Children during Argentinian military dictatorship

This is a French interview with author Laura Alcoba.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Childhood memories of dictatorship

(Sunday 07 September 2008)

The Rabbit House: an Argentinian Childhood by Laura Alcoba
(Portobello Books, £12.99)

LAURA was a seven-year-old child during the 1970s when Argentina was convulsed by a brutal military dictatorship.

Her parents were active Montoneros, the left-wing Peronist urban guerilla group that the fascist military dictatorship was ostensibly formed to counter.

And it did so with unprecedented brutality. This period is labelled “the dirty war.” Thousands were tortured, murdered and disappeared. Laura’s father was jailed and her parents’ friends murdered. She is one of the lucky ones, eventually escaping with her mother to France.

During the early period of the dictatorship, she was involuntarily drawn into the clandestine life of her parents and party to their conspiracies and subterfuges but hardly aware of the wider political circumstances in which their lives unfolded.

Her slim volume – just 137 pages – details her memories, as she recalls them today as an adult living in France.

Her spare, unadorned prose provides a vivid record. It has similar fatalistic qualities to a Greek tragedy – an unfolding to an inescapable conclusion.

It clearly represents, as she herself implies in her introduction, a cathartic process, a need to expunge the demons of the past and to record her memories as another facet of that sombre history in the life of Argentina.

Former Argentine generals sentenced to life: here.