Dr.Nila Heredia is the President of the Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of Disappeared – Detainees (FEDEFAM). A medical doctor by profession, Nila manifests an inner strength tempered by years of trials and struggles.
Bolivia is a Latin American country with a very low health and education index but rich in natural resources.
The permanent interest of many business firms and the ruling elite is to exploit the natural resources with the sole intention of increasing their personal businesses before considering the development of the country. It has resulted in the frequent mobilization of the people for the purpose of improving the economic and social situation with a model government that guarantees a just and equitable society.
In the same way as other groups with economic interests, Bolivia experienced, as a control mechanism, coup d’ etats that helped the Armed Forces and developed the violent repression under the guidance of the North American powers.
Between the 60s and the 70s, the population achieved significant levels of organization and advanced in social developments and politics in the same way as that many countries of the continent. This was a dangerous situation for investments. The North American dominance was seen through a series of coup d’ etats whose objective was to destroy all political organizations, unions and social movements. This context would not surprise us about the presence of the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara on Bolivian soil and the application of a strategy of counter-insurgency with all its might and operative capacity supported by the US government.
The coup d’ etat instigated by General Banzer in 1971 constitutes one of those which, with great force, adopted the practice of detention, torture, enforced disappearance and all types of violations of human rights. It was during this period that many of us were put in a situation of risk and had to perform our daily tasks and political activities in an underground and semi-underground situation.
It was the time of the organization of Plan Condor characterized by the political and physical coordination between the police and the army of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay with the intention of ending the insurgency in the Southern Cone of the continent. It is for this reason that the arrest of many of us were perpetrated by the repressive apparatus of these countries.
In 1976, after much persecution, I was detained, tortured and disappeared for at least three months. I was in solitary confinement for five more months. Those were moments in which torture was an ordinary practice, the main objective of which was to pressure or kill all persons considered as dangerous. In this situation, my husband, Luis Stamponi of Argentine birth, with whom I shared a very active political life, was imprisoned.
Luis lived in Bolivia since 1969. He was a militant soldier of the National Liberation, an organization which was highly persecuted because it was the representation and continuation of the organization formed by Ernesto” Che” Guevara during his work in Bolivia.
On September 28, 1976, Luis Stamponi was detained in the “mining city” of the north of Potosi, a place where he lived and worked. His detention was expected. It was perpetrated by the national police and the Camacho regiment according to the testimony of Maria Victoria Fernandez.
Immediately, he was placed in the hands of the Department of Political Order in the city of La Paz and transferred to Achocalla, one of the infamous torture camps. It was then known for its cruelty in the application of torture wherein many comrades were found helplessly beaten to death. In this place, the Bolivian and Argentinian forces applied all types of torture on him.
He was handed over to Argentina together with another Argentine Bolivian, Oscar Gonzales de la Vega according to what was mentioned in the cable No. 203/76.
From this moment, we have never known the whereabouts of Luis and Oscar despite all the investigations, complaints and demands done by my person and the family of Luis. However, the aggression was not just applied to Luis. As a consequence, his mother also disappeared.
The mother of Luis, Mrs. Mafalde Corinaldeci de Stamponi was 65 years of age, of Italian nationality and rooted in Argentina. She struggled that the Bolivian government would permit her to go to Bolivia on the 13th of November 1976. After all the many tedious procedures that they obliged her to accomplish, she was informed that her son had been handed over to Argentina on the 18th of November for the reason that he had to immediately return to his country.
Upon arriving at the airport of Buenos Aires, Argentina, she was confronted by the Federal Police. Since she lived in Punta Alta, a place far from Buenos Aires, she stayed in Hotel Esmeralda with the objective of staying for a night in order to travel the following day. She used the time to communicate with her family. On the same night, three plain-clothes men, without a doubt, members of the Federal Police of Argentina, took her in a violent manner from the hotel and from then on, her whereabouts have never been known.
In a manner which was very showy, on the 26th of December of 1977, a news report appeared in the A.P. that “Dra. Nila Heredia, wife of Luis Stamponi who was killed in an encounter with the Federal Police of Buenos Aires, has been expelled from the country.” The news broke out earlier in the press of Oruro. Without doubt, it was news artificially made in order to justify his disappearance.
Despite all the work carried out by the Argentinian colleagues, until now, we have never achieved any clarification of the case. I can only say that an Argentine lady colleague who was also detained in Bolivia together with her daughter of nine months and handed over to Argentina, also disappeared. However, her daughter, now 29 years of age, was found after nine years in the hands of the assistant chief of the Orletti prison, known because, in there, they deposited particularly persons of non-Argentinian nationality or Argentinian but related with other nationalities.
