La Llamada: Un Retrato

“In the late 1960s, at the age of thirteen, Silvia Labayru, an Argentinian, was a shy, bookish, animal-loving teenager and an enthusiast of John F. Kennedy. She came from a military family; her father was a member of the Air Force and a civilian pilot. At that age, she entered the prestigious Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires, a public school, where she became involved with leftist student groups and transformed into a fierce activist. In March 1976, a coup d’état took place in Argentina, ushering in a military dictatorship. At that time, five months pregnant and twenty years old, Labayru was a member of the intelligence sector of the Montoneros, an armed group with Peronist roots. On December 29, 1976, she was kidnapped by the military and taken to the ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School, a clandestine detention center where thousands of people were tortured and murdered. There she gave birth to her daughter, who was handed over to her paternal grandparents a week later. At the ESMA (Navy Mechanics School), Labayru was tortured, forced into slave labor, repeatedly raped by an officer, and forced to play the role of the sister of Alfredo Astiz, a member of the Navy who had infiltrated the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo organization—an operation that resulted in the disappearance of three Mothers and two French nuns. She was released in June 1978, and on the plane to Madrid with her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, she thought, ‘Hell is over.’ But hell was not over. Argentinians in exile repudiated her, accusing her of being a traitor because of the Mothers’ disappearance. Abhorred by those who had been her fellow activists, and supported by a few loyal friends exiled in Europe, she built a life for herself. Until 2018, when she was contacted from Buenos Aires by a man who had been her partner in the seventies, and in a sequence involving family manipulations that twisted destiny, a story began to unfold that continues to this day.

Journalist Leila Guerriero began interviewing her in 2021, while awaiting the verdict in the first trial for crimes of sexual violence committed against women kidnapped during the dictatorship, in which Labayru was the plaintiff. Over nearly two years, she spoke with her friends, former partners, current partner, children, and fellow prisoners and activists. The result is a portrait of a woman with a complex story interwoven with love, sex, violence, humor, children, parents, infidelity, politics, friends, and moves, all overshadowed by a phone call made from the ESMA (Navy Mechanics School) on March 14, 1977, that saved her life.” -- Provided by publisher.