His name was Esteban Benito Badell. He was born in San Nicolás, Buenos Aires Province, on November 26, 1943. He worked at the Ministry of Security of the Province of Buenos Aires and was a militant in the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores – Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (PRT-ERP), a militancy he shared with the "Chilean" María Eliana Acosta, his partner with whom he had two children: Esteban Javier, born on September 2, 1967, and Paula Eliana, born on June 19, 1969.

In the early hours of September 28, 1976, the couple was kidnapped from their home at Camino Gral. Belgrano and Calle 15, along with Esteban's brother, Julio Badell. Employee of the Ministry of Security of the Province of Buenos Aires.

PRT-ERP militant, 32 years old. All three were seen at the Clandestine Detention Center known as the "Pozo de Arana," as confirmed in the La Plata Truth Trials by the testimonies of Atilio Gustavo Calotti and Walter Docters.

Both he and his brother lost their lives in that center, while María Eliana was transferred to the Batallón de Infantería de Marina N.°3 (BIM 3). At that time, an official note was issued stating that Esteban and his brother had committed suicide, although it is known through various testimonies that this was not the case.

Esteban was 32 years old. Days after his disappearance, Julio Badell's body was handed over to his family, and Esteban's two days later. The couple's children went to live with their paternal aunt and her husband, Evaristo Tadeo Rojas, who was an officer in the Buenos Aires police and participated in the repressive actions carried out by that force.

According to the testimony of Esteban Javier, the couple's son, Rojas was involved in the disappearance of his own siblings-in-law, even though he had promised that they would be returned alive. Rojas died with impunity. María Eliana's body was never found. Esteban's case awaits justice.

Source: huellasdelamemoria.com.ar

A witness recounted yesterday, Tuesday, the kidnapping of his parents during the last civic-military dictatorship and the beatings suffered at the hands of his appropriator uncle, situations that still cause him "night terrors and the fear" of reliving those traumatic events.

The witness is Esteban Badell Acosta, who testified this Tuesday before the Federal Oral Tribunal 1 of La Plata, which is trying 17 repressors, including Miguel Etchecolatz, for the kidnappings, torture, and crimes committed in the clandestine detention centers of Pozo de Banfield, Pozo de Quilmes, and El Infierno, in Lanús, against nearly 500 victims during the last military dictatorship.

Esteban was nine years old when, on the night of September 28, 1976, a task force broke into the home in the La Plata locality of City Bell, where he lived with his parents, Esteban Benito Badell and María Eliana Acosta, a Chilean national, and his seven-year-old sister, Paula.

Both children were sleeping when men dressed in civilian clothes and armed entered their bedroom and pointed machine guns at them, while demanding that their father hand over weapons. "We heard them telling my mom to change her clothes and they took them away.

We heard the car doors slamming. My sister and I were left with a lady who had stayed at the house that night to sleep, and the next day she took us to the house of an uncle named Tadeo Rojas, who was a policeman like my dad and lived five blocks away," Badell recounted.

Esteban and his sister told this uncle what had happened and, as he recalled: "This guy didn't even flinch. From that day on, we stayed in that house, with his wife, who was my dad's sister, and my cousins." The man recounted that on the same day his parents were kidnapped, another of his father's brothers, Julio Badell—also a policeman—had been abducted; his body was thrown days later from the third floor of the La Plata Police Headquarters. "Later they gave us my dad's body, and we learned he died under torture at the Pozo de Arana.

During the wake, this appropriator uncle broke down and, in front of the casket, said: 'These sons of bitches screwed me over, they promised me they would deliver Esteban to me alive,' but he realized what he was saying and his wife pulled him away," he related.

Days later, Esteban asked a cousin to accompany him to his parents' house, where he surprised his uncle and other relatives dividing up furniture and burning books. "I was only able to rescue The Little Prince, which they were also going to burn...

And that was when I realized I was never going to see my mother again," he recalled, breaking into tears. 17 repressors are being tried for the kidnappings, torture, and crimes committed during the dictatorship.

Rojas decided to move with his family and his two nephews to the house where the kidnapping had occurred, which caused Esteban traumatic shock, nightmares, and hallucinations. "I would see the furniture growing and falling on top of me, or I would wake up surrounded by shadows and screaming.

The first time this happened, they scolded me; the following times, they beat me. He (his uncle) used to say that the best psychologist was a stick," he relived. Esteban Badell detailed that this uncle threatened his maternal grandfather, who was demanding the return of María Eliana's children from Chile, and even when this man came to the country to see the children, he threatened him, warning him that he would also disappear.

