Legacy of a ‘Disappeared’ Family in Argentina
October 19, 2015
Legacy of a ‘Disappeared’ Family in Argentina
by Cesar Chelala
Politics can have a devastating effect on a country and its people, as I saw during a recent trip to Argentina.
I stayed at the Buenos Aires apartment of a relative by marriage, university professor Felix Eduardo Herrera, who died there in 2007; the apartment had been empty since then. He had been a noted mathematician in Tucuman, a city in northern Argentina. Much respected by his students, to whom he dedicated his life and work, he was married to Leonor Herrera and raised two boys, Abel and Claudio, and a girl, Leonor Ines.
I met the Herreras in Tucuman in the 1960s when my wife, their niece, studied at the university where Professor Herrera taught. When I met them, they had an active social life managed by Leonor. Their house was a place of lively intellectual gatherings, frequently visited by out-of-town scientists and researchers.
The Herrera children inherited their father’s intellectual drive and their mother’s concern for the poor and dispossessed. Those characteristics led to their downfall. Realizing the tremendous damage the military was doing to democracy and to the rule of law in the country, the children joined the violent opposition to the military’s rule.
During the 1970s the brutal dictatorship of Argentina’s military left the country in disarray, and the Herrera family decimated. In the end, the couple’s two sons and the wife of one of them, Georgina, as well as the couple’s daughter and her husband, Juan Mangini, a guerrilla leader opposing the military rule, were among the more than 30,000 estimated “disappeared.” Both Abel and his younger brother, Claudio, died under torture in 1975.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/19/legacy-of-a-disappeared-family-in-argentina/