Silvia Quintela - Life and "disappearance"

Life and "disappearance"

Silvia Quintela and Abel Madariaga met as students at the Universidad de Buenos Aires School of Medicine. As active members of the Peronist Youth, both were followers of Juan Perón who, more than three decades after his first presidency, had returned to become, once again, the President of Argentina. After Perón's death in 1974, his wife Isabel succeeded him in the presidency, only to be overthrown by the Argentine military in a 1976 coup d'état.

Silvia Quintela spent the brief number of years that she served as a physician tending to the indigent of Buenos Aires. Because of that service, she was one of the earliest of those singled out as leftist sympathizers. She was 28 years old and four months pregnant when, on 17 January 1977, she was detained while walking down a road. The same men who seized her later broke into her mother's house, rummaged through her belongings, and told her mother that Quintela had been arrested. With help from Quintela's mother, Abel Madariaga tried to find her, but he soon had to flee the country, ultimately becoming a political refugee in Sweden.

According to witnesses, Silvia Quintela was kept at a military base where she eventually gave birth to a baby boy. The newborn was taken away from her, and she was reportedly transported to a military airfield. Her fate has remained unknown, but detainees sent there were often stripped naked, blindfolded, chained together, and put onboard cargo planes, known as "death flights". The planes would fly out over the Atlantic Ocean at night and groups of prisoners would be pushed out to their deaths.