The figure of the lawyer and human rights activist, Eduardo Luis Duhalde, was remembered on Friday at an event organized by the Human Rights Secretariat in the National Archive of Memoryten years after his death.
The tribute was held in the Rodolfo Puigrós Hall of the Archive, on the former Esma property, where Duhalde’s relatives, friends, workers and authorities from the Nation’s Human Rights Secretariat gathered.
The ceremony was headed by the secretary Horacio Pietragalla Corti, accompanied by the president of the National Memory Archive, Marcelo Castillo.
“The memory is one of the tools What do we human beings have to keep alive to the people we feel were importantboth personally, as well as collectively, as in history”, stated Pietragalla during the meeting.
He considered that Eduardo Luis Duhalde was “part of a historical processwhich he built from the defense of brothers and sisters who put their lives at risk and then in the process of judgment to the genocidal and in the construction of the Secretariat”.
“There is no Secretariat of Human Rights in the world like the one formed by Eduardo”, highlighted Pietragalla Corti.
During the meeting there was a speaker panel made up of the president of Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained for Political Reasons, Lita Boitano; the former director of Attention to Groups in Situations of Vulnerability of the Secretariat, Victoria Martinez; and Judith Saidformer General Coordinator of the National Memory Archive.
Also, a video prepared by the Coordination of Audiovisual Funds of the National Memory Archivewith a summary of the most important milestones in Duhalde’s career.
For his part, Castillo, president of the National Archive of Memory, highlighted Duhalde’s role in the creation of the organization and stated: “The best tribute and claim for this construction, which turns 20 next year, is deepen the process of opening the Archive, that it go out into the street, that it be linked with society and be strongly integrated into all the policies of the Human Rights Secretariat”.
Throughout the meeting, tribute was paid to the figure of the lawyer, writer, committed intellectual, defender of political prisoners and founder of the Argentine Commission for Human Rights (CADHU).
That morning, the current Federal Trade Union held a ceremony at Graphic Federation to remember Eduardo Luis Duhalde “as lawyer for workers and militants”.
Also, it was highlightedits essential role in judging the genocide of the civic-military dictatorship”.
Eduardo Luis Duhalde was a professor, writer and one of the Justicialist lawyers most identified with the Peronist resistance and then with the defense of persecuted political leadersalthough he had to go into exile with the 1976 coup that started the last civic-military dictatorship.
In 1976, the dictatorship ordered the capture and seizure of Duhalde’s assetswho before going into exile organized the Argentine Human Rights Commission (Cadhu) to denounce state terrorism in Argentina.
In the 1990s, he served as Judge of the Chamber of the Oral Criminal Courts of the Federal Capitalconsultant for UN Human Rights and Consulting Professor of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UBA.
Then, in 2003, he took up his post at the head of the Secretary of Human Rights of the Nation in the Ministry of Justice, Security and Human Rights in the presidency of Nestor Kirchner and continued with Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner until his death on April 3, 2012.
