in the city of Santa Fe.

Without a search warrant, and in a threatening manner, they arrested me and seized the home I shared with my parents. They searched the entire house. They stole personal belongings – such as my father’s tools, my mother’s clothes and private books (among other things), commonly known as “booty.” And they completed their search with a “Negative” result. I was thrown brutally into the army van, my hands cuffed behind my back…

We enter through the garage, they take me out of the car with punches, I walk about 20 meters, and they throw me into a disgusting cell, 6 m2 with a bench for a bed and seat. A heavy green armored door, with a tiny peephole. The walls are a yellowish color, and have creepy engravings. I remember one, that days later I understood in its totality: “My god, please don’t let them torture me more.”

Even without knowing where I was, I already knew why I was there.
The next night, the door to the cell opens. A uniformed officer, hood in hand, tells me in demands “Let’s go.” After putting the hood on me, he takes me to a room in the same station where they torture me.

Though I could not see them, I remember their voices, their words, their vices. They order me to take off my clothes, they attach my feet and my hands to a metal bed frame. Naked, hooded, only 16 years old, alone with an unknown commissioner and in the hands of a pathetic abuser, some of the worst hours of my life passed.

They suffocated me various times (what they call the “dry submarine”), throwing in insults and a few questions about my participation in the Student Center.

The pair and horror grew and grew, and they decided to shock me. The prods hurt, they burn deep inside the skin, they shocked me, they bent and stretched me, and they began to beat me. I wished they would stop quickly. I think I couldn’t take any more and me fainting was my escape from that witches’ sabbath.

Slowly I wake up when two or three people enter the room, they take me in two to the cell, open the heavy door and throw me in, beaten and torn.

I think I slept. When I awoke the next day, I knew I was no longer the same teenager, I knew my life had changed forever.

I promised myself that this atrocity must be made known and must be condemned, so that it may never be repeated.

Source: Website von Patricia Isasa