Avenger | 3. The World Cup

Hello, Avenger listeners, It's Steve Fishman and I'm really glad you've tuned in. I hope you love this show as much as we do. A quick word on an upcoming bonus episode. We're doing a bonus with Miriam, the real Miriam. We'll be asking her questions, your questions and getting answers. She'll update us on what's going on in her world and a lot has Please email your questions or thoughts or comments too. Info at Orbitmedia dot fm. Oh and Fisher Stevens can answer your questions too. He's our co

Before we begin, please note that for this story we interviewed Medium and everyone else for dozens of hours in Spanish. We hired actors to voice their words in English. By now, Medium Lewin has been a hostage of Argentina's military junta for weeks. Her captors tester. She recalls the first warning she received the day of her kidnapping. If you don't cooperate, you die. Her captors constantly bring the phone to her cell.

They were taking me to the location where my friend, the guy who broke protocol asked to meet. They blindfolded me, and then they put me inside the trunk of a Ford falcon. All I could think about was how this meeting should not be happening. We had agreed on a protocol with our comrades. If any of us were captured alive, pick up the phone, but always assume the person calling

Medium arrives at the agreed meeting place, closely monitored by her captors.

It was near a gas station at a busy intersection. My captors had told me to tap on my head as soon as I saw my friend. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see someone waving at me, trying to get my attention. It's my friend. Instead of tapping my head, I ignore him and immediately look the other way. But when I turn, my captor is right there, watching everything, and then he grabs my arm and drags me away.

Medium's comrade is captured, abducted.

I see him on the floor. He's bleeding from his stomach. They ask me who is he. I tell them I don't know him. They take us back to the detention center and they drag my friend away. I thought they were going to torture me for saying I didn't know him, but instead they just slap me, insult me, and throw me back in my cell. But then they leave my door open so I would hear everything they're doing to

Listening to her friend. Medium thinks about her suicide attempt the day she was kidnapped.

I was willing to swallow that cyanide pill because I wanted to protect my friends so badly, so badly that dying was the only option.

But now here she is living a scenario she feared. At the end of the day, she collaborated in the capture of her comrade, and now she's being tortured too, psychologically.

And when my friend's torture ends, a guard walks over to my cell and point blank tells me, by the way, Juan is dead.

Juan, the guy she had married and got into hiding with before her kidnapping.

I cried for days. They still miss him.

From Orbit media, I'm Andrescaba Scheedo. This is Avenger, the story of Medium Lewin Episode three, the World Cup. I've spent more than half of my life outside Argentina. Now as a journalist, reconnecting with my homeland, learning more about this horrific part of my country's history. I can't help but ask did people know about what the military junta was doing about the clandestine torture centers in the middle

Alden Dayocho.

SOCASA said, this event, according to the propaganda machine, shows the world what Argentines are capable of, but medium. She's captive in a small cell inside a Coindestine detention center in the middle of the city.

My holding cell was so close to an apartment building where regular families lived. I could hear them singing happy birthdays, and I could hear siblings fighting, a mom calling her kids to dinner, sounds of dishes being washed, life as usual, And there I was.

Frozen in time not quite frozen. Medium is well aware of the World Cup approaching.

Every morning, the guards would tune into Radio Rivadabya. There was a show hosted by a legendary sports announcer everyone loved. He was pro dictatorship and the junta used him for political propaganda. He would announce how many days were left until the start of the World Cup. Then you would talk about how we Argentines were great humans and that all that talk about human rights violations were nothing but lies.

For Medium, the psychological torture inside the detention center starts getting worse. The captors play good cop, bad cop with the prisoners, and they tell them that if they cooperate, if they show remorse for their actions, they won't be punished, and that death and harm to their loved ones outside is the cost of not complying. Medium has found a way to survive. She will play by the room rules, their rules.

One day they took me out of the cell and they put me in front of a camera where I had to explain why I had chosen violence as a way to protest against the government. They also asked me what family, God, and country meant to me.

She's being forced to apologize for her mistakes. She knows they're making an example out of her. She had never been a violent activist, but she went along with it.

I was absolutely against their values, but I had heard their rhetorics so much I was very familiar. It was easy for me to tell them what they wanted to hear. Days later, they came into my cell and told me I had saved my own life.

The World Cup was just days away, and I kept.

Hearing that same sports show coming from the Guards radio with the World Cup countdown.

This massive event that people around the world would tune in to see. Little did Medium know that she would soon be thrust into the middle of them.

Get provided by another Privaan and now the beginning of the arrade of representative.

The World Cup's opening ceremony takes place at the River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires in front of eighty thousand people. On TV, you can see hundreds of pigeons released into the air.

This is Augentina, sevent to eight of the eleven World Cup final sixteen times Tenian.

The announcer introduces General Horge Raphael Videla, who stands in front of two microphones. He's ditched his military uniform for a gray suit and a blue tie. He looks dapper. Everyone turns around to face.

Him, Senor, Senor.

In his speech, Midela talks about the World Cup bringing happiness to the entire country, about diversity, unity, Yes, the EVENTO, and then he calls on God, the Lord. He talks about how the event affirms world peace. It's a pass that piece that we all long for, he says, I know what it's like to be a sess with the World Cup. I wasn't alive yet in nineteen seventy eight, but I grew up watching countless video replays of the final game. A ruthless striker Mario Kempis taken on the

The stadium was just blocks away. Depending on the direction of the wind, we could hear the sounds of the euphoric crowd seeping into the torture chambers.

And if the wind blew in a different direction, Medium could still hear the World Cup madness coming from the radio that the guards huddled around in the hallway.

The World Cup stirred rage inside me. I felt helpless. It was painful because the World Cup blinded all Argentines from what was happening, and we the disappeared were the number one victims of that blindness.

