In the last months of the Argentine dictatorship, the military used an emblematic photograph to whitewash their image. The alleged embrace between a police officer and a mother from Plaza de Mayo during a demonstration in Buenos Aires on October 5, 1982 was reproduced in media around the world, including EL PAIS. Years later, already in democracy, it came to light that, in reality, the woman rebuked him, shouted to let her pass and pounced on the policeman’s chest for less than a second, a gesture that was recorded by Marcelo’s lens Ranea. That was the image of the day that the regime endorsed, authorizing its dissemination. 40 years after that event, the discovery of six censored photographs in the archive of the state agency Telam allows us to reconstruct the farce put together by the military to exhibit a reconciliation that never existed.
The author of the censored images is Jorge Eduardo Sanchez. As a photographer for Telam, at that time intervened by the dictatorship, he went to cover the March for Life, the first called by all human rights organizations and attended by more than 10,000 people. The demonstrators asked to know the whereabouts of the thousands of people who had been detained and disappeared and the end of the state of exception under which kidnappings, torture and murders were perpetrated. The police banned the protest. Seeing that he could not prevent it, he fenced all the accesses to the Plaza de Mayo and repressed the demonstrators so that they could not get there.
One of Sanchez’s snapshots shows a row of uniformed men on horseback surrounding the protesters, while they take one detainee away. In others, different members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo organization can be seen confronting Commissioner Carlos Enrique Gallone to stop blocking their path. In the last one, one of them, Susana de Leguia, is seen crying with rage at the policeman’s refusal, with her hands raised towards him.
Sanchez returned to the newsroom and the negatives were reviewed by the president of Telam, Colonel Rafael de Piano. From his desk, without dialogue, he addressed the photographer in a commanding voice: “This does not have to be published. For your sake, back off!” That’s how it went. His work did not come to light that day. Instead, Telam reproduced the image of Ranea, a photographer from another agency, DyN, accompanied by a cable titled demonstrations without incident, in which it was detailed that the demonstrators had not been able to reach Plaza de Mayo but that the concentration had ended “without disorders or arrests” near there.
The official version was published in local and international media, accompanied by that powerful photograph. “Peaceful concentration in the center”, headlined the newspaper Clarion. “In the photo, a police officer comforts one of the protesters,” he added.
This newspaper published the same image on its front page on October 8, 1982. “A police officer, in charge of repressing the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo —who have been demanding for years the appearance of their loved ones— emotionally comforts one of the 10,000 people who participated in the afternoon in the March for Life”, reads next to the photograph. The following year, the image was awarded the King of Spain Prize.
sentenced to life
Gallone used the award-winning photograph as evidence in his favor in the trial for the Fatima massacre, which occurred on August 20, 1976. Some thirty detainees in a clandestine center dependent on the Police in Buenos Aires were executed and transferred to the northern outskirts of the city, where they were dynamited. The bodies of the twenty men and ten women had bullet holes. Most were killed with their hands tied behind their backs. Justice found the commissioner guilty of these crimes and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
“That photo distorted reality. She went around the world a lie. I am hurt because your medium, the media, published something without checking it,” laments Sanchez in dialogue with EL PAIS.
Nora Cortinas, head of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo — Founding Line, confirms the manipulation. “It was not usual for this mother to come because she worked, she attended a hairdressing salon, so she did not know our codes, which were never to touch or be touched by a police officer. In her desperation Gallone was on top of her, who took advantage of her moment to hug her and it seemed that the police treated her mothers well. But Susana’s gesture was one of desperation and fury, ”she told Telam.
“I had to keep my mouth shut and even so on the 8th I was sucked [secuestrado] by the military. I don’t want to talk about it, it’s over, but the pain will never go away,” adds Sanchez. He kept a copy of one of the six censored photos and first posted it on his Facebook two years ago. There he also explained how he had been kidnapped and transferred to a clandestine detention center to be subjected to “verbal and physical abuse” before being released on the street hours later.
Ranea, the photographer of the award-winning fake hug, died last year, but he also acknowledged that the image gave a distorted view of what had happened. “It was a fraction of a second during which Susana de Leguia, a mother from Plaza de Mayo, and Commissioner Carlos Gallone confronted each other. She punches him in the chest and to stop her hysteria, the guy hugged her for half a second at most. It was a very short situation. I had started taking photos around this group and I see the scene, ”he said in an audiovisual report.
The censored photographs were rescued as part of the work to enhance the value of the Telam archive that is being carried out under the management of director Bernarda Llorente.
“We were doing a survey of photos of the Malvinas War, reviewing uncatalogued material, and we found an envelope that said “March to Plaza de Mayo, June 15, 1982”, says photographer Analia Garelli, coordinator of the enhancement of the archive . Argentina surrendered to Great Britain on June 14 and that day and the next there were protests. That is why they thought that the material stored there was related to the Malvinas. “But when we opened the envelope we found a single strip with six frames and I recognized one of them, it was the one with the photo of Gallone and Mother Susana de Leguia,” says Garelli.
This photographer explains that the censored images were discontinued but, in addition, they used to be saved with another date to prevent them from being easily located and destroyed. That decision saved them, but it took them 40 years to become public.
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Source: EL PAIS
