On May 19, 1977, José Liborio POBLETE ROA, a member of the "Christians for Socialism" community, was detained along with his Argentine spouse and their eight-month-old daughter, Claudia POBLETE HLACZIK.

The couple and their daughter were forcibly disappeared; there are testimonies indicating their presence at the "El Banco" and "El Olimpo" detention centers in Buenos Aires, where all trace of them was lost in mid-1979.

The Commission reached the conviction that they were victims of human rights violations at the hands of their captors, with no evidence suggesting the participation of Chilean agents in these events.

Source: Rettig Report

A few weeks ago, Buscarita Roa, a Mother and Grandmother of Plaza de Mayo, Chilean like her disappeared son, was honored by her country's embassy. This is her story, told by her in the year 2000, altri tempi*, and that of José Poblete, a tireless militant on both sides of the Andes and founder of the Peronist Disabled Front.

This story should begin on Three Kings' Day in 1955 in Chile, when José Poblete was born. It would be good to start it that way so as not to stumble immediately upon the fear that surfaces in Buscarita as soon as the recorder is turned on.

Buscarita, José's mother, hedges: -This is all a bit problematic for me; because when I talk about my son, I get very emotional. It is as she anticipates: she breaks down on the tenth line of the transcript.

So, for now, it is better to start this story in a working-class neighborhood south of Santiago de Chile, with José and his many siblings. At age five, Buscarita enrolled José in kindergarten and the teacher warned her: watch out for this boy, he is very sharp.

He did not disappoint at the start of his life: he skipped straight to the second grade. At twelve, he entered secondary school with a desire to be everywhere—at school, in the neighborhood with the children. -He was always present in the neighborhood to do something for the people.

He would bring all the children to my house. I would sometimes get angry because I said the house was small and he would fill it with children. He would tell me: "Mom, the children can't go to school." Because the parents were sometimes drinkers and the kids would go out to the street to sell newspapers or candy; they didn't go to school.

So he would take them home and, with other friends, they would teach them to read and write. He always told me to have a towel for the children. He made them wash their faces, their little hands, because in the humble neighborhoods, at that time, in the families that worked, the children were very neglected.

Buscarita’s scares regarding her son’s escapades were early. Not at 16 or 18 or 20, but at age 13. She says he would say, "I'm going and coming back," and disappear at midnight, taking a blanket with him.

What has he gotten into, where has he gone, Buscarita would wonder. The next morning he would appear at home without the blanket. "What have you done with the blanket?" Buscarita would ask. "I left it for some old folks," José would reply.

Or, "I left it for a lady who has many children." -I would tell him, "Negro! There are many of us. You take things and we need them here. How do I know if those people need that?" He would tell me, "If you want, I'll take you." And he would stay in those places so the police wouldn't take the people away.

I lived terrified; sometimes I would forbid him from going out and he would escape through the window when we were already sleeping. That’s how his militancy began, doing those kinds of things. After controlling her urge to break down at the beginning, Buscarita rushes the story, starting and crossing a thousand different anecdotes about José's childhood and adolescence in Chile.

She recounts the takeover of the neighborhood primary school where her children studied. One day, a mother discovered that the storage room where the food received for the children was kept was "dirty and full of rats." The parents asked for disinfection, and the principal replied that it was an audacity, that parents should not get involved in matters they were not in a position to opine on.

Buscarita had the bad idea of commenting on it to her children and told them that from that moment on they would eat at home. -He heard, and so he went to talk to the lady who had seen that. He started a whole revolution, talked to all the parents, they took over the school, they removed the merchandise.

It was true, it was all eaten by rats, it was dirty. The principal didn't worry too much; the desks were broken, the chairs smashed, a disaster. They took over the school, kicked out the principal, he organized the parents to fix the desks, to paint the school.

So I ended up participating in painting the school, in the takeover of the school; the whole family ended up doing a lot of things. That was the first thing he did, and the principal said he was a communist, that surely the parents were communists.

At that time, I lived with my husband; he never liked politics or got involved in that, nor did he like religion; he was a person very much like that. Already with his little Vietnam on his back, José continued looking for new scenarios in which to apply his Leninist organizational skills.

When he turned 15, a neighborhood council was formed, something that, as Buscarita points out, was common in the Chile of that time and here as well. "He organized the neighborhood council, called all the parents from the school, all the mothers, and a little chapel was formed.

A priest came, and the chapel was made of wood, very poor. My son became friends with the priest they had sent to the neighborhood, who was very young, and he told him why didn't we take up collections among everyone to make the chapel out of brick.

All that was organized, and again I ended up working in the chapel. Even my ex-husband ended up doing everything, at the fair, collecting money because there was nothing." -The priest was divine, too. The chapel was built with much sacrifice; we would go out with little bags to collect money from everywhere.

Everyone would put in either a package of noodles or one of rice; a basket was made or a raffle. The day the mayor showed up There was so much commotion in the neighborhood that even the mayor showed up at the time of electing the council president.

It was the era of Salvador Allende's presidency, and Buscarita says that many humble neighborhoods were becoming fancy, "all paved, with water, with electricity, sewers." Little houses that had their living-dining room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a patio, a front garden, "flexi flooring," and the possibility for the neighbors to finish setting them up according to their taste and possibility.

In José's neighborhood, there ended up being 360 houses plus the building for the council. When the time came to dialogue with the mayor, the neighbors raised the "José for President" ticket. The mayor looked down, in the direction of José. -"How old is this child?" -"Fifteen years old," he replied.

And immediately he reached out his right hand, shook the mayor's, and said, "Nice to meet you." The man looked at him a bit bewildered and looked at the people around him in the same way. But the neighbors began to heatedly defend José's resume and his skills, highlighting point by point all the initiatives of that tiny leader, including the little trees that were then as tiny as he was and that today are big.

After the discussion, the people and the government reached an agreement. They designated a neighbor named Hugo as the formal president, but it was clear that Pepito would stay by his side to continue throwing out ideas.

An immediate one was the creation of a reading room where José and his companions dedicated themselves to teaching half the world to read. -That’s how he organized and taught many children in the neighborhood to read and write, people who are now adults.

And now, many times, when I go to Chile, they tell me: "Pepito taught me to read." At 17, José had already finished secondary school and went on a trip to the south of the country. It was then that he suffered the accident that made him come to Argentina: he fell from the train he was traveling on onto the tracks. -He was left with broken legs.

They operated on him, but they couldn't save anything. I thought at that moment that everything was going to come crashing down on him. But he finished school—he was missing very little—he kept going. I think he kept going because he had such a revolutionary spirit that it strengthened a lot of things for him.

The soul of the end of the millennium comes sufficiently dimmed and sad for any translator-mediator of interviews to try to manage certain distances when expressions such as "revolutionary spirit" appear.

