Why is Leila Guerriero's book "The Call" at the center of a heated controversy?

Awarded in Spain and at the last Buenos Aires Book Fair, with fifteen editions since its launch in early 2024, La llamada (Anagrama) has also become the center of a controversy . Leila Guerriero 's book once again raises the problems of memory and the last dictatorship in Argentina without having intended to do so, since its subject is a portrait of Silvia Labayru , a former Montoneros militant detained in the Navy Mechanics School between December 1976 and June 1978.

Labayru had her daughter in the clandestine center, where she was tortured, forced into slave labor, and raped by an officer and his wife, a fact she reported as a complainant in the first case of sexual crimes committed at the ESMA. She was also forced to accompany Alfredo Astiz in the marines' infiltration of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the solidarity circle that included the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet.

The reconstruction of that episode is one of the aspects questioned in The Call : "The figure of Astiz appears in the book with a veneer of sympathy , as if he were a friend. The complex fact of the infiltration is very relativized, without any questioning," objects sociologist and essayist María Pía López .

Guerriero maintained conversations with Labayru for a year and seven months and obtained more than 100 testimonies from people related to the protagonist in various circumstances. He aimed to "find as many facets as possible to tell this story and write a text without reductionism," as he explained to Martín Gras when the former detainee-disappeared man declined an interview.

The closeness and intimacy achieved with the protagonist are a trademark of her work as a chronicler, but now they are also receiving criticism. In a review of the book, Conicet researcher and author of Pensar los 30,000 (Thinking the 30,000 ), Emilio Crenzel, highlights "the effect of fascination with Labayru that nullifies in the author any critical perspective regarding the core of her experience."

In another review, published in Spain, writer Jorge Carrión, however, praises the thoroughness of the interviews and Guerriero's narrative as "a profile rich in dialogue," "a chorus of voices, counterpointed by the narrator's discreet point of view," from which "the reader draws their own vision of the character."

Rubén Chababo, in turn, values ​​“the attempt to enter a hellish zone by shedding the classic mandates about what to say, what not to say, or how to say it.”

Rubén Chababo, former director of the Rosario Museum of Memory, dismisses the criticism : “ The Call is a version of a past, singular, uncomfortable, out of step with the established model, as valuable and deserving of attention and listening as any other. It is a biographical account that the author in no way intends to extend to all militants or those who suffered captivity,” he says.

In 2024, The Call was the subject of discussion at a meeting convened by anthropologists Virginia Vecchioli and Sabina Frederic, consultant Tomás Fabricante, and political scientist Alon Kelmeszes at the Cultural Center of Cooperation.

There were four meetings attended by seventy people from diverse generations, political positions, and perspectives on the past, from victims of state terrorism to libertarian activists. The readings were also diverse, ranging from the challenge to the book as a narrative of memory to its celebration as a new "Never Again."

“In The Call, I do not object to the decision to narrate the singularity of a story, but rather to an ethical and also a political question : the careless treatment that Silvia Labayru’s testimony receives, as well as the absolute depoliticization of the story of her militancy , her disappearance, her exile and what followed next,” says Ana Longoni , author of Traiciones , a book in which she examines the representations of dictatorship survivors in fiction and non-fiction stories.

Longoni, like others, questions what Guerriero's title suggests: that the decision to release Labayru was influenced by her father's response to a phone call from the repressors. "It obstructs consideration of the captors' arbitrary will and any collective dimension in the fact of having survived," asserts the essayist and Conicet researcher.

Guerriero explains in the book that The Call does not aim to address the 1970s and instead points out with deliberate simplicity ("a summary without depth," she says) the political events that marked the decade. "It's difficult to paint a portrait of a person whose life was marked by what happened in relation to militancy and repression without considering the social processes in which that life unfolded," María Pía López argues.

The sociologist associates The Call with Argentina, 1985 , Santiago Mitre's film about prosecutor Julio César Strassera and the Trial of the Military Juntas. Both works coincide in producing "an off-screen" that excludes a political understanding of repression: "If in Argentina, 1985 this was evident in the absence of the human rights movement and the deprivation of the Mothers' headscarves, in The Call it materializes in the substitution of the conversation about the motives of the insurgency for the fascinated observation of Labayru's beauty."

