Disobedient Histories Overcoming Dictatorship in South America

“Disobedient Histories” is the name of a group made up of the descendants of criminals of the Argentine dictatorship. Its members confront their family’s past and say no to denial and complicity. In recent years, the movement has reached beyond Argentina, extending to other countries, most recently, Paraguay.
 

Analía Kalinec introduces herself as a teacher, psychologist, mother of two, and a daughter of a genocide perpetrator. On August 31, 2005, she was holding her one-and-a-half-year-old son in her arms, about to take him out to the kindergarten. Her mother calls and tells her: “Stay calm, but Dad has been arrested.” Denial was Analía’s first defense mechanism: “No, that’s got to be a mistake. Not my dad, it can’t be. My dad will explain.” She did not know why he was detained.

At the time, the trials for crimes against humanity had started again, and her father, Eduardo Kalinec, had retired from the police a little while before. He is known as “Doctor K” by his victims and those who were sequestered at the Atlético, Banco and Olimpo clandestine centers in Buenos Aires during the last civilian-military dictatorship (1976–1983). He was sentenced to life in 2010 for kidnapping, torture, and murder.

According to Analía in her book, Llevaré su nombre (I Will Carry His Name), within the family dynamic, Eduardo Kalinec was a loving, protective father, totally disassociated from other worlds. At home, they did not talk about the dictatorship or what he was doing. “All I knew was that he was a policeman. The moment my father was detained marked a break for me personally,” she recalls.

For Memory, Truth, and Justice

“Are you daughters of the disappeared?”, asks a woman at a Ni Una Menos march on June 3, 2017. “No”, Analía Kalinec replies. “We are daughters of the perpetrators of the genocide.” Analía is a member of the group Historias Desobedientes (Disobedient Histories). She is marching with three other members of the group, holding a cloth flag. The caption on the banner reads: “Daughters and Sons of the Perpetrators of Genocide for Memory, Truth, and Justice.” That was the first public appearance of the Historias Desobedientes group.

To obey comes from the Latin “obaudire”, which means to listen, to understand what one says to another and to follow that directive. “To disobey is to ignore what we are being told. We come from families where worldviews prevail, views which we are renouncing and opposing,” Analía Kalinec says.

Confronting the Past So as Not to Repeat It

Historias Desobedientes was founded on May 25, 2017, minutes after what in Argentina became known as the historic “2x1 march”, which brought thousands of people into the streets against a Supreme Court ruling. The 2x1 ruling benefited the oppressors with their release. That is when the first disobedient voices became public.

But the emergence of Historias Desobedientes is also connected to the history of a country “that has tried its own perpetrators of crimes against humanity in its own courts with its own laws, something that has not happened in any other country nor on any other continent,” says Analía Kalinec. It cannot be understood without the work of human rights organizations, the political will of former President Néstor Kirchner, and the powers of the State coming together to review and confront the past so as not to repeat it.

Sons and Daughters, Grandchildren, Nieces and Nephews

Four years after that Ni Una Menos in 2017 in Argentina, the disobedient grew by the dozens. Today there are more than 150 of them, and they are no longer just sons and daughters—they are also grandsons and granddaughters, nephews and nieces of the oppressors. “We accept the horror of what our family members did, not without pain, not without an emotional toll, not without a burden on family, but we understand it is our social duty to repudiate those crimes, a social duty to fight and work so that it never happens again. That is why we went out there to give testimony,” Analía Kalinec explains.

The existence of the movement soon came to the attention of the international press. People from Chile joined Historias Desobedientes in Argentina. In 2019, a chapter was founded there. In 2020, it arrived in Brazil and recently in Uruguay and Spain. In 2021, it was established in Paraguay.

A Struggle for Living Memory in Latin America

The chapter of Historias Desobedientes presented itself publicly to the country at the Plaza de la Democracia in the Paraguayan capital, Asunción, at a ceremony organized by the Coordinator of the Human Rights Organization CODEHUPY. Alongside representatives from Argentina and Chile, Alegría González and Olinda Ruiz were among the first to take this step in a country that endured thirty-five years of dictatorship. Both are somewhat ashamed to admit that they had known little about Alfredo Stroessner’s regime, who ruled Paraguay as a dictator from 1954 to 1989, until after adolescence. They say that little or nothing was said about it at their schools. Also, both share the pain they felt when they found out about the role their families had played in it.

In Alegría González’s home, no one questioned the dictatorship. Every November 3rd, they celebrated the dictator’s birthday. But at 27 years old, through photography and visual arts, she tries to construct a critical view on that relationship. The first break occurred when she told her family that she was a lesbian. That established a distance that helped her to look at her life from a new angle. She was reviewing a page on Paraguayan exiles in Argentina when one testimony caught her attention. They were talking about Alberto Planás, her paternal great-grandfather. He was seen drunk in a torture chamber. He was Stroessner’s Chief of Investigations.

The “Family Terror” Files

Olinda Ruiz was in college when she went to the Museum of Memories in Paraguay for the first time.  In a list of names of police torturers identified in the testimonies of the dictatorial regime’s victims, one was familiar: Julián Ruiz Paredes, her grandfather. “I exited the museum, called my mom crying and that’s when when I started the process of asking the first questions about my family,” she says. Olinda Ruiz is thirty-three years old, a psychologist and systematizer. While researching, she came across a lawsuit the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had brought against the Paraguayan State for illegal and arbitrary detention, torture and forced disappearances between 1974 and 1977. Her grandfather’s name also appeared there.

In what she calls “the family terror files” she found a series of documents that her grandmother kept, which Olinda Ruiz dusted off after her death. She managed to confirm the position her grandfather had held during the Julián Ruiz Paredes dictatorship: Director of Surveillance and Crime, a leadership position within the Police Department of Investigations, where interrogations, torture and executions were carried out under Pastor Coronel’s command. Her grandmother, Olinda Gregor de Ruiz, also a police officer, had worked at the Identifications Directorate.

A New Chapter in Paraguay

With the documents in hand, staying silent was no longer an option. It was hard for Olinda Ruiz to learn everything her father knew about her grandfather. That he knew that he had killed and tortured. “But in my dad’s generation, at least maintaining the family silence was a form of protection. My grandfather’s excessive violence was also experienced inside his house,” Olinda explains. That changes with her. “There is a very sizeable generational gap that allows us grandchildren to be able to break the silence in a simpler, more confrontational way. Time has enabled me to speak out,” she says.