Twenty years ago, Nestor Fantini was released after five years in an Argentinian prison. On that day, he thanked Amnesty International for his freedom.
Today, Fantini is still thanking Amnesty.He still cries when he speaks of the Americans who wrote letters and lobbied on his behalf. To this day, whenever someone from Amnesty calls him and asks him to give a speech, Fantini agrees. "I have a debt with them I will never be able to repay."
This evening, on the 51st anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Fantini will come to Salt Lake City to tell his story at the University of Utah. He will speak at 6:30 p.m. in room 175, Orson Spencer Hall.
He will tell his Utah audience about his arrest. He will describe how, as a 22-year-old student, he was taken from his college, imprisoned without a trial, kept incommunicado for a year -- and tortured.
He was lucky, though, he knows. Many thousands of people are still missing from those days, from Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s. By some estimates, 30,000 are missing. Fantini saw some of his fellow political prisoners shot. Others were taken from their cells and just never came back.
Although he didn't know it, during his first year in prison, people were organizing on his behalf. His mother and sister, who were living in Brazil, were desperately calling every human-rights group they could find. A small group of Amnesty volunteers in Texas, led by a graduate student named Mary Evelyn Porter, also wrote letters, called their senators, kept a vigil for a young man named Nestor Fantini, a young man they were not sure was alive.
At the end of his first year of captivity, he was moved to another political prison. A Red Cross worker was allowed to interview him. And then a few months later, he was moved again, this time to a prison near Buenos Aires. Here he was actually allowed to have a book in his cell. With each move, his hope grew. He was sure people in the outside world knew where he was. He felt safer, knowing the government might be embarrassed if he died.
When he was finally released, he was still a political prisoner. He couldn't leave the country. So Mary Evelyn Porter came to Argentina to meet him. She came back the next year. Eventually, Fantini was allowed to leave and he chose to go to Canada, where a program for political prisoners offered him an education.
Porter met him there. They married and had a child.
Now they live in California, where Fantini writes for several Latin American newspapers. The Fantinis are no longer married, yet Fantini still speaks of all he owes her. He has no empirical proof, he says, but he does not doubt that she, and the other members of Amnesty International, saved his life.
Fantini will no doubt mention this, on International Human Rights Day, when he speaks in Salt Lake City. He will say that common people can make a difference when they join a letter-writing campaign. "Students, farmers, workers, lawyers . . . ." They can end cruelty, he will say. "They can stop the torture."