Leonie Duquet
Encyclopedia
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
President
President of Argentina
The President of the Argentine Nation , usually known as the President of Argentina, is the head of state of Argentina. Under the national Constitution, the President is also the chief executive of the federal government and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.Through Argentine history, the...
Jorge Rafael Videla
Jorge Rafael Videla
Jorge Rafael Videla Redondo is a former senior commander in the Argentine Army who was the de facto President of Argentina from 1976 to 1981. He came to power in a coup d'état that deposed Isabel Martínez de Perón...
during the Dirty War
Dirty War
The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...
.
Biography
Léonie Duquet dedicated most of her life to religion, becoming interested in the Catholic ministry when she was young. She joined the Catholic Church in France, and, after taking vows as a nun, she traveled to many countries, on many church-related missions.Duquet and fellow nun Alice Domon
Alice Domon
Alice Domon, Caty, was a Roman Catholic nun from France whose forced disappearance occurred in Argentina during the military dictatorship of the "National Reorganization Process" .-Life:Alice Domon was born in Charquemont in France's Doubs region...
arrived in Argentina at some point during the early 1970s. Duquet dedicated herself to helping Argentina's poor, and became involved with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement. This enraged the authorities. Argentina was under a military government at the time, and many Argentine citizens that opposed the government were killed or officially 'disappeared'.
Duquet lived and worked at the San Pablo de Ramos Mejia cathedral. In December 1977, she was arrested by Alfredo Astiz
Alfredo Astiz
Alfredo Ignacio Astiz was a Commander, intelligence office and maritime commando in the Argentine Navy during the dictatorial rule of Jorge Rafael Videla in the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional...
. Alfredo Astiz had arrested and given orders to kill Mothers of Plaza de Mayo organizer Azucena Villaflor
Azucena Villaflor
Azucena Villaflor was an Argentine social activist, and one of the founders of the human rights association called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which looked for desaparecidos .Villaflor was the daughter of a lower class family, and her mother, Emma Nitz, was only 15...
, and he did not want any witnesses. Leone Duquet was killed by a death squad
Death squad
A death squad is an armed military, police, insurgent, or terrorist squad that conducts extrajudicial killings, assassinations, and forced disappearances of persons as part of a war, insurgency or terror campaign...
that the Argentine dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
had at the time. She was apparently flown by helicopter and thrown out over the coast of Buenos Aires. Her death caused large outrage around the world, and protests to investigate it reached the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
. Various books about her life and case were written.
In 1990, Alfredo Astiz was found guilty of kidnapping by a court in Paris. He was not charged with murder because no bodies had been found yet in Argentina, but he is due to face trial in Argentina.
In January 2005, seven bodies were found in a mass grave
Mass grave
A mass grave is a grave containing multiple number of human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave, although the United Nations defines a mass grave as a burial site which...
. Believing that the bodies were the ones of some of the people disappeared from 1976 to 1983, the new Argentine government ordered for DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
tests to be performed on the bodies. On August 28, 2005, it was revealed that one of the seven bodies found had been identified as being that of Léonie Duquet. Exactly what happened to Alice Domon remains a mystery.
Trial
Judged as a part of the ESMAESMA
The Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics , commonly referred to by its abbreviation ESMA, is a facility of the Argentine Navy that was employed as an illegal detention center during the dictatorial rule of the National Reorganization Process...
trial, Luis María Mendía
Luis María Mendía
Luis María Mendía was the Argentine Chief of Naval Operations in 1976-77, with the rank of vice-admiral. According to confessions gathered by Horacio Verbitsky and made by Adolfo Scilingo , Luis María Mendía was the architect of the "death flight" assassination method whereby the Argentine state...
testified in January 2007, before the Argentine judges, that a French intelligence "agent", Bertrand de Perseval, had participated in the abduction of the two French nuns. Perseval, who lives today in Thailand, denied any links with the abduction, but did admit being a former member of the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), and having escaped for Argentina after the March 1962 Évian Accords
Évian Accords
The Évian Accords comprise a treaty which was signed in 1962 in Évian-les-Bains, France by France and the F.L.N. . The Accords put an end to the Algerian War with a formal cease-fire proclaimed for March 19, and formalized the idea of cooperative exchange between the two countries...
putting an end to the Algerian War (1954–62). French intelligence agents have long been suspected of having trained their Argentine counterparts in "counter-insurgency
Counter-insurgency
A counter-insurgency or counterinsurgency involves actions taken by the recognized government of a nation to contain or quell an insurgency taken up against it...
" techniques (involving massive use of torture, as experimented during the Algerian War). Referring to Marie Monique Robin's film documentary titled The Death Squads - the French School (Les escadrons de la mort - l'école française), which demonstrated that the French intelligence services had trained Argentine counterparts in counter-insurgency techniques, Luis María Mendia asked the Argentine Court that former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing is a French centre-right politician who was President of the French Republic from 1974 until 1981...
, former French premier Pierre Messmer
Pierre Messmer
Pierre Joseph Auguste Messmer was a French Gaullist politician. He served as Minister of Armies under Charles de Gaulle from 1960 to 1969 – the longest serving since Étienne François, duc de Choiseul under Louis XV – and then as Prime Minister under Georges Pompidou from 1972 to 1974...
, former French ambassador to Buenos Aires François de la Gorce, and all officials in place in the French embassy in Buenos Aires between 1976 and 1983 be summoned before the court. Besides this "French connection", he has also charged former head of state Isabel Perón and former ministers Carlos Ruckauf
Carlos Ruckauf
Carlos Federico Ruckauf is a Peronist politician in Argentina, member of the Justicialist Party.-Biography:Carlos Federico Ruckauf was born in the western Buenos Aires suburb of Ramos Mejía. His parents separated when he was seven, and he lived in Mar del Plata, Salta, and Buenos Aires during the...
and Antonio Cafiero
Antonio Cafiero
Antonio Francisco Cafiero is an Argentine Justicialist Party politician.-Biography:Cafiero was born in Buenos Aires. He joined Catholic Action in 1938, and enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires, becoming President of the Students' Association...
, who signed the "anti-subversion decrees" before Videla's 1976 coup d'état. According to ESMA survivor Graciela Dalo, this is another tactic which pretends that these crimes were legitimate as the 1987 Obediencia Debida Act claimed them to be and that they also obeyed to Isabel Perón's "anti-subversion decrees" (which, if true, would give them a formal appearance of legality, despite torture being forbidden by the Argentine Constitution).