It is known: there is an incorporated modesty according to which one must avoid those things for fear that no one will believe them. It happens that the translator cannot betray the material they work with either.

Buscarita Roa's memories of her son are like that—impressive. And it is embarrassing to let them languish as mere marginal notes. For a time, back from the hospital, José was at his house surrounded by friends from the neighborhood and school, in a "nothing happened here" atmosphere.

One of the most frequent visitors was a professor friend and fellow militant. He was the one in charge of bringing José back to earth, of telling him that after the loss of his legs, life would continue but it would be different.

He also told him that he had to face his new life alone and that things were no longer going to be the same. The first weeks passed, and one day, when the family still hadn't bought him a wheelchair, a fire broke out in the neighborhood. -He began to despair.

He told me: "Mom, I have to do something." Because about four little houses burned down and he was used to running out every time something happened. He told me: "Someone lives nearby who uses a wheelchair; why don't you tell the kids to go ask to borrow it?

Let him sit in a chair and lend it to me for a while, nothing more." The chair arrived and José started a new collection, but this time on wheels. He got mattresses, blankets, food, and didn't stop until night.

The next morning, slowed down, Buscarita says his reaction arrived. He spoke with his mother and announced that he was going to have to leave for any country where they would put something in place of his legs.

He reminded Buscarita of the compensation he had received from the railway company and told her: "Buy me the wheelchair and buy me a ticket." -He thought about going to France, but there wasn't enough money to go to France.

So he said he was going to Argentina. –When was this? -More or less in '73, before the dictatorship in Chile. José arrived just in time to live the prologue of ours. Santiago de Chile-La Plata-Barrancas de Belgrano "A pilgrimage of people," according to Buscarita's literal expression, went to say goodbye to José when he left for Argentina.

No one had money to accompany him beyond the limits of the neighborhood itself, and Buscarita didn't have any either to walk around with a camera to record the scene, something she still regrets. So Pepito headed off alone with his suitcase; they loaded his wheelchair, they hoisted him aboard the bus.

And goodbye. He brought a single address of acquaintances in La Plata with whom he stayed for a time, and from there he went rolling until he entered an institute for the rehabilitation of the disabled in Barrancas de Belgrano.

As always—thousands of little Vietnams—José did things with haste and without pause. When he verified that state subsidies were not enough to make the institute a better place, he began to fight and ended up founding the Peronist Disabled Front.

It might be surprising as a political figure, but at that time things were like that: Movement of Peronist Slum Dwellers, Tenants' Movement, groups and sub-groups in all neighborhoods, in all unions. The curious thing is that the demands of the Front—a quarter of a century later—spoke of the same problems as today: disabled people condemned to confinement, discriminated against in the street and at work.

José began to organize bus trips through Mar del Plata, through San Andrés de Giles, wherever. At the same time that he began to stir up trouble, he ordered, thanks to the mediation of the Chilean embassy, some prosthetics that came from Germany and were finally adjusted at the institute.

Shortly after, as the old joke said, he walked, the fool, but he walked. So much so that at six months he appeared in Santiago showing off his legs. -No one could believe it. He got off a taxi at the door of my house and said, "Here I come, walking and standing." In 1974, Buscarita sold everything she could in Santiago and brought her other six children to the country.

She settled in San Martín, near Route 8, in a little room lent by compatriots. José kept fighting: he got the State to start paying pensions and battled publicly for the opening of job sources. In those days, the front of Buscarita's house was a perpetual parking lot for up to ten wheelchairs simultaneously.

José, who had a degree as a lathe operator, began working as an administrator at Alpargatas and started studying Psychology in La Plata. He met a woman, Gertrudis Marta Hlaczik, married her, and they both went to live in Guernica.

They were militants in the "Christians for Liberation" group. They had a daughter: Claudia Victoria. Eyes through the cracks. El Olimpo Claudia was eight months old when her father was kidnapped on November 28, 1978, in Plaza Once. "Almost simultaneously," according to the Nunca Más report, his wife Gertrudis was abducted with Claudia in her arms by a group of police from the Lanús Brigade.

They took the baby wrapped in a sheet, crying. "That was what people saw," says Buscarita, "through the cracks." They took the three of them to the El Olimpo concentration camp. But Claudia was only there for a couple of days.

For once, a mother of the disappeared had relatively quick and accurate news about the fate of her relatives. -One day a blind girl who had also been kidnapped, because she was a friend of theirs from the institute, appeared thrown on the General Paz highway.

Her parents had a lot of money; he was a manager at the Mantecol factory. They made her appear because there must have been some pressure there. There were two other people too. I met with them, and they were very scared; they told me that my son and my daughter-in-law were alive and were in a place they called El Olimpo.

In the Nunca Más report, the call Buscarita received in December is also cited. It was Marta, her daughter-in-law, who barely managed to explain to her that she no longer had the baby because "a guy they call Colores" had asked for her.

It is known, the so-called Colores was a companion of "Paco" and "Turco Julián" in the union of torturers at El Olimpo. In the Nunca Más report, one can read this paragraph: "Both Gertrudis and José Liborio Poblete—whom the repressors nicknamed 'Shorty,' mocking the lack of his legs—were brutally tortured.

She was 'paraded naked, dragged by her hair while they punished her'; her husband is remembered 'when they saw him pass by the bathroom every day dragging himself on his hands, since he had no legs and they had taken away his wheelchair'." Buscarita knew something of all this long before the appearance of the CONADEP report. -Chiche, one of the disabled—because they took the disabled too—who was the husband of Mónica, this blind girl, saw them, talked to them.

He told me he had seen them in the bathrooms, because they had showers separated by a partition. He told me that since Pepito didn't have legs, he was bathing on the floor. Pepito saw the legs with metal braces of this boy who had polio.

So he asked him: "Chiche, is that you?" He told him yes and warned him: "Look, I'm leaving; they are letting me go." Pepito asked him to tell me that they were okay, that maybe they would get out of there.

José was taken away forever in one of the transfers of 1979. His companions at El Olimpo knew it two days later, when they saw his wheelchair thrown in the camp's parking lot. In the Presidency of the Nation -A little while after he disappeared, I was with the Mothers.

When I saw that there were people related to the disappeared who were gathering in Plaza de Mayo, I went there and found out. Later I already knew about the Grandmothers. At that time, this president who is there now wasn't there; she was wonderful too, and I went there and started participating.

Again, something incredible appears in Buscarita Roa's account. Something that this time refers to the place from which she left, several times a week, for the Grandmothers' headquarters. She didn't do it from her house in Guernica—bought with the help of the hundreds of '78 World Cup flags her children sold—but from her workplace, located in a very particular place. -At that time, I worked in the Presidency of the Nation; I was a cleaning supervisor.

