Pilar Calveiro


Pilar Calveiro is an Argentine political scientist, a doctor of political science residing in Mexico. She was exiled to that country after having been kidnapped at the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics during the military dictatorship of the 1970s. In her writing she has made important contributions to the analysis of biopower and political violence, as well as recent history and the memory of Argentine repression. Her work has been published in Mexico, Argentina, and France, and she is currently a research professor at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Her publications include Poder y desaparición, los campos de concentración en Argentina and Desapariciones, memoria y desmemoria de los campos de desaparición argentinos.

Biography

Pilar Calveiro was born in Buenos Aires on 7 September 1953. She studied at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and began studying sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. She was a militant of the , and later of the Montoneros.
On 7 May 1977, she was kidnapped by a member of the Air Force in the middle of the street and taken to the clandestine detention center called Mansión Seré in Ituzaingó. In a term that lasted for a year and a half, she was also detained-disappeared in the Castelar police station, the former house of Admiral Massera belonging to the Naval Information Service, and at the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics.
She went into exile in Spain in 1978, and later in Mexico, where she has lived since 1979. There she studied political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she obtained her bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctorate in that discipline.

''Poder y desaparición''

Poder y desaparición: Los campos de concentración en Argentina is Calveiro's most referenced work. Written in the framework of her master's thesis and published for the first time in Buenos Aires in 1998, it is a work drawing on testimonies of survivors from different torture and concentration camps of the Argentine military dictatorship. Calveiro reflects on the political concepts that underlie these practices, interweaving her personal experience into this broader narrative. The prologue of the book was written by the poet Juan Gelman.

Personal life

Pilar Calveiro became a widow in 1980, when her husband, Horacio Domingo Campiglia, was arrested in Brazil by personnel from the 601st Battalion of the Argentine Army, who moved him to Argentine territory and then "disappeared" him as another victim of Operation Condor. She is the mother of two daughters, Mercedes and María Campiglia.
In 2014 she received the Konex Award Diploma of Merit as one of Argentina's most important writers of political and sociological essays of the decade.

Individual publications