Part I
The Repression

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

Disappearance of Carlos Alberto Mazza - File N° 2883

Carlos Alberto Mazza is a working man who was arrested on 27 July 1978 while waiting for a bus near Police Station No. 46 by the Railway Hospital. A few minutes earlier he had disembarked from the Rio de la Plata, the boat on which he worked. He says:

In the port district night after night several stevedores were taken away after they had finished their day's work and all the money they had been paid was stolen. One man who was arrested with me protested that the money they were taking was all he had to support his family; he was shot in the shoulder and they left him lying there. The following day the newspaper reported that a man had been injured in a brawl between stevedores. As my son was about to graduate as an engineer, on a voyage of the Rio de la Plata I had bought him a Dupont lighter, which was also stolen. Without knowing why, I was held for about ten days in the Navy Mechanics School, where I was kept in a cellar: I remember that one of the women prisoners shouted to us not to talk amongst ourselves because there were microphones, and that if the guards heard us we would be subjected to all sorts of punishment. Once I heard a guard saying to one of those women: 'You're going to get what the Swedish woman got.' When I was told that I would be set free because there was no reason to keep me, I asked for my things, but an officer who was there and whom I can recognize as Captain Astiz punched me in the mouth and broke my false teeth, shouting, 'They will be kept for the anti-subversive struggle.' After I was released I returned twice to the guardroom at the Navy Mechanics School to reclaim what had been taken from me, but without success; all I was told was that if I returned again I would have an even worse time, so I didn't go back again.