So, when I left work, I would go and do the little things, I collaborated with what I could. I was in the Presidency and they would run the SIDE (sic) on me every three months to know what was happening with my family.

The SIDE is to see if you participate in something, if you participate in politics. Now, how they hired me, how I was able to enter there, I don't know. I arrived because one time I met a girl on the bus.

I was without work and she said to me: "Don't you want to work for a cleaning company?" They hired me and I started. At six months, Buscarita Roa, Chilean, mother and grandmother of the disappeared, was promoted in the Presidency of the Nation to the position of cleaning manager. "I worked many hours.

They would tell me if I could stay until 6 and I would stay, until 8 and I would stay. And if I could stay at night, I would stay." For years, no one ever knew anything. Buscarita would leave with her light blue smock and with the smock she would go to the Plaza, do the rounds, and return to work "because it was very close." That was how it was until well into democracy. -When the trial of the military happened, I had to go testify.

I had been working there for 14 years already. I entered at the end of Isabelita's government and left in the first months of this man's, Alfonsín. The trial comes and I couldn't erase myself in there, I couldn't put anything on my face.

So I appeared on TV. My colleagues, friends of mine, and all the people at work told me, "How could you with so much suffering, how didn't you tell me, so that no one would find out, how did you do it?" They gave me a lot of support.

I had thought: "They're going to fire me here." And no one called me. Pepito didn't run away -I am now sure they killed them and everything because of the years that have passed, because until recently I still had the hope that Pepito had escaped, that he had ended up in another country.

This is the movie one made for oneself, that maybe he couldn't communicate with us but that at some point he would; the hopes were always there. For many years I had that hope. I even went to the asylum later, I went to all those places because I thought that maybe he had lost his memory or they had him for being crazy.

I asked for the lists of the sick, but never again. Of my daughter-in-law too, because I thought that since she didn't have very large political participation, maybe they were going to let her go and tell her to go to another country.

But no. And about two years after my daughter-in-law disappeared, my co-mother-in-law killed herself, she committed suicide, so I also lost her company there. We went everywhere with her. –Do you remember when you thought Pepito wasn't coming back? -Fifteen years passed and one day I went to the church.

I always have the habit of entering the church when it is empty, when there is no mass. That day I entered the church and it's as if someone told me he wasn't there anymore. It was like something I felt, that I shouldn't look for him as alive, even with my daughter-in-law.

I still think she might be alive because sometimes I see girls in the street who look like her. I have even followed them and until I have seen their faces, I haven't been calm. But my son was very notorious because he was the only disabled person they took without legs, because I have his orthopedic legs; a friend has them because I couldn't have them in my house.

I already told my children there: Pepito is no longer here. I already started lighting candles for him, on Mondays. The suffocated return to the Plaza "Now it's been a long time since I've gone to the Grandmothers because it makes me very ill; I enter the Grandmothers and I start to cry, I can't stop.

The same thing happens to me in Plaza de Mayo. When I go to the plaza, I do the whole round and the whole round I am suffocated; I was never able to recover. I have some of my son's clothes there, I keep them, I have them hidden there because every time I see them it is a suffering...

I can't, I have six children and for me, it's as if that one is missing and there's no case; no child fills the void of another child, it's impossible. The disappearance of a child is terrible because if a child dies, one knows they died, one buries them, there is a little place where one can go to leave a little flower.

There was a time when I went to the cemetery and left a flower on any grave, things like that; one does very strange things when one has this problem. I think all the Mothers must go through the same thing.

A little while ago I went again to have blood drawn at the Durand Hospital; the Grandmothers asked me to. But I have abandoned the whole fight a little. It's not that I've given up; if I had any end of the ball of yarn, I would keep doing it.

The girl worries me a little because I say to myself: if she happens to appear, poor thing. The history that children like her must live must be terrible too. Some, maybe, can't accept it. –Is that the biggest fear? -Yes, that is the biggest fear.

I am very afraid that the girl, upon appearing, will say no. No, I am not anything of yours. –How do you imagine an encounter with your granddaughter might be? -I don't know, I imagine it in so many ways.

I imagine that if she has something of them, she will be happy to find her family, her identity, and I also imagine that maybe she will reject it. I also sometimes think that she will reject everything, that she will blame them, that because they were revolutionaries, she was raised somewhere else.

There are many ways to think. One says what will she be like, will she be tall, short, blonde like her mother, dark like her father, will she have their feelings, will she have good feelings, will she not.

Buscarita continues speaking, without mediation. "Before I die, I want to find the girl; I don't know how, but I will find her. It is very important that the children get DNA testing, because I think one has to know their identity.

Look at what happened to me: I was raised by a grandmother; my parents died when I was three years old and it turns out my paternal grandmother raised me. My mother's mother raised two of my siblings who were only my mother's children.

My sister was six and my brother nine. And it turns out that, because of those family conflicts that used to happen a lot in the old days, where one family didn't want the other, they separated us and I was raised by a grandmother. "I, since I was raised without parents, carried a pain inside of knowing that I didn't know my parents and I didn't know my siblings either.

My grandmother never told me that I had siblings and the years passed and my siblings were looking for me, they were looking for me everywhere and I came to live in Argentina and of course they didn't find me.

And one time they went on television in Chile and a friend of my son, the one I have, told him, told Fernando that there was a family looking for me and my son Fernando said: 'Some siblings? My mom doesn't have siblings.' "They told him they were looking for a Buscarita Roa and it had to be me.

They call the channel and they tell them yes, that indeed there was a lady and a gentleman who were looking for a lady named Buscarita Roa. There they give him the phone number of my brother who lives in the south of Chile and my son calls and introduces himself as my son and they tell him he is the nephew.

They tell him they are looking for his sister and my son was traveling the next day to Chile and arranges to meet him. My brother went to Santiago where my son was. There they met for the first time; I found out and we met for the first time five years ago.

Look at what family does sometimes. I had that joy, of having found my siblings. "I am 56 years old and I had Pepe when I was 15. That's why. If I found my siblings after so much time, how am I not going to find my granddaughter." When I go to Chile Buscarita still gets up every morning to go to work, visits her children, goes out from time to time to the movies with a friend, did gymnastics while she could pay for the classes.

She likes to knit, do crafts, and read. She says that reading distracts her a lot, that she buys a book whenever she can, and that she is also "writing something, although I have little education, so it costs me a bit." -What I want to do when I have a little more time is go to Chile, take a recorder, and go talk to people who knew my son.

And have them tell me what they saw of him when he was a child and when he did things. I would very much like to record everything and then make a book, go talk to some writer and have them do it. She cries one more time when she says it.

She recovers and continues. -If one day the girl appears so that she has it, that is my dream. I, to die in peace, want to find my granddaughter and write the book. Have someone write the book for me with everything my son did in the short life he had.

