Alejandra Revisited After 40 Years Alejandra: Victim of Dictatorship Reunited in “Argentina, 1985”

In his face, you can feel determination and at the same time a certain shyness. If we didn’t know her story, we could talk about innocence, but that’s what was already taken from her in 1985’s Alejandra Naftali. She was 24 when the camera stopped for a few seconds on her: she was about to tell the Argentine military junta in a historic trial how she was kidnapped, tortured and raped as a minor.

The frame of a young woman with curly hair and a determined gaze appeared in Argentina in 1985, awarded the Golden Globe for the best foreign language film. The feature film, which was also nominated for the Goya Award and was shortlisted for the Oscar, tells the story of the process that ended with the condemnation of those most responsible for the dictatorship for crimes against humanity.

Alejandra saw his face almost four decades later, watching the film. “He always saw me from behind because some of the images of the trial were not released to protect the victims. At that time there was still a lot of fear,” he explained to elDiario.es from his home in Buenos Aires.

He speaks of this union with quiet surprise. It is noticeable that many people have thought about this issue since the moment when he came across his own past on a giant screen in a dark room: “This is the image of being called to the stand to testify. And it was strong: I saw a girl.”

“Many years have passed and I feel that I have worked to the best of my ability with this experience,” says this historic human rights activist. Because the young Naftali became a muse over time and was the architect of the redefinition of the country’s worst secret detention center: the Naval School of Marine Mechanics (ESMA), where he worked as the director of the Museo Sitio de Memoria. Just recently. “I feel like this job was a gift and it’s like I’ve been preparing for it all my life,” he explains with a bit of nostalgia in the middle of “mourning” after his recent retirement.

Santiago Miter’s feature film was successful in Argentina and also in Spain. And in both countries, it has renewed debates about processes of memory, justice and reparations. “It is a necessary film that has found a channel, a language for young people to bring this issue back to the family table,” analyzes Naftali.

For him, the phenomenon of the film shows that amid the advance of the right, old cracks and hate speech, Argentina still has in its DNA the seeds planted by human rights politics. “Some here say there is denial. But I don’t think there is an Argentine, even in the right-wing sector, who defends that the military should not be arrested. In any case, they ask for house arrest.”

But the feature film was also the subject of questioning, by some human rights activists and the protagonists of this process. Criticism has focused on its Hollywood account, with a story that puts the hero in the shoes of the collective effort that made this historic trial possible. “It’s a film with a first-rate cast and it has all the ingredients of a complex story, in a good way. Yes, this is a story in search of a hero. It focuses on the figure of the gray man of the judiciary, which history places in a crucial place.”

He refers to the prosecutor Julio Strassera – interpreted by Ricardo Darin – who was responsible for the session of the military leadership, which recently left power on the bench. Raúl Alfonsín, the first democratic president after the dictatorship, took office in December 1983 and facilitated an investigation by Conadep (the National Commission on Disappearances) on which the indictment was based two years later and whose report. Strassera dedicates the last two words of the last request: never again.

“The film shows how this trial, which was entirely hand-crafted, is also the result of an epic. And obviously, it has a lot of silence that maybe it doesn’t show enough of the work of human rights organizations, but it’s a work of fiction, a work of art that, although based on real events, always leaves something out. Naphtali settles down.

Alejandra takes the photo in her hand, zooming in to get a better look at the faces of the very petite and smiling teenager next to the man. “It’s me and dad, the day I got home,” he explains. Because Alejandra was a missing person. But he came back.

On May 9, 1978, in the early hours of the morning, several men knocked on the door of his house. They asked about him, searched the whole room. There were 15 of them in total, they were armed. They took him in front of his sister and parents, without explanation, without accusing him of anything. He was 17 years old. In 1975, when he was 14, he participated in the school’s student union, which was dissolved two years later after a military coup. They were taken to an illegal detention center called El Vesuvio, where they were tortured and raped. They asked him a thousand times what he didn’t know until someone decided he could be released after almost a year of hell.

But if the shot from Argentina in 1985 doesn’t say everything Alejandra went through during the trial, the smile in the photo hides a lot of what happened after returning from the horror. “I didn’t talk about what happened to me. Not with my family either. They were afraid and felt that something should be buried,” he recalls. “But I was convinced that I had to say it for myself and especially for those who weren’t there. I saw a lot of detainees who never showed up, including two schoolchildren. That is why I applied to Konadep to testify without my parents.

After some time, a telegram arrived summoning him to the trial. His parents, though reluctantly, offered to take him. “But already in the car I realize that we are going in the opposite direction. And I tell them, “They’re ripping me off again.” I even opened the door and threatened to throw him in the car. I went to court trembling. Fortunately, a friend was waiting there and accompanied me, because it was a very difficult moment.”

It doesn’t appear in the film, but the transcript of his testimony makes it clear that empathy was not part of the questionnaire. “I have never read it again, but I remember some of my innocent responses and the feeling that at the time the audience was not prepared for the narrative of those of us who went through this barbarism,” Naftali reflects.

“At the time, I had no intellectual awareness of what I was doing,” he explains. However, the motives were clear: “I had a mission: to help me search for the truth, but I did not think about it from a political point of view. “I was looking for nothing more than to have a space to say what I saw,” he recalls.

Those few moments in Argentina in 1985 had an echo in Naftali’s life. “I don’t know why my testimony was chosen among 850. Maybe because I was one of the kidnapped minors, or because I’m talking about rapes that weren’t mentioned at the time. Already, as the head of the museum, I worked a lot on the issue of sexual crimes.” In fact, it was one of the crimes that took the longest trial in Argentina. Naftali’s torturers and abusers were sentenced years after the first trial in a case that is still open.

“After the premiere of the film, many people came and moved. The acquaintance admitted that he did not know what to answer when his grandchildren asked him what he was doing during the trial. He told me, “I had no idea what was going on, and now I see it as a lack of commitment.”

The film, apart from being a discovery of the young generation, meant a personal questioning for Argentines, a return to their own experiences. But although there was a timid attempt, he did not open a dialogue in Alejandra’s family, as if the wound after the death of his father was too painful to heal. “Yes, I’ve talked about it a lot with my daughter and her friends,” he admits. A daughter who studies cinema.

By now, the film and the change in life have awakened Alejandra Naftal to revisit the past, perhaps to write a book about her story, but from a different perspective, one who survived the horrors of her teenage years, who had to leave. In exile to start over, those who returned and found their way through culture and motherhood. The one who, with his knowledge and experience, transformed the corner where hundreds of people were killed into a museum that is an example to the world of how to prove memory and justice. Kadri Alejandra, who appeared in the courtroom and, almost four decades later, can be considered to have more than accomplished it.

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Source: El Diario

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