By Alejandro Prieto |
Montevideo (EFE).- A book that in a few strokes vindicates the memory of the disappeared and the fortuitous discovery of an abandoned plane intersect in the story of Sebastián Santana, the Uruguayan illustrator who pushed his ego “to one side” to contribute to the fight for truth and justice in the face of the crimes of the Condor Plan.
Marked “since he was a child” by family histories linked to the Uruguayan civic-military dictatorship (1973-1985), since his father and uncle were kidnapped in the clandestine torture center “300 Carlos”, from which they managed to “break free”, Santana He did not hesitate to let the theme mix with his passion, drawing.
Thus, as he recounted in an interview with EFE, as a teenager “he was already very involved”, he collaborated in a play about Elena Quinteros -one of the disappeared Uruguayans- and made posters for a campaign to repeal the ‘expiration law’ , which prohibited the prosecution of the military for crimes of State terrorism.
My uncle is coming tomorrow
In May 2011, hours before the March of Silence – a mobilization that annually gathers thousands in Montevideo to demand “Memory, truth and justice”, a dissident vote within the leftist Frente Amplio prevented another attempt to repeal the amnesty agreed in 1986. .
“The march was done as always, in silence, but the atmosphere was burning. There was a feeling of discomfort but also of fury and a generation (…) that had taken the lead in the fight to annul the law”, describes Santana.
It was while walking in that march that someone who has illustrated and collaborated with the creation of dozens of children’s books sketched “Tomorrow my uncle is coming”, an “autofiction” -although his relatives did not disappear- that in black and white and simply with a child and a door, try to wait for a guy who never comes back.
“I wanted to question how someone can not empathize with a person who wants to know what happened to their relatives; what the disappeared person may have done goes into the background next to thinking about how someone can not empathize with a mother, with a brother”, says who also sought to induce questions from children to adults, which, he alleges, did not work out .
“In many cases (…) what the botijas (children) do is suddenly read about unfulfilled promises. The way the book works is strange, because it has happened to me that people (adults) start crying when I give them the book to read and it is terrible because at the same time looking for that type of emotion is something that one wants ”, he says .
Plan Condor plane
Tied to his work with this illustrated book, translated into several languages, Santana participated with drawings of an audiovisual short based on testimonies of arrests during the dictatorship that caught the attention of the Italian researcher Francesca Lessa, who from the University of Oxford promoted a site informative website about the Condor Plan.
As the illustrator recounts, Lessa invited him to draw pictures for three shorts that review the historical context of the repressive plan of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone and, as one narrated about a transfer to Argentina of detainees kidnapped in Paraguay, he wanted to know, to draw, What was the plane like in which they were taken in May 1976?
“In the Internet browser I put the character code -of the plane’s registration, named in military files- and I went to the images tab to see what jumped. Some photos appear and the first thing that catches my attention is one of a black and white plane”, indicates the person who searched the Internet looking for the ship “5-T-30/0653”.
Doubting himself, Santana came across a surprising discovery, collectors’ blogs and photos of the Argentine Navy allowed him to find his final destination, already a private one, the twin-jet plane, which belonged to the Argentine Emilio Massera, was abandoned at the Airport from Melilla in Montevideo.
“What nobody had found is where the plane was today. That was the contribution that I was able to make (…), to say ‘look, the plane is abandoned in Montevideo’ and there it is today, waiting for something to happen”, she expresses.
to one side
Asked about his feelings regarding his contribution to finding the ship where the Argentines Alejandro Logoluso, José Nell, Marta Landi and the Uruguayans Gustavo Inzaurralde and Nelson Santana were clandestinely transferred, Santana says it was “very moving” and gave him a lesson in humility .
“Artists are very vain, we have a very big ego and this is great because it reduces everything to a very small scale. ‘Bring this and run to the side’, is the best in the end. It is a humanist work, it does not have an aesthetic correlate, ”he sums up.
It is that, although he claims to have “aesthetic ideas” of what could be done with the metallic witness of historical events, he knows that it is up to Justice to determine his fate.