Because he disappeared at 22 years old and in that short life he did so many things. She stops again, resumes. She tells it one more time. -"At this moment in Chile, there is a place where they remember him.

Not in the little school, but they made a kind of social club where they put his name on it. Now, when I go to Chile, there are many grown young people who remember him and tell me: -'Josecito taught me to read.'" This text, written based on an interview by Paula Romero-Levit, was drafted for a book about the Grandmothers and the grandchildren that was never published, at the same time a complement to the documentary Botín de guerra*, by David Blaustein.

The interviews were conducted in 1999. Buscarita, her family, and the Grandmothers found the granddaughter, Claudia Poblete Hlaczik. She had been appropriated by a former agent of the 601 Intelligence Battalion. The encounter took place on February 10, 2000, in the court of Gabriel Cavallo, 22 years later.

Source: socompa.info, 12/10/2022

Date: 12-10-2022

Front for Dignity - José Poblete

José Liborio Poblete Roa (1955-1978) was a Chilean comrade who, while very young, lost his legs in a railway accident and decided to come to Argentina to begin his rehabilitation treatment. Once here, he began to share his injustices with other comrades with disabilities, and his militant spirit, born from the Chilean popular struggles in the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) under the government of Salvador Allende, resurged once again.

He fell in love with the Peronist struggle consciousness bubbling at that time and, in 1971, together with other comrades, founded the Peronist Disabled Front (FLP), thus recovering the dignity of this marginalized sector.

In 1974, through the National Socio-Economic Union of the Disabled (UNSEL), they promoted the most important regulation in Latin America regarding labor rights for Persons with Disabilities: Law 20.923.

The regulation proposed that people with disabilities be conceived as workers and that all private, state, or mixed companies must employ 4% of people with disabilities as labor. Pepe Poblete never abandoned his convictions and resisted the fierce civil-military dictatorship alongside other comrades, until on November 28, 1978, he was kidnapped along with his wife, Gertrudis Hlaczik, and their 8-month-old daughter.

Both he and his partner are part of the long list of the disappeared. The effort of his family, together with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, achieved the restitution of his daughter Claudia, and his case served so that in 2005, the Supreme Court declared the "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" laws unconstitutional, thus beginning the trials of memory.

Those are the reasons why we adopted your name as a banner, to carry it definitively to victory.

YOUR NAME AS A BANNER

WILL SHELTER THE DREAMS,

OF OUR FORGOTTEN ONES,

OF THE VOICELESS,

OF THOSE WHO SAY ENOUGH,

OF THOSE WHO INVITE TO CHANGE HISTORY,

SO THAT THE HOMELAND CEASES TO BE A SCORCHED EARTH.

Source: @LaPobleteFPD, 7/11/2020

Date: 07-11-2020

Argentina: Former repressor convicted for emblematic case of disappeared Chilean

A court in Argentina today sentenced former police officer Julio Simón to 25 years in prison for the 1978 disappearance of a Chilean-Argentine couple, composed of José Poblete and Gertrudis Hlaczik, and the abduction of their daughter, in a paradigmatic case of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983).

This is the first sentence by the Argentine justice system against a repressor after Parliament repealed the "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" laws in 2003. Both laws exempted more than a thousand agents of the dictatorship from responsibility, and in 2005 they were also declared null and void by the Supreme Court.

The case of the Poblete and Hlaczik couple gave rise in 2001 to the first judicial ruling that declared these norms, sanctioned in 1986 and 1987 and known as the "laws of pardon," unconstitutional.

Source: lanacion.cl, August 4, 2006

Date: 08-04-2006

Argentine repressor tried for case of disappeared Chilean

Simón, alias "el turco Julián," is being tried for the 1978 kidnapping of the disabled Chilean José Poblete, the Argentine Gertrudis Hlaczik, and the couple's eight-month-old daughter, in a case considered an example of the crimes against humanity committed by the military regime that governed this country between 1976 and 1983.

The repressor of the last Argentine military dictatorship, Julio Simón, refused to testify today in an oral and public trial for the disappearance of a couple formed by a Chilean and an Argentine and the abduction of their daughter.

Simón, alias "el turco Julián," is being tried for the 1978 kidnapping of the disabled Chilean José Poblete, the Argentine Gertrudis Hlaczik, and the couple's eight-month-old daughter, in a case considered an example of the crimes against humanity committed by the military regime that governed this country between 1976 and 1983.

This is the second process to reach trial after Parliament annulled the "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" laws in 2003, which had exempted more than a thousand repressors of the dictatorship from responsibilities.

On the first day of the process, a video of an Argentine television program was shown in which the former police officer confessed that he personally applied torture through "electric shock" and asserted that the "general criterion" of the dictatorship was to "kill everyone." In that footage, Simón also admitted to having acted in three clandestine detention centers, although he asserted that in none of them did he carry out "transfers," as the repressors called the murder of people who were deprived of their liberty.

The trial is being carried out by the Federal Oral Tribunal 5, and more than 30 witnesses must appear at the hearings. The Poblete-Hlaczik couple's case is one of those considered a paradigm of the dictatorship's crimes and gave rise in 2001 to the first judicial ruling that declared the "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" laws unconstitutional.

Both norms, which were called "laws of pardon," were repealed in 2003 by Parliament, and last year the Supreme Court of Justice ratified their nullity. José Poblete, a 23-year-old Chilean who had lost his legs after being hit by a train in Santiago in the early 70s, arrived in Buenos Aires in search of his rehabilitation and contributed to the creation of the Peronist Disabled Front.

As a member of that group, he met his wife, another Peronist militant and psychology student, two years younger than him. The couple was kidnapped on November 28, 1978, and the same fate befell their eight-month-old daughter.

They were all taken to "El Olimpo," one of the 200 clandestine prisons that the dictatorship set up in the country, where they were tortured. Their daughter was handed over to a couple sympathetic to the dictatorship, but the young woman, who is 28 years old, was found in March 2000 by the humanitarian association Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and was thus able to reunite with her biological family.

Poblete and Hlaczik are part of the list of the disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship, which includes 18,000 people according to official data, although human rights organizations raise the figure to 30,000.

Last week, the first trial against a repressor after the annulment of the so-called "laws of pardon" began on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It is the former police officer Miguel Etchecolatz, former director of Investigations of the Buenos Aires police during the military regime, who is being tried for the alleged kidnapping, application of torture, and murder of six disappeared persons.

Source: elmostrador.cl, June 28, 2006

Date: 06-28-2006

The atrocious kidnapping of the Poblete family, the basis for the ruling that annuls the «laws of pardon»

An empty wheelchair, a disappeared mother, a kidnapped baby, a daughter who discovers her identity after 22 years... these are the ingredients of this drama. BUENOS AIRES. They do not know. They cannot know.

