The march began in near silence. Only the repetitive sound of a saxophone rang out as the procession moved through central Paris, making its way from the Pantheon, where France buries its great, to the Place de la Concorde, the biggest public square in the French capital. One by one, 100 10-foot-high banners hoisted on tall bamboo poles appeared, carried by some 300 activists.
Like a veritable flotilla of sails, they fluttered in the winter wind. One was in both French and Spanish: “Ou sont-ils? Donde estan?” (“Where are they?”) Another was wordless — just a canvas painting of two eyes, wide open as if in shock. Each banner stood for an artist who had been “disappeared,” presumably killed, by a military regime half a world away — in Argentina.
The protest on Nov. 14, 1981, organized by the International Association for the Defense of Artist Victims of Repression in the World (AIDA), drew between 5,000 and 7,000 people, including French-Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar, First Secretary of the French Socialist Party Lionel Jospin and Greek-French film director Costa-Gavras.
The march was a theatrical way to capture the international spotlight: For a few hours, the plight of Argentina’s disappeared took center stage.
Since Jorge Videla’s military coup in 1976, Argentina had been waging war against dissidents, artists and intellectuals. Though the dictatorial regime had tried to hide its reign of terror, information that was surreptitiously filtered out of Argentina had led to a burgeoning global awareness of the ever-rising number of the disappeared — which by the end, human rights organizations today estimate, was as high as 30,000 people.
In 1981, the return of democracy in Argentina was still two years away. But international resistance was building — and the nerve center of this growing movement was not Buenos Aires or even Madrid: It was Paris. French leftists (including French President Francois Mitterrand and his wife), artists, activists and intellectuals in homegrown human rights groups came together with Argentinian exiles to combat the dirty war from the City of Light. Together, they gathered international support for regime change and asked, relentlessly, for the return of the disappeared. AIDA, the organization that put together the November 1981 march in defense of Argentinian artists, was one of the key nodes in this transnational resistance network.
That France played a major role in the fight against the Argentinian dictatorship shouldn’t come as a surprise. The countries have a deep, long-lasting relationship, ties that inspired a popular saying in Buenos Aires: “Argentinians are Italians who speak Spanish but think themselves French.”
But according to Moira Cristia, a researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), the relationship goes both ways. “There’s a sensitive bridge between the French and the Argentinians,” the scholar of cultural resistance told New Lines. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cristia says, “the French drew a connection between their own tragic and recent experience of occupation during the Second World War and the Argentinian crisis.” France’s own history, she argued, played a fundamental role in creating empathy: “The French adopted this distant tragedy as if it was their own.”
Some three decades after the French Resistance had found its foothold in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian Resistance found its own in Paris. This iteration was bold, colorful and — in perhaps stereotypically Latin American form — theatrical, and the artist- and intellectual-led movement would soon engulf the continent.
Nearly five decades after she fled Argentina, Liliana Andreone is still amazed at how warmly the French welcomed her in exile.
“These people who had nothing to do with Argentina were touched by our struggle,” she told New Lines, “and they welcomed us with open arms.”
Today, at 76 years old, Andreone is just as comfortable speaking French as she is speaking Spanish. She uses her mother tongue to speak of her emotions — joy, fear and sadness — and switches to a melodic, lightly accented French to describe her political activism. But back in early 1976, the language of Moliere and Marcel Proust was still foreign to the 28-year-old Andreone.
In Buenos Aires, she worked with impoverished communities, providing legal advice through a church that practiced liberation theology. Her partner, Envar “Cacho” El Kadri, was Argentinian Lebanese. He had founded the Peronist Armed Forces, a left-wing urban guerrilla group, in 1968. The two of them were easy targets for the increasingly powerful and conservative military forces.
