translated from Spanish: 24M and LGBT memory: 30,400 disappears present now and forever!

“When the first Pride March was just organized in Cordoba, in 2009 I was invited. In that, one of the boys, who had entered History in college and was about 18 years old, tells me, ‘What’s this about the urban myth that fuckers were put in jail?’ I stayed like ‘this doesn’t know anything’, but I actually realized that the problem was ours, because we had to take care that if we didn’t talk about it it was going to be an urban myth,” film director Daniel Tortosa, arrested in 1980 at the former D2 detention center in Córdoba, now the Provincial Museum of Memory, introduced Filo.news.

24M and LGBT memory: 30,400 disappears present now and | Gentileza Ivanna Aguilera

Today, March 24, it has been 45 years since the 1976 military ecclesiastical civic coup and, like every year, we ask for memory, truth and justice for disappearing and detenoid in dictatorship. During these years, the trans activist and survivor of Battalion 121, Ivanna Aguilera, asks for visibility and justice for the 30,400, a number that is a symbol of fighting for LGBTIQ+ disappearoids, for a long time erased from history.

Ivanna Aguilera and Daniel Tortosa.

30,400 disappearing detenoids present
“We are always told that the 400 companions we appoint are within 30 thousand. Obviously, the 400 is a symbol,” Aguilera explained, continuing: “But there are 400 companions who were appointed. This in the CONADEP registers was not visible by pressures from the Catholic wings of different groups.” Issue 400 was first mentioned in LGBT+ militant Carlos Jáuregui’s book, Homosexuality in Argentina (1987). “The statistical data is not official, it is not included in the report of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons Never Again, but one of the members responsible for CONADEP affirms the existence of at least 400 homosexuals on the list of horror,” Jaúregui wrote. The term “homosexuals” at the time encompassed diverse identities within the LGBT population. Later, in 1996 in an article in Nx Magazine, the activist provided more information: “The late Rabbi Marshall Meyer, an integral member of the CONADEP (National Commission for the Disappearance of Persons), created during the radical government, told the former firm in 1985 that the Commission had detected on his payroll of ten thousand people reported missing, four hundred homosexuals. They had not disappeared because of this condition, but the treatment received, the rabbi claimed, had been especially sadistic and violent, like that of Jewish detainees.”

Arrests
“The state’s policy on LGBTIQ+ people was terrifying, extermination, continuous beatings, of taking you to where they found you, even depriving you of the slightest right that is, for example, not to register in a ticket book when you were a detain. That’s why we have so many detenoid companions that aren’t listed on books or police entrances. In my case, out of 60 arrests there are only 5 registered,” explained Aguilera.Ivanna Aguilera is 63, a trans activist and a native of Santa Fe. She is currently at the head of the Trans, Travesti and No binarie area at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the National University of Córdoba and is part of Flores Diversas, an organization that accompanies trans women and transvestites in critical health. In addition, she is a survivor of the arrests during the last dictatorship in Battalion 121 (Command Communications Battalion 121), a former clandestine detention centre with a seat in Rosario, and a complainant in the FECED III case, which represents a historical reparation as it tried crimes of sexual rape in the context of other crimes against humanity. The first time she was arrested, along with other colleagues, was in May 1976 and she was 13 years old. She was in jail for 72 hours. “Our sexuality, expression and gender identity was the political reason why we were kidnapped and tortured,” explained the activist who was later arrested several times.

Ivanna Aguilera.

“Beyond the beatings and stings we received, that kidnapped you and so on, we were also used as a sexual flesh. Because on the way to all that, they walked us or took us to have group rapes. They did it to you because they thought you deserved it or thought you liked it. Rape is a way of wanting to correct you. We were broke from the crowd because we they were throwing a pack and that was the corrective,” Aguilera described, adding, “They also put us sometimes with ordinary prisoners. Then we suffered one more violence.” As for the history of persecution of sexual diversity, distintes refer to point out that it began in the 1930s under the de facto rule of José Félix Uriburu. “This continued during the dictatorship and we had the great repression, which did not end in the years that followed. The advent of democracy brought more persecution, more imprisonment, more torture and more lack of rights,” she added. In democracy
“More than an election outing, it’s an entry into life,” was former President Raúl Alfonsín’s slogan in the 1983 election campaign, but that axiom was not for alles: the razias, persecutions, institutional violence and police edicts continued to be present, mainly affecting the LGBT+ population and, within it, trans and transvestites. Daniel Tortosa is the director of the film Los Maricones (2016), a documentary that shows the testimonies of surviving distinctions at arrests in the Department of Information (D2) of Córdoba in dictatorship and democracy, starting with his own account. It was 1980 and Tortosa was with a friend around 7pm on the street, in a meeting place for homosexuals. In that, two officers approached, “What are you doing here?” They then showed off their gun and badge and took them away. “Ah, haha, look, they bring these faggots!” they exclaimed when they saw them coming. “As soon as we walked in they made us put down and made us sit on a bench and bandaged us. That gave me a lot of impression because the bandage had been worn. It had as perspiration, it was wet, it was dreadful,” Tortosa describes at the beginning of the documentary.

Below are the stories of Nadiha, Eugene, Vanessa, Agostina, Marcia and Romina. “They fucked us up, and kicked us, obviously. And the one that made the rebel, they handcuffed you with feet and hands and kicks everywhere. And wet, obviously, so you don’t notice the blows,” Nadiha says in his account. “Thirty days of terror,” Eugenio says, adding, “Doing your needs in a bag and throwing them out. This in the ’90s, I’m not talking about the ’70s.’ Romina, meanwhile, tells part of her story. “I don’t forget it anymore, Fructuoso Rivera y Bolívar, barrio Goemes (Cordoba). Half a block away lives a friend named Patricia. As if to take a risk we wanted to walk to the corner, to show that we were cute and what do I know. And he grabbed me right the distracted patrol car and I went to stop in detention. Since I was younger I couldn’t stop, but I still, when I was 11, and have no idea what my legal situation was at the time, imagine being slapped, beat, put in a dungeon when I didn’t have to be.” Vanesa Lorena Ledesma
Vanessa Lorena Ledesma was a fellow detainee on 11 February 2000 in Córdoba who died five days later in police custody. One report attributed his death to a “cardiac arrest.” However, autopsy results indicated that his body showed signs of torture, including severe bruising.” This was a case that moved in the midst of democracy and where a companion, Vanessa Pidrabuena [que aparece en el documental], he began to visualize it in a very strong way and in this way the death of Vanesa Ledesma is to this day a witness case for Amnesty International on violations of transgender people and transvestites in the Argentine Republic,” explained Ivanna Aguilera.

Today: What it takes
When consulted on how she sees the state’s treatment of LGBTIQ+ people today, Aguilera replied, “They are still killing us.” “Just because you’re not being taken any more close,” he added, “doesn’t mean you don’t still lack rights and that the state continues to violently violently, murder you, and take your life away: when we don’t have access to work, when a trans person’s life expectancy in 2021 is 38 years. Genocide to LGBTIQ populations turned but remains.” In this sense, he indicated that transvestites and trans are still not guaranteed a basic right: to have and to be able to choose a job. “What we, we and we need are true and transparent inclusion policies. We need a Labor Inclusion Act.” On this 24 March and 45 years after the coup, Aguilera concluded: “What we want, intend and want is to be able from us to recover the memory of LGBTIQ+ companions disappeared during the last military dictatorship. Memory must be for alles, Justice must be for alles and the truth must also be for alles. WE EXIST and resist!”

In this note:

March 24
30.400
LGBTIQ+ memory

Original source in Spanish

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