Carmen Lapacó

For more than 30 years, Carmen Aguiar de Lapacó has fought to find out what happened to her daughter Alejandra. Carmen was kidnapped along with her family on March 16, 1977.

“We were chatting after dinner when we thought we heard somebody faintly ringing the doorbell … when I opened the door, they said to me, ‘you saved yourself just in time, we were about to shoot,’ and they forced their way into the apartment, telling us to raise our hands and forcing us out into the hallway… In response to a question from the one they called “Captain”, I turned my head to answer, but he became angry, grabbed me by the hair and hit my head against the wall several times. They blindfolded us with scarves that they took from my closet.”

They kept my mother and I in the hallway for about 13 hours, while they did a thorough search of the apartment and interrogated the young people. My house was practically ransacked: they stole jewelry, money and things of value. They carried off two loaded suitcases.

Around 2 a.m. on the 17th, they took Alejandra, Marcelo, Alejandro and me…. They took us to a place that I think were garages…from there, they took us to a place where there were other prisoners. This place was divided into small cubicles approximately 60 cm wide by 1.40 m long, and there were chains on the wall. In addition to having chains on their feet, the men had their hands tied; I don’t know if they were chains or handcuffs. They made us lie down on the ground. I kept the blindfold on my eyes in such a way that I was still able to see.”

Carmen was able to talk to her daughter only twice before they released her on March 19, 1977. From that time, she began a ceaseless search to find her daughter by legal means, taking her case to various branches of the Armed Forces.

“They told me: ‘Your daughter is a subversive, in three months she’ll turn up in jail; otherwise, she’ll turn up in your house.’ I told them that for a mother, it is terrible not to have any news of her daughter for three months. They answered that they did it this way so that the people ‘wouldn’t make attorneys waste their time.’”

Through other survivors, she found out that Alejandra had been given an injection in April, 1977 and they had taken her away. Nobody knew where. Carmen met with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and with the assistance of human rights organizations, continued her search. After the Junta lost power and the impunity laws were approved, Carmen took her petition for truth and justice to the Supreme Court, basing her arguments on the Constitution.

On August 13, 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the victims of the military dictatorship did not have a right to the truth. Despite her defeat, Carmen filed a complaint against the Argentine government for violation of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH).

On November 15, 1999, in response to pressure from the CIDH, the Argentine government signed an agreement that guarantees the right to the truth, requiring the government to use all resources necessary to get results.

contact

Carmen Lapacó