Large colorful rugs, rolled up and standing upright, are scattered around the room, bearing recordings narrating moments from the life of a Uruguayan girl. On the wall, a video shows photos of her displayed outside the walls of Punta de Reales prison in Montevideo. Elsewhere, there is a long aluminum foil screen with writing on it, which is how her mother communicated while she was in prison. In the third case, the collection of newspaper and magazine clippings resembles a story told and retold by many people over the years – except for her.
The girl is Francesca Casariego, now 50 years old, a visual artist and professor at the Faculty of Arts of Odelar (La Republica University, Uruguay). She was kidnapped when she was three years old in Operation Condor, in Porto Alegre, in November 1978.
These pieces are part of the exhibition “Although I Don’t Remember”, which opened at the UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) in the week that marks 50 years since the beginning of the international repression plan coordinated between the dictatorships of Southern Cone. Operation Condor, sponsored by the United States in the context of the Cold War, took place from 1975 to 1981 and officially involved Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.
In Francesca’s words, works of art are the calculation of a mind without memory, but without forgetting. “It’s an attempt to reconstruct the absence of memories,” she explains. “We usually call memories what we see as having happened. Since I didn’t have that, I was very young, it was as if it had happened to someone else.” “But at some point I needed to connect with it. I realized how this story shaped me, even if I didn’t remember it.”
For her brother, Camilo Casariejo, 54, the carpets are as vivid a memory as a nightmare. He says he was seven years old at the time of the kidnapping, was separated from his mother and taken to Uruguay, and says that bedding was wrapped around them when the army moved them from one place to another. Francesca doesn’t remember, but her body remembers her – the artist is still afraid to cover her head, suffers from bouts of claustrophobia, and has a soft voice, which sometimes needs straining to come out.
“I have no memories before the kidnapping,” Camilo says. “It’s as if my life began around the age of eight, when my childhood ended. I was still a child, but they stole the happiness and innocence of childhood from me.”
The two were kidnapped in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul along with their mother, activist Lillian Celebrity, now 75 years old. After a period of exile in Italy, where Francesca was born, she separated from the father of her children and decided to return to South America to denounce the military dictatorship in Uruguay.
In Brazil, there were already other citizens associated with the PVP (People’s Victory Party), like her. Then the other activist Universendo Díaz moved with them to an apartment on Botafogo Street, in the Menino Dios neighborhood, in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul. As then, the neighborhood today remains middle class, residential and quiet.
The city’s months-long calm was interrupted one Sunday in November when soldiers approached Lillian at the bus stop, where she was supposed to meet someone. From there, they searched the apartment located on the ground floor of Building No. 3, where the family lived, and took the children as well. Their lives will never be the same again.
In the early hours of the morning, after undergoing a simulated shooting in Santa Teresa, on the border, Lilian returned with agents to Porto Alegre and the children went to Montevideo. A separation that will last for years.
Camilo, left alone and in charge of his sister, became a key witness to identify the Brazilians involved in the operation and confirm the joint action of agents from both countries within the framework of Operation Condor.
“There were systematic measures against the children. We were not just a side effect of our mothers and fathers, but the appropriation, that is, handing us over to other families to provide another education, was as if they considered us young or future terrorists,” says Francesca.
According to the Plan Condor project, which collects data on the operation, among the 805 victims recorded so far, 55 were children and teenagers. The majority, 48% of the total, were from Uruguay. This explains why so many Uruguayans were able to go into exile in neighboring countries, while regimes in Argentina and Chile immediately repressed, says Francesca Lissa, a researcher at University College London and author of Trials of the Condor, who is leading the project.
The project considers November 28, 1975 to be the official day of the establishment of Operation Condor, the date of the minutes signed at a military intelligence meeting in Santiago, Chile, which established the repressive cooperation system. In addition to the Chileans, representatives of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay signed. Other countries will join later.
According to the survey, the number of victims in Brazil reached 33 people. Lisa says that the country played a key role, although it did not appear among the signatories to the minutes, because it inaugurated practices of surveillance and persecution of national citizens abroad at the end of the 1960s, after AI-5 (Institutional Law No. 5), which led to the deepening of the regime’s repression.
However, Lissa recalls, there have been instances of cooperation since at least 1969, when Brazilian journalist Jorge Miranda Jordão was kidnapped at the request of the Brazilian military dictatorship in Uruguay. Although the process entered its final phase in 1978, cases continued until 1981. In Latin America, there was persecution in 13 countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay – and in Europe, in four: France, Spain, Italy and Portugal.
It was popular pressure that made the Uruguay issue have a different ending than many other issues.
After an anonymous call to the Vega magazine newsroom, journalist Luiz Claudio Cunha and photographer JP Scalco discover the kidnapping in progress when they knock on the apartment and find Liliane and the agents, five days after she has been separated from her children. As news spread in the press, the case opened a campaign for their release and return to Brazil, in cooperation with lawyer Omar Ferri and activist Jair Kreschke.
“We arrived here because before Francesca (Casariego) could express herself with this work, there was a collective and social mobilization for the truth,” Lilian says. “That is why we remember and talk about what happened. It is not about counting the torture they committed and how they did it, but about the forms of power then and now.”
In December 2022, 44 years after the kidnapping, and on the same day that news broke of the arrest of the former Uruguayan soldiers involved in the case, Francesca learned that she had been awarded the Cultural Fund to hold her exhibition – the same one that was in Porto Alegre until March.
“Justice has been delayed,” she says. “This should have happened sooner. There has been more than 40 years of complete impunity.” “It is important to get to the truth. How do we ensure that this does not happen again? With justice. If tomorrow someone wants to carry out a new coup attempt, he knows that there will be consequences.”