Cristina Feijóo

“Perón disappointed me a lot, and so I stopped being active shortly after his death in 1974. I didn’t want to support Isabela Perón, not Montoneros, which united the rest of peronist organisations, because I believed an armed fighting was unacceptable under democratic conditions. The same happened to many of my co-fighters; we lost all our clues. During the dictatorship I was persecuted for my former activities; once I was active so I deserved a punishment. But the fact I didn’t engage in FAP at the time might have saved my life, when AAA kidnapped me. We were driving a car together with my colleague, and AAA commando crossed our path, took us to Garaje Olimpo, one of the illegal capture centres, kept us there for a day and then let us go. Something similar used to happen to the lost ones; no one knew, why live or die, or who is to decide. Very engaged people survived and others, who had nothing in common with armed groups, were murdered. After AAA kidnapped me, I tried to flee from the country with my husband and daughter, but meanwhile the new regime managed to tighten the screws again, everyone was escaping, and we could not get any false documents, so they didn’t let us pass the borders as our names were listed in many reports; and it was impossible to accommodate any activists; so we were changing places of residence all the time. They caught us in September.”

“My daughter suffered much terrible experience. When I got kidnapped by AAA, she stayed at home with her girlfriend, unknown armed men jumped over the wall and inside. Earlier there was a bounty announced in the newspapers on my and my partner´s head and she had to attend school for a year using a false name. But that was our daily bread; the children of activists shared their parents fate, and my daughter got used to it.”