My shame: My father, a monster

When he was 15 years old, Luis Alberto Quijano’s father forced him to witness the horrors of La Perla, a clandestine detention centre in the city of Córdoba in Argentina.

Now an adult, Quijano testified against his father in the La Perla-Ribera mega-trial for crimes committed during the military dictatorship. Forty-three people were charged with crimes against humanity and the trial was concluded on August 24.

From the burden of having the same name as his brutal killer father to being exposed to brutal operations in La Perla, Quijano had suffered long enough. His father was Gendarmerie Officer Luis Alberto Quijano, second-in-command of the Intelligence Detachment 141 at La Perla from 1976 to 1978, during a period of state terrorism against the left in Argentina from 1974 to 1983.

But this isn’t the story of Luis Alberto Quijano, the oppressor, accused of 158 kidnappings, torture, almost 100 homicides and the abduction of a 10-year-old. It is the story of his son, a man who over the years learned the magnitude of the terror he had lived as boy and ultimately testified against his own father. It is a story that reflects the immense power that a parent has over a child, and how that child can choose a path of redemption. This is his account:

When my father started taking me to the detachment, I had been going to the provincial gym and became friends with a boy who did martial arts. They called him “Kent”. I told my father and a few days later he showed me a black-and-white photo card and asked me to identify my friend.

He said: “You’re an asshole, you made friends with an ERP! Watch, later they’ll kidnap you and I’ll have to save you.”

The ERP stands for the People’s Revolutionary Army, which was the military branch of the communist Workers’ Revolutionary Party in Argentina.

So he forbade me to go back to the gym and a few days later he took me to the detachment to work. He told me I was going to be a secret agent. I was 15, and in that context I believed it was okay because it was what my father had taught me.

At the detachment, they made me destroy documentation that belonged to the prisoners. Docu­ments of all kinds: university degrees, handwritten notes, literature, certificates, propaganda, books.

My father took me to La Perla four times, all in 1976. The first and fourth visits, he left me waiting in the car at the entrance.

The second time he made me get out and took me to a shed where there were cars, furniture, televisions, refrigerators, anything you could imagine. All of it stolen. He gave me a package wrapped in a blanket and told me to take it to his car and, when I opened it, I saw it was a giant lump of silver.

That day I went to the other side of the shed where they dropped off the stolen things and I started chatting to a gendarme who was standing guard. At one point he gestured to an open room and told me: “Over there is where they torture the prisoners.”

I peeked in and saw a bed where they tortured people. It was like a military cot with metal springs.

Later I learned that they hooked up a stripped negative cable to the metal and used another positive cable to touch the body of whoever was tied down. They would handcuff a person on the cot, drench them with water and apply 220 volts to their genitals.

The third time my father took me to La Cuadra [where prisoners were handcuffed and blindfolded]. He was talking to “Chubi” López [Jose López, a civilian prosecuted in the trial] and I took the opportunity to look inside La Cuadra.

In the back I saw a row of mattresses with naked people lying face down; all were tied at the hands and feet. Closer to the entrance, there were other people silently squatting on mattresses. My father saw that I was looking at the prisoners and said: “What you looking at, asshole?” And I said: “Well, why did you bring me here?”

I had full knowledge that they killed those people. They threw them in a pit and military personnel shot and buried them. I know because my father talked about it at home …

If they survived the torture sessions, the disappeared detainees were thrown in La Cuadra until an order came from the higher officers that they should be moved. This was the lie, the euphemism they used for shooting and disappearing their bodies in most cases.

My father brought home all kinds of stolen goods. But, at that age, I had no idea what was meant by “spoils of war,” as they called it … But, if you walk into a house and steal the refrigerator, the record player, clothing, paintings, money … those aren’t spoils of war, it’s vandalism. That is theft.

I always wondered how my father, the chief officer of a security force, could participate in such vandalism. I don’t understand it. I was also an officer in the gendarmerie and it never occurred to me to enter a house and steal everything …

When I testified in the trial, I showed a photograph from back then in which I was wearing a jacket and a wool turtleneck my father had taken from La Perla. We were not poor but he brought home clothes just the same. The defence accused me of being a co-conspirator in those crimes, and I said “no problem” — they could accuse me of whatever they wanted. I was there to testify.

Now that I’m older, I feel remorseful. I have children. Once you have children you realise the value of a life. You evolve and understand that killing is wrong. I even went so far as to say: “Fine, suppose you executed people during the dictatorship, but why disappear the bodies? Why did you steal children?”

My father had once brought home a girl whose mother they killed. She was like a pet: almost like a dog, only it was a little girl.

Thoughts kept going through my head: They were tortured but why were they killed? They could have just put them in jail. I guess they decided to kill them but why disappear the bodies?

Didn’t those people have families to claim their remains? To disappear the body is the final odious act to do to a human being …

The complaint against my father developed while talking to him when he was under house arrest. I reproached him for making me live through such atrocities. At one point he said: “I don’t know; I didn’t kill anyone.” I felt repulsed inside, I wondered what all that jingoism and all that “Western and Christian sentiment” that they claimed to be defending was for.

Then I shouted: “How can you say that to me? I have seen you kill people! You committed very serious crimes. You made me participate in those crimes as a child.”

And he said: “Well, go denounce me then.” And so I did. In 2010, I filed the first complaint. I finally realised he was a criminal.

■ Quijano Snr died in May last year while under house arrest before the trial concluded.

He was charged with 416 offences: 158 counts of aggravated unlawful deprivation of liberty, 154 counts of torture, 98 counts aggravated homicide, five counts of torture resulting in death and the abduction of a child.

The trial ended after four years of hearings, including more than 580 witnesses, into the crimes committed against 716 victims between March 1975 and December 1978.

Forty-three people were found guilty of crimes against humanity, and the court handed down 28 life sentences, nine sentences of between two and 14 years, and six acquittals. Eleven of the original 54 people charged died during the trial.

Claudio Orosz, an attorney for HIJOS, an Argentinian organisation founded in 1995 to represent the children of people who had been murdered or disappeared, said: “The trial was more than three years, but 39 years of research.”

In March 2007, the government turned over the land on which La Perla was located to establish a memorial. — Globalvoices.org

This is an adapted version of an interview with Luis Quijano by Alejo Gómez, which originally appeared on August 23 2016 in Día a Día. It has been translated and is published with permission.