The Anahí Association commemorated the 46th birthday of Clara Anahí Mariani, the granddaughter of María Isabel “Chicha” Chorobik de Mariani, who founded this entity inspired by the search for the girl who was kidnapped when she was just three months old in an operation carried out in La Plata, during the last civic-military dictatorship.
The organization recalled, as every year since the return of democracy, the 46th “birthday in absence” of the girl born on August 12, 1976.
On November 24, 1976, Clara Anahí Mariani was kidnapped after surviving the attack on the house at 1134 30th Street in La Plata, in which her mother, Diana Teruggi, and four fellow members of her parents were murdered. after an attack that lasted nearly four hours.
Today after 3:00 p.m., at the doors of the house where the married couple Daniel Mariani and Diana Teruggi lived, headquarters of the Association, an act began with a release of balloons, one for each year of Clara Anahí’s life. .
More than 200 members of the Army and the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires participated in this repressive act, which was commanded by the then Colonel Ramón Camps, who was seconded by the multi-convicted genocide and former head of the Buenos Aires Police Investigations Directorate. Aires, Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, recently deceased.
Since that day, “Chicha” Mariani tried to find out what had happened to her granddaughter, her daughter-in-law, and her son, Daniel Mariani, who was not in the house at the time of the attack but was murdered some time later in August 1977.
Federal Judge Alejo Ramos Padilla, who acted as “Chicha” Mariani’s lawyer, reflected before a large number of participants and stated that “I needed this reunion in this house to remember the values instilled by Chicha.”
“The military did brutality in this house but it served to promote Grandmothers, an organization that transcended time,” the magistrate remarked in one of the passages of the speech he delivered during the ceremony.
Ramos Padilla affirmed that “Chicha” “was a great investigator who fought in each court despite the fact that they did not listen to her and she was mistreated by the judges and the press.”
“But with her at the helm, it became one of the engines for truth trials to be carried out,” said the judge.
For her part, the leader of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, Nora Cortiñas, considered that “this fight is impossible to forget” and maintained that “luckily the genocide of Miguel Etchecolatz” – who was involved in the operation in which he disappeared Clara Anahí- found death in the place she should have, which was jail”.
He then insisted that “the last dictatorship surpassed everything one could imagine, but we were not afraid and we continue fighting to change this country. Commitment should never be lacking. What mobilized us is the desire and the obligation to fight. We have to do it all together but not scrambled. Let’s not be with those who don’t love us,” Nora stressed.
The Mariani-Teruggi House is today a Space of Memory and its walls preserve the bullet and projectile impacts that the joint forces fired at the house where a clandestine printing press of the Montoneros organization operated in 1976.
A few days ago on its YouTube channel, the association published a video with photos of the stolen baby and the audio of a letter written by “Chicha” Mariani and addressed to her granddaughter.
“It’s August 12, it’s your birthday and I can only imagine you,” “Chicha” is heard saying as a series of images of the baby pass by with her parents.
“I’ve been looking for you since the moment your mother was killed and you were kidnapped from your home. You were three months old and time stopped,” he adds.
In another section, and based on a drawing of Clara Anahí’s face as a baby that is being modified over time, the voice of “Chicha” traces a possible image of the granddaughter she searched for until the last minute of her life and who did not could find.
“I kept imagining, would they have changed your name? Changed your age? Will your hair still be dark? Could you have inherited family myopia? Your big ears, also inherited, won’t change… you must be tall like your parents. There are many unanswered questions that flutter inside you. Your grandmother Chicha Mariani hugs you, “the letter ends.
Due to its historical value for the memory of State terrorism, the Mariani Teruggi House was successively declared of Municipal Interest (1998), Cultural Patrimony of the province of Buenos Aires (2000), of National Interest (2003) and National Historic Monument (2004). ).
Rosa Bru (Miguel’s mother) and Rubén López (Jorge Julio López’s son) were present at the act where adhesions were received from various human rights organizations.
