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Silvia Quintela
Silvia Quintela was an Argentine doctor who became one of the best-known victims among "the disappeared" during 1976-83 military dictatorship. Her case has gained recognition for the fact that at the time of her detention by the military junta, she and her husband Abel Madariaga, an agronomist, were expecting their first child. It is thought that Quintela was secretly allowed to give birth in custody and that the child was adopted while she was subsequently killed.
Silvia Quintela and Abel Madariaga met as students at the Universidad de Buenos Aires School of Medicine. As active members of the Peronist Youth, both were followers of Juan Peron who, more than three decades after his first presidency, had returned to become, once again, the President of Argentina. After Peron's death in 1974, his wife Isabel succeeded him in the presidency, only to be overthrown by the Argentine military in a 1976 coup d'etat.
Silvia Quintela spent the brief number of years that she served as a physician tending to the indigent of Buenos Aires. Because of that service, she was one of the earliest of those singled out as leftist sympathizers. She was 28 years old and four months pregnant when, on 17 January 1977, she was detained while walking down a road. The same men who seized her later broke into her mother's house, rummaged through her belongings, and told her mother that Quintela had been arrested. With help from Quintela's mother, Abel Madariaga tried to find her, but he soon had to flee the country, ultimately becoming a political refugee in Sweden.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Silvia Quintela
