Alice Domon
According to witnesses who saw her there, over a period of about 10 days she was interrogated and tortured, forced to write a letter claiming participation in guerrilla group opposing the government, and photographed in a staged setting in front of a Montoneros banner.
Their lives are celebrated in an annual commemoration at the Santa Cruz church of San Cristobal, where they had worked and where the remains of Duquet and several Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are buried.
In 2011, Alfredo Astiz, who had infiltrated the Mothers of the Plaza and organized the abduction of the twelve in December 1977, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for that and other crimes against humanity.
Domon was a member of a group directed by Father Ismael Calcagno, first cousin of Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictator in power from 1976 to 1981, at the time of both the kidnapping and the murder.
Alice Domon and her fellow nun Léonie Duquet were introduced to Videla because he needed assistance for his son Alejandro, a disabled child whom they taught and looked after in the Casa de la Caridad in Morón.
In December 1977, Sisters Alice and Léonie, along with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other human rights activists, prepared a request for the names of those who disappeared and for the government to divulge their whereabouts.
Horacio Domingo Maggio and Lisandro Raúl Cubas, survivors of detention at the ESMA, related what they knew on the subject in testimony to the national commission in 1985: The same thing happened to the French nuns Alice Domon and Leonie Renée Duquet.
Up until their worst moments of pain, Sister Alice, who was in "Capucha", asked for the luck of her compadres and, at the pinnacle of irony, she emphasized the "little blond boy", who was none other than Frigate Lieutenant Astiz (who had infiltrated the group, passing himself off as a relative of a desaparecido.
[7]As the two Catholic sisters, Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon, were French nationals, their "disappearances" generated an international scandal, especially with France, which repeatedly tried to trace what had happened to them.
To this end, officers forced Domon under torture to write a letter to her superior in her order, in French, saying that she had been abducted by a group opposed to the administration of General Jorge Videla.
On 15 December 1977 La Nación published a notice from the EFE news agency entitled "Vivas y con buena salud" (Alive and in good health).
[9] After democracy was restored, the government held a national commission to collect testimony from survivors about desaparacedos and treatment at the hands of military and security forces.
Under threat of a military coup, the Congress passed legislation known as the "Pardon Laws" in 1986 and 1987, ending prosecution and establishing a kind of amnesty for acts on both sides during the Dirty War.
During this period, in 1990, Captain Alfredo Astiz was convicted in France of kidnapping Duquet and Domon, and sentenced in absentia to life in prison by the Appellate Court in Paris.
[12] In 2012 an Argentinian prosecutor filed charges against the Dutch-Argentinian pilot Julio Poch for flying the navy plane which supposedly dumped Domon, Duquet and three other women into the Atlantic Ocean.
[13] After the restoration of democracy in 1984, the investigations of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons and the 1985 Trial of the Juntas led to the exhuming of graves in the cemetery of General Lavalle, searching for evidence related to war crimes.
Secret government documents from the United States Government declassified in 2002 show that the US Ambassador to Argentina advised the State Department in March 1978 that bodies washed up on beaches of Buenos Aires Province likely included those of missing French nationals, the nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet; as well as three founders of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo: Azucena Villaflor, Esther Ballestrino and María Ponce, and two other mothers.
(Agence France-Presse) March 28 story filed from Paris reports that the bodies of the two French nuns (Alicia Doman and Renee Duguet) (sic) who were abducted in mid December with eleven other human rights activists were identified among corpses near Bahía Blanca.
Buenos Aires was filled with such rumors over a month ago based on accounts of the discovery of a number of cadavers beached by unusually strong winds along Atlantic Sea, points closer to the mouth of La Plata River some 300-350 miles to the north of Bahía Blanca.
(Name redacted), which has been trying to track down these rumors, has confidential information that the nuns were abducted by Argentine security agents and at some point were transferred to a prison located in the town of Juníi, which is 150 miles west of Buenos Aires.
Embassy also has confidential information through an Argentine government source (protected) that seven bodies were discovered some weeks ago on the beach near Mar del Plata.
[1]El Infiltrado: La Verdadera Historia de Alfredo Astiz, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1996, by Uki Goñi (in Spanish)