In this uncle's house, Esteban and his sister Paula were mistreated, humiliated, not allowed to eat dinner with the family, given old food, and for two years were made to sleep under a table on some blankets. "They hit us with sticks, belts, shoes, and their hands, and a family dynamic was created where we were considered worthless, like we were second-class, and every member of the family felt they had the right to hit us," he maintained.

Among those who beat him was a cousin who "would choke me until I passed out" and Rojas's wife, his paternal aunt, who every time she hit them would refer to her sister-in-law, the children's mother, whom she called a "subversive whore" and seemed to blame for what happened to her brother.

Esteban was able to reconstruct that his mother was at the Pozo de Quilmes, where she was murdered, as stated in a death certificate signed by Jorge Bergés, one of the defendants in this trial. It was not until 1986 that the maternal family managed to recover them, and since that date, both siblings have lived in Chile. "To this day, I don't sleep well because I have exacerbated nocturnal sensitivity; I wake up 3 or 4 times, I hear cars approaching, and until I verify that they keep going, I can't fall asleep.

I'm not one to make friends, I'm distrustful, I don't know how to connect, and although I love Argentina, I like the people, I can't live there because the terror overcomes me," he said. He explained with sorrow that when he has come to the country for visits, "I walk looking to see if they are following me; if I have to take the subway, I get off halfway and take another one to throw them off, because I feel like they are following me.

It's something irrational, but I can't avoid it." The TOF 1, composed of Walter Venditti, Esteban Rodríguez Eggers, and Ricardo Basilico, also heard the testimony of Paula Badell, who requested that her testimony not be broadcast, and then adjourned until August 3.

Source: fmlaunica.com 14/7/2021

Pozo de Quilmes Trial: "In the appropriators' house, everyone felt they had the right to hit us"

A new virtual hearing was held for the trial regarding crimes against humanity committed in the clandestine detention centers Pozo de Banfield, Pozo de Quilmes, and Brigada de Lanús. A new virtual hearing of the trial for crimes against humanity committed in the clandestine detention centers Pozo de Banfield, Pozo de Quilmes, and Brigada de Lanús included testimony from the recovered grandson Esteban Badell Acosta, who gave details of the kidnapping of his parents, María Eliana Acosta Velasco and Esteban Benito Badell.

The witness gave an account of the mistreatment suffered until he reunited with his Chilean family, where his mother was from. The words of survivor Miguel Hernández were also heard. Esteban Badell Acosta is the son of María Eliana Acosta Velasco and Esteban Benito Badell, both PRT-ERP militants.

His parents were kidnapped on September 28, 1976, in City Bell, La Plata district. "I heard them asking my dad where the weapons were. They took him, and my sister Paula Badell and I stayed with a lady who was in the house, Angélica.

The next day, she took us to an uncle's house," he explained to the Federal Oral Tribunal 1 of La Plata. His uncle Julio Badell was also kidnapped, and shortly after the illegal detention of his parents, he learned of his death. "We heard that Julio Badell, my dad's brother, also a policeman, had been kidnapped.

They returned him dead; they threw him from a third floor. Later they returned my dad, who also died, I think in Arana," he specified, and continued: "My dad was a very beloved person, in the family and in general.

I think my uncle held him in high regard. At the wake, he broke down in front of the casket and said, 'They screwed me, they promised me they would deliver him alive.' That was when the family had its first doubt regarding this situation." "A week later, I went walking with one of my cousins, who was his son, to the house where the kidnapping had occurred.

There were some relatives dividing up the furniture, and this uncle was there, with another one who was also a policeman, burning the books. I was able to rescue The Little Prince. They told me to leave.

Right then, I realized I wasn't going to see them again," he said with a broken voice. Both he and his sister ended up living with Rojas, "the appropriator"—as he described him—Evaristo Tadeo Rojas, an officer of the Buenos Aires Police.

In the house of the kidnapping, he began to have nightmares, which he described as "hallucinations." "The furniture would throw itself on top of me; I would wake up surrounded by human shadows that were whispering and falling on top of me.

The first time they scolded me; the second and third time, the beatings began," he recalled. "We were discriminated against; they left us sleeping under the dining room table with a couple of blankets.

