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“The company was an accomplice in the disaster they made,” said the son of a worker who was disappeared during the last dictatorship in Pozo de Quilmes, one of the clandestine centers of “Circuito Camps,” referring to the Peugeot car company. For this reason, the Federal Oral Court 1 of La Plata judges the former Minister of the Buenos Aires Government of the dictatorship Jaime Smart, the former Director of Investigations of the Provincial Police, Miguel Etchecolatz, and 15 other repressors accused of crimes once morest humanity once morest almost 500 victims who were also held captive in the Pozo de Banfield and El Infierno, in Lanús.
“My father worked in the Peugeot stamping sector, in electrical maintenance. He was in that place for eleven years”, Sergio Maly reminded Alberto Felipe Maly, who was kidnapped in September 1977 from his home in La Plata and was held captive in the Pozo de Quilmes, the Valentín Alsina police station and, now available to the PEN, in Unit 9 of La Plata, from where he regained his freedom in 1979 to go into exile.
Sergio recalled that Peugeot workers went on strike and “the military took over the factory.” “The women and the workers lay down on the ground to avoid the advance of the tanks,” she detailed, noting that her father and eleven other workers were designated by their companions to speak with the uniformed men and managed to get them to leave the premises of the business. “The workers did not call the military to repress a strike, it was the bosses. All those who were in that commission were taken and several are still missing, ”she remarked.
Maly was doing military service in Campo de Mayo when, on September 15, 1977, “the house was taken over by a group of workers, who surrounded the block and came to look for dad”, then 44 years old. “He arrived on the 16th at half past six in the morning and was approached in the little car, a white Renault 6, by all these people, all in the presence of my mother and my seven-year-old brother, who was the one who received the gang or these gentlemen, at the point of a machine gun to the head,” he said, adding that “he still has psychological consequences of everything he experienced.”
“They took him from home and brought him back with clear evidence of torture, cigarette burns, prods, poor old man,” he added. He recalled that during a stage in which the factory was stopped “he had brought in some boys” among whom there was “a Montonero activist.” His father told him that “when they took him to torture, next to the torture chamber, in the corridor, there was a stretcher with a shot corpse and when he looked it was this man.” The repressors took him back to his house but they settled there waiting for the call of the murdered Montonero’s wife. “They ordered her to tell her when she called that Eduardo left a package for her, to come get it. My dad, with all the people in here, agreed. The woman called and came but when she reached the village she realized the operation and automatically took a cyanide pill. They tried to revive her, they put a hose with water on her but she died there, ”she recalled.
Maly said that they took his father away once more and “it seems unbelievable but on the block it seemed that they had dropped a neutron bomb, nobody was walking. Yes she saw a couple of cars, Falcon, Torino”. When he left Franco and found out what had happened, “the first thing I did was call the barracks, I was doing military service in Campo de Mayo, in the General Lemos combat support service,” she recalled. Then he himself was taken to Campo de Mayo, from September to December 1977.
After recounting the efforts of the family to locate Maly, the witness explained that following a year in captivity his father was released. “He told us that he was in the Pozo de Quilmes, that he was tortured. He was skinny, broken. They fed him garbage and he said that sometimes they took them out of the cells, they made them line up and those they named made them step forward and take them away, ”he specified. He learned that “they took them to a small plane and threw them into the river,” he said.
“One day my grandfather came with a Clarín newspaper that published a list of people made available to PEN, including my father, who was with us at home. The next day the task force returned to look for him, (they said) that he had to go to the Valentín Alsina police station to sign some papers. My mom accompanied him. From there they took him to unit 9. There he spent another year. He left in October 1979 and we went into exile,” he recounted. Maly assured at the end of his statement that he “did not come to testify out of hatred or revenge, but out of justice.” “The best revenge, if you will, is that they did not manage to destroy us as a family, we kept the ties, the love, the family,” he remarked emphatically.
The court made up of Walter Venditti, Esteban Rodríguez Eggers and Ricardo Baslico judges Smart, Etchecolatz, the former police doctor Jorge Antonio Berges and Federico Minicucci, Carlos Maria Romero Pavón, Roberto Balmaceda and Jorge Di Pasquale. Also to Guillermo Domínguez Matheu, Ricardo Fernández, Carlos Fontana, Emilio Herrero Anzorena, Carlos Hidalgo Garzón, Antonio Simón, Enrique Barré, Eduardo Samuel de Lío and Alberto Condiotti. For the crimes once morest humanity committed in the center known as El Infierno, Etchecolatz, Berges and Smart and former police officer Miguel Ángel Ferreyro are accused.
