After the death of Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, at 91 years of age, people recall part of her life and work, among which her time in the CONADEP. To which the following doubts arose among Internet users: What was the Conadep? Who integrated it and why did it remain in history?
Conadep are the acronyms that summarize the name of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, created by President Raúl Alfonsín on December 15, 1983, just five days after taking office. Its objective was to investigate human rights violations during the period of state terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, carried out by the military dictatorship called the National Reorganization Process.
This explains, for example, that Graciela Fernández Meijide, a member of Conadep, questioned those who expressed the idea - Mempo Giardinelli and later the actor Dady Brieva - of creating a commission to audit the role of journalism in the coverage of acts of corruption. linked to Kirchnerist officials and businessmen.
“The Conadep had a single objective, which was to find out what had happened to the people who had disappeared. It did not even deal with the issue of political prisoners. To think of something similar is to almost assimilate one situation to the other, It is a lack of respect and a lack of criteria of reality that at the time that Conadep was created, with personalities that stood out in different aspects of society, there was not the use that there was later during all these years”, expressed months ago Fernández Meijide, who was the secretary of Reception of Complaints of the historic commission created by Alfonsín.
The commission was made up of a president, the writer Ernesto Sábato, 5 secretaries and 12 other memberswho for 280 days traveled the country looking for testimonies from survivors, relatives and also the repressors regarding the places used as detention centers. Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazu was part of CONADEP.
On September 20, 1984, Sábato delivered the report to President Alfonsín which included the evidence and an inventory regarding the 340 clandestine detention centers, testimonies of survivors, police and morgue records, data on the procedures used to extract information from detainees -among other things- throughout more than 7,000 archives at 50,000 pages, along with a partial list of the disappeared persons that later served as basis for the historic Judgment of the Boards of 1985.
The Trial of the Juntas, during the government of Raúl Alfonsín, was based on the “Never Again” report, a canonical book on the dictatorship. (File, Archive)
When Sábato delivered the report to the President, he read the prologue, which was later included in the book edition called “Never more”a title chosen by Marshall Meyer (a member of the commission), because it was the motto originally used by the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto to repudiate the Nazi atrocities.
“With sadness, with pain, we have fulfilled the mission entrusted to us at the time the Constitutional President of the Republic, this work was very arduous because we had to put together a gloomy puzzle after many years of the events, when traces had been deliberately erased, all documentation had been burned and even buildings had been demolished. We have had to base ourselves on the complaints of family members, on the statements of those who were able to get out of hell and even on the testimonies of repressors who, due to obscure motivations, approached us to say what they knew”, reads the famous writer before the attentive gaze de Alfonsín, in an event that was broadcast by Cadena Nacional.
Conadep members
- President: Ernesto Sabato
- Complaints Reception Secretary: Graciela Fernández Meijide
- Data Processing Secretary: Daniel Salvador
- Secretary of Procedures: Raúl Peneón
- Secretary of Legal Affairs: Alberto Mansur
- Administrative Secretary: Leopoldo Silgueira
- Secretary: Agustin Altamiranda
- Other members: Ricardo Colombres; René Favaloro (resigned because the commission opposed investigating the actions of La Triple AAA); Hilario Fernandez Long; Carlos T. Gattinoni; Gregory Klimovsky; Marshall T. Meyer; Jaime de Nevares; Eduardo Rabossi; Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú; Santiago Marcelino Lopez; Hugo Diogenes Piucill; Horacio Hugo Huarte