We were like that for two years. The mistreatment, beatings, and humiliations began at the hands of this aunt, Rojas's partner, who was my dad's sister. I think it was a process of revenge against my mother because she always told me, when she hit me, 'that subversive Peronist, that fucking whore.' The family blamed my mom for what had happened; I confirmed this when I arrived to live in Chile and found a letter that my grandmother exchanged with Darío Rojas.

He says he was going to take charge of our education, that he had promised to educate us in a Christian manner and with good customs, and that my mom's ideas had caused Julio and Esteban to be killed. I think that idea prevailed in the family," he reflected. "The only thing we wanted was to go to Chile," the man admitted, and specified: "In December 1976, a friend of my mom's arrived to see how we were and to see the situation so she could take us and bring us to Chile.

We saw her and we got our hopes up, but she never appeared again. When we arrived in Chile, we found out that she had been threatened by this uncle. In 1978, my grandfather traveled to come look for us; he was in Argentina for two or three days, but from one day to the next, he also disappeared.

Indeed, they had threatened him." "The hopelessness of being able to get out of that house was growing. We began to resign ourselves. This person had the task of denying the Chilean family; they sent us letters and never informed us.

We felt totally abandoned, trying to survive and understand a little of what was happening," he pointed out. In the context of the mistreatment, the two children were beaten savagely and discriminated against. "They hit us with sticks, belts, shoes, with their hands.

A dynamic was generated because we were worthless and didn't have much value within the family. Everyone felt they had the right to be able to hit us. We couldn't eat the same thing they ate, before or after the family; however, during holidays, an image of a happy family was presented, and that way we could be at the table and we ate the same thing," he detailed.

Among the images he remembered from those indelible years, he stated: "One day Rojas arrived at the house with a baby. The woman started screaming for him to leave the baby: 'I want it for myself, don't take it away,' Esteban recalled the woman shouting.

But his uncle got very angry and replied: 'This baby no, if you want another one, yes.'" Esteban Badell never knew more details about it, although it never ceased to be a "strange" episode, which could be linked to the theft of babies born in captivity to their mothers.

At 14 years of age, Esteban dared to confront his uncle and ask him about his mom. "I had the fantasy that my mom was alive," he confessed. "My cousin told me that my mom had died in Arana and that they had burned her between tires.

My uncle told me she died in Quilmes and that they had thrown her into a mass grave in Quilmes." According to the testimonies he gathered, his mom was kidnapped at the Pozo de Arana and the Pozo de Quilmes.

Esteban recalled that in order to have custody of the children, his uncle needed a death certificate for his parents. That was how Esteban learned that a first certificate regarding the cause of his mother's death, to which he had access, said "death in a confrontation," and the last official certificate, which he himself requested, says "death by hanging" with the intervention of the Quilmes Brigade, signed by Mr.

Bergés. "I think this last information is the closest," he explained. The Buenos Aires police doctor, Jorge Antonio Bergés, is one of the defendants in this trial and is under house arrest. Finally, they went to live with their grandparents in Chile.

In 1986, the young people were able to meet their maternal grandfather who lived in Chile and who had always demanded their return from that country. "To this day, I don't sleep well. I wake up three or four times at night.

I hear the cars when they approach," he declared. "Today I don't have many friends; it's hard for me. I don't know how to connect with other people," he asserted. Witnesses who testified in this trial in previous hearings, such as survivors Walter Docters and Nora Ungaro, mentioned that they saw Eliana Acosta and Esteban Badell at the Pozo de Arana, in deplorable conditions due to torture, and at the Pozo de Quilmes.

Before Esteban Badell gave his statement, his sister requested that her statement not be public. Later, Miguel Hernández, a survivor, testified. He was kidnapped on May 12, 1975, in Florencio Varela. "I was kidnapped by several people, in the early hours of the morning," he began by saying in his account.

He was transferred to the Pozo de Banfield. "When I arrived at the pozo, they began the interrogation, beatings; they wanted to know what relationship I had with a party at that time, which was proscribed, and to get information out of me, they took me to a room and began the electricity session all over my body," he commented.

The torture at the pozo lasted for a week, and there was a doctor who verified that his life was not at risk. "You could hear the screams of other detainees," he remarked, alluding to the psychological torture to which he was subjected.

While in Banfield, he found out that his wife had also been kidnapped. His wife, who was also tortured and spent several years in prison, preferred not to provide testimony. Miguel remained in captivity for 30 days in Banfield. From there, he was transferred to the Sierra Chica prison in September 1977 and subsequently to Unit 9 of La Plata, from where he was released in July 1980.

