Miriam Lewin
speaker
112 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Miriam Lewin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You heard that right. Members of Miriam's group made homemade cyanide pills in case they were ever arrested. A grim reality for activists during this time and a reflection of the unimaginable conditions of military rule. For Miriam, the day of her arrest came when she was 19 years old. Argentina's secret police tracked her down in the streets. She had the pill on her person.
Miriam learned the military was interested in very specific information. They wanted to know the whereabouts of her close friend and fellow activist, Patricia. Patricia was the daughter of a high ranking Air Force officer. Miriam says she couldn't help them because she didn't know where Patricia was. But that didn't stop the torture.
After hours of questioning and electric shocks on the verge of passing out, she made a decision. She gave them a location.
The car ride was a momentary hiatus. Miriam would not be freed anytime soon. Her abductors made her call her parents and tell them she was safe and still on the run, while armed men stood by to ensure she cooperated. She spent roughly the next 10 months alone in a cell in a secret location just a few blocks away from the federal police headquarters in Buenos Aires.
The questioning continued, as did the torture. Without any other company, she says she developed a deeply complex relationship with one of the officers who guarded her cell.
Miriam survived that first detention center only to be brought to another. And at some point, she heard rumors as well as firsthand accounts about what was happening to some prisoners. Stories she didn't want to believe about a method of killing that was difficult to trace.
To this day, Miriam Lewin doesn't know what happened to the young man she unofficially married before her capture, but she believes he was most likely arrested and killed. As for her friend Patricia, Miriam's abductors claim she blew herself up with dynamite during a confrontation with the military.
Incredibly, Miriam says, she's buried in the military sector of a cemetery in Buenos Aires, a decision that couldn't possibly have been her own. Miriam's second detention center was a place called ESMA. It's now a World Heritage Site. But at the time, its public-facing purpose was as a mechanic school for the Navy.
Few knew that around 5,000 Argentine citizens were being brought through its doors and detained against their will.
An estimated 30,000 people were disappeared and brought to centers like Esma. We now know many of them were taken from their cells, drugged, hooded, bound, and thrown out of planes alive. a method of execution that has since been referred to as death flights.
According to witnesses, military officers would sometimes tell the prisoners they were being released and play music for them to dance in celebration as the sedatives took effect. Miriam is reportedly one of about 150 desaparecidos to survive detention. She can't say with any certainty how she got so lucky.
But at a certain point, she says, members of the government saw value in prisoners like her.
Those with useful skills were given specific tasks. As a former journalism student who could speak multiple languages, Miriam was made to translate news stories from abroad. The Argentine government was worried about reports being published overseas about human rights violations happening in their country. They also made Miriam Wright articles they could send to media outlets as propaganda.
For example, when the World Cup came to Buenos Aires in 1978... They made Miriam write a piece about it. The event served as a source of national pride and an easy distraction from the allegations of abuses. The same abuses Miriam was a victim of. She could hear the roars of the crowd celebrating when Argentina won the final game.
Unbeknownst to most, she was hidden away in a prison cell near the stadium, listening from behind a wall just a few feet away from some celebrants. Miriam believes, after spending so much time as an unwilling participant in her government system, they eventually assumed she was a willing participant. That, after everything, she had somehow been reformed.
It's how she found herself having dinner with General Macera at a fancy restaurant. A dinner he invited her parents to. Miriam hadn't seen her parents in nearly two years. They didn't know any of what she'd been through because she hadn't told them. She hadn't been able to. Even sitting across from them, she knew that to speak ill of her abductors could risk her life or her family's safety.
She remembers her parents gifting General Macera a bottle of nice scotch and thanking him for keeping her safe. Miriam was eventually allowed to leave ESMA and move into an apartment, paid for at great cost by her parents. But even then, she wasn't free. She was kept under surveillance while continuing to work for General Macera's press bureau and other departments of the government.
Around this time, she fell in love with a man who was her fellow prisoner. She got pregnant, she married, and shortly after, she asked her repressors for permission to leave the country. They denied her request at first, and her son was born in Buenos Aires. But by the spring of 1981, they finally let her leave the country.
She moved to New York, and for the first time, had a moment where she felt free.
Miriam says she later found evidence that the military was surveilling her even in New York. She and her family remained in the United States until democratic elections were restored in Argentina in 1983. Later, the men who abducted her were put on trial for their crimes against humanity. Survivors of the detention centers were asked to testify in court. Many were afraid to.
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