Tasked with revitalizing Argentina’s deteriorating political and social climate after President Juan Peron died in 1974 and his wife Isabel (who had been his vice president) inherited his office, the military was quickly gaining power. Cacho was forced into exile in January 1975. He made his way to Spain by way of Beirut. Andreone — who unlike Cacho could not be granted political asylum — stayed behind in Argentina, where the armed forces began planning for a coup backed by the local elite, Chile’s own dictator Augusto Pinochet and Washington, by way of the CIA.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Andreone used her Italian passport to flee Argentina on March 22, 1976. Two days later, shortly after 3 a.m., regular transmissions on all television and radio stations were interrupted and replaced by a military march. The new regime’s first communique was then broadcast: “People are advised that as of today, the country is under the operational control of the General Commanders Junta of the Armed Forces. We recommend that all inhabitants … be extremely careful to avoid individual or group actions and attitudes that may require drastic intervention from the operating personnel.”
By then, Andreone was thankfully already in Madrid. “We ran away because we didn’t want to die and also because we wanted to live,” she told New Lines. But a few weeks later, Spanish police, collaborating with Videla’s, had put their apartment under surveillance, arrested her partner and kicked him out of the country into neighboring France, which Cacho was told was “full of lefties such as himself.” Andreone decided to join him in Paris.
“I left Madrid without belongings, money or train tickets,” she recalled. But French conductors let her ride trains for free as soon as they heard her story. The French, who had been very taken with Chile’s plight after socialist President Salvador Allende was deposed and committed suicide in a 1973 military coup, “still had room in their hearts for Argentina’s exiles,” she told New Lines, emotion strong in her voice at the memory of the solidarity she felt half a century ago.
Despite her legal training, Andreone struggled to find a job in Paris. She was eventually hired as a housekeeper in the home of a wealthy psychiatrist, whose dresses and pantsuits she would sometimes mend. Her boss took a liking to Andreone and, in August 1976, told her of a theater company that was known for employing people like her — refugees without work permits but handy with a sewing machine. She told her it was called the Theatre du Soleil.
In 1964, in the midst of the Cold War and the conservative presidency of former Resistance leader Charles de Gaulle, the Theatre du Soleil was born as a form of protest against traditional theatrical institutions in France.
The collective had set up camp in La Cartoucherie, an abandoned munitions factory located in the Vincennes forest to the east of Paris, which had previously been squatted by sex workers. Andreone, who first joined the troupe to help with costume design and now heads their public relations, described the Theatre du Soleil as a “way of life,” committed as it was to treating political and human topics through a universal, transnational angle.
The troupe welcomed Chilean playwright Oscar Castro, founder of the Teatro Aleph, an experimental theater in Santiago, among many others. Castro — along with his troupe — had been captured, tortured and deported into Pinochet’s concentration camps after the 1973 coup. After five years of imprisonment, during which he put on a new play with his inmates every week, Castro was liberated and fled to France. Under the wing of the Theatre du Soleil, and with the help of other refugees, he re-created the Teatro Aleph and put together a political comedy on dissidence and exile.
In this context, Andreone said, her accent, rather than hindering her, opened the doors of La Cartoucherie to her. Her co-workers had either lived through the events that rocked South America in the 1970s or were fascinated by them.
“They showed me great solidarity,” Andreone told New Lines. “And soon,” she added, “I discovered that this solidarity followed me wherever I went in my new country.” In typical French style, this solidarity included an introduction to the local cuisine.
In the summer of 1977, Andreone followed the troupe to southern France for the annual Avignon Festival, which celebrates the performing arts. She and other Argentinian dissidents stayed in a small house in a neighboring village. Every morning, they found apricots, cheese, wine, pastries and all kinds of food gifts that miraculously appeared on their windowsills. “It was both truly extraordinary and something we experienced every day,” Andreone said.
Between shows in Avignon, Andreone was called into a meeting with the troupe’s director, Ariane Mnouchkine. Born at the start of World War II to a Franco-English mother and an exiled Russian father, Mnouchkine, like many French left-wingers, had a soft spot for Latin American resistance movements and their exiles, and followed the events in the southern half of Latin America, or the Southern Cone, with rapt attention. When she was called in to meet Mnouchkine, Andreone worried that she might lose her job.