That disappeared or disapparicidos the term given to people who were kidnapped and never heard from again. Inside Esthma, Medium starts noticing something new. Prisoners who showed more resistance were starting to be quote transferred.

The transfers happened on Wednesdays, and they would tell people they were taking them to a ranch in the south, where they would have a better life and where they would be re educated.

Five thousand prisoners passed through the detention center. Medium was among the few, just three hundred or so who survived. She had convinced her captors that she was reformed, that she had repented from her leftist sins. The reformed prisoners were being kept in detention and forced to work jobs mundane stuff like the cells doing laundry. But if a prisoner had special skills, they'd get a special assignment. Medium had studied journalism, and that's useful to the junta. She's

We got to sleep on beds with sheets, We could shower, We had access to phones we could use to call our families, and I was allowed to make short calls to my parents to let them know I was alive. During the first year after my kidnapping, I would call them and I would tell them I was in hiding. They didn't know I'd been captured. When my mother asked me where I was, I would just tell her I couldn't say for safety reasons. I would assure my parents I was okay, and they believe me.

The men in charge of everything that happens at the detention center is Navy Admiral Emilia Massea. He helped orchestrate the coup. He'd like to be president, and he's been assigned a crucial task for the junta. Admiral Maceda is running the propaganda campaign. News about human rights violations in Argentina is heating up in the international press ahead of the World Cup. Marcera's job is to spin a counter

As I understanded, as I understanding you're interest in human rights, your INSIDR rights, I'm inst in human rights, and we think that general be then as interested in your right right.

One of Buckley's guests is the US Ambassador to Argentina, Robert Hill. Oddly, it's the US Ambassador who gets agitated and starts interrogating Buckley.

What caused the human rights problems the Buckley in your opinion in Argentina, Well, what caused the human rights problem is a series of reports by people who are allegedly innocent who have disappeared. Essentially that the failure of the government, who releases the names of those who doesn't. That's not that's not correct in my opinion.

It's not a hard hit against the dictatorship. But even this soft criticism from Buckley was unexpected, so the US Ambassador quickly jumps in to set the record straight.

The human rights problem was caused by the terrorists.

They were killing innocent people.

Week two months after this interview, Medium is kidnapped off the streets. Now Medium finds herself deep inside the junta's propaganda machine.

I also knew English and French, so they asked me to help out in the translations department.

She scans foreign newspapers to see what they're saying about Argentina and the dictatorship. She writes articles for media sources controlled by the junta.

We were hostages. They would tell us what to write, and one day they asked me to write about the World Cup. They brief me to make sure the script had a patriotic spirit, a nationalist tone. I knew none of us had guarantees of coming out alive simply for being part of the staff. And sure I could have resisted and earned myself a spot on a death flight, but I wanted to live.

Less than a week until the World Cup final. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger lands in Buenos Aires. It's not just an American pr firm that is burnishing the junta's image. Kissinger is invited to the games by his friend, the dictator, General Videla. Kissinger had helped orchestrate Nixon's war in Vietnam. He helped organize the rights of Chili's dictator at Gusto Pinochet, and he supported Videla's claim to impose law and order in Argentina. At the airport,

You stop your mob of the casino stopt.

And they forced us to watch the games. Some of my fellow captives, I must confess, sometimes got carried away by emotions and embrace their tortures. When Argentina scored, it made me sick to my stomach.

With less than five minutes left, Argentina scores the third goal and clinches its first World Cup title ever a Cana Canina. The sounds of people celebrating seep through the walls in the windows of the colandestine center. Suddenly, a guard in the hallway starts yelling out names.

I hear my name and my friends Gracila Valleo. The guards took us outside with a dozen other people, and then they forced us into a car that was part of a convoy.

The gate opens and they drive out into the mass of people. It's pure euphoria. The guards instruct Medium and Gracila to look out the car windows and look happy like everyone else. Gracila asked for permission to stick her head out of the car sunroof.

People were getting out of their cars to hug one another on the sidewalks. We drove through traffic slowly. It was incredible, so many people.

The cars with Medium and Gracila eventually stop. They part in front of a restaurant. The waiter puts some tables together while the guards order pizza and beer and share it with their prisoners, including a woman that Medium knows they had just raped and tortured.

People were literally jumping on top of the tables. There was no end to it. It was pure, uncontrollable joy. And I sat there silent pale. I looked at my friends, thinking, how do they not realize we're being held captive? How do they not know these men are torturers. It made us think that the dictatorship would easily last another forty years.

At one point, her friend Razila gets permission to use the bathroom. Once there, she takes out a red lipstick one of her captures had given her so she would look like any other woman celebrating with their friends. With the lipstick, she writes the words quote military murderers, Maceda the murderer, all over the walls. She goes back to her table. They sit watching people dance.

What Graciela did was basically a modest act of rebellion. It was a statement. There wasn't much else we could do to say. We were kidnapped right at that moment, out in the open. It was completely unthinkable. No one would have believed us. For me, it would have been suicidal. It would have put my friends' lives in danger. It was like another form of torture, another test of how submissive we were. The junta had won.

After about an hour, Medium and Grazila are taken back to the Clendestine Center to be tortured by the sounds of joy that would contain you through the name.

The way the dictatorship used this passion shared by the Argentine people. It was just horrible. It's hard to think about it.

In the next episode, Medium and Giancarlo continue their hunt for the planes, and they finally come across one promising lead. On one list, there was a plane called the Rio Grande for more than a decade. It sat there, motor less, right under our noses. From Orbit Media, This is Avenger, the Story of Medium Lewin. I'm your host and Senior producer Andrescavachedo. The series was produced by Seguiel Rodrie Sandino and edited by Monica Campbell. Original score Nicolas Paschela, mixing

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