A photo, a story, our story

I took this picture, if my memory and my calculations do not fail, on March 24, 1983. It was the last march of the Mothers that was held on that emblematic date under the dictatorship. In the background, on the pyramid, you can read the graffiti asking for the freedom of Dante Gullo, the leader of the Peronist Youth who was still imprisoned in those days.

During all these years the image continued to impact me by the feeling of helplessness that transmitted me that woman, alone with her children, holding a handmade flag, in a half-empty Plaza.

Now it seems incredible to me, but for years, and perhaps because my attention had been caught by that badly wounded family group, I had not stopped at the name that appears on the banner: Orlando Galván. A from then I began to investigate. I wanted to join the past and the present, to fill that space. What happened before the photo, what happened after. I will not tell my discoveries in chronological order, but in the order they appeared before me.

First piece of information and first impact. The news is from November 2012 and says: “Moving tribute to the disappeared of Villa Matheu”. Villa Matheu is located in Caseros, province of Buenos Aires. The Commission of Relatives of Detained-Disappeared of 3 de Febrero organized a tour of the houses of each of the disappeared of the area, their relatives recalled their history and painted their faces with stencils on each of the houses. The article was accompanied by a video, and the interviewee was none other than Miriam Galván, the daughter of Orlando. One of the girls in the photo.

I keep going backward-forward in history and a new impact. In December 2008, the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology informed the family that the remains of Orlando Galván had been found in the cemetery of Berisso, together with the bodies of four other people. Finally, after 31 years of waiting.

The group had been shot at 4:30 a.m. on December 8, 1977. The media published, as was customary in those days, that they had died in a “confrontation with security forces”. The same day of that massacre, a group of tasks of the ESMA kidnapped the French nuns Leonie Reneé Duquet and Alice Domon and nine other people, among which was Azucena Villaflor, founder of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

Who was Orlando Victor Galvan? Tucumán, shoemaker, he worked in a factory, he was a union delegate, at the age of 33 he bought a land and built his house, where he lived with his wife and his five children. He was a militant in the Peronismo de la Base and later in the Juventud Peronista-Montoneros. In his own house there was a Basic Unit, where he met with his comrades and programmed the activities that they carried out every weekend in the neighborhood and in a nearby villa. He was disappeared on October 19, 1977 and murdered on December 8 of that year. His remains were found on December 4th, 2008 by the EAAF in the cemetery of Berisso and returned to his family on August 12th, 2010.

Epilogue. Article from a Cuban media of March 24, 2015. The note reviews the multitudinous march, and a then a series of photos. Among them, one with the caption “Three generations claim for Orlando Galván”. In the image, now, another banner that reads “Children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the disappeared Orlando Victor Galvan. PRESENT”.