Rubén Chababo has another perspective: “Guerriero's book is not a sanitized version of history, nor does it contribute to any advance in justifying the crimes perpetrated by the State. I can't help but read this kind of criticism as a resistance, one of many, to breaking the frieze of consecrated and epic versions , those that have dominated public narrative in recent years.”

The controversy also points to the characterization of Silvia Labayru as an "uncomfortable victim" for both sides in the 1970s and her position in a "pariah articulation," according to Guerriero, due to her rejection of the theory of the two demons and her criticism of the Montonero leadership.

María Pía López cites Power and Disappearance (1998), the book by Pilar Calveiro that opened the discussion on the ESMA, Rodolfo Walsh's criticism of the Montonero leadership, and the discussion "Thou Shalt Not Kill" based on a letter from Oscar Del Barco: "In other words, there is no pariah situation. There are a number of people who were involved with the militancy of the 70s and they did not stop criticizing what was being done . That is the type of operation the book carries out: it erases a field of complaints to let a person go free."

A jury of twenty-four writers and cultural journalists assembled at the last Buenos Aires Book Fair named The Call the best book of 2024. Previously, in Madrid, Leila Guerriero received the Zenda Prize for Narrative after a verdict that praised the narrative and journalistic production as factors in “a tremendous, moving, and at the same time humorous story about life’s extreme experiences and the powerful human instinct for survival.”

Among those interviewed for Labayru's portrait were other former ESMA survivors who were also dismissed as alleged collaborators in the repression . "Just as the book portrays the fact that Silvia's role as a survivor was heavily criticized by many of her colleagues, as was the case with other survivors, the significance of accompanying Astiz is less clearly addressed, and we should consider what infiltration means, and how this situation came about ," suggests María Pía López.

Ana Longoni points out that “ Silvia Labayru and several other survivors have been very brave in highlighting sexual crimes as a specific area of ​​illegal repression during the last dictatorship” and “they have also made it clear that consent can never be spoken of in sexual, or even emotional, relationships between prisoners and repressors.”

The topic “has gained traction as a topic of elaboration” with other books—starting with Ese infierno (That Hell) (2001), conversations between five women survivors of the ESMA (Spanish National University of Madrid)—and exhibitions. “Overcoming shame and breaking the silence to denounce systematic sexual violence as a repressive procedure is another manifestation of how feminism has transformed us . I wonder when male survivors will be able to make that subjective move and recount the sexual crimes they were also subjected to in clandestine detention centers,” adds the author of Traiciones (Traitions ).

The debates at the Cultural Center of Cooperation also referred to the national government's "Complete Memory" spot , and the reading of The Call served as a platform for reopening questions about the memory of the 1970s .

Emilio Crenzel considers the book “a significant object of study” , whose impact shows “that the stories and legacies of the forced disappearance of people continue to arouse interest in the country ” and consequently proposes “thinking through denaturalized lenses about the concentration camp universe, the testimonies of its victims and their experiences, avoiding moral condemnation but, at the same time, uncritical complacency.”

The research process, the interviews, and the details of the encounters with Labayru are part of the story in The Call . Guerriero's own doubts and the questions he received as he began to construct the portrait are also present, starting with the most basic: what criteria he uses to choose his stories. "Perhaps because of questions from two decades ago that were left hanging in the wind," he answers, and the controversy seems to prove him right.

The discussion about representations of betrayal was revived by a series of articles published by Mario Santucho in Crisis magazine about the death of his father, Roberto Santucho, in an army operation. The topic is already a tradition in literature and essays, "but it is new to those outside the field of recent past studies," observes Rubén Chababo.

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“The stigma that weighs on those who survived the concentration camps continues to sting, and a clear manifestation of this is the articles in which Mario Santucho insists on pointing fingers at a supposed informer who led to the fall of the Villa Martelli department where the ERP leadership and their families were sheltering,” says Ana Longoni.

Under the title "Who betrayed my old man," Santucho reviewed the events leading up to the Army operation of July 19, 1976, in which Benito Urteaga, Liliana Defino, and Alba Lanzillotto were also killed.

"Once again, the revolutionary defeat is being dealt with by finding someone to blame, rather than addressing the difficult task of considering multiple factors : the massive and systematic repression, first and foremost, but also the mistakes , distortions, responsibilities, and even errors of those who promoted emancipatory projects," Longoni argues.