With A Woman's Voice and From the Periphery

An Interview with Silvia Faget About State Terrorism in San Rafael (Mendoza)

Abstract

The interview explores Silvia Faget's experience during the state terrorism in the department of San Rafael, in the south of Mendoza province. She and her husband, Santiago “Chiche” Illa, were members of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores – Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (PRT-ERP) in that town. Fifteen days before the coup d'état, repressive forces broke in their home in the early morning and kidnapped Illa. Faget's testimony offers a first-person story of her experience, told from a gendered perspective. She relates the experiences of a pregnant woman with a one-year-old child who embarks on a search for her disappeared husband in a small town, while her organization is dismantled. She describes her experience of childbirth and postpartum during the dictatorship, the depression, the panic, and the ongoing search. The interview reveals the traces of forced internal exile and the conditions under which those who were not forcibly disappeared by genocidal state policies survived, as well as the persistence of the search and the trajectories that brought together those who later formed Human Rights organizations.