Por Irina Hauser

Daniel Antokoletz has a thick beard with neat edges. He has a deep look in his eyes. At least that is how his somewhat slanted eyes are reflected in the face of his love Liliana Andrés. His imposing presence challenges the university, as it does also in family gatherings, or with friends and colleagues. It’s nineteen seventy-odd, but it could very well be today. It is always today for the disappeared of the last civic-military dictatorship. Daniel was a lawyer for political prisoners and an expert in public international law. I’m starting to get to know him through photos. He’s a boy on a skateboard. He travels a lot with his diplomat father. He is a teacher. He is an official within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during president Héctor Cámpora’s government. He is a man in a striped sweater who looks askance from a deck chair, wearing canvas shoes. The images welcome you into the last Five O’clock Tour of 2020.

It is the strange and devastating year of the coronavirus pandemic, which took away many things, but not this event. This time, we will not visit the former ESMA in person, although this virtual visit at a distance that fortunately fades away is connecting us with the most vital, joyful and daring part of the history of this fighter who was kidnapped on November 10, 1976 from the door of his home in Palermo by Task Force 3.3.2. Liliana was with him and the kidnappers took her too. She was released a few days later.

They had met at the University of Belgrano in 1970. She was his student and he was trying to train disciples. Liliana was enthusiastic about a research project on international law and also fascinated with her professor, because she saw him as a “different one, not stiff at all, the kind who teaches you how to read between the lines, doubt everything and draw your own conclusions”. They became a couple a year later and, as she continued her career, she joined him in the defense of political prisoners, meeting with relatives or comrades of prisoners and disappeared persons. Apart from this task, they had fun together, they laughed a lot, they were great companions.

Daniel lived under threat since 1972 and even so, she recalls gently, he toured prisons in Rawson, Resistencia, Posadas and Mercedes, but also helped detainees in other countries or foreign citizens imprisoned in Argentina, such as Uruguayan senator Enrique Erro, who confronted Luis Margaride, the Chief of Superintendency of the Federal Police in times of the Triple A. Liliana, whose hair falls straight over the shoulder almost like it did back then, still maintains that «feeling of fear» she had back then, only now it is mixed with a certainty: «we were reacting to something that could be new, and we dreamed of changing it.»

The purpose of this tribute to Daniel Antokoletz is to consider what “advocating in difficult times” was back then. To reflect on the “right to resistance and resistance as a right”, as our host Alejandra Naftal, Executive Director of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, puts it. For all of us who are listening to her, it feels like a definition from both yesterday and today, without any time jumps. Those who knew Daniel and share this tour say that they picture him today fighting for the freedom of lawfare prisoners, for indigenous law, against institutional violence, against sexist violence, agribusiness, mega-mining, fake news, in favor of income distribution by the state, among many other current issues.

“Recent and current Argentine history shows that the Law in our country has belonged to the ruling classes, a tool at the service of the political and economic elites, which explains why the civic-military dictatorship has enjoyed the explicit endorsement of the Judicial Power. But the Law can also be conceived as a tool to transform”. This summary belongs to lawyer Andrea Pochak, Undersecretary of Protection and International Liaison on Human Rights. “There are many of us,” she adds, “who have learned from courageous people like Daniel Antokoletz and other lawyers, that when the Law is well used, it can be an element of resistance and transformation of people’s lives, that we must use the best tactics for each moment, without ever renouncing our principles ”.

Antokoletz built strategies against impunity, perhaps without being aware of it literally or with those same terms. So did his other fellow defenders of political prisoners. Many disappeared detainees did it in their own way. In this event in late November, two of them who were kidnapped at ESMA and survived are now being honored and remembered. They passed away only days before this Five O’clock Tour.

Victor Basterra was one of them. The navy officers had put him to work in the documentation area of ​​the clandestine detention center, so he managed to hide in his underwear and sneak out pictures he had taken of repressors –to forge documents– and of kidnapped people. All that material, plus documents and the lists of comrades and genocide perpetrators Victor managed to put together, was essential to reconstruct what happened there for the courts. We also remember Sara Solarz de Osantisky, known as «Quica», whose husband and two children were murdered by state terrorism. She got the nickname «the midwife», because she was put to do slave labor in the clandestine maternity ward of ESMA. Sara attended the kidnapped women who gave birth there and whose babies were taken away from them. She wrote down their names on little pieces of paper she hid and then lost, but managed to remember later on. The voices of Víctor and Sara, in the trials and among us, give a special atmosphere to this day.

“Come on, Adela! Let’s go get some choripanes by the waterfront!” – Daniel surprised his sister one midnight in the seventies. She gawked at him as always. He always managed to get her out of her little world, so they ran out and grabbed a taxi. María Adela enjoyed her brother’s audacity, his ability to surprise her and “break the rules”. Sometimes, she confesses, she felt as «the dummy of the house» whom the shrewd brother came to wake up.

–Do you realize? The lines in this newspaper are saying one thing, but I am reading what is blank, what is in the middle and cannot be read at first glance, Daniel told her in one of the many talks in which she was stunned by him.

