Human rights activist Fernando Albareda pointed to potential police involvement in the murder of his mother Susana Montoya in an interview on Monday. Montoya was the widow of a policeman who was forcefully disappeared during the last military dictatorship.
“It’s out of the question, I don’t believe the robbery [theory] for a second,” Albareda told news channel Cba24 on Monday. “This was a murder.”
Albareda found his mother dead in her house on Friday evening — according to local reports, she suffered blunt force trauma to the head and stab wounds. A chilling message was allegedly left on the door for the family: “We’ll kill you all. Now we’re going for your children. #Police.”
His father and Montoya’s husband was Ricardo Fermín Albareda, a Córdoba police deputy commissioner and member of the armed organization PRT-ERP. Fellow members of the provincial police kidnapped him in September 1979 and tortured him in a clandestine detention center, as proven in a 2009 trial. He was never seen again.
“Since the return of democracy, the police force was never cleansed, so I am suspicious of everyone,” Albareda said.
The last time Albareda saw Montoya alive was Thursday afternoon: he had taken her to the doctor earlier and dropped by for a check-in. On Friday morning, at around 10.30 a.m., he started calling her, but she wasn’t answering.
“I thought maybe she had taken a sleeping pill and was still asleep, she did that frequently. I also thought maybe her phone’s battery had run out,” he said during the interview. But she never picked up.
At 6 p.m., after hours of being unable to reach her, Albareda passed by her house and a few odd details caught his attention. “She always left the blinds open, even when she was not home, but they were shut,” he said. “I looked inside and I saw a door she always leaves closed was open.”
He then decided to ask a neighbor to climb her roof so he could access his mother’s backyard and noticed her TV and radio were on. “I climbed the roof and I saw my mother lying there.”
‘She never stopped being scared’
Albareda said his mother was worried after local news outlets reported how much money she would receive in state reparations for the dictatorship murdering her husband. The information had been disclosed in the Official Bulletin in May but she hadn’t yet received the stipend.
“She was always very careful, she never stopped being scared,” Albareda said.
Albareda, who works for the Human Rights Secretariat and gave human rights workshops to aspiring police officers in 2023, has already received threatening messages. In December, he found several handwritten notes stuck to his front door with messages related to his work at the police headquarters, and six bullets scattered near the door.
On Sunday night, human rights organizations from Córdoba released a joint statement saying they were “shocked and worried” over the “violent murder” and the threats. They also called for the crime to be cleared urgently and for the family to be protected.
The signatures of that release included the local branch of H.I.J.O.S., an organization that groups the children of dictatorship victims and that Albareda belonged to until recently.
“Hate speech permanently circulating in our society are a dormant danger that can turn into action. We said never again!” said the statement.