Midway through 2005, a handful of neighbors, relatives, friends and social activists from three communities of Villa Lugano, Villa Soldati and Villa Celina joined to form the Comisión x la Memoria y Justicia Villa Lugano, Villa Soldati y Villa Celina (Commission for Memory and Justice of Villa Lugano, Villa Soldati and Villa Celina). We met with the aim of consolidating the collective memory of our communities in order to restore and strengthen the social bonds that were destroyed by Argentina’s military dictatorship.

The initiative coincided with the 30th anniversary of the military coup, and began with the placement of commemorative tiles outside the homes and businesses of our compatriots who have disappeared, los desaparecidos. The tiles were placed on the sidewalks where these people lived, worked and studied, and where they were kidnapped or murdered.

The Commission decided to visit these communities to raise public awareness of the 30,000 missing compatriots who once lived on these same streets. We searched for the stories that people carried with them, and we placed the tiles in the sidewalks so that these paths would be filled with reasons to become committed in the recovery of our recent past.

Our country must stop treating these wrongs with impunity. The first step is realizing that making our country more aware of these atrocities is a difficult, but necessary task. Our work should contribute to piece together along with the work of others this puzzle of our history, and with time, the path to long-standing remembrance will be built.

We continued looking for stories about the detained, disappeared or murdered in the communities of Lugano, Celina, Soldati and Villa Riachuelo. By learning about the life of each militant, we can start to understand what motivated them in their struggles and what their dreams had been. Through their stories we can recover the person, the friend, the worker, and the activist. By recovering their identity, we will be able to restore the dignity they were robbed of.

As part of Argentine society, we feel we have the duty to ensure that this collective memory is maintained and passed along. In so doing, we will also enable people today to deepen their understanding of our present society.

The individual stories told by the protagonists, transmit experiences and sensations that can not be told by what it is referred to as archive memory.

Therefore, we humbly accept the invitation to the Walk of Human Rights, because our desaparecidos call us to fight to set their memory free, after a captivity that lasts up to the present.

Remembrance is a way of achieving some kind of justice.

www.memoriasandantes.blogspot.com (up to 2006)