They are disappeared. But, because of them, the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice threw into the trash bin the two laws that left hundreds of torturers and murderers free: the Full Stop Law and the Due Obedience Law.

They are, or were, the Pobletes: José, Gertrudis, and their daughter Claudia, the only survivor. The tragic story of José begins to be written in 1971. At 16 years old, at the Estación Central in Santiago, in his native Chile, a train struck him down like a leaf.

His legs, separated from his torso, were scattered across the rails. The following year, he traveled to Buenos Aires to rehabilitate an amputated body that had to learn how to move. At the Instituto del Lisiado, he founded, with other patients, the Frente de Lisiados Peronistas, and shortly after, through a fellow member, he met Gertrudis, "Trudy." On March 25, 1978, at the height of the dictatorship, Claudia was born.

They barely enjoyed the baby for eight months, the time the military needed to get their hands on them. Terror had taken hold of Argentina, and the entire family was taken to one of the emblematic centers of torture with the sarcastic name of El Olimpo.

In this "paradise" of torments, they called José, due to his physical condition, "el cortito" (the short one). They did it, "before, during, and after applying the picana" (electric shocks) or subjecting him to any martyrdom, according to those who were able to tell the tale.

One day, his wheelchair, empty, appeared at the street door, next to the gate. José never returned. Nor was Gertrudis seen again. The girl was with them for only a short time. Lieutenant Colonel Ceferino Landa and his wife, Mercedes Moreira, were in a hurry to be parents.

She had been with them for five years when her uncle Fernando, with the help of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, discovered her trail after more than two decades. Today she is 27 years old, a systems engineer, blonde, and 1.70 meters tall.

Without wanting to go into details about the people who "adopted" her and using her real name, Claudia Victoria Poblete, she told the newspaper Página 12: "Everyone is responsible for their actions; I feel more complete, calmer, now I am not part of a lie." Those who were most cruel at El Olimpo were two police officers, "El Turco" Julián and Juan Antonio del Cerro, alias "Colores." With impunity, the former boasted on television about his expertise in torture with fists, cables, and bags, among other tools.

The law that they had been turning their backs on will be applied to both, as her uncle Fernando declared: "It is not revenge, it is justice."

Source: abc.es 10/6/2005

Date: 06-10-2005

Argentines who stole daughter from Chileans refuse to testify

The first hearing of the oral trial for the theft during the Argentine military government (1976/1983) of the 8-month-old baby Claudia Victoria Poblete, daughter of a Chilean father, went into recess this Thursday after the couple accused of the appropriation refused to testify before the Tribunal, exercising their constitutional rights, an AFP journalist verified at the Tribunals.

Military officer Ceferino Landa and his wife Mercedes Beatriz Moreira, both detained within the framework of this case, are being tried starting today for their responsibility in the abduction and retention of the now young woman, who lived with them for more than 20 years ignoring her true origin and identity.

Landa, a retired lieutenant colonel who is serving prison time at the Campo de Mayo military garrison after federal judge Gabriel Cavallo processed him with preventive detention, opted for his constitutional right and refused to testify.

Only the testimony he gave before the investigating judge was read. His wife, who is under house arrest due to being 71 years old, remained throughout the debate wearing dark black glasses. She also refused to answer the judges' questions.

Previously, the Tribunal read the request for elevation to trial made by prosecutor Luis Comparatore, where the facts for which the couple will be judged in a debate estimated to last more than a month are detailed.

The girl's father, José Liborio Poblete Roa, was born on January 6, 1955, in Santiago, Chile, and suffered the amputation of both legs in 1971, the victim of a train accident. A year later, he came to Argentina for rehabilitation and joined the Frente de Lisiados Peronistas, according to a statement distributed today by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.

According to the same source, Claudia Victoria was born on March 25, 1978, at the Hospital de Clínicas in the capital. According to the representative of the public ministry, "it is hardly credible that Landa was unaware of the mechanisms of the military dictatorship," as he himself declared, "when he appears mentioned in the archive of repressors of the CONADEP" (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, created by the government of Raúl Alfonsín, which issued the book "Nunca más," used in the 80s by judges to condemn the commanders of the de facto regime).

Her mother, also disappeared, was Marta Gertrudis Hlaczik. Both were kidnapped and forcibly disappeared on November 28, 1978, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Once. The Justice system charges the appropriating parents with "the retention, concealment, and suppression of identity" of the young woman and the use of three "ideologically false public instruments," such as "the child's birth certificate, her birth record, and her DNI" (National Identity Document).

The statement from the Abuelas asserted that mother and daughter were seen by survivors at the clandestine detention center of El Olimpo, in the Floresta neighborhood. It was highlighted that Marta "was paraded naked, dragged by her hair while they punished her." It adds that the "torturers" took Poblete out of his wheelchair and mocked him, calling him "Cortito." Landa explained during the instruction stage that Claudia Victoria came into his arms through the intervention of military doctor—now deceased—Julio Cesar Cáceres Monié, who signed a false birth certificate, arguing that the girl had been abandoned. The case was initiated by a complaint from the Abuelas, who verified through a "histocompatibility" study that the young woman who had been registered as Mercedes Beatriz Landa was, in reality, Claudia Victoria Poblete. It was also adopted as "categorical" evidence that the appropriating mother was infertile and was 49 years old when she supposedly gave birth to her daughter. Claudia Victoria was summoned to testify for next Friday the 22nd; although she has integrated into her biological family and has adopted a new identity document with the surname of her disappeared parents, she still lives with her appropriating mother.

Source: emol.cl June 15, 2001

Date: 06-15-2001

The Poblete case reaches the Tribunals

A retired Army officer and his wife refused to testify yesterday before a tribunal, on the first day of the trial to which they are being subjected for the appropriation of Claudia Victoria Poblete, daughter of a couple disappeared during the last military dictatorship.

In the first oral and public trial of a former Army officer for the abduction of babies of disappeared persons, Lieutenant Colonel (R) Ceferino Landa and his wife, Mercedes Beatriz Moreira, occupied the defendants' bench before Federal Oral Criminal Tribunal number 5, but exercised their right not to testify.

Both are accused of the retention, concealment, and falsification of the documents of the Poblete girl (who is now 23 years old). The person who did provide testimony before judges Guillermo Madueño, Luis De Renzi, and Guillermo Gordo was the director of the National Genetic Data Bank, Ana María Di Lonardo.

The scientist asserted that the DNA tests established "a total identity in the lineage, an extraordinary result of establishing the link" between the young Poblete and her kidnapped and disappeared parents, José Liborio Poblete Roa and Marta Gertrudis Hlaczik.

The trial continues The trial will continue today, at 9:00 AM, at the Retiro tribunals, where the girl's paternal grandmother, Buscarita Roa, will testify. The couple is accused of illegally raising Claudia Victoria Poblete Hlaczik under the false name of Mercedes Beatriz Landa.

