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My documentary film, “Finding Mabel,” aims to be a revealing look at the atrocities committed during the Argentinean Dirty War (1976-1983) and the 30,000+ victims of this genocide, known today as “The Disappeared.”
As a first generation American born to two Argentinean parents who fled during the genocide this story is a part of who I am. I want to reconnect with my roots and the sacrifices woven into them. My parents saw and heard of countless friends who were pulled away at gunpoint from their lives, their homes, and their beds, never to be heard from again. One of these victims was a woman by the name of Mabel Damora, the title of the documentary and my namesake.
This isn’t a story I want to tell; it’s one that I must. I’ve found that most of my peers hadn’t even heard of “The Dirty War” before I began working on this project. For so long it has been swept aside by murky American politics or lost in the ever-accumulating pile of world atrocities, and I can’t sit idly by and let that happen. Many of the people responsible for the torture, including such heinous acts as dropping people from helicopters into the middle of the ocean, are both alive and unpunished for their crimes. This is not ok. Not for me, not for my family, and not for Mabel Damora. For most of my life I have sat on the peripherals of my parents’ activism, and now I too have been called to action in my search to find Mabel.
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