The Disappeared: in Memory of Mónica Mignone

Take care of your wish. —John Ciardi, The Wish-Tree

Often these days, I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. I lie in the dark as dreams and memories, wishes and fears drift by like phosphenes. Night distorts distances and blurs borders; everything is as far off as Andromeda and as close as my pale hand. Heartbreaks are old, tarnished coins tossed down a bottomless well. This morning the ghost in the darkness, the coin down the well, was Mónica Mignone. Her short life intersected with my family’s more than 50 years ago, a decade before her death in her native Argentina. Far off in space and time, still she floats here, as near as my hand.

Mónica Mignone

Birthday Parties and Bomb Shelters on Waterford Road

You can learn much about Mónica and her family online, especially her father Emilio, who became one of Argentina’s most relentless and effective human rights advocates in the wake of her murder. What I feel moved to share are some ways she and her family touched my family’s lives during their sojourn in the U.S. in the 1960s. First, I have to describe the world in which these two families—one Argentinian Catholic, one American Jewish—came to know and care about each other.

When my four older siblings were little and I was still an accident waiting to happen, our father left the Air Force and became a sales rep for one of the first modem companies. The main buyer of that early technology was the U.S. military. Our family settled in a ranch-style house in Silver Spring, MD, a suburb of D.C., and lived there until I was three years old. I’m old enough to recall the metallic screech of a modem connecting through a phone line, but I know the Silver Spring years mostly through hand-me-downs: photos, toys, children’s books, and family stories.

Waterford Road was a peaceful street on which neighbors became friends. On long summer evenings, the adults would gather outside to chat as their children swung hula hoops, rode bikes up and down sidewalks, and played “hitchhike”: a kid without a bike would stick out their thumb, and another would stop to give them their bike for a turn. Even a young child could ride their bike safely to the Five and Dime store for candy, model airplanes, and gumball-machine charms. Children’s birthday parties were neighborhood-wide celebrations.

Of course, children are no angels, and the monsters of the larger world cast long shadows. My brother Rick remembers with deep regret a prank he and his friends played on a quiet boy during the Duck-and-Cover days of the Cold War. (Unrelatedly, that same boy once barfed in the backseat of our Pontiac Bonneville.) They lured him into someone’s basement bomb shelter and then shut him up in there.

After locking the "hatch" we told him that the bomb shelter was where the atom bomb WAS. It was a "shelter" for an atom bomb! And it was going to go off soon. Then we went outside and played. For hours. When we eventually went back and let him out, he was very quiet and very pale. After a while he just said, "I'm going to tell."

“I’m still working out karma for that one,” Rick added on one occasion.¹

A Confluence of Cultures

Because it was so close to D.C., that Silver Spring subdivision was home to many families from other countries. My sister Tracy remembers the excitement they’d feel when a foreign family moved in: Let’s go teach the kids English! Let’s teach them to play dodgeball!

Even in such a diverse and friendly neighborhood, the Mignones were special. They were a family of educators, cultured and kind. Emilio Mignone was a teacher and lawyer who had come to D.C. as Argentina’s representative to the Organization of American States (OAS). But to my siblings, he was just their friends’ dad.

Rick became good friends with Fernando and Javier, and he also would walk to their house to take beginning Spanish lessons with their mom. As the years passed, Mrs. Mignone’s own children became so fluent in English that she had to make them practice their Spanish so they wouldn’t lose it.

B is for Book.

There was possibly one angelic child in Silver Spring: Mónica Mignone. At 12 or 13, she already was practicing her future vocation with my siblings. Cory struggled at first while learning to read, so Mónica became his tutor, worked patiently with magnetic letters on the basement freezer. Tracy, now a longtime teacher of English to international students, shared her own poignant memories of Mónica helping her.

Before I started kindergarten, Mónica taught me the alphabet. I would go to their house at the corner of Waterford Road and Cherry Tree Lane to practice the alphabet with her homemade flash cards. I remember having trouble with b and d and how kind and patient she was. I adored her the way young children adore teachers they know care about them. It was at her brother's birthday party—Fernando or Javier, I don't remember which—that I won The Wish-Tree by drawing the winning stick. I had no idea what was happening when Rick and all the other kids started hollering, "You won, you won!" Remembering all of this breaks my heart into 10,000 pieces.

I’m not sure which makes my heart ache more: hearing about Mónica teaching my siblings their ABCs, or learning the Mignones were the source of a book that both graced and haunted our childhoods. The Wish-Tree was John Ciardi’s contribution to a Modern Master’s series of children’s books. Fresh from translating Dante’s Purgatorio, Ciardi brought wonder and gravity to a story about a five-year-old boy who wants a puppy for his birthday. The night before his sixth birthday, in a dream, the boy climbs up inside a giant Wish-Tree to learn the meaning of the mysterious message carved into its trunk: TAKECAREOFYOURWISH. I loved that wondrously illustrated book in the same way I loved A Wrinkle in Time, another book that lifts children into a realm in which their acts of conscience and care have great meaning. I can still picture the pencil scribbles one of us made on the front end paper of The Wish-Tree. Tracy has the original hardcover now, but I recently ordered a paperback reprint.