In 1978, the girl—only eight months old—was kidnapped at the clandestine detention center El Olimpo along with her parents, José Poblete—a double amputee—and Gertrudis Hlaczik, who were kidnapped on November 28, 1978, and remain disappeared today.

Source: lanacion.com.ar, 6/15/2001

Date: 06-15-2001

The case of Claudia Victoria Poblete: Raised by her parents' repressors

Kidnapped with her parents in 1978, she was raised by a lieutenant colonel and intelligence agent. The appropriators are detained and processed. And she, only at 22 years old, is getting to know her real family.

Federal judge Gabriel Cavallo and secretary Hernán Folgueiro tried not to lose their composure in front of the defendant. "Military doctor Julio César Cáceres Monié offered to give me a baby who had been abandoned," the lieutenant colonel stated.

And he added: "In those days, many abandoned babies appeared." The accused, a former intelligence agent of Battalion 601, named Landa, had just recognized that the daughter he had raised was falsely registered as his own.

Genetic analyses showed that, in reality, it was Claudia Victoria Poblete, who was 8 months old when she was kidnapped along with her mother and taken to the clandestine center El Olimpo. On November 28, 1978, a group of men in Buenos Aires provincial police uniforms kidnapped Gertrudis María Hlaczik and her little Claudia Victoria Poblete from their home in the town of Guernica.

The girl's father, the Chilean José Liborio Poblete, disappeared the same day. The month after the kidnapping, Gertrudis communicated by telephone with her mother and asked if they had handed over Claudia Victoria.

The woman asked if she was okay and if they were forcing her to say anything. "Watch your words, your daughter is better off than the rest of her companions. We are not in Russia here," a male voice answered before interrupting the communication.

Testimonies from survivors of El Olimpo allowed for the establishment that José, Gertrudis, and Claudia Victoria were taken to that clandestine detention center. The baby was seen for only two days, then she was removed with a destination that was until recently uncertain.

The Poblete case brings back to the stage one of the terrible facets of state terrorism. José, a Chilean lathe technician, had lost his legs in a car accident seven years before his disappearance. He met Gertrudis at the Rehabilitation Institute located in the Belgrano neighborhood.

In 1971, José had formed, along with other companions from the medical center, the Frente de Lisiados Peronistas (FLP), which came to be composed of more than two hundred people who attended marches with their crutches, wheelchairs, and guide dogs.

The group dissolved in mid-1974. José and Gertrudis were later part of the Unión Nacional Socio Económica del Lisiado (Unsel) and of Cristianos para la Liberación. Both groups fought for the rights of the disabled.

The Automotores division of the Federal Police, located on the large lot at the corner of Ramón Falcón and Olivera, in Floresta, became El Olimpo on August 16, 1978, the date on which many prisoners were transferred there from El Banco, another prison camp.

Judge Cavallo began investigating the Poblete case a little over a year ago, following a complaint made by the representative of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo Association, Alcira Ríos. The lawyer reported that retired military officer Ceferino Landa and his wife—who for health reasons could not have children—had in their possession a young woman fraudulently registered as their daughter, who could be Claudia Victoria Poblete.

She also noted that military doctor Julio César Cáceres Monié—now deceased—appeared signing the false birth certificate. The investigation established that the girl, furthermore, had been registered six months after the day she was supposedly born.

In the complaint, the Abuelas pointed out that Landa was identified as a commander of military operations during the military dictatorship. When the military officer—who served as an intelligence agent—was called to testify, he recognized that the 22-year-old woman he had registered as his own was not his.

He said that toward the end of November or the beginning of December 1978, military doctor Cáceres Monié offered to give him a baby who had been abandoned. Landa stated that he was unaware of the minor's origin and that he never told the truth to the young woman, out of "selfishness." The lieutenant colonel asserted that he was not officially aware of the crimes committed by the military during the last dictatorship.

His wife refused to testify. Fifteen days ago, and after the National Genetic Data Bank scientifically corroborated the link between the young woman and the Poblete and Hlaczik families, the magistrate and his secretary—advised by a psychoanalyst—explained part of her history to Claudia Victoria Poblete and returned her true identity to her.

They also informed her that, at that moment, her appropriators were being detained. In the testimony of two former detainees of El Olimpo, it is recorded that in one of the "transfers" of 1979, José Poblete was taken out of the place in his wheelchair.

Two days later, the chair was lying in a corner of the camp's parking lot. Gertrudis Hlaczik was last seen on January 28, 1979. Both are disappeared, as was their daughter. "The abduction of the minor—and of her parents—arises from the historical context investigated here, of which the accused were not at all unaware, especially in the case of Landa, who served as an active military officer in the position of Army lieutenant in the year 1978, a profession from which he could not be unaware of the illicit methods employed to combat subversion and all forms of opposition to the illegitimate government that usurped power between the years 1976 and 1983," the judge asserted in his ruling.

BASIS OF THE PROCEEDING

Judge Gabriel Cavallo based the prosecution of the Landa couple by citing the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

On that basis, he classified both the appropriation of minors and the suppression of identity, as well as the disappearance of persons, as a "permanent crime" and a "crime against humanity." "All States respectful of international human rights law must commit to preventing and prosecuting their authors, in order to comply with their international commitments in pursuit of the general objectives of the international community.

It is for this reason that, by virtue of the rule of the law of nations incorporated into our constitution, international human rights law finds a place in our law, in such a way that every judicial decision must necessarily conform to the guidelines set by international norms, jurisprudence, and doctrine," the magistrate stated.

THE REPRESSORS OF EL OLIMPO

The Poblete case could be the first step toward conducting an investigation into what happened at El Olimpo, a camp that depended on the First Army Corps in charge of Carlos Guillermo Suárez Mason. Several well-known figures, such as El Turco Julián, Colores, and even commissioner Roberto Antonio Rosa—linked to the scandal of federal judge Norberto Oyarbide—could be compromised.

These are some of the members of the task forces: Juan Antonio del Cerro, alias "Colores": was part of the groups at El Olimpo, Club Atlético, and El Banco. His name became known in 1996 when he vindicated torture on a television program.

There he said about the children: "we couldn't keep them in the regiment and we gave them to military families for a while. Later, like when someone gives you a dog, the families would get attached." According to the archives of the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), he participated personally in the kidnapping of Gertrudis Hlaczik and Claudia Victoria Poblete.

He was benefited by the Due Obedience Law. Julio Simón, alias "Turco Julián": non-commissioned officer of the Federal Police. Also a repressor at Club Atlético, El Banco, and El Olimpo. Like Colores, he recounted his experience in front of television cameras.

