Massacres, disappearances, and espionage in La Plata, a focus of violence and memory in Argentina

Massacres, forced disappearances, baby theft, and a significant espionage center drowned the province of Buenos Aires and, in particular, its capital, La Plata, during the Argentine dictatorship that began 50 years ago and perpetrated 40% of the State crimes in this area. Since then, human rights organizations have not ceased in the search for justice and truth. On November 24, 1976, eight months after the military coup, about 200 Army and Police officers attacked, by land and air, a house located on 30th Street in La Plata and executed one of the most remembered massacres: five cold-blooded murders and the theft of a baby, Clara Anahí Mariani Teruggi, still missing. “In this house there was a printing press where ‘Evita montonera’ was published, a magazine about militancy and repression that was happening. In that attack, Diana Teruggi and four comrades die, and the three-month-old baby is kidnapped, who has been proven to have come out alive wrapped in a curtain. One of the military men took her out,” says Elsa Pavón, president of the Anahí Association.

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Pavón, who replaced the late Isabel Chorobik as president of the Association, better known as Chicha Mariani -by her husband’s last name- and grandmother of Clara Anahí, tells EFE what happened in that home, which was converted into a memory museum in 1996. The Mariani-Teruggi House, also known as the ‘house of the rabbits’, because the family had, in addition to the clandestine printing press, a rabbit in escabeche business, was frozen in time and its visit is disturbing: hundreds of bullet impacts on the walls and on the vehicle parked in the garage, the large hole caused by a tank and that went through several rooms, remains of the printing press, rabbit cages and the bathtub where Clara Anahí was saved from death. Everything intact. “Clara Anahí’s father wasn’t there at that moment, he had gone to work,” continues Pavón, who explains that eight months later, on August 1, 1977, he was riddled with bullets in a street in La Plata along with other Montoneros comrades (Peronist guerrillas). The case of this family symbolizes the punishment. Daniel Enrique Mariani, father of Anahí, was 29 years old; and Diana Emeralda Teruggi, 25.

Repression in Universities and Factories 

La Plata and other Buenos Aires towns have always welcomed a significant university community and combative industrial hubs: “The most important places of repression were the universities and factories. For that reason, the province houses almost 40% of the people detained and disappeared or executed,” Sandra Raggio, executive director of the Provincial Memory Commission, tells EFE. “Only the National University of La Plata has more than 800 missing persons,” he adds, then explaining that what is now the Memory Commission was for decades an important espionage center. “This is the Archive of the Intelligence Directorate of the Buenos Aires Police, it was created in 1956, after the coup d’état against Peronism and in parallel with the implementation of the National Security Doctrine at a continental level, and which deepened until reaching the well-known Condor plan. It was aimed at political persecution,” highlights Raggio during an EFE visit to the place, full of filing cabinets and documents with detailed information on thousands of people, including foreigners. 

Plan Condor and Cold War 

“It’s the first file of the repression declassified in Latin America,” from which it is deduced that the objective was “to spy on everyone”: political organizations, unions, universities, but also schools, cultural centers, embassies, sports spaces, churches and newspapers. An intelligence work inscribed “within the framework of the Cold War at a global level and of persecution of internal enemies,” according to Raggio. The documents stored in this place, converted into a memory space in 1998, have made it possible to clarify crimes against humanity, reconstruct hierarchies and structures of the repressive apparatus, identify clandestine burials and identify people buried as ‘NN’.

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“There are documents linked to Operation Condor, an articulation operation between the repressive agencies of the Southern Cone,” adds the director, specifying that there are files with data on foreigners since the coup d’état in Brazil in 1964, long before Operation Condor was formally born in 1975.

After the coup, “many Brazilians come to our country as exiles, then they go to Chile; and all that circulation of militants through the Southern Cone will be recorded by the intelligence agency”, reveals Raggio. 

“We have provided documentation to the investigation of Operation Condor, to the truth commissions and to trials in the different countries,” concludes the director of the Memory Commission, highlighting that La Plata is not only a source of documentary information, but also of the fight for justice. It’s no coincidence that the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo association was born in this city, precisely under the leadership of Chicha Mariani; nor that one of the mythical films about the Argentine dictatorship, ‘La noche de los lápices’, takes place in La Plata and deals with kidnapped and disappeared students.