I remember being in the school patio. My grandfather had been arrested the day before. I didn’t say anything about what had happened. I didn’t understand. I wanted to tell someone something, but I knew no one would understand what I was saying. In my school in 2002, they didn’t teach us anything about the history of contemporary Argentina. We didn’t talk about the coups or the dictatorships. We didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything about who my grandfather was, but I did know that on the weekends, he went to the Military Circle Club in Olivos in Buenos Aires Province. I knew that I couldn’t say that at school. I said “the club,” but I said I didn’t remember the name.   

I remember. I am seven years old, maybe even a little younger, and my grandfather shows up in our kitchen. He tells me, as always, to look inside his shirt pocket. He brought me picture cards. He always has picture cards. Sometimes he takes me to a bookstore and lets me choose some stickers or writing paper. My favorite places in the world are bookstores. I collect stickers as if they were gold. They are my most valued treasure. My grandfather always gives me little gifts.   

 Natalia Dopazo and Orlando Oscar Dopazo. Personal Archive. 1994

I remember. I’m 20 years old and a substitute professor in Contemporary Latin American History at a private high school. We are in a program of truth and memory that takes place by the National Goverment. The first day I’m called in to substitute, I find the activity already programmed. Several people show up, including a man nicknamed “El Mono.” We are going to the clandestine detention center “El Vesubio”.  We go under the highway. The next day, we go to the former ESMA, the Navy headquarters used as a clandestine center and torture where more than 5,000 people went through. “El Mono” introduces himself, and tells his history; he was a People’s Revolutionary Army Party activist; his wife was killed by being dropped out of a helicopter to Río De la Plata River; she was pregnant.

It’s October, and it’s hot. I go to the former ESMA, taking several students from the school. We are scheduled to go to the Officers’ Casino. I find my throat tightening up. I remember my grandfather’s voice, as he told me about the parties in Officers’ Casino in Cordoba or Mendoza, I can’t quite remember where. It’s not this one in Buenos Aires. I remember the photos of my grandfather and his collegues there. It’s the same type of place. The Officers’ Casino of the former ESMA operated as part of a clandestine center. They show us a place that was a darkroom or a printing operation.  

  Sector “Capucha”, located on the second floor of the former Officers’ Casino of the former clandestine detention center of the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (now Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos), in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Wiki Commons

 We go on another visit with students, this time to a detention center on Humberto Primo Street. The journalist Miriam Lewis was illegally detained there. They show us the terrace. The guide tells us the military let her go out there from time to time; We see the green and white awning that let her recognize the place. We also see the surrounding buildings, imagining all the eyes that must have seen this place.  

I remember. It is summer, school vacation. After lunch, I have to take a nap. I lie down in a cot next to my grandparents’ bed. My grandmother pulls down the shades. She tells me the story about the bald rooster or an alligator. Sometimes when my grandmother is working, my grandfather reads to me. He tells me about the calf Pombo and his mother.

My grandfather smoked. He died of colon cancer—a cancer he never told us he had. He smoked his entire life, although he quit for a few years when he was young. He told us that after this hiatus, he became addicted again after one of his soldiers died on his stretcher after an armed confrontation. 

I remember. I open my grandfather’s glove compartment. Every afternoon, before my parents came home, my grandfather would come pick me up at school in his salmon-colored  Ford Falcon that was very special because it had a custom-made five-wheel drive. His car was always so very clean. I open the glove compartment and find two weapons. I don’t touch them. They are old. I tell my mother. Later, I learned he sold them. My grandmother told me that only God could know what he did and thought. And later I told her about the weapons. 

  View of the Ford Motor Argentina plant in General Pacheco, September 1982.

It’s New Year’s, probably 1996, my sister is a little baby, and we’re in a country farmhouse loaned to us by a friend of my parents in La Reja, Moreno. We’re going to see how my dad sets off fireworks. My grandfather and I are sitting in some small chairs at a distance, looking up at the stars, waiting for the makeshift firework show. I think I asked him what he did before for a living and he told me: I fought against subversion.

I remember. I’m 12, and every afternoon, or at least many afternoons, I spend with my grandmother. My grandparents have separated, living in different houses until my grandfather’s arrest. When he went out on bail with her as guarantor, she let him live with her to avoid jail. I learned this years later. For a time we didn’t see each other. My mother didn’t want to talk to him, but as the years went by, we began to have some sort of relationship again. We live in the same building, my grandparents on the first floor and we on the fourth. My grandfather asks me to write a paper by hand and then type it on the computer. He doesn’t know how to use a computer. He explains that in the trial  they accused him of something he didn’t do; they didn’t understand the chain of command. 

He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t kill anyone. Something that my grandparents repeated to myself every so often. He’s not like Paulino Furió, this one was indeed all messed up, a violent type who beat up his kids. Your grandfather is an excellent person, they tell myself. My father, a former member of the Communist Party, tells me: what happened is that he sucked up to [General Luciano] Menendez, your grandfather didn’t want to get involved in these rackets and that’s why they stabbed him the back and sent him off to Buenos Aires in 1978. Years later, he would confes to me that he didn’t know the truth but he said that to me so I wouldn’t get upset.

 Menendez went to visit my grandfather, Orlando Oscar Dopazo, at the Military Hospital in Buenos Aires where he was hospitalized for medical exams; he’d already been living under house arrest for quite a while, awaiting trial. As my grandmother tells it, the general came to the room and my grandfather pretended to be asleep; he did not want to see Menendez.

