I’ve not been sleeping much at night lately. Last night I went to bed after 3 a.m., read for a long time in bed, then woke up just a little after 6 a.m. … yawn … but it makes for a good time to wander down the street and take more early morning photos…these photos are from Saturday morning in Parque Lezama.
I’m writing this very early on a Sunday morning and in a few hours the tourists will be descending on San Telmo for the weekly “antiques” fair. I actually don’t mind the Sunday tourist fest but I think people should try to give San Telmo a visit during the week when the neighborhood is very different.
Every time I wander along Av Chile I intend to take a photo of these three plaques in the sidewalk that commemorate three people abducted more than thirty years ago during the last dictatorship. The other morning I finally had my camera with me.
I didn’t know the stories of these three: two women and a man. The date of their disappearance is the same - July 27, 1976: Susana Elena Pedrini, Jose Daniel Bronzel, Cecilia Podolsky.
Thanks to the Internet even the disappeared are remembered so that their names exist not just as words on the sidewalk.
I thought that this would be a short, simple post but, by chance, just before pressing the publish button I thought to enter one of their names in Google, which returned several pages from different sites devoted to the disappeared. The Proyecto Desaparecidos site tells us (in Spanish) a little about their lives and death as well as providing a photo.
Do they look like a danger to the nation?
An architect and teacher at the University of Buenos Aires, Jose Daniel Bronzel and his wife Susana Elena Pedrini were both 28 and expecting a child when they were kidnapped along with her mother Cecilia, a 51 year-old housewife. Susana was 6 weeks pregnant.
Their lives came to a brutal end three weeks later on August 20, 1976 when they were executed with 27 others in an incident referred to as the Fatima massacre.
The bodies of the victims laid in an unmarked grave for more than 20 years until being discovered in June 1999. The bones of Jose Daniel and Susana were among the first to be positively identified by forensic specialists. The couple were buried in the British Cemetery in November 2000. From the research I find on the net, the remains of Cecilia Podolsky have not been identified.
… names shift from anonymous, random arrangement of letters to reflection of faces now absent from the world.
