Author: Leila Guerriero.
In the late 1960s, at the age of thirteen, Argentine Silvia Labayru was a shy teenager, a reader, an animal lover, a John F. Kennedy enthusiast, the daughter of a military family that included her father, a member of the Air Force and a civilian pilot. At that age she entered the Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires, a prestigious public institution, where she came into contact with leftist student groups and became a fierce militant. In March 1976, a coup d’état took place in Argentina, ushering in a military dictatorship. At the time, Labayru was five months pregnant and in her twenties, she was a member of the intelligence sector of the Montoneros organisation, an armed group of Peronist extraction. On 29 December 1976, she was kidnapped by the military and taken to ESMA, the Navy’s School of Mechanics, where a clandestine detention centre operated, where thousands of people were tortured and murdered. There she gave birth to her daughter who, a week later, was handed over to her paternal grandparents.
At ESMA, Labayru was tortured, forced into slave labour, raped repeatedly by an officer and forced to play the role of the sister of Alfredo Astiz, a member of the Navy who had infiltrated the organisation Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, an operation that ended with three Mothers and two French nuns disappeared. She was released in June 1978 and on the plane to Madrid, with her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, she thought: “Hell is over”. But hell was not over. Argentines in exile repudiated her, accusing her of being a traitor in the wake of the disappearance of the Mothers.
Journalist Leila Guerriero began interviewing her in 2021, while awaiting the verdict of the first trial for crimes of sexual violence committed against women kidnapped during the dictatorship, in which Labayru was a plaintiff. Over the course of almost two years, she spoke to her friends, her ex-partners, her current partner, her children and her companions in captivity and militancy. The result is a portrait of a woman with a complex story in which love, sex, violence, humour, children, parents, infidelity, politics, friends, moves, and a phone call from the ESMA on 14 March 1977, which saved her life, all come together.
Pages: 432
Publisher: ANAGRAMA
Binding: Soft cover
ISBN: 9788433922069
RPP: 19,86 euros