“Instead,” she told New Lines, “I was formally invited to join the family — for good.”
Andreone was given a permanent post, as a secretary of sorts, overseeing the Theatre du Soleil’s daily life, from food to costumes and schedules. “I felt like I was being offered a fresh start in France,” she said. “But still, I remained Argentinian, and even in my exile I never forgot that I had to do everything I could to help my country and those I had left behind.”
At the time, a groundswell of activism against the dictatorship in Argentina was washing over France.
From 1974 to 1983, some 3,000 Argentinians arrived in the country, fleeing political persecution. Around 900 of them were granted asylum, while others entered the country on other types of visas or, like Andreone, without any papers at all.
The first cause they took up was the boycott of the June 1978 FIFA World Cup for soccer, set to take place in Argentina, in stadiums close enough to torture centers that it was said the prisoners could hear the cheers. Argentinian dissidents joined French and European activists under the banner of the Committee for the Boycott of Argentina’s Organizing of the 1978 World Cup (COBA). Together, they produced flyers, posters and even a weekly bulletin. Titled L’Epique (The Epic), a play on the name of the French sports newspaper L’Equipe (The Team), the bulletin sold more than 100,000 copies across France in early 1978.
To garner support for the boycott, some exiles also took their stories to the French press. Carlos Gabetta, an Argentinian journalist whose wife had been killed by Videla’s police before his very eyes, published an investigation in Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record. “Argentina: The Killing Machine” made headlines across the country in January 1977.
“No football between concentration camps,” read one COBA poster, later donated by Andreone to the Memoria Abierta (Open Memory) archive. The campaign drew a clear link between the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games organized by the Third Reich and the 1978 World Cup, Andreone told New Lines, “because the French had a recent history of collaboration with dictators, and we knew that was not something they would take lightly.”
French intellectuals joined Gabetta, Andreone and other exiles in denouncing Videla’s military regime. Authors Marguerite Duras, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to name a few, supported the Committee for the Defense of Argentinian Political Prisoners. On their advice, Flammarion, a major French publishing house, translated a report from an Argentinian nongovernmental organization based on the testimonies of dissidents who had escaped the country. Published in 1978, its title was “Argentina: Files on a Genocide.”
“The cause, which by then was still unknown to most, was a noble one,” human rights advocate Pierre Bercis told New Lines. In 1977, at age 31, the lawyer founded the “Nouveaux Droits de l’Homme,” an NGO that advocates for updating and expanding the breadth of human rights. Now 78, Bercis reminisced about his youth from his book-filled apartment in central Paris: “I’d read about what the mothers of the disappeared were doing in Buenos Aires in the newspaper, and I decided that we should do the same in Paris.”
Shortly after the coup, the “Madres” (“Mothers”) had begun gathering every Thursday in front of the presidential palace on Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo to demand the return of their disappeared children. They wore their children’s swaddles wrapped around their heads like scarves. Soon, the Madres had become an international symbol of resistance against the Argentinian junta.
On Thursday, Oct. 5, 1978, Bercis and two friends stood outside the Argentinian Embassy in Paris’ wealthy, tree-lined 16th arrondissement. Over 300 weeks, their ranks had swelled to include hundreds of other protesters, including Andreone. Soon, the Madres had their own branch in Paris, and French and Argentinian women with missing children or grandchildren tied white scarves around their heads and joined Bercis under the embassy’s windows, which invariably remained closed.
Bercis and his colleagues at Nouveaux Droits de l’Homme targeted other symbolic places across the city, too. In March 1980, protesters filed into the “Argentine” Metro station in central Paris. They were carrying placards that they posted over the name of the station, rebaptizing it “Human Rights.”
Some of France’s most famous artists rallied to their cause. On those Thursday afternoons, it was not uncommon for Andreone to run into singer Yves Montand, philosopher Michel Foucault, or actors Catherine Deneuve and Simone Signoret, among other A-listers who shone some of their spotlight on Argentina’s disappeared.
