Part I
The Repression

Nunca Más (Never Again) - Report of Conadep  - 1984
 

Secret detention centres 
within the jurisdiction of the 2nd Army Corps

Formosa 

The secret detention centres operating in Formosa province were the RIM (29th Rural Infantry Regiment), based in Formosa, and the Escuelita at San Antonio, installed in the Rustling Division of the Provincial Police. Its headquarters, at the above-mentioned Regiment, came under the control of the 7th Corrientes Infantry Brigade, headed by General Cristino Nicolaides, during the first year of military government.

I was detained just after midnight on 5 August 1976, by a gang of twelve or fifteen men, both military and plainclothes. They were looking for my daughter, who wasn't there.

They took me to the 29th Rural Infantry Regiment without a blindfold. I spent eighteen hours of the first day waiting in a corridor. After that they took me to a room behind the guardroom, where I could see a lot of people wearing blindfolds and handcuffs, held in separate cells, as though they were stabled.

I remained in the 29th Regiment for over nine days, able to see various people who today are still listed as disappeared, among them Zulema Cena, with whom I was brought face to face. (Osiris L. Ayala, file No. 6364.)

Carlos Rolando Genés was seen by Ismael Rojas (file No. 6363) at the 29th Regiment. Carlos was a conscript and a student at the Formosa National School of Commerce. He was abducted from his own school.

The Regiment advised me that they'd convened a military tribunal to determine the extent of my brother's guilt, since he was doing military service at the time. They accused him of having become compromised through dancing with an extremist at a fiesta. At one o'clock on Sunday 19 September an officer called at my home and ordered me to accompany him to the Regiment. There they gave me the news that my brother had died as a result of strangling himself with his shirt, and on falling received a blow to the spine, dying in consequence of the lack of medical attention. This soldier begged me not to tell my mother the truth, because it was such a sad end. (Teotista Genés de Ortiz, file No. 6957.).