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.
Their story
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.
April 14th, 2007 at 10:08 am
I saw a documentary “El Alma de los Verdugos” in TVE about the dictatorship of 76. I thought I had heard and seen everything about this and to hear the stories from the victims and the people behind the tortures was pretty hair raising. Hope this never happens again in Argentina or anywhere else in the world.
April 15th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Thank you for this post. I remember last June when I noticed a plaque in Almagro on the corner of Medrano and Corrientes. It was chilling to be standing in that same place. Often times I see the plaques and think but life but never think to do the follow up.
November 12th, 2012 at 4:36 am
Thank your for keeping the memory of my grandmother alive. We finally found her 2 years ago and after going through the entire process of getting her back, we will finally burry her at the jeweish cementry in Buenos Aires.