2023-06-12 08:12:02
BUENOS AIRES (AP) — As soon as she entered the white block building where the Argentine military dictatorship held her for a month, Julieta González began to have memories, like flashbacks in a movie.
I saw blood stains on the mattresses. She heard screaming while she was inside her cell. She remembered being forced to wash the blood she had left on the cars. Endless sexual abuse.
Transgender women like González often pretended to be asleep when a guard appeared in the middle of the night, she recalled.
“I was always the one paying the price,” recalls González, 65, as she speaks to Associated Press reporters who accompanied her during a visit to the cell where she was once held. “I was younger,” she adds.
González and four other transgender women testified in April, during a trial once morest former security agents on charges of crimes once morest humanity, regarding the repression they suffered, such as rape and torture.
His testimony is part of what lawyers and human rights activists say is a long-awaited attempt by Argentina to acknowledge systematic human rights violations committed once morest the transgender community under the country’s military regime between 1976 and 1983.
Several members of the community participated last month in a demonstration in support of a bill being debated by a congressional committee that seeks to grant a lifetime pension to trans people over 40 years of age.
Patricia Alexandra Rivas, 56, told the rally that she was raped and tortured while illegally detained for five days in 1981, when she was just 14 years old.
The people who did the dirty work during the dictatorship were particularly brutal towards members of the transgender community, which continued to suffer even following the return of democracy in 1983. However, things have been changing in Argentina: more than a decade ago , the country passed a gender milestone: an identity law that allowed people to change their gender on documents without permission. More recently, Congress passed a law reserving 1% of public sector jobs for transgender people.
They “were brought to this place, they were tortured, they were raped, they were subjected to slave labor, they were deprived of their freedom and then they were released,” declares assistant prosecutor Ana Oberlin as she stands in front of a set of cells in the so-called Banfield Pit, a former suburban police station that was one of hundreds of illegal detention and torture centers in the capital.
Much of Latin America had military rule in the 1970s and 1980s. According to human rights organizations, some 30,000 people were illegally detained in Argentina and disappeared without trace. Until very recently, little was said regarding how the trans community suffered under military governments.
Part of the reason recognition has been so long in coming is because violence once morest members of the trans community “is absolutely naturalized,” says Marlene Wayar, 53, a transgender activist and author who gave expert testimony during the trial. .
This dynamic has been developed to a large extent in the 296 trials for crimes once morest humanity from the dictatorship era that have been carried out since 2006, following the repeal of the amnesty laws. In the trials, 1,115 people have been sentenced, according to the Public Ministry.
It is only recently that Argentina has begun to debate gender roles and sexual mores under the dictatorship, Oberlin adds, including a “family model that indicated the place that men and women have to have.”
Oberlin played a key role in including testimony from the five transgender women who were detained at the Banfield Pit as part of a trial that began in 2020, in which 12 officers face charges of crimes once morest humanity for acts that occurred in three clandestine prisons, with some 700 victims.
Violence at the hands of the security forces was something González was used to when the police arrested her and other trans women in 1977 or 1978—she doesn’t remember the exact date—while they were working as prostitutes. They ended up in the Banfield Well.
“They lift us up and I hadn’t wanted to get in the truck. Then, with a rifle like that, he hits me on the back and grabs me by the hair (saying) ‘What? Aren’t you going up?’” recalls González.
She and her friends were locked in a cell where they often heard people they mightn’t see screaming in pain.
One night they heard a girl scream several times and then a baby crying was heard, González recounts.
“All my life I kept thinking” regarding that baby, she says.
Security agents often stole babies born to detained pregnant women, who then disappeared.
González and her cellmates were forced to do various types of work, such as cooking and cleaning cars. “Many of them had blood inside,” González testified in April.
“They also sexually abused us,” González testified during the trial. She frequently described cases in which she was raped.
“Could they deny that?” Oberlin asked González.
“No, no,” González replied with a shrug. “It was, I don’t know, at that time it was normal.”
Once, a group of soldiers picked her up and gang-raped her.
“When those things happen, did you see? What do I know? I think regarding other things, ”she recalls in his former cell.
Although trans women—who largely had to resort to prostitution to earn a living—were abused by the security forces, things got worse for them during the dictatorship, which promoted a traditional conception of the family.
“In addition to the rapes and torture” they were subjected to a “particular cruelty, precisely because of their gender identities,” says Oberlin.
The sentences in the case, which are expected by the end of the year, “are going to be very important,” Oberlin stresses, because trans women were taken to illegal detention centers “all over the country” and might open the door for others to testify.
For his part, González admits that he “never” thought he was going to testify in court. For a long time he thought that what he had experienced in the Banfield Well “is not important.”
However, now he knows that “it is important,” adds González.
“Today that we can talk… be heard, that we were all always so quiet”, we have to do it, she affirms.
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Associated Press writer Víctor R. Caivano contributed to this report.
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