 Years later in the pandemic, for the 1000th time, I try yet again to reconstruct who Orlando Oscar Dopazo was, the person whom journalist  Horacio Verbitsky mentions on the back cover of Página 12 in 2004. It seems that my grandfather was present at a massacre in Cordoba. I tried to search databases for those who had commited crimes against humanity. I enter in his last name; I know that he died before he actually received a sentence. How many cases are there, three, four? What is the difference between the cases? What is the mega-case of La Perla, a clandestine detention center in a rural area outside Cordoba.  My boyfriend at the time told me about this center. Was my grandfather responsible for the kidnapping of the journalist Paco Urondo? What was my grandfather’s rank? Colonel? Liuetenant Colonel? I knew that he studied at the War College. That he came from a humble family in Entre Ríos, and that he wanted to go to the War College ever since he was a little boy. Not everyone got in. I knew that he was very intelligent. According to my dad, he was a fanatic committed to acts of violence. I open the search engine once again and this time I find a document from the Argentine Secretary of Human Rights that talks about organizational charts. It’s a PDF. I press CNTRL+F:  Dopazo. Up comes the term COT in 1976 in the Intelligence Division G2.

 When you look a monster in the eye, you can’t just turn the other way. That’s what Lili Furió tells me. She is a disobediant daughter. Lesbian, activist, tango dancer, Lili was always my mother’s best friend, along with María Marta. The three daughters of perpetrators. Three friends from the time they were teenager. The only one who decided to transform herself into a human rights activist is Lili. She is like a godmother to me for those topics I can’t talk about to anyone else. When I feel ready, she invites me to meetings. I don’t go.

 March 24, 2022, or maybe it wasn’t that date at all. I’m at the home of my friend Lucía Vela. Her mother was kidnapped and tortured, enduring electric shock, when she was an adolescent. We cried together, we hugged each other, I heard her talk about her film, about the exile of her mother and aunt. Her aunt decided never to return to Argentina. She was also tortured. Her mother returned. She recently testified at the truth trials.  

 I’m in my new house, far from Buenos Aires, in Boston. I dream about a woman with short hair who runs and runs; she’s being followed. They find her; they torture her. They immerse her in wáter—the submarine. They pull out her nails. I wake up shivering and in anguish. I had this dream several more times. I keep dreaming about the woman with short hair, she runs, she is afraid. She runs through a factory. I try to find out who the disappeared women prisoners were that my grandfather killed or kidnapped. I don’t see them. The dreams torment me. I begin to be afraid of going to sleep. Roxy says that I should write a letter to my grandfather, one to my mother and one to the woman with short hair. I write my grandfather that I do not pardon him, that I hate him, that he hurt me and I can only imagine how many people whose lives he destroyed.  He totally fucked them up. I say that I loved him when he was my good grandfather, but that man doesn’t exist any more. I write to my mom, that I don’t understand how she left me in the care of such a monster. I ask for forgiveness from the woman with short hair for what my family did to her. I burn the three letters. Some days later, I dream again with her, she kisses my forehead. I never see her again.

 One day, my grandmother gives me the plaques with military insignias she has kept. Choose the ones you like, she invites me. She had them hanging on the wall before. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say to her. I take some and toss them into the garbage on my way out. After my grandfather’s death, she also gave me all his military dress uniforms. I have no idea where they are. I don’t want to know either. 

 It’s after one of the history classes, and this time, the surviver “El Mono” came back. I have a lump in my throat. I want to cry. It is the first time in my life I meet a person in voice and body who was arrested and a direct victim of state terrorism. I asked myself how many more there are. I say that I need to tell him something and explain that my grandfather was a perpetrator. With much shame, tears in my eyes, I cannot explain who this man was because I do not not know. Every time I want to learn, I forget. It is as my mind does not want to recall the horror. He says it doesn’t matter; he hugs me; we drink a coffee in a nearby bakery. The next time I see him, he gives me a book on the history of the People’s Revolutonaty Army Party.  That year, a few months earlier,  Orlando Oscar Dopazo had died in the Military Hospital. He had a heart attack the moment he saw me. He clutched my hand and broke down. 

  Orlando Oscar Dopazo in a Military Demostration. Personal Archive. No Date.

 I remember. When I was 19 or 21 years old, I lost my wallet. A young man called me; he had found it. I’m studying anthropology. I check and find everything is in the wallet, and then I freeze up when I realize that a Military Circle carnet is among my documents. I’m a lifetime member as my grandfather’s granddaughter. I never thought about it before because I hadn’t gone in ages; I never liked it. My family does go, my former Commuist party dad and my mom use the swimming pool and organize barbecues there. One of my fears has become real, that someone will discover my secret. The next day I call the military club; I renounce my membership a few days later; I just have to go in person to the headquarters in San Martín and say I no longer want to be a member. I do so. I am still the only person in my family to have done so. 

 I’m at a family dinner with my grandparents. They remember a corporal who sometimes went to get my mom at school because there was an armed confrontation. I hear that term, “armed confrontation” many times at the dinner table. Now that I’m almost 34, I understand that it means state terrorism. I ask myself how much my mother knew. One day, recently, I ask her directly what she knew. She cries. She says to me: you have no idea what it is like to have to assume responsibility for your grandfather’s monstruosities. She says little. There are sorrows that don’t have words. 

 I remember. I’m eight years old. My grandfather attends a school event because my parents can’t go. Someone says to me something like, you’re the last Dopazo. If you have kids, they aren’t going to carry that name. I ask my father about this comment and he tells me that’s why I have two last names, García Dopazo. That was important to him. I now realize that I have the possibility of being the last in the line. I am not going to have kids. May that blood end right here.