Source: tiempoar.ar 15/07/2021

Esteban Javier Badell Acosta is 53 years old, has a lot of gray in his short hair, and struggles with sleep. “I still wake up three or four times a night; sometimes I have to get up to check that everything is okay,” he said yesterday at the conclusion of his testimony before the Federal Oral Tribunal 1 of La Plata in the trial regarding crimes committed by the Brigades.

When asked by the legal representatives of the Justicia Ya collective about the consequences the last civil-military dictatorship left on his life, he added “general disillusionment” and “total distrust.” Esteban and his sister witnessed the kidnapping of their parents and lived for nearly a decade under the physical and symbolic violence of one of their uncles—who was also the repressor who handed them over.

The lives of Esteban and his sister changed drastically on September 28, 1976, when a group of people in civilian clothes surrounded the house where they lived with their parents and a woman in City Bell.

They were already asleep when he began to hear noises. “Open up, Badell,” he heard from the other side of the door. In an instant, they were inside. They turned on the lights, and he saw “a guy in civilian clothes with a machine gun pointing at us, telling us to stay quiet.

He told the woman to stay face down, ‘Silence or I’ll kill you,’ he told her.” They asked his father, Esteban Benito Badell, to say “where the weapons are”; they told his mother, María Eliana Acosta, to get changed. They ransacked and broke everything. They took the couple away, and they, the woman, and the children were left behind.

“This woman didn’t know what to do. My sister was crying, and I felt a terrible sense of helplessness. Terrified. We fell asleep,” he recounted. María Eliana was Chilean, “a socialist militant her whole life,” her son defined her.

In Argentina, she joined the PRT-ERP, where Esteban Badell, whom she married, was also a militant. They had their children in 1967 and 1969. Months before “falling” in La Plata, she suffered a raid in Santiago de Chile, the last time she traveled to see her family.

From their house in City Bell, they were taken to the clandestine detention center known as Pozo de Arana. That night, they also kidnapped Julio Badell, Esteban’s brother and also a PRT-ERP militant. Both worked for the Buenos Aires Police.

Their lifeless bodies were handed over to the family between one and two weeks after the night of September 28. Through the testimony of survivors, it is known that the Quilmes Investigation Brigade (known as the Pozo de Quilmes) was the last destination where María Eliana was seen alive.

Complicity

The day after the kidnapping, the woman who was with them took the Badell siblings to the house of a paternal aunt, who was married to Evaristo Tadeo Rojas, an officer of the Buenos Aires Police. “We arrived overwhelmed and started to tell them what had happened.

He was shaving. The guy didn’t even flinch; it was as if we had told him ‘the sun came out’,” Esteban recalled. Two days later, the Badell family received Julio Badell’s body. Esteban asserted that “they handed him over dead, but through the testimony of a repentant police officer, we later learned that they had thrown him from the third floor of the La Plata Police Headquarters, although the news reported it as a suicide.” The window from which they threw him belonged to the office of the genocidaire Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz.

The “children” were not allowed to go to Julio’s wake, the man maintained in his testimony. But they were allowed to go to their father’s, whose remains were handed over to the family two days later. At that farewell, he saw Tadeo Rojas “break down in front of the casket and say, ‘These sons of bitches screwed me, they promised me they were going to hand him over alive’.” Through testimonies, Esteban was able to learn that his father died while being tortured in Arana.

Years later, he worked up the courage to ask Rojas directly if he had been complicit in the events. He summarized the dialogue: “I told him that I knew something about what happened. The guy looks at me and tells me yes, that I’m right, that he was a policeman and was only following orders. He assured me that my mother was dead, but that he didn’t know where. And that he would find out for me.”

Years of Abuse

Weeks after his father’s wake, Esteban and his sister returned to the house where everything had happened. It was because Rojas, his wife—the sister of the murdered Badell brothers—and their children turned it into their own home, after “the entire family” divided up the furniture and burned the books that had belonged to the couple of PRT-ERP militants.

Esteban was only able to rescue The Little Prince.

Since then, his days and those of his sister became an ordeal. “They hit us with sticks and belts, they insulted us. We were discriminated against; they left us sleeping under the dining room table with blankets for two years.

My aunt would call us ‘that communist subversive, that fucking whore’ in reference to my mother, as if they were blaming her for what had happened to my father and my uncle Julio,” Esteban indicated. He confirmed part of this by reading the correspondence between Rojas and his maternal grandfather—which he learned about years later: “In a letter, Tadeo Rojas tells my grandfather that they would take charge of our Christian education since my mother’s communist ideas had caused his brothers to be killed,” he recounted.

