Continued: Teacher remembers Argentina’s Dirty War

Gwen Bottoli sits down. Finally. She has just led her rambunctious fourth-graders downstairs to lunch at Robbinsdale Spanish Immersion School after a morning of impressively managing Friday-before-spring-break chaos. "Hola, Señora Bottoli!" they shouted earlier, before diving under desks or heading out into the hall to pretend, at least, to finish their work.

We've been trying to meet for weeks, but Bottoli has had student assessments, parent conferences and lessons to plan. Still, it's seldom a good time to talk about what I have come to talk about. Rail thin and 57, with a short bob of brown hair, a lovely smile and enviable Nordic cheekbones, the mother of three grown children is among the least likely people to know anything about a horrific period in Argentina's past, known as the Dirty War.

But life is funny. I notice that today's math lesson is "comparisiones." Comparisons.

"Oh," Bottoli says, smiling whimsically.

On this very day 33 years ago, a military dictatorship overthrew the government of Isabel Peron and began a systematic campaign of abduction, torture and murder of as many as 30,000 people. Many of the victims were still in their teens, 90 percent were under 40. Some were subverters, but most were idealistic students and others concerned about social justice and human rights.

From 1976 until 1983, when a civilian government was established, they became "Desaparecidos." The disappeared.

As Argentina's Supreme Court reopens the trials of military and police officials, many facing genocide charges, the Dirty War's legacy arrives in the Twin Cities in two powerful ways.

An exhibit at the Sabes Jewish Community Center of Minneapolis, running through April 23, features the work of Twin Cities photographer Sylvia Horwitz, who traveled to Buenos Aires in 2003 to dance tango and, two years later, turned her lens on three decades of relentless protest by the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared. On Friday, Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner and torture victim Adolfo Perez Esquivel will deliver the keynote lecture at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul.

My child is gone

Horwitz's photos are heart-breaking, not just in what they show, but in what is left out. A young girl swirls in joy on the sunny Plaza de Mayo, surrounded by pigeons. Beneath her feet, painted in the stones, are the symbolic white head scarves worn by the mothers still marching there weekly, arm in arm, telling the world: My child is gone. A lovely view of Rio de la Plata, or Silver River, belies a grim truth. This is the watery grave of thousands of victims drugged and dropped from overhead planes.

Don't bring the kids.

"How do people go on after some irrevocable loss?" Horwitz, a former school social worker, forever wonders. "How do they find purpose and meaning?"

I've come to ask Gwen Bottoli.

At 20, she traveled to Argentina, keen on learning Spanish and immersing herself in a culture vastly different from her upbringing in south Minneapolis. It was an exciting time, but also increasingly dangerous.

First, armed guards on the streets, then colleges shut down by the government, then the coup and the kidnappings. Bottoli admits that she was in "a democratic mindset," believing that she could argue her point of view and remain safe. A month after the coup in 1976, she was carefully distributing pro-democracy pamphlets in coffeehouse rest rooms. Seeing no one around, she set a few extras on a bus bench, then stepped on board.

Five uniformed, heavily armed men dragged her off by her hair. At the police station, "I argued my position in a pretty strong, fierce 24-year-old way," Bottoli said. The officer got up and slapped her across the face.

She was moved to another room, blind-folded, stripped and tortured with a cattle prod. "They threatened that I'd never have children," she said matter-of-factly. "I shouted. It was angry shouts. These things came out of me, a strength I didn't know where it was coming from."

'It was madness'

During her five months in a crowded underground prison, she learned that she was pregnant. She ate watery stew, day-old bread and extra milk given to her by other women. "It was madness," she said.

After her release, she returned to the Twin Cities and married Miguel Angel Bottoli, whom she'd met in Argentina.

Raising three healthy children with Miguel, she spoke to human rights groups and helped translate some of the mothers' stories. "But it's just so hard to translate," she said. "I don't have ... the vocabulary." It's the only time her eyes water up and her voice cracks.

The kids are back from lunch. A few hours until freedom. Freedom. Bottoli can tell you about freedom. "The feeling is just so amazing," she said. "Pretty soon, you fall back into the day-to-day worries that everyone else has.

"But, at times like this, I think, 'Wow. That was pretty traumatic.'"

Gail Rosenblum • 612-673-7350 gail.rosenblum@startribune.com