<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/aug/20/long-shadow-argentinas-dictatorship-she-was-not-who-she-thought-she-was-neither-was-her-father>
"As a child, Analía Azic used to pretend she was secretly a princess, the
heiress to a magical distant kingdom. In real life, she was the daughter of a
greengrocer named Juan Antonio Azic and a demure housewife named Esther Abrego.
The family lived in the province of Buenos Aires, which, as anyone from the
area will tell you with a dash of pride, is not the city of Buenos Aires but
its rougher neighbour. Analía was not royalty, but she had an iron will and
audacity out of proportion to her small stature.
Analía cared little for grades at the Ladies Institute of the Sacred Heart,
where she rolled with the dominantes, girls who hiked their school skirts up so
high they served as little more than belts, and dreamed of the weekend when
they could finally trade in their school uniforms for designer jeans and tight
tank tops and sashay into Electric Circus, the one local club that allowed in
minors. There, Analía would climb atop the speakers and dance, then leap back
down to toy with the boys from the Argentine air force’s technical trade
school.
It was the 1990s and she and her friends were middle-class kids from families
with ties to the armed forces. Their understanding of recent events was that
the nation had emerged, in the previous decade, from a “dirty war” between two
opposing forces of equal strength. On the one side, a national army fighting
for the preservation of Christian values and the fatherland; on the other,
unscrupulous Marxist guerrillas advocating their overthrow. Both sides had
committed crimes, that was true – but it was war, and thankfully the army had
won and reinstated order. Analía absorbed this narrative both at school and at
home, where her father, Juan Antonio, railed against what he called the
“atheist, unpatriotic left”.
From the age of nine, Analía had taken to reading the newspaper after her
father had finished with it, and at night would sidle up beside him to watch
his political programmes on TV. This bonded her to her father, as surely as it
unsettled her mother. Esther believed that politics, like climbing trees, was
not becoming of the female sex. Analía – who, by her own admission, possessed
a “rebellious, contentious nature” – ignored her. But it was precisely this
defiant streak that soon led her to question her parents’ politics. When
Analía turned 15, she got her hands on Che Guevara’s complete works. She
started to become curious about leftwing ideas."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