D is for Disappeared.

Emilio Mignone’s D.C. job ended the same year our family moved to Massachusetts as a fresh start for our parents’ rocky marriage. A phone call to Buenos Aires would have been prohibitively expensive, so I doubt our families stayed in touch beyond a few airmailed letters and postcards. Researching online—the words zipping to my screen at a speed early modem makers could only have dreamed—I’ve learned that Mr. Mignone served as the Undersecretary of Education. He was a practicing lawyer when the military coup overthrew President Isabel Perón in 1976 and a junta seized control of Argentina.

The dictators quickly launched a Dirty War against leftist guerrillas and anyone they suspected of supporting them. Most Argentinians were not fans of leftist guerillas, so at first there was little resistance against the dismantling of democracy and the suspension of due process. But then their neighbors started getting dragged away in the middle of the night. Teachers, writers, journalists, priests, and anyone associated with certain “radical” elements of the Catholic Church began to disappear, while other elements of the Church aided and abetted the state terror. (To this day, it is unclear which side Pope Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio, was on.)

One day in the late 1970s in our New England kitchen, my mother opened a Reader’s Digest article about Argentina’s Disappeared. When she saw the names Emilio and Mónica Mignone, her hand flew to her mouth and she moaned aloud. It was our old neighbors. It had to be them.

The kind girl with the flash cards had become an educational psychologist who helped children with learning disabilities. However, she also devoted much of her time to volunteer work. The efforts that drew the notice of the military regime were her visits to a shanty town where families lived in dire poverty. Alongside priests, nuns, and a small group of friends, she made trips there to teach children how to read and to do whatever else she could to help.

“Mónica lived for others, in a permanent and generous attitude of service, forgetting herself.” —Disappeared in Argentina: Mónica Maria Candelaria Mignone, by Chela and Emilio F. Mignone

The pounding on one’s own door must have been unimaginable until it came. When heavily armed men came for Mónica on the night of May 14, 1976, they said they “just wanted to ask some questions” and would release her in a couple of hours. Her father demanded to see identification; the only answer was a machine gun pointed at him. Mrs. Mignone asked if she could give her daughter some pesos to take a taxi home. They allowed her to. If she had been able to see what was going to happen to her gentle daughter, she probably would have died of terror and grief on the spot.

Mónica never came home. Most likely, she and her friends, who were taken away the same night, suffered the same fate as tens of thousands of other Desaparecidos. Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know.

They would have taken her to the Naval Mechanics School, the site of mass interrogations, and tortured her so brutally that they couldn’t let her go home to tell the story. However, neither did they want to leave a physical trace. So they drugged her and tossed her into a helicopter with other bruised and broken people. Men who were “just following orders” flew them out over the ocean and dropped them naked and alive into the water. “Fish food,” the dictators chuckled, proud of their tidy solution. Perhaps they felt inspired by the fugitive Nazis whom Argentina welcomed after WWII.

Back in the school turned torture center, someone must have pocketed the coins meant for Mónica’s cab ride home.

The military dictatorship “disappeared”—that terrible new verb—30,000 people whose families never stopped speaking their names and demanding answers. However, the murderers essentially signed their own arrest warrants when they took Emilio Mignone’s daughter. He was a deeply religious Catholic who exposed the complicity of the Church. He was a lifelong “institutionalist” who bravely stood up to a terrorist government. He was an experienced lawyer who co-founded the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), which compiled detailed records on thousands of atrocities committed by the Argentine junta and offered legal support to victims and their families.

In a series of class-action suits famously recognized as the Perez de Smith cases, Mignone successfully persuaded the Argentine Supreme Court to acknowledge the government's obligation to acknowledge the disappearances and account for the well-being of the disappeared individuals mentioned in the lawsuits. Mignone personally oversaw the center's campaigns to raise public awareness and maintain connections with foreign governments and international human rights organizations, including the United Nations Human Rights Commission. In this role, he played a significant part in ensuring that the human rights situation in Argentina remained a global concern. —Wikipedia article

In February 1981, Mignone and five other CELS directors were arrested, but global protests led to their release. Argentina regained democratic governance in December 1983. Five former junta members were prosecuted and convicted in 1985, and additional prosecutions are ongoing. Mignone continued his work as president of CELS until his death in 1998.

A Legacy of Light

Mónica’s short, shining life still serves as a beacon. Her kindness still ripples outward. To me, her and her father’s stories say to our own precarious democracy: Take care of your wish.

I’ll light a candle for her on May 14, the anniversary of her death. Please join me if you’d like to.

1. Some online sleuthing revealed the boy is now a retired math teacher, so the psychological damage wasn’t permanent.