By Tim Anderson
Argentine journalist Miriam Lewin told a filled Towson University lecture hall that she still fears for her life 30 years after being disappeared and tortured by the Argentine military.
“I don’t feel safe,” Lewin said while speaking at Towson as a part of a nationwide tour to promote her book “Putas y Guerrillas,” translated as “Whores and Guerrillas.”
Photo by Tim Anderson
Lewin said she was a 19-year-oldstudent political activist when she was abducted and disappeared by the communist Argentine government that ran the country from 1976 to 1983. The government ran more than 500 illegal detention centers in the country where they detained and tortured political activists for political information.
Most of those tortured, she said, were ultimately sedated, flown over the Atlantic Ocean by the Argentine navy and tossed from a plane, their bodies never discovered.
Lewin said she does not know why she survived the camps while many others did not, but it is a question she is often asked.
“Why do they ask us why we survived?” Lewin said, paraphrasing the words of another survivor. “Why don’t they ask them why they killed so many people?”
When Lewin was released from the illegal detention center, she could not talk about what happened to her out of fear the military might come back for her.
“I couldn’t say I was in prison,” Lewin said. “I couldn’t say the word ‘desaparecida’ until I went to the United States.”
When she revealed herself as “una desaparecida,” or “one who vanished,” and recounted her time in the detention centers, she was shunned by the families of those who did not survive.
“They did not want us,” Lewin said. “We were carriers of information about their loved ones.”
Lewin said many believed she and others survived not only because they gave the government information, but also because they had sex with the guards in the detention centers.
“[To them] we were not only traitors, but prostitutes,” Lewin said.
According to Lewin, many of the women in the centers did have sex with the guards, often in exchange for phone calls to their family. She described the rape scenes as resembling a black mass. There was screaming, guards punching women in the stomach, hair pulling and electric probes that shocked the women’s vaginas, she said.
Lewin still believes that to some, the violent sexual encounters were worth it.
“Can we blame them if they accepted contact with their loved ones?” Lewin said.
After her release from the center and after the end of the Argentine dictatorship, Lewin testified against the government and its crimes in 1985.
Lewin said she believed it was her responsibility to testify, but she did so in fear. Lewin said she and other survivors who testified kept their passports with them in their purse at all times in case they needed to flee the country immediately.
Lewin constantly asked herself, “Will they come back?”
With help of Lewin’s testimony, members of the former government were punished for their crimes, with many charged with torture and sentenced to life in prison.
However, Lewin said the courts failed to charge many of the detention center workers with rape because many of the victims were unable to identify the men who raped them, and often showed no physical marks associated with rape.
Lewin said that those who were raped were blindfolded so they could not see their aggressor, adding that many refused to fight because they wanted to live. Yet, Lewin said, the victims were still asked to prove they were raped, a standard practice that leaves victims helpless.
“No one asks at the police station for marks to prove you were robbed,” Lewin said.
Since her release, Lewin has worked as an investigative journalist, something she had wanted to do even before experiencing the detention centers. She has been nominated seven times for the Martin Fierro Award, an honor given to the best journalist in Argentina.
Her most recent book, “Putas y Guerillas” was released in May of 2014 and is currently only available in Spanish. The book tells the story of seven different survivors of the same centers that Lewin experienced.
“When I first wrote the book, I said that’s it. All the pain is over,” Lewin said. “But on the contrary, it feels worse.”
Lewin, who has interviewed many oppressed people in her job as a journalist, including young boys who were sexually abused by an Argentine priest, said that she has always been able to keep a distance from her subjects and avoid becoming emotionally attached.
But, in telling the stories of the other detention center survivors, she said she is unable to remove herself.
“I feel like I am always surrounded by the pain, by the anguish,” Lewin said.
Lewin hopes that “Putas y Guerrillas” will help other female survivors to speak out against their attackers just as she did.
“Many women still stay silent,” Lewin said. “I would like them to speak up, to heal.”
For herself, Lewin hopes that her U.S. speaking tour will relieve the guilt she feels as a survivor.
“I don’t know how I will feel after this,” Lewin said. “I hope that I am going to feel better.”
Nevertheless, Lewin said the question of “will they come back” continues to haunt her.
The question has become real for Lewin in recent months as Argentina moves towards an election that Lewin believes could, in part, bring back her attackers.
“If the conservative party wins the election, us witnesses will be in trouble, seriously,” Lewin said. “There’s a lot of thirst for revenge in them.”
“If the conservative party wins the election,” she added, “I don’t think I’ll stay in Argentina.”