“I admired him. Maybe on occasions he thought I was a bit of a fool. There was no time for me to catch up with things while he was alive and I could realize things «, remembers María Adela, a literature professor, member of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Founders, and author of the book «Desovillando la historia» (Unravelling History).
Over time, she added information and impressions to that feeling of family intimacy she had. People told her, for example, that while Daniel was taking an exam at the Law School, someone arrived with the news that a student from the Peronist University Youth had been arrested. He interrupted the exam and ran out along several students in order to look for him. “That spontaneity in the defense of rights was very characteristic of him. I tend to think that his writing was masterful. Today I think of him as an endearing person who had the right to continue with his life and to live what we live today. I am so sorry that my family has not been able to witness the trials and the highest degree of reparation that we are experiencing with the convictions for crimes against humanity,” says María Adela, as if trying to put her thoughts into words.

During the dictatorship led by Juan Carlos Onganía, prisons began to fill with political prisoners. At that time, a group of lawyers was emerging to take on their defense, they “broke with the logic of lawyers reproducing the relations of domination” and “would gradually join left-wing political, revolutionary Peronism, armed organizations, and civilian ones ”. That is where lawyer Eduardo Tavani, currently the head of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (Apdh) locates Daniel Antokoletz. Tavani was his student, and he remembers that those lawyers “could put their differences aside because it would help to banish a presumptuous and apparently neutral legal profession, with reactionary and conservative roots, that persisted in classrooms, forums and courts. That is why it was so important that they disembark at the university, later renamed as Popular University of Buenos Aires, which opened its doors for the common people to enter” (in 1973).

That picture Tavani makes makes you imagine what that team of lawyers was like as they «became radicalized, fought beyond their forces, and did not stop even in the face of the terrorist state that occupied the scene and unleashed the worst barbarism.» They left the huge lesson “that the law is also the right to resistance, that justice was and is selective, that there are non-negotiable issues», and that «neutrality in law means to always be on the side of the oppressor.»

Throughout the talk, each person will contribute other names from among the more than 100 lawyers who were kidnapped, murdered and disappeared. From Néstor Martins and his client Nildo Zenteno to Teresa Israel, Rodolfo Ortega Peña, Nelly Ortiz, Mario Abel Amaya, Tomás Fresneda, Mario Yacub, Miguel Zavala Rodríguez, Silvio Frondizi, among many others. Daniel Antokoletz is remembered as a Marxist with deep convictions who «became peronized», Tavani will say.

A long-time advocate of human rights and a consultant professor at the UBA, constitutionalist Eduardo Barcesat met Daniel during the “Cámpora spring” of 1973 through lawyer Eduardo Luis Duhalde. They tuned in easily and he summoned him to an inter-American colloquium in Peru where they drafted a declaration of economic independence and laid the foundations for the American Association of Jurists. Having completed his mission, Antokoletz went on his own to discover Machu Picchu. When he returned, he announced to Barcesat with a strange solemnity: «I have known the tiger’s milk.» He bought a bottle and then made it himself. With a hint of shame, the jurist says that in that whole scene » had felt “a capitis diminutio», because he had never tasted that traditional sauce that accompanies ceviche.

Barcesat says that in the face of the arrests and disappearances they debated among themselves about what was the most convenient thing to do. «We agreed to publicize and reveal the situation of the detainees and the disappeared.» On one occasion, they met in the press room of the Palace of Courts, where the journalists told them: «Why do you submit habeas corpus if you know nothing is going to happen?.» Antokoletz believed that this was essential to make those claims, to put them on the record. In fact, these seemingly bureaucratic traces became essential over time to understand the dictatorial machinery and its judicial complicity. They were also useful to bring all that to trial. «It’s the law, what’s wrong is not doing it,» he told Barcesat, who remembers him visibly moved to tears.

Liliana Andrés’ life was marked by the disappearance of Daniel. She denounced his abduction, searched for him and did everything in her power to find him and, afterwards, to get the courts to try his disappearance. She lived in exile in Spain, where she had two children (she has four in total), and returned in 1983. In her quest for justice, she testified before the Human Rights Commission of the United States House of Representatives. When the case on the crimes committed in the former ESMA was reopened, she also gave her testimony. One of the many things she said was that, while she was captive, on the morning of Saturday, November 13, she was able to see her husband. A guard brought her to meet him, after warning her that she could not say anything because it would compromise him. Another guard took Daniel to the same place. They were allowed to remove their hoods and blindfolds and see each other for a minute or two. She saw he had been severely tortured and he had trouble walking. They had used an electric prod on his testicles and gums.

In 1985 Liliana had the opportunity to visit the clandestine detention center. She was with Daniel’s mother, María Adela Gard de Antokoletz, a rural teacher from San Nicolás turned judicial clerk who would become one of the founders of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the ones who began the rounds in 1977. They were received by the director . She remembers it as a moment of immense fear, where she was joined by lawyer Luis Zamora, whom she mentioned fondly.

The trials for crimes against humanity, which were able to resume once the laws of Full Stop and Due Obedience were declared unconstitutional, complete to a certain extent the struggle of lawyers of political prisoners. They constitute a form of reparation and create a barrier against impunity.

To honor Daniel Antokoletz and say what his story means, Barcesat chooses a quote from Julius Fucik, a Czechoslovak journalist, anti-Nazi militant, and Gestapo prisoner who was executed. It is one sentence among many others his wife, journalist Gusta Fucikova —who was also held captive for a time under the same roof as him and then released— recovered from her husband’s notes: “I have lived for joy. For joy I have gone to combat and for joy I die. May sadness never be associated with my name ”.