State Department during the Jimmy Carter
administration in the 1970s. In the documen-
tary, he says, “Our intelligence services knew
beyond the last drop of a sparrow what the
Argentine regime was doing.”
The documentary highlights what happened
from 1976 to 1983 when the country’s military
regime, in an effort to crush a leftist guerrilla
movement, targeted a large swath of the popula-
tion, including students, union activists and
other civilians. It focuses on what’s happening
today as people in their 30s find out that their
parents were abducted, tortured and killed and
that, in many cases, the people who raised them
were at least aware, if not complicit.
Drama Student Brought Family’s Dirty War Stories to the Stage
Carina Cortese ’09, who graduated from
UNC with a double major in drama and philosophy, grew up in Durham, and during her
childhood the Dirty War in Argentina was a
distant concept that occasionally and only briefly
crept into her mother’s description of relatives.
Cortese’s parents, who were born and raised
in Argentina, moved to the U.S. in 1985. They
survived the Dirty War unscathed, but that was
not the case for several of Cortese’s uncles and
cousins.
Cortese started unraveling the details of her
family’s history when she spent her sophomore
year studying in Argentina. The process began
with the assigned reading of a book called
Operation Massacre about the 1956 shooting of
Peronist militants, including her great-uncle.
“I started talking to my mom and my aunt
about it,” she said. Through those conversations
she learned that relatives from her mother’s side
of the family had been members of the Los
Montoneros rebel group and that nine uncles
and cousins had disappeared. Cortese chronicled
their fate in her honors thesis, a one-woman
play that tells the family’s story through the voices
of her mother, her aunt and a cousin, interweaving their stories with her own discoveries.
Cortese came to understand, for example,
why she and her brother had to wake their
mother when they came home at night. “She’d
get very upset if we didn’t,” Cortese said. “I
never really understood why she was so
adamant about it until I learned people didn’t
come home. You’d leave for the night and just
wouldn’t come back.”
The moment came, she said, “when I knew it
[the family history] had to be shared. I had to
give it a life of its own in a positive and proac-
tive way, as opposed to something internal and
secret.” The result was her one-woman play,
After-Images of the Disappeared, which won the
2009 award for Best Undergraduate
Presentation in the Humanities.
“I always knew it was a really important
story to be told,” she said, “and coming from a
theater background, it felt natural that it would
COURTESY CARINA CORTESE ’09
be on a stage.” Theater, she
said, is a powerful way to
connect with people. It’s
intimate; it humanizes
events, puts them into context and allows for the
learning process to be a
community experience.
When the play was presented, “we had talk backs
every night,” she said.
“That was valuable for me
to see how people related
to the story and identified
with it.”
KATHERINE VANCE/DTH
It’s important, she said, to get beyond the
numbers — for example, 30,000 disappeared
— and to give them names and faces. That, she
said, is when “we really learn to look at our
neighbors and to see the people we interact
with as people with stories.
Carina Cortese
’09 used a play
to tell the effect
Argentina’s Dirty
War had on her
relatives. The
photo chronicles
the toll of the
Dirty War on the
Lizaso family.
Many Argentine
families have
experienced
similar losses.
“The person at the checkout at the grocery
store has a story,” she said. “The man on the
street has a story, and the professor you love or
despise has a story. The ability to empathize
comes with that emotional scrutiny.”
