Tortured and murdered: The tragic story of Pope Francis’ Marxist feminist friend

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/11/tortured-and-murdered-the-tragic-story-of-pope-francis-marxist-feminist-friend/



Tortured and murdered: The tragic story of Pope Francis’ Marxist feminist friend
By Uki Goni, The Guardian
Wednesday, December 11, 2013 14:03 EST

He was in his late teens and still some years away from entering the Jesuit Order. She was in her mid-30s, a revolutionary and a feminist far ahead of her time. They met around 1953 or 1954 in the most unlikely of places – a laboratory where she worked as a pharmaceutical biochemist and he as an apprentice chemical technician. The two could not have been more dissimilar. Yet they cemented a unique friendship that bridged decades as well as deep political and religious chasms.

The woman was Esther Careaga, a non-believer who, because of her Marxist ideals, disappeared under Argentina’s dictatorship in 1977. The man was Jorge Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis in March this year.

Careaga had arrived in Buenos Aires as a political exile from neighbouring Paraguay a few years before meeting Bergoglio. She had been a fiery socialist orator and the founder of Paraguay’s first feminist movement in the 1940s. “She toured the towns in the countryside of Paraguay pleading for people’s rights in general, but especially the rights of women,” says her daughter Ana María Careaga.

Careaga was one of thousands of people who “disappeared” between 1976 and 1983, a bloody spree that stopped only after Argentina entered into a losing war with Britain in 1982 over the Falkland Islands. Victims were taken to secret camps, tortured and thrown from military planes – drugged but still alive – into the South Atlantic Ocean. It was an unsuccessful tactic because sometimes the bodies washed up on shore days later.