Worth Watching: Argentina’s Disappeared

Elizabeth DeNovella writes for The Progressive:

The new documentary, Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos, examines the disappearance of 30,000 people during Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Though Argentina's history differs from ours, we can still take away a valuable lesson: those who participated in state-sponsored torture must be held accountable.

This moving film was written and directed by Juan Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum fled Argentina in 1977 to escape the growing repression in his country. He returns thirty years later after an accidental discovery. Through a Google search, Mandelbaum learned that Patricia Dixon, a college girlfriend, was one of the “disappeared.”

Mandelbaum returns to Argentina to see what happened to Dixon and to others who had also disappeared. He weaves the national narrative—Peron's return to power and the military junta's deliberate attempt to destroy the left—with personal ones. We hear from the mothers, fathers, siblings, and even the children of the disappeared. The pain in people's faces when talking about their missing loved ones is heartbreaking.

The director doesn't shy away from the violence perpetrated by leftist armed radicals. “But the film leaves no doubt that there was no equivalency between the actions of the left and the repression by the military,” Mandelbaum writes in his director's statement. “The military represented the State of Argentina, and were obligated to follow the law.”

Instead, people were kidnapped, tortured, and held in secret detention centers. Mandelbaum visits the infamous Navy Mechanics School, which housed a detention center and five torture rooms. It was here that pregnant women were kept alive until the birth of their children, who were then adopted by military and police families. It was here that Mandelbaum's ex-girlfriend was probably taken.

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