Former detainees described him as deeply anti-Semitic. He is free due to the Due Obedience Law. Ricardo Scifo Módica, alias "Alacrán": principal of the Federal Police. He operated in the same camps as the previous ones.

He was also in the news during democracy. In his case, it was because former detainees recognized him in 1996 when he was at the head of the Victim Assistance Center of the Federal Police, a position he had held since 1991.

Enrique Carlos Ferro, alias "El Francés": Army colonel. He was the chief of El Banco, El Olimpo, and Club Atlético. As such, he is responsible for all the crimes that were committed in those clandestine centers, and for the fate of the detainees.

He was being prosecuted for 111 crimes when the Due Obedience Law reached him. Juan Carlos Avena, alias "Capitán Centeno" and "Caballo": member of the Federal Penitentiary Service. He acted at El Olimpo, El Vesubio, El Banco, and Club Atlético.

Pointed out as a participant in the kidnapping of Lucila Rébora, who was pregnant when she was kidnapped. He benefited from the Full Stop Law. In 1988, he was the director of the Esquel prison. Roberto Antonio Rosa, alias "Clavel": commissioner of the Federal Police.

He was recognized as a kidnapper at El Club Atlético, El Banco, El Olimpo, and Brigada Güemes when the scandal of federal judge Norberto Oyarbide put him on the front pages of the newspapers. Rosa was pointed out as a partner of the judge and of the brothels he protected.

Source: elsiglo.cl, March 16, 2000

Date: 03-16-2000

The flags of José Liborio Poblete: Street vending for the revolution

A group of disabled militants generated resources to survive during the '78 World Cup with the street sale of Argentine flags. On the morning of Friday, June 2, Fernando Navarro arrived at the shop that "Turco" Ibrahim had on Pasteur Street, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Once, with a clear idea of what they needed: Argentine flags.

That afternoon, the national team would debut in the Soccer World Cup that had just begun to be played in the country, against Hungary. "Little flags, Turco, don't you have any around there? There must be," Fernando asked him.

Neither he nor the seller, nor his brother Pepe, nor the rest of the disabled people who made up the revolutionary group Cristianos para la Liberación with them, imagined that morning that the idea would be a "big deal." Fernando is the brother of José Liborio Poblete Roa. "Pepe," "Cortito," "Martín," as they called José depending on the setting in which he interacted, arrived in Argentina in the first half of the 70s.

He came from Santiago de Chile, where he had suffered a train accident that had left him without legs. Some historical records say he traveled to Buenos Aires to rehabilitate from his disability. But his mother, the Abuela de Plaza de Mayo Buscarita Roa, asserts that José, who in his native land was part of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), left when political militancy began to be persecuted in Chile, after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

José immediately made Argentine friends. With several young disabled people he met at the Bajo Belgrano Rehabilitation Institute (Claudia Grumberg, Hugo Avendaño, Alejandro Alonso, Norberto Scarpa, Mónica Brull, Gertrudis Hlaczik), he founded the Frente de Lisiados Peronistas, an organization that came to concentrate more than 200 political militants during the 70s, with and without disabilities.

The persecution deployed by the Triple A forced them to disintegrate the front, but the original group of companions continued to be united, working and militating. Shortly after, they converged in the group Cristianos para la Liberación.

Fernando joined them after crossing the Andes Mountains with the rest of José's brothers, Buscarita, and her husband. The last civil-military dictatorship found them combining militancy with strategies for daily survival. "The situation was difficult from a personal and political standpoint," Fernando relates.

The kidnapping of Claudia Grumberg, on October 12, 1976, forced the group members to move and self-impose strict security measures so as not to fall into the clutches of the repressors. Fernando went to live in Florencio Varela with Hugo Avendaño.

José and Gertrudis, who were already a couple, went to Buscarita's house in Guernica. "Companions were falling every day, the economic issue was becoming very difficult," Fernando adds. Street vending was an outlet that helped them sustain themselves.

Fernando says: "With José, we began to set up a kind of cooperative with the companions to be able to survive. The sale was quite easy because people bought from the disabled companions. We had blind companions, in wheelchairs, but with an enormous spirit of struggle." By 1978, the task was already organized.

They used to buy merchandise from the Turco that they then resold on buses and trains or on the street. June was all about the World Cup. "Nothing else was talked about." Fernando went to see his reseller with an idea: —Turco, do you have little Argentine flags? —Chilean, why do you want them if they aren't going to make it past the first round?— he joked, but he headed to the back of the shop and began to rummage through bags of combs and plastic jugs, school and sewing kits, until he found a bag about to break with a handful of flags.

Fernando and his brother Víctor "Lolo" Navarro grabbed them and began to offer them just a few blocks from the Turco's shop, shouting "Argentina, let's go Argentina!" They sold them all in half an hour.

Happy, they went to watch the match that the local team won 2 to 0. The next morning they met with Pepe at the Constitución train station to think about how to exploit that hot cake they had discovered the day before. "Pepe did everything as social organization," the brother defines.

Buscarita remembers him telling his companions that even if they lacked legs or were blind, they had to work, that they could not settle for charity. That same day, the brothers went to see the Turco, who promised to get more flags.

Poblete, for his part, organized everything so that companions from Cristianos para la Liberación would also manufacture the blue and white fabrics. They repeated the success in every Argentina match. The selling hands grew with the organization.

There were groups of Cristianos para la Liberación selling at every important point in the city. Fernando and Lolo, Hugo, Pepe, and "Trudi" offered them at the five corners—of the streets Honorio Pueyrredón, San Martín, Angel Gallardo, Díaz Vélez, and Gaona—that converge where the monument to the Cid Campeador is, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Caballito.

Sometimes, the couple brought their little baby Claudia Victoria with them, whom their militant companions called "Mundialito." The nickname had been given to her by Pepe's stepfather for having been born in March, very close to the World Cup.

The rest of the days, the girl was left in the care of her grandmother Buscarita, who later searched for her intensely. The fact is that Claudia Victoria Poblete Hlaczik was kidnapped with her parents in November '78 and taken with them to the former clandestine center known as El Olimpo.

After a few days, she became one of the 400 babies appropriated during the dictatorship. She was raised as their own daughter by the member of the Army Intelligence structure Ceferino Landa and his wife, Mercedes Beatriz Moreira.

Thanks to the struggle of Buscarita and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, she recovered her identity in the year 2000. People were happy with Argentina's performance in the championship and the Cristianos para la Liberación were too.

Even though the dictatorship was "blowing in their heads all the time," with news of one companion kidnapped here and another fallen there, how the 1978 World Cup was experienced served them to feel "that which is felt when the people are in the street, that joy... it was a relaxation, there was a lot of joy," Fernando recognizes.

