© Pablo Lasansky
Alejandro Segura, today Federal Judge in La Matanza, was a young grassroots militant, and was already an official of the Judiciary -he had graduated a year earlier-, when he decided to attend the act of March 30, which was called in 1982 by the confrontational CGT Brazil. “I participated with the Union of Justice Employees of the Nation in the march called by Pan, Paz y Trabajo, against the civic-military dictatorship,” he explains. Escaping from the unleashed repression, he manages to get on a bus, but his uniformed pursuers do too and he is arrested. “On the sidewalk, in front of the soldier who looks at me and points at me, the photographer Pablo Losansky takes a photo where he sees me under the shadow of the repressor whom I look defiantly in the eyes,” he describes.
That image, which he was able to see published a few days later in a current affairs magazine, would become a symbol of resistance and as such would go through “galleries and documentaries all over the world and throughout these 40 years,” he reviews. One of the best known is the film the lost republic. And it is already part of the documentary heritage of the former Esma.
For Segura “seeing that young man that he was, fighting for democracy and social justice is an enormous satisfaction, because I can tell my children and granddaughter what I was doing during the dictatorship. And it confirms that I have not left my convictions at the courthouse door either, ”he says. “I’m still the same – he maintains –, I’m still fighting for the same principles and values. Resisting the dictatorship was a medal for me. And if I went to the march it was because the dictatorship couldn’t take it anymore, and we knew everything that had been devastated, the disappeared people, the totally bankrupt economy, but the CGT guaranteed in that act, the rights of the workers. That is why on that day, everyone who claimed to be democratic and popular supported that struggle and the march on March 30, which was replicated throughout the country, and which in Mendoza left the sad toll of the death of Benedicto Ortíz, a murdered comrade in the repression of that day”.