patricia

had the great honor last month of meeting patricia isasa. as soon as she started her presentation i knew i was going to like her. there was a video of george bush signing the military commissions act and when it started (re)playing on a loop she took off her shoe and aimed it at the projection screen.

patricia was disappeared in argentina in july 1976 when she was 16 years old. a student organizer in santa fé, she was designated a terrorist and held for more than two years in a clandestine detention center. she is a survivor of torture who has relentlessly fought state violence & its many accomplices for decades, ever since she was released.

lo que mas me ha impresionado about patricia is her unwillingness to let those crimes that happened to her & to so many people, be understood as aberrations in history, as some dark moments when things got out of hand. she traces the legacy of state repression from her torture in argentina by u.s.-trained milicos in the late 1970s to the present-day torture of detainees in u.s. custody at guantánamo, and in occupied iraq & palestine. she insists upon discussing these acts not in isolation (as the discourse on "human rights" so often encourages) but within the context of the economic system that they serve.

she won't let people forget the role of the ford motor company for example. in addition to providing an endless supply of ford falcons, which became notorious as the favorite automobiles for forced disappearances & political assassinations during the argentine dirty war, ford's complicity in persecuting the labor leaders in its own factories there is well-documented. just outside buenos aires the main ford factory housed a clandestine detention center within the factory walls itself, an excellent metaphor for the entire dirty war. human rights violations, yes of course. but human rights violations in the service of upholding capitalism & imperialism, and of protecting the interests of the argentine, u.s., and european ruling classes.

this is patricia's democracy now interview from 2006, in which she recounts some of the details of her case. (her interview starts at 12:00 minutes.)



gracias, gracias, patricia, compañera. por compartir tu historia y por seguir siempre luchando por la justicia y contra la complicidad... 30000 desaparecidos ¡¡presentes!! ¡¡ni olvido ni perdón, juicio y castigo a los culpables!!