Last July, a group of La Libertad Avanza lawmakers paid a prison visit to Alfredo Astiz and other dictatorship-era repressors. Perhaps the most ingenious explanation came from Deputy Lourdes Arrieta

“We were tricked into going,” she claimed, adding that she had no idea who these men were.

Her assertion was met with skepticism. The 1976-1983 dictatorship years are part of every high school curriculum. Astiz, a former Navy intelligence officer convicted of crimes so heinous that they earned him the nickname the “Angel of Death,” was one of the most infamous protagonists. 

Whether we believe her or not, it’s safe to say that Arrieta now knows the extent of Astiz’s crimes. For instance, that he infiltrated the nascent Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as they searched desperately for their missing children and later betrayed them when his handlers decided to end his mission.

Incidentally, this Sunday is the 47th anniversary of that operation, known as the kidnapping of the 12 from Santa Cruz. On December 8, 1977, Astiz identified a dozen human rights activists who the military detained and disappeared upon leaving a church called Santa Cruz. All of them were later thrown alive from an airplane into the Río de la Plata. 

Among the victims of that tragedy was a French nun named Alice Domon, a trailblazer committed to social work at a time when that type of labor in the Church was reserved only to men. The particulars of her life have been inevitably blurred by her tragic death, but a research project into her life and work by philosophy professor and theologian Diana Viñoles is revealing that she was much more than a victim of Astiz. 

The disappearance of Domon and another French nun named Leonie Duquet caused a scandal in their home country. The French government made inquiries and tried to locate them but was unsuccessful. In 1990, in light of the impunity against Astiz in Argentina, the former Navy man was tried in absentia in France and found guilty of kidnapping and murder. He received two life sentences. The decision confined Astiz to Argentina forever: he ran the risk of being arrested and sent to France if he ever strayed beyond the country’s borders. 

In addition to wanting to give a voice to dictatorship victims, Viñoles had a personal reason for researching Domon: as a former nun interested in social work, she identifies with her. She added that Domon’s life choices were not what was expected of women in the Catholic Church. 

A committed believer in the preferential option for the poor, a social teaching by the Church that states that the Bible gives preference to the well-being of the powerless, Domon was not content with doing visits to poor neighborhoods. 

At a time when priests were the only ones out in the field, she immersed herself in working-class environments. She lived in a villa, an impoverished informal settlement in Buenos Aires, and among rural workers in Corrientes, not only helping with their daily activities but also doing the same jobs as them. 

Viñoles has recently finished a third book on Alice Domon, Veinte entrevistas sobre una desaparecida con los desaparecidos (Twenty interviews about a disappeared with the disappeared). Following Domon’s biography (published in 2014) and a collection of her letters (2017), this collection of interviews with people who knew the French nun is intended to show the backstage of the writing process and reveal the people who “shared her life and were protagonists of a moment in time in which a commitment with solidarity” was at the forefront. 

A life of service

Alice Ann Marie Joan Domon was born in the Doubs region in France in 1937. As a young girl she entered the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris, a Catholic missionary organization. Her first choice to travel was India, but because her religious order had a presence in Argentina, in 1967 she eventually landed in Morón, Buenos Aires province. 

Her first assignment was teaching children with disabilities, but she quickly became interested in the social situation of the country. In 1969, she started visiting an informal settlement known as Villa 20, in the Buenos Aires City neighborhood of Villa Lugano, and eventually decided to move there permanently. In addition to care work, Alice sought employment as a cook and cleaning lady. 

Five years later, amidst a worsening in the climate of political violence in Argentina, Alice left Buenos Aires for Corrientes. A short-handed group of nuns living in the rural parts of the province reached out to her looking for support, and she agreed to go. But once again, she went against the grain and declined to live among her peers in the congregation. 

She went to live with rural workers and their families in what are known as parajes. These settlements were made up of the homes of two or three families who worked the tobacco fields and decided to join and form small communities. 

That was when she became interested in the labor exploitation rural workers faced — as well as their attempts to organize and demand their rights. Her contribution: she stayed in the family home babysitting so the women could attend the gatherings of rural workers and campesinos. 

Then, two rural leaders Domon knew in Corrientes were dissapeared. The Catholic Church was also undergoing a seismic movement, a development that would play an indirect role in Domon’s fate. Faced with the recommendation of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) that religious orders “reconnect with their roots,” the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris held a General Assembly in France in 1975. 

The Vatican’s suggestion called into question the Domon’s religious order’s principle of working to cater social needs. The result: twenty nuns, including Domon, resigned their positions within the Church when faced with the possibility of shifting their work.

“One person told me that her reasoning was all about being close to those she lived with: she didn’t want to give the impression that she was hiding behind the credentials of the Church,” Viñoles recalled.

Without the institutional backing of the Church and left to her own devices, Domon’s position within the violent context of Argentina would be seriously compromised. Worried about her friends in Corrientes, she nonetheless returned to Argentina after a few months in France to take up her old position. Shortly after the coup in March 1976 and in the midst of a terror campaign against rural leaders, Domon was forced to leave Corrientes and return to Buenos Aires. 

In her search for her friends, she would eventually attend the Santa Cruz church, as it was one of the few places that allowed families looking for disappeared members to gather. In those meetings, which began in June 1977, she met people like Mothers of Plaza de Mayo co-founder Azucena Villaflor, painter Romo Berardi, and Julio Fondevila: they were all searching for their loved ones and would be kidnapped alongside Domon on that fateful December 8, 1977.

According to testimony from survivors, the 12 of Santa Cruz were later seen inside the Navy School of Mechanics, the largest clandestine detention center of the dictatorship. They were all tortured and later thrown into the Río de la Plata about a week later. The apparent reason for the haste was the fact that the kidnapping had caused an international commotion due to France’s protest, which worried the Navy and prompted them to murder them and try to cover their tracks. 

Something that stands out to Viñoles from her previous book about Domon’s letters is that Alice, despite the unworldly violence and suffering she encountered, never had a bad thing to say about anyone. 

“She would talk about her missionary work with prostitutes and joke that she tried her best but there was one that she lacked: the world experience to help them at their job,” Viñoles remarked with a chuckle, adding that she was “much more than a nun” and a forebearer of things to come.

“She lived her life with the goal of never being separated from the people. And although she didn’t intend to, she was part of a group of women who did something unheard of: they questioned the pyramid structure of the Church.”