Pedro Troiani and Carlos Propato were trade union leaders at Ford Motors in Argentina four decades ago, when they were detained in the company’s factory and tortured by the military dictatorship.
They were held prisoner for two years and letters were sent to their families claiming they had been fired for failing to show up for work.
Now they are suing the company’s former executives for complicity in the 1976 coup and subsequent 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
Photo: AFP
They are not the only ones pursuing international car companies in court over alleged abuses during the dictatorship — complaints have been made against Mercedes-Benz, Renault and Fiat too — but theirs is the most advanced.
Although Ford is not implicated in the judicial process, the plaintiffs do want to demonstrate there was complicity with the seven-year dictatorship that killed 30,000 people, according to human rights organizations.
“Without the participation of civilians and more of these companies, this coup would not have succeeded,” Troiani told reporters. “These people collaborated, they gave them vehicles, food, fuel, they gave them the companies so they could move as they wanted, and that’s how we were removed, one by one.”
“They collaborated. I painted the Falcon cars that they used in the repression,” Propato said, referring to the vehicles the dictatorship used to kidnap opponents, real and perceived.
Both Troiani and Propato insist they had no involvement in political militancy, and that they were held and tortured, alongside other work colleagues, because of their union activism.
At the Ford plant on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, there were 100 union delegates, of whom 24 were taken captive from their jobs.
In those days, military brigades were stationed at the factory while soldiers ate at the plant’s canteen, many workers have testified.
“They paraded me around the whole factory in handcuffs as if they were saying: ‘Look at what could happen to you,’” Troiani said. “The colleagues threw screws at them.”
Pointing to a leisure area at the factory, Propato said that was where he and his colleagues were tortured.
He said soldiers covered his head with a plastic bag and he thought he was going to suffocate until Troiani poked a hole in it and “saved my life.”
Smiling sheepishly, Troiani said he cannot remember the incident.
From the plant, they were taken to a police station in Tigre, a Buenos Aires suburb, after which they were transported to a succession of detention centers throughout their two-year captivity.
“A person imprisoned without knowing why suffers twice as much,” said Troiani, who like Propato was already a father at the time.
According to historian Victoria Basualdo, the bubbling union and worker activism of the 1970s was “a central worry as much for the armed forces as it was for company management.”
It explains the “workplace repression” on the day of the 1976 coup, on March 24, when “large numbers of armed forces were mobilized in factories” leading to “the detention and kidnapping of workers and unionists,” Basualdo told reporters.
In Latin America, a region where military dictatorships were once the norm, Argentina is the country that has taken the greatest strides toward prosecuting those accused of human rights violations.
Hundreds of military personnel of various ranks have been sentenced, while several members of the successive military juntas died in prison.
“When democracy began” during the 1983-1989 presidency of Raul Alfonsin, “and the military juntas were prosecuted, we started asking ourselves: ‘Why? Why did this happen to us?’ There we saw that justice was possible,” Troiani said.
Of the 24 Ford unionists detained, only 13 are alive today.
In December last year, the first stages of the oral trial against former Ford directors Hector Sibilla and Pedro Muller began, as well as that of military officer Santiago Riveros.
Since then, the judge has heard dozens of testimonies.
Reached by reporters, the defendants’ attorneys declined to comment.
“My colleagues and I fought to arrive here. For me the success is having arrived at trial,” Propato said.
Troiani still wants more, though.
“We want them to be held responsible and that our case serves as jurisprudence for other colleagues” whose cases are less advanced, he said.
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