Tuesday 11 October 2011

Argentina: La mujer del Eternauta

La mujer del Eternauta (Dir. Adán Aliaga, Spain, 2011):



Thanks to the Memoria Documental blog for drawing my attention to this trailer; as it rightly points out, the trailer is quite mysterious and you don't get much information from it. Nevertheless, I can add a few words about its subject, Elsa Sánchez de Oesterheld. She was the wife of Argentine journalist Héctor Germán Oesterheld, whose most famous work was El Eternauta. Her husband and all four children were disappeared by the military regime.

In Antonius C. G. M. Robben's "Political violence and trauma in Argentina", he quotes her as saying,
"I believe that disappearance is one of the most brutal things that can exist in today's war. It is the inhumane of the inhumane. I don't know how to express it. It's one of the most horrendous things because from one moment to the next a child disappears, a loved one, son, father, brother, whatever, husband and this person has vanished into thin air without ever knowing what happened to him. It's very difficult to come to terms with. That's the anxiety, the despair, that in my personal case will obviously die with me."
Yet she did not give in to this despair, but got involved with the Grandmothers and last week was named a Distinguished Person of the City of Buenos Aires in recognition of her work for human rights.

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