Under the brutal rule of the military junta in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, hundreds of secret torture camps were established to interrogate
A final example of the ways in which the lives of prisoners and guards crossed paths was through ‘romantic’ relations – I use this term extremely dubiously, as any relationship between guard and prisoner cannot be considered consensual and is inherently unequal. According to Villani, the prisoner Lucía married a torturer known as Cat, ‘the inventor of Carolina, an instrument of electric torture’. Villani did not know whether Cat had ever tortured Lucía, however he was certain that Cat had been present during interrogations because ‘he came often to check in on Carolina’. Regardless of their married status, the conditions in which Lucía and Cat met must be seriously taken into consideration. Further, female survivors of ESMA recall being taken on ‘pseudo-dates’ by guards to hotels or restaurants against their will. In her testimony published in 2007, Marta Álvarez commented on the duality of the men who were involved in these actions: ‘It was crazy, right? Because the same one who tortured you, that same one… was the same who seduced you.’
Sexual contact between guards and female desaparecidas will only briefly be mentioned as to avoid addressing sensitive material. ESMA detainee Graciela García stated that she felt compelled to engage in sexual contact with a top officer, known as Tigre Acosta, as a means of survival. Other women expressed similar opinions in their testimonies. Eduardo Pavlosky’s Paso de dos (A Dance of Death), a play first performed in 1990, portrays a ‘love story’ between torturer and victim during the Dirty Wars, aiming to portray a female experience comparable to those recorded in testimonies. Although the writers of Paso de dos termed the play ‘feminist’, the problematic amount of violence present in each scene can be argued to have taken away from its main point, which was that the mind of the female prisoner never gave in to her captor. The Argentine human rights organisation Madres de Plaza de Mayo condemned the play for this very reason. It seems clear that, in many of the camps, the boundary between female prisoners and guards was blurred. However, for the women victims, this was simply a means of survival.
