On Aconcagua Radio, Ana María Careaga spoke about her family and her special bond with Pope Francis.

Interviewed by Pablo Pérez Delgado, psychologist Ana María Careaga recounted onAconcagua Radio the unique story that both she and her family shared with Pope Francis . According to Ana María, there was first “a very close relationship between him and my mother, Ester Balestrieri de Careaga, in the 1950s when she was in charge of an industrial analysis laboratory, and he, upon finishing technical school, went to do an internship there. She had a doctorate in chemistry and pharmacy and was his boss during that time.”

According to Ana María Careaga, her mother was Paraguayan and a member of the Febrero Revolutionary Party of Paraguay. "She came as an exile, persecuted by the Stroessner dictatorship ." Ana emphasizes that years later, as Pope Francis, during an interview with him, he acknowledged the strong influence his mother had on his upbringing, to the point of saying that "she was the woman who taught him how to think" and also "political breadth, the courage and responsibility of work."

In the interview with Aconcagua Radio, Ana María recalled a very powerful part of her own story when she was kidnapped by the dictatorship on June 13, 1977, in the city of Buenos Aires by an armed group. “That's right, I was kidnapped when I was 16; I turned 17 in the concentration camp. I had gotten married in April 1977, and they kidnapped me in June. I was three months pregnant and brutally tortured. I was subjected to inhumane living conditions. Always blindfolded, always with my feet chained, always isolated. My mother had first begun accompanying the mother of my brother-in-law, Manuel Carlos Cuevas, who had been kidnapped and remains missing. That journey mothers made, visiting prisons, police stations, barracks, ministries, trying to find some answers to the loss of their loved ones. When they kidnapped me, my mother, years later, in an exchange we had when I was already a refugee in Sweden, told me that she felt like an automaton after my disappearance, that she would leave in the morning and return at night, all day long with the mothers. That search, from which the mothers, I say, founded a civilizing pact, They devised an unprecedented response, which was what made it possible to denounce the disappearance and make it visible...”

“Pope Francis once sent me an audio recording on the anniversary of the Mothers' Day, in which he told me that mothers showed us the way, precisely because of how they conceived, how they invented this mode of searching that made disappearances visible.”

Last year, Ana María Careaga received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Cuyo in Mendoza at the request of the Faculty of Education. She noted: “It has been an honor for me to receive this distinction, which I don't experience on a personal level, but rather as recognition of the historic struggle of the human rights movement. In fact, when they awarded it to me, I was accompanied by human rights organizations and family members, who in some way created the conditions for this historic struggle and for being able to also consider, on an academic level, the subjective consequences of state terrorism.”

When asked about the current government's vindication of the dictatorship, Ana María replied: "I think the disappearance is a tragedy. It has to do with crimes against humanity, which precisely means that they injure, that they offend the human condition. And this means that they don't only concern the direct victims, but that they offend humanity as a whole. Therefore, they involve society as a whole. That's why everything that can be written on the subject of public policies, memory, truth, and justice is so important. And I think that denial, and not just denial, but the vindication of the crimes of the dictatorship makes it clear that there is an attack and a subjugation of these public policies, an attempt to drain them from a financial point of view, layoffs, a draining and defunding of memorial sites... It's precisely about undoing something that has been a model in Argentina, has been a model in the world, which is precisely the fight for memory, truth, and justice."

Regarding the connection with Pope Francis, she added, "It was on this anniversary of the Mothers' Day that he sent this message, saying that they had shown us the way, vindicating that struggle. In August of last year, my daughter Anita, the one I was pregnant with, traveled to see him and sent us another message, saying that we must continue, that we must bear witness, that we must not forget, precisely because of the concern he expressed to my daughter about the visit by a group of deputies to repressors convicted of crimes against humanity... So it was a very important message. I believe that it is indeed a time of returning to witness and international denunciation. It seems to me that education in what has been called the cultural battle is fundamental, and oral history occupies a key place."

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