Mnouchkine, at the Theatre du Soleil, went a step further.
In the summer of 1979, Castro, the exiled Chilean playwright, had helped Mnouchkine and French filmmaker Claude Lelouch organize a visit to three Southern Cone countries plagued by dictatorship — Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In Buenos Aires, she met fellow artists and playwrights and heard tales of the disappeared in their midst.
Upon her return to Paris, Mnouchkine began thinking of a way to support them. She and Lelouch decided to launch AIDA, the organization dedicated to the defense of artists and intellectuals, with a particular focus on Latin America. Cristia, the CONICET researcher, describes AIDA as a “polyphonic project of transnational artistic solidarity.”
The name was a reference to Verdi’s opera, “Aida,” which tells the story of an Ethiopian princess captured by the Egyptians. Pointing out that the artists were just “the tip of the iceberg,” AIDA’s founders called for combating all types of abuse of power — in Moscow, Beijing and Pretoria as well as Buenos Aires, in both communist and capitalist countries — distancing themselves from the logic of the Cold War. To do this, they invited “all artists in the world” to join them in their fight against “the repression of creators.” Andreone and her partner Cacho were key drivers of the project.
To Jean-Francois Labouverie, AIDA’s secretary and co-founder, who describes himself as a “theater man,” the organization was something entirely new. “AIDA was perhaps one of the first initiatives to take a specific interest in the censorship of writers, visual artists and actors,” he told New Lines.
“Right away, we knew we needed to build advocacy campaigns around individual artists,” Labouverie explained. With so many disappeared artists in so many countries, Mnouchkine had initially highlighted cases like that of pianist Miguel Angel Estrella, who was imprisoned in Uruguay. After Estrella was released in 1978 and joined Mnouchkine, Andreone, Cacho and Labouverie in Paris, they came together to advocate for other threatened artists.
Headquartered in La Cartoucherie, AIDA quickly formed branches across Europe, including in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and what was then West Germany, and in the United States. Those chapters acted as a federating force for the various resistance movements in Latin America and around the world. Members met every week to organize their activities.
“Several among our group were former French Resistance fighters,” Labouverie told New Lines, “and they knew how important it was for the Resistance to have a voice.”
With the support of Mnouchkine and AIDA, Andreone and her partner gathered testimonies and published a book about Argentina’s disappeared and the attacks against cultural institutions in Argentina. Published by a small press, the book was translated into Spanish.
Still, if the goal were to make noise on a grand scale, the group knew it needed to put together an unforgettable act. In an October 1981 communique, AIDA announced their next move: a choreographed, theatrical protest across Paris.
“Protesters will take over the city in a new way,” the communique read.
Inspired by a protest in Japan, the Theatre de Soleil designed giant cloth banners hoisted on bamboo poles, which floated in the wind like sails. AIDA gathered a dozen artists from across the world to each paint a banner in their own style. Then they needed to see how well the new-fangled contraptions could actually float.
And so, in true thespian form, the march had its own dress rehearsal, in Amsterdam. In September 1981, AIDA protesters dressed in black with white scarves and walked the streets of the Dutch capital, maneuvering the banners in the cool wind along the canal.
“The extraordinary aesthetic impact of the procession was elating,” Andreone wrote in AIDA’s bulletin the following week, which featured a dozen photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a founding member of the Magnum Photos cooperative. “We’re ready for Paris.”
Andreone and Labouverie called on artists, both French and exiled, to gather at La Cartoucherie with their own paintbrushes and add to the flotilla of banners. The goal was to gather 100 of them, for 100 disappeared Argentinian artists.
Labouverie told New Lines that AIDA had to be granted special permission by French authorities to organize the procession. “But we were on their good side,” the actor said, “so there wasn’t a lot of convincing to do.” Mitterrand, a longtime advocate for the Argentinian disappeared, had been elected president only a few months earlier. On May 10, 1981, the night of his election, left-wingers had hung a large banner on Paris’ Place de la Bastille to celebrate their victory. It read, in Spanish: “Argentina Presente” (“Argentina Is Here.”)
