Part
I
The Repression
Nunca Más
(Never Again) - Report of Conadep
- 1984
Transfers
In
a large number of detention centres the word ’transfer’ was
associated with the idea of death, ’Transfers’ were
experienced by prisoners with simultaneous reactions of horror
and hope. They would be told that they were to be taken to other
centres or ’rehabilitation’ farms, so that they would put up
no resistance. They did not know where they would be taken,
whether to another centre or to their deaths, which caused a
constant and deep-rooted fear. For the ’transfers’,
prisoners were usually stripped of their clothes and meagre
belongings, which were then incinerated. Sometimes they were
given injections to make them drowsy. Their guards would try to
calm them down by giving them a remote hope of living, a feeling
which gained strength from the very fact that they were
surrounded by death and horror.
Numerous
testimonies have been collected concerning the special treatment
received by those who were later to be ’killed in gun
battles’. Days before they were to be shot, these prisoners
would be given better food, and were made to wash and have a
bath, since it would have been difficult to explain to the
public the appearance of ’extremists killed in shoot-outs’
with skinny, tortured, bearded and ragged corpses.
This
constituted an indescribable cruelty, since it raised a
person’s hopes that he would live, whereas his real fate was
death.
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