“We wanted to go to Chile; we had a very bad time, my sister worse,” Esteban highlighted. Paula, his sister, testified at length before him, but requested that her testimony remain reserved, without dissemination.

Rojas and his wife obtained legal guardianship of the then-children in 1978. To do so, they first had to present a death certificate for María Eliana. Esteban said during his testimony that he saw two: “The first said ‘died in a confrontation,’ but in the Civil Registry there is another one, which says ‘died by hanging,’ it is signed by Bergés and lists the address of the Quilmes Investigation Brigade.” The repressor José Antonio Bergés was a police doctor and had involvement in the Pozo de Quilmes.

The body of María Eliana Acosta, however, never appeared. The Chilean family tried, at least twice, to go look for the Badell siblings at the Rojas family home. First, it was a friend of their mother, and then their grandfather. “We would receive those visits, we would get our hopes up, but then from one day to the next, they would be cut off.

We felt totally abandoned,” Esteban recounted. What they did not know was that, on both occasions, the woman and the grandfather were threatened by Rojas and gangs of civilians to stop insisting. They lived there until 1985, when, at the request of the maternal family, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo made their location possible. Since then, they have lived in the trans-Andean country.

During those years, in addition to the abuse suffered, they also saw things that confirm Rojas’s participation in state terrorism. Like that day when “this man arrived with a baby wrapped in a blanket” at the house, where his wife “made a scene, that she wanted it for herself, that he should leave it for her, that it was hers.” “The guy got very angry, took the baby out of her arms, and told her: ‘Not this one.

If you want one, we’ll go look for another, but not this one’,” Esteban recounted, among other episodes that seemed “strange” to him. Another thing that surprised him was a visit that he and other “cousins” could not complete to “one of the police stations where Rojas worked.” He used to take them “for a ride” to his “places of work,” but they could not enter this one—he did not remember which one. “He sent us back to the car, but I snuck around here and there until through a window I saw that they had a person tied to a table inside, and then they turned on the radio and a motor.” Rojas died with impunity.

*

Her name was María Eliana Acosta. They called her “Julia” and also “Chilena.”

She was born on February 10, 1942, in Santiago de Chile and came to the city of La Plata, where she enrolled in the Psychology program at the National University of La Plata and was a militant in the Revolutionary Workers’ Party – People’s Revolutionary Army (PRT-ERP).

In Chile, she had been a militant in the Socialist Party. She was married to Esteban Benito Badell, who was also a militant in the PRT-ERP and worked at the Ministry of Security of the Province of Buenos Aires.

With him, she had two children, Esteban Javier, born on September 2, 1967, and Paula Eliana, on June 19, 1969. In June 1976, during her last trip to Chile, María Eliana was interrogated at the Ministry of National Defense by military forces after they raided her parents’ house, in order to verify her activity and her ties in Argentina.

Back in La Plata, in the early hours of September 28, 1976, she was kidnapped from her home at the intersection of Camino Gral. Belgrano and Calle 15, in City Bell, along with her husband and his brother, Julio Badell, who was an inspector officer of the Buenos Aires Police.

Details of her detention are not known, but those of her captivity are. They were first taken to the Pozo de Arana, a clandestine detention center where they were seen by Atilio Gustavo Calotti and Walter Docters.

Her husband and brother-in-law were murdered there, although they were officially reported as suicides. By October, according to Juan Carlos Fueyo, the “Chilena” was at the Marine Infantry Battalion No. 3 (BIM 3), under the command of Vice Admiral Eduardo René Fracassi.

She was later transferred to the Pozo de Quilmes where, according to documentation in the CONADEP files, she was allegedly executed on November 15 of the same year. The couple’s children went to live with their paternal aunt and her husband, Evaristo Tadeo Rojas, who was an officer of the Buenos Aires Police and participated in the repressive actions carried out by that force.

According to the testimony of Esteban Javier, the couple’s son, Rojas was implicated in the disappearance of his own in-laws, even though they had promised him they would be returned alive. Rojas died with impunity.

María Eliana was 34 years old at the time of her disappearance. Numerous repressors were convicted for her case in the trial known as the “Camps Circuit.” She is currently being judged in the trial known as “Brigadas.” Her file as a Psychology student was repaired through Resolution No. 273/18 in 2018.

Source: imagenesparamemoriar.com