When Ford Built a Torture Chamber

Carlos Propato described how on April 13th he was kidnapped by military officials. Alongside four other workers, he was taken to the recreation center. What had once served as a socializing and organizing space for the workers was transformed into one of the many interrogation and torture centers constructed by the new military dictatorship. Carlos was tortured from eleven in the morning until eleven at night. In addition to beatings, which continued from the moment he was seized, he endured the brutal electrical torture devices that had become a signature of the Argentine police and military. Interrogators would apply the electric prod to victims’ genitals, eyes, lips — anywhere to cause the maximum amount of pain and suffering. Propato described how he was electrocuted to the point of having a stroke. The impact on his health continues to this day.

When a worker was kidnapped, Ford would immediately send out a termination notice for their “failure to appear” at work. In Propato´s case, his household received the notice while military officials were torturing him inside the Ford plant. Attempts to contest notices with the argument that workers were being held within the plant were rejected by Ford.

From the plant detention center Propato was taken to the local police station, where he endured forty days of “daily torture, hunger, and filth. I lost an eye and they broke one of my vertebrae.” Some were released after a few months; in Propato’s case he faced two more years in prison before he was finally released. The ordeal did not end there, as it was almost impossible to find work and he was now disabled as a consequence of the torture. Yet despite torture, imprisonment, and unemployment, he began a long struggle for justice that is just now starting to see results.
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https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/ford-factory-argentina-videla-mauricio-macri