"My father, the KILLER!". "Did you ACTUALLY KILL HUNDREDS of PEOPLE, Dad?…
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — History
— 5 years ago(March 25, 2021 06:26 AM)
: Eduardo Kalinec in his uniform as a young policeman.
It's not a question that many people feel the need to ask their parents. But for a group of daughters and sons in Argentina, it became one they could not ignore.
When the phone rang in Analía Kalinec's Buenos Aires home on a wintry August afternoon, she had no reason to suspect the call would end up blowing her family apart.
"It was my mum. 'Look, don't freak out but Daddy is in jail,' she told me. 'But don't worry, this is just politics.' Until that phone call, I had never ever linked my dad's job to the dictatorship. Not even remotely…".
Analía's father is Eduardo Emilio Kalinec, a former police officer who served under the brutal military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.
He was accused of some of the worst human rights violations in the country's recent past - over 180 cases of abduction, torture and murder committed in the regime's secret detention camps.
For the seven years it held power, the military government targeted political dissidents - communists, socialists, union leaders, students and artists. Up to 30,000 were "disappeared" after being kidnapped and illegally imprisoned by security officials like Kalinec.
But Analía hadn't got even a hint of her father's well-kept secrets until 2005, when she was 25, and received that call from her mum.
Kalinec was taken into custody and, despite his wife's initial optimism, was never released. In 2010, he was given a life sentence for crimes against humanity.
"He asked me: 'Do you think I'm a monster?'" Analía says. "What did he expect me to say? It was my beloved dad, I was so close to him…I was stunned.".
: Analía dances with her father, Eduardo Emilio Kalinec.
Paula (who asked the BBC not to use her full name) also experienced a moment of revelation about her father.
When she was 14 he took her and her brother to a cafe, and told them he had been an undercover cop. Later she realised he had been a spy, infiltrating left-wing groups and identifying people to be seized by the regime.
"Since it clicked in my head that what I knew about the dictatorship had been done by my father, or that he worked for them, I've been feeling ashamed and guilty as if I were an accomplice," says Paula.
"Now I have this knowledge and there's nothing I can do. It's like I'm keeping a secret I don't want to keep.".
It took these daughters years to understand and come to terms with their family history, but recently they have felt the urge to speak out.
They are part of a group of the "sons, daughters and relatives of the perpetrators of genocide", as they call themselves. They publicly condemn their fathers and are often ostracised by their families as a result.
Short presentational grey line
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Analía Kalinec, a psychologist and school teacher was born in 1980, in the middle of the junta's battle against supporters of the left. Her memories of her policeman father mostly date from after this period - she remembers him cooking barbecues, taking his daughters to the sports club and on hunting trips.
She and her three sisters all married young and weren't interested in politics.
The day after the phone call from her mum, she remembers, they went to visit her dad in prison.
"When we spoke to him, he just said 'Don't believe what they will say about me, it's all a bunch of lies,'" she says.
He told the family he had nothing to apologise for, that he had been fighting a "war", and that he was now being persecuted by "lefties" intent on revenge.
"I didn't understand a word," says Analía.
For Analía the dictatorship was a thing of the past, and for the first couple of years after her father's arrest, she lived in denial.
"I supported the mothers and grandmother of Plaza de Mayo who were campaigning for their disappeared loved ones," she says. "All good, but my father had nothing to do with any of that. I still believed it must have been an error… It was when the trial started that I realised things were not quite as my father had been telling us.".
: Analía Kalinec with her family on a family trip in the 1980s.
Analía came face to face with her father's past when she started to read the case files. Over 800 pages filled with stark accounts of the terror he had inflicted, in the voices of the survivors.
"I read the descriptions of those concentration camps where the military kept the people they abducted. It was like a map and I had to place my dad in it, which was unbearable," she says.
The victims didn't know Kalinec by his real name. In the clandestine prisons where he worked, he went by an alias, as most did to conceal their real identity - "Doctor K".
"I knew they called him that because he once told my grandma, and when I asked him where the nickname came from he told me it was because he was always very proper and looked like a lawyer, and here we address lawyers as doctors. But it may also be because he was 'the doctor' in the torture chamber that they called 'the operating theatre'.".
Analía finally confr