http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37077
RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: 17 'La Perla' Survivors Still Waiting for Justice Marcela Valente BUENOS AIRES, Mar 23 (IPS) - Only 17 of the more than 2,200 political prisoners held in the "La Perla" clandestine torture centre during Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship survived. On Saturday, the 31th anniversary of the Mar. 24, 1976 military coup, President Néstor Kirchner will head a ceremony in Córdoba, the city in north-central Argentina where La Perla is located. He will sign an agreement handing the army installation over to the "provincial commission for memory", a public body in which human rights groups also participate. La Perla will now become a museum for preserving the memory of the appalling abuses committed by the de facto regime, which according to human rights groups "disappeared" around 30,000 leftists, trade unionists and other opponents of the dictatorship, mainly young people. The regime's third-largest clandestine detention centre, after the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) and the Campo de Mayo -- both of which are in Buenos Aires -- La Perla is now a paratroopers' barracks located just 15 km from the provincial capital of Córdoba. "It was sheer horror," Ana Mohamed, a La Perla survivor, told IPS. "The shadow of death crept through your body, haunted your mind. What else could you expect to happen, after they brought you in with your eyes blindfolded and tortured you without mercy?" In 1976, at the age of 19, Mohamed, a member of the Córdoba School of Arts students centre, was abducted along with two fellow students and taken to La Perla. "One of the two people who were kidnapped along with me was tortured to death," said Mohamed, who was held captive in various detention centres in Córdoba and Buenos Aires until 1982. Her testimony helped shed light on what happened in La Perla. But although she first testified in 1984, none of her captors or torturers has been brought to justice. The clandestine prison, which occupied two of La Perla's 36 hectares, is marked off by four guard posts. It will now become a museum of memory, along the lines of the one being prepared in ESMA and in other former detention centres that operated throughout the country. "This was a longstanding demand by different organisations in Córdoba, and the national government promised to fulfil it," Marcelo Yornet, the son of Roberto Yornet, a trade unionist who was abducted in Córdoba in 1976, taken to La Perla and never heard from again, told IPS. "We don't yet have a specific project for La Perla, but we want the first step to be taken and for the installations to stop belonging to the army," Agustín Ditoffino, the son of another labour activist who was "disappeared", commented to IPS. Agustín's father, Tomás Ditoffino, was also seized in 1976 and held in La Perla, where he, like Roberto Yornet, was supposedly shot to death in a nearby field. Yornet and Ditoffino both belong to the Córdoba branch of the Argentine human rights group Hijos (which means sons and daughters), and neither have precise information about the fate of their fathers. In the case of ESMA, which is located near the Río de la Plata, many victims of forced disappearance were thrown into the sea from airplanes. But in the inland province of Córdoba, the "transferred" detainees -- a euphemism which meant they were being taken away to be killed -- were driven in trucks to remote areas in the countryside, shot and buried in common graves. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-governmental organisation that is working to identify the remains of victims of forced disappearance, determined the identities of 14 bodies found in the San Vicente Cemetery in Córdoba. But the families of victims know that many more bodies were probably buried there and in empty fields around La Perla. "The great majority of people held in La Perla were 'transferred'," says Gustavo Contempori in his book "Survivors of La Perla", in which he recounts how members of the security forces broke into his home in 1976 and hauled him and his pregnant wife Patricia away, stealing furniture, dishes, the car, and cash in the process. Contempori and his wife were both beaten and tortured with different methods, including electric shock and the "submarine" or "waterboarding" (submersion in tanks of water), to get them to turn over fellow activists. Patricia was also raped, as were female political prisoners in general. They were held in La Perla on straw mattresses, with their eyes blindfolded. "They called us the walking dead," Contempori recalls. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