The sale of flags allowed them not only to generate resources for the subsistence of the companions but also to finance militancy activities. They were able to print flyers with revolutionary slogans, they bought a car, and they helped with the rent of houses for those who needed it in the organization. "Money was not a concern for us, but rather it was at the service of the struggle," Fernando points out.

The group financed itself with the resources generated by the sales of the World Cup flags until November 1978, when Pepe, Trudi, and Claudia Victoria were kidnapped.

Source: papelitos.com.ar no date

Exclusive: HOW CLAUDIA VICTORIA POBLETE RECOVERED HER IDENTITY: The return from Olimpo

Kidnapped with her parents in 1978, she was raised by a lieutenant colonel and intelligence agent. The appropriators are detained and processed. And she, getting to know her real family. Federal judge Gabriel Cavallo and secretary Hernán Folgueiro tried not to lose their composure in front of the defendant. "Military doctor Julio César Cáceres Monié offered to give me a baby who had been abandoned," the lieutenant colonel stated.

And he added: "In those days, many abandoned babies appeared." The accused, a former intelligence agent of Battalion 601 named Landa, had just recognized that the daughter he had raised was falsely registered as his own.

Genetic analyses showed that, in reality, it was Claudia Victoria Poblete, who was eight months old when she was kidnapped along with her mother and taken to the clandestine center El Olimpo. The Landa couple is arrested and processed.

On November 28, 1978, a group of men in Buenos Aires provincial police uniforms kidnapped Gertrudis María Hlaczik and her baby Claudia Victoria Poblete from their home in the town of Guernica. The girl's father, José Liborio Poblete, disappeared the same day.

The month after the kidnapping, Gertrudis communicated by telephone with her mother and asked if they had handed over Claudia Victoria. The woman asked if she was okay and if they were forcing her to say anything. "Watch your words, your daughter is better off than the rest of her companions.

We are not in Russia here," a male voice answered before interrupting the communication. Testimonies from survivors of El Olimpo allowed for the establishment that José, Gertrudis, and Claudia Victoria were taken to that clandestine detention center.

The baby was seen for only two days, then she was removed with a destination that was until recently uncertain. The Poblete case brings back to the stage one of the terrible facets of state terrorism. José, a Chilean lathe technician, had lost his legs in a car accident seven years before his disappearance.

He met Gertrudis at the Rehabilitation Institute located in the Belgrano neighborhood. In 1971, José had formed, along with other companions from the medical center, the Frente de Lisiados Peronistas (FLP).

Just as Martín Caparrós writes in La Guerra Moderna, the FLP came to be composed of more than two hundred people who attended marches with their crutches, wheelchairs, and guide dogs. The group dissolved in mid-1974.

José and Gertrudis were later part of the Unión Nacional SocioEconómica del Lisiado (Unsel) and of Cristianos para la Liberación; both groups fought for the rights of the disabled. The Automotores division of the Federal Police, located on the large lot at the corner of Ramón Falcón and Olivera, in Floresta, became El Olimpo on August 16, 1978, the date on which many prisoners were transferred there from El Banco, another prison camp.

El Olimpo operated as a clandestine center during 1978 and 1979. Within the division of the country made by the military of the last dictatorship, it belonged to Zone 1, Subzone Capital Federal, and Area 5.

At El Olimpo, baptized as such because it was considered "the place of the gods," the repressors were divided into three task forces in which members of the Army, the Federal Police, and the Penitentiary Service coexisted.

That cohabitation meant that many times fierce fights broke out over the "spoils of war" that they took from the kidnapping operations. The largest room in the place was used to repair household items and electronics stolen in the raids. "El Turco Julián"—police sergeant Julio Simón—, "Colores"—Juan Antonio del Cerro—, "Capitán Centeno"—Juan Carlos Avena, member of the Penitentiary Service—, and "El Francés"—Federal Police commissioner Juan Carlos Lapoyoule—are some of the repressors who passed through El Olimpo.

Colonel Enrique Carlos Ferro, alias "El Francés," was pointed out as the chief of the centers El Banco, El Olimpo, and Club Atlético, different dependencies that operated with the same men (see sidebar).

According to testimonies of former detainees that are on record in the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Conadep), Gertrudis Hlaczik and José Poblete were terribly tortured. The repressors took José's wheelchair away and mocked him, calling him "Cortito" due to his lack of legs.

They paraded Gertrudis naked, dragging her by her hair while they punished her. Other disabled companions of José and Gertrudis, such as Gilberto Renguel Ponce and Mónica Brull de Guillén, also passed through El Olimpo (see sidebar).

The case Judge Cavallo began investigating the Poblete case a little over a year ago, following a complaint made by the representative of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo Association, Alcira Ríos. The lawyer reported that retired military officer Landa and his wife—who for health reasons could not have children—had in their possession a young woman fraudulently registered as their daughter, who could be Claudia Victoria Poblete.

She also noted that military doctor Julio César Cáceres Monié—now deceased—appeared signing the false birth certificate. The investigation established that the girl, furthermore, had been registered six months after the day she was supposedly born.

In the complaint, the Abuelas pointed out that Landa was identified as a commander of military operations during the last military dictatorship. When the military officer—who served as an intelligence agent—was called to testify, he recognized that the 22-year-old woman he had registered as his own was not his.

He said that toward the end of November or the beginning of December 1978, military doctor Cáceres Monié offered to give him a baby who had been abandoned. Landa stated that he was unaware of the minor's origin and that he never told the truth to the young woman out of "selfishness." The lieutenant colonel asserted that he was not officially aware of the crimes committed by the military during the last dictatorship.

His wife refused to testify. Fifteen days ago, and after the National Genetic Data Bank scientifically corroborated the link between the young woman and the Poblete and Hlaczik families, the magistrate and his secretary—advised by a psychoanalyst—explained part of her history to Claudia Victoria Poblete and returned her true identity to her.

They also informed her that, at that moment, her appropriators were being detained. Landa and his wife are imprisoned in the Gendarmerie division of Campo de Mayo. Claudia Victoria is now trying to establish a link with her true relatives.

On Friday, Cavallo signed the prosecution and preventive detention of the military officer and his wife. In the testimony of two former detainees of El Olimpo published by Amnesty International, it is recorded that in one of the "transfers" of 1979, José Poblete was taken out of the place in his wheelchair.

Two days later, the chair was lying in a corner of the camp's parking lot. Gertrudis Hlaczik was last seen on January 28, 1979. Both are disappeared. As was their daughter. "The abduction of the minor—and of her parents—arises from the historical context investigated here, of which the accused were not at all unaware, especially in the case of Landa, who served as an active military officer in the position of Army lieutenant in the year 1978, a profession from which he could not be unaware of the illicit methods employed to combat subversion and all forms of opposition to the illegitimate government that usurped power between the years 1976 and 1983," the judge asserted in his ruling.

Source: paguina12.com.ar no date