Anna Masuccia former militant from Corrientes, who was kidnapped during the dictatorship and later exiled to Brazil, reviewed her disappearance and how she became a prominent figure in Brazilian gastronomy. “I believe that standing up for democracy today means being a revolutionary,” he said. Fontificia modeby Net TV and Radio profile (p. 1190)
Anna Masucci from Corrientes Province. He was a militant officer and montonero in his youth. She went into exile in the 1980s in São Paulo, Brazil, and is currently a famous gastronomic entrepreneur. He founded several successful restaurants, including the famous Martín Fierro and Elja Carandá.
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I had to interview Sylvia Lapiro at the time for Leila Guerrero’s book, The callin a position more or less with some point of comparison. She was detained at that time at ESMA and forced to be the lover of one of the soldiers there. Your case has some points of contact. You saved your life and your son’s life after you were chosen as a lover by one of the soldiers there, in the place where you were held captive, and then you suffer a kind of double invisibility due to the guilt of your survival and the ill-treatment your comrades suffered at the time because you saved them.
The story is mentioned in the book Missing twiceWritten by Maria Teresa Donato, who did in-depth research and improved the data I had, because I was wrong about some of the data. When I met Teresa, the idea was to tell the story of a woman who, like many others, believed at that moment in her life that the best thing she could do was to change the conditions that existed in the country in the hope of victory. We were twenty years old. But what I’ve been wondering all along is that in these stories we don’t have heroes or victims. It is a story, as I think there must be many others, where once someone is kidnapped by the Argentine army and disappears into this reality, it is a situation that has no parameters that one can describe or define. It’s as if you’re entering another portal, some say, or entering another situation that’s incomparable to anything you’ve ever experienced before or been able to experience since. You become a number and not a person, and your life ceases to exist. If you are gone, then you do not exist. In this case, I was fortunate to be able to notify my colleagues of the controls. They couldn’t get any important information from me because everyone had already woken up.
After some time in the place where I was missing, I began to establish a more personal relationship in principle with the person responsible for me, the kidnapper. Since at that time it was already the end of the dictatorship and nothing important left me behind, if there were no spoils of war to follow, I was lucky to have time to get to know this character in a different way. This means that when I read things, the description that the military gave of the montoneras or montoneros officers, was terrifying and yes, we were monsters everywhere. This man saw the house I lived in, the room I had prepared for my son, everything, and it seemed almost impossible to him that I was talking to a group of people and that they were human beings. I think that during his career as a repressor and a perpetrator of genocide and everything that Argentine oppressors were, surrounded by the Argentine state, which was most dangerous, he was creating a minimal relationship of respect.
There came a time when this man, due to further interventions from other colleagues, discovered that I knew more than I was telling him, and he became more interested in these things and simply appeared one day with a rose in my cell. Because because of all that, at that time I left the cell and was in a small cell with a blindfold and a hood. During the day they took me to that place where they called the operating room and talked. I said from the beginning: “I am an officer in Montonera, so I want to talk to an officer, I will not talk to these cowards,” who were the Federal Police, who were responsible for the dirty things.
What secret detention center were you in?
I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to mention names.
In what year?
World Cup.
World Cup 78. Not much left in 78.
That was luck.
They arrested her too late.
Yes. There, in everyday life, day in and day out, this man takes care of me, long before any other sexual relationship happens later. It was this man who saved my life, who got me out of this detention place, and after some time allowed me to leave the country and come to Brazil with my son. I’m not telling you what my classmates told me, but what I thought, and what my classmates thought as well. So, I didn’t need anyone to do an analysis for me. I knew what that meant that if I was alive it would mean I cooperated. He completely understood why I thought that way.
What year do you arrive in Brazil?
In March or April 1979.
Until then, were you in the same place of detention?
Actually there were transfers, but I did not participate.
And you were in that cell alone?
With my son. I was initially in one of the homes of the Brazilian Catholic Church. I leave Brazil, I go to Paraguay because my husband’s family was in Paraguay, and through the Argentine army they were able to welcome me to Paraguay, but I don’t stay long either and there I go back to San Pablo. This time I’m back in Brazil with a friend we’ve been in contact with before. I had no documents in Brazil. So I was not a political refugee, I was in hiding. After six months, when you enter the country, they give you a tourist document that is six months worth and you have to renew it, and I didn’t renew it anymore, so I was in San Pablo without documentation. But there we found a Chilean immigrant with documents, so we joined forces and opened Martin Fierro, which was a garage where we made empanadas, and that’s where we started in Brazil.
Over the years she has become a successful gastronomic businesswoman.
Yes. The matter was not without a battle, because we went through several economic plans. After the start of the partnership, I bought out my partner and it went very well.
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From this perspective on life, that subjectivity from when you were 20, to this day, in a country with greater economic prosperity than Argentina and your country, how has your perspective on life changed? What perspective on capitalism and democracy?
If I had to choose a name today for what I aspire to, it is democracy. You will know that Brazil is still going through a difficult moment where democracy is under constant attack. So what fascism is could be very close. As an economic system, an economic system that is better distributed and has less inequality has not yet been invented. Today Argentina is sad. Brazil was like this before, but with this latest government that Brazil elected, it is once again off the hunger map, which is no easy feat. There is a greater distribution, but they have serious problems. But if I had to choose more capitalism, I would say that I defend democracy, I defend minimum rights, which not all citizens have, of course, because those who have no food and no place to live, who have no guarantee of food and housing, have minimum human rights that they cannot fulfill.
Can I say that what has changed is that his ideas at that time coincided with those who believed that to change the world one had to make a revolution, and today he defends democracy in a different way than he defended it 50 years ago? This is the change.
clear. I believe that defending democracy today means being a revolutionary. This Sunday, in San Pablo, we have a women’s demonstration that will be similar to the Ni Una Minos demonstration. In recent weeks in Brazil, the number of murders of women has been horrific. I was growing up. It’s one thing when I was 18 and I had a Che Guevara poster on the headboard of my bed. Then I pulled everything out of hiding. We young people at that time did not have the opportunity to participate in political parties, and the state did not allow you any kind of entry. Regardless, this does not remove our responsibility as young people to believe that we can do what we set out to do, nor does it remove the state’s responsibility towards these young people. When they tortured me, I told them: “But you are the state, you should take care of me, not torture me.” So what happened to these young people who had nowhere to go? Of course many mistakes have been made, but the world has become much worse. And when we did that in Argentina, 5% of them were below the poverty line. What is the poverty line in Argentina today? How many residents are there?
Do you want to return to the Argentina you fought to change?
exactly. I don’t know what that is called. How do you define that?
maturity.
I agree.
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