This route also included the Police Hall with its notorious Department 2.
On 14 May 1976, at 1.30 in the morning, I was arrested in my home. They took me with my hands tied and my eyes blindfolded to D2. Around midday they took me to the basement of this building, to a room containing a wooden bench. There they stripped me and tied me to the bench, and interrogated me using an electric prod for two hours. I continued to be a disappeared person until 31 May, when my family were told about me on the authorization of the 8th infantry Brigade. (Raúl Aquaviva, flle No. 6842.)
I was arrested in my home on 9 February 1976, with a companion from the trade union of which I was a delegate, and my little four-year-old son. To get in they broke down the door. We were brutally beaten, then they tied our hands and blindfolded us. They took us with my son to a place I did not recognize immediately. There they took away my son. It was a horrible scene, as we were both screaming for them not to separate us, and he was begging them not to kill his mother. I stayed there for about eighteen days.
I suffered all kinds of torture, from the constant threat that they would kill my son to every sort of rape, several of them attacking me on my own, or attacking the three women who were there. The place was very small and we could hear everyone talking, moaning and crying. They punched me, hit me with chains, and applied the electric prod to my most delicate parts. I was left so ragged and emaciated that when they took me before the judge they gave me another woman's dress so that I would appear more 'decent'. Afterwards I recognized the place where I was held for those eighteen days: it was the D2. I was in a cell beside the guards' entrance. There was a long passage with bathrooms at the end where they made all the women bathe naked together in cold water, with their eyes blindfolded and much to the delight of the guards. At the other end there was a larger cell where they did group tortures, such as human pyramids. In one of these Miguel Angel Gil got stuck under everyone else and came out so badly hurt that he did not recover, dying a few days later. The judge who dealt with me was Dr Carrizo, at Police Headquarters. I had been threatened beforehand: 'If you open your trap your son will pay for it' and they showed me a jacket of his. The judge was totally passive, though I was an absolute wreck. Two guards had to support me as I walked and my face was disfigured (my nose, which was broken, was operated on in prison thanks to the International Red Cross). It seems that judge Carizzo approved of the methods used, as he convicted me despite all I said. Some day those judges will have to explain why they took declarations from people completely out of their minds, and went to police premises to do it. (Susana 0., file No. 6891.).