Once permission was granted, the Theatre du Soleil’s scenographers scripted the event like they would any theatrical performance. “The preproduction process was very intentional,” Andreone told New Lines: “They wrote a storyboard for the march, scouted locations, carefully cast musicians and banner-bearers.” Only a handful of AIDA’s core members were involved behind the scenes, Andreone added, and most of the attendees were taken by surprise by the sheer amount of attention to detail on the day.
When the first protesters gathered at the Pantheon on that chilly November day, only a handful of banners were floating in the wind. As the activists made their way through Paris, the rest of the 100 banners popped up from nooks and crannies along the way, each carried by three activists. From side streets and cafes, 100 musicians from the French band Urban Sax joined. “Parisians who’d been looking at us with confusion ended up joining in,” Andreone said, “mouths wide open with shock at how grandiose and theatrical our motley gathering had become.”
Cristia, who published a history of AIDA, described these surprise apparitions in the streets of Paris as an “aesthetic translation of the Madres’ demands.” It was a nod, she said, to the bereaved mothers half a world away in Buenos Aires, who were demanding that their disappeared children be returned alive, or in their words, “aparicion con vida.” In Paris, that day, they did appear, however symbolically.
Rather than march toward the Place de la Republique, as most French political protests do, the scenographers had been allowed to pass by culturally important sites: The Pantheon, the Sorbonne, the Pont Neuf and the Seine. Eventually, the procession crossed through the Louvre’s iconic square on its way to the Place de la Concorde.
There, 100 banners and 100 musicians gathered behind Alba Gonzales Souza, a Uruguayan pianist whose son had been disappeared in Argentina. As she played the accordion, members of AIDA read out the names of the 100 disappeared artists. After each name, the protesters called out: “Ou sont-ils?”
On Dec. 10, 1983, almost exactly two years after AIDA’s Paris protest, a doctor, Raul Alfonsin, took office in Argentina, ending seven years of dictatorship. The reasons for the fall of the military junta were many: the catastrophic war in the Falkland Islands, civil society resistance on the ground and changing political winds across the continent.
But to Mayki Gorosito, the director of the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory in Buenos Aires, located on the site of the former torture center, international pressure was paramount in helping to overthrow the dictatorship.
In a video call with New Lines, Gorosito said France was “iconic” in Argentina for its dedication to human rights and its underground resistance in the 1940s. “France joining in on civil society resistance against Videla brought hope to Argentinians — especially to the families of the disappeared,” she added.
Bercis, who organized the Thursday protests in support of the Madres in Paris, agreed. “I think our mobilization contributed to tarnishing the image of Argentina’s military regime,” he told New Lines. “I like to think we played a small part in its fall.”
After the return of democracy, many Argentinian exiles returned home, but AIDA continued on in a limited form. The group was active during Algeria’s civil war, a period known as the “black decade” that lasted between 1992 and 2002 and led to as many as 1,000 disappeared. Then, as the world changed, the association fizzled out, though its Hamburg branch is still active.
Labouverie and Andreone, however, are adamant that AIDA is more necessary than ever in today’s world. “Today, AIDA is missed,” Labouverie argued. “On the international stage, AIDA could play its part, like Reporters Without Borders and many other organizations — in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Iran,” he said, trailing off.
Andreone didn’t hesitate to draw a parallel between the protests organized by AIDA in the 1970s and 1980s and contemporary attacks against cultural institutions. When she spoke to New Lines from Buenos Aires, Argentina’s president Javier Milei was promising to take a “chainsaw” to cultural institutions, and various French far-right parties had won a historic third of the vote in the first round of snap elections on an anti-immigrant platform.
“I think preserving the memory of what we did then is key if we are to resist again in our very damaged world,” she said.
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