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Kidnapping and disappearance still unexplained
Guatemalan female poet Alaíde Foppa disappeared in Guatemala City at around midday on 19 December 1980. According two eyewitnesses, she, and her driver, Leocadio Actun Shiroy, were stopped by armed men, from the Guatemala Army Intelligence Service G-2, by order of the military government of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García. Her husband, Alfonso Solórzano had been a minister in President Arbenz's government and the founder of Guatemala's first social security system.
As she was the presenter of the radio program Foro de la mujer, broadcast by the University radio station, Radio Universidad. It may have been her work for this program that finally provoked the action against her; for she had recently recorded an interview, by then still untransmuted, with Indian women from the Quiché province of Guatemala, one the most active areas of guerrilla opposition to the country's military government.
Alaíde Foppa was a poet, translator, art critic, teacher, and feminist activist. She spoke for the women who were silenced during her country's dictatorship. She denounced the untouchables and injustice in Guatemala. In 1980, exiled in Mexico, she traveled to Guatemala with the intention of renewing her passport and visiting her mother. Silencing her voice was the reason for her disappearance.
After Alaide Foppa's disappearance, relatives combed Guatemala City's hospitals, but found no trace of her. Appeals were made to the government (two of whose then members were her relatives) though international bodies such the UN Committee on Human Rights, through an extensive list of internationally known intellectuals and cultural figures. There has so far been no response.
Several friends still hoped or demanded that she return alive. The Honduran writer, Augusto Monterroso, also tried to make room for this duel. In his diary La carta, from 1984, he observes Foppa's birthplace from the plane, on the way to Managua, and painfully remembers his friend:
Guatemala now “passes” below us. You are welcome [...]. Down in the mountains, in the cities and in the villages, our friends in struggle, our dead; another day in their lives and in their deaths for a cause that is not that of the North Americans either, and that says that this is the cause: the popular cause, the poet Alaíde Foppa, tortured, killed and disappeared; that of her children, killed in combat.
Elena Poniatowska, Mexican writer and journalist, winner of the Cervantes Literature Prize in 2014, says it is difficult to accept the poet's definitive disappearance and thinks, “Now she will open the door and enter. The phone will ring and I will hear her voice.”
Many authors who knew her personally highlight her sweet character, her charming personality, her culture and also her work as a feminist and intellectual.
Four decades of political turmoil
The October 1944 Revolution in Guatemala neutralized all parliamentary attempts to maintain the traditional system, opening space for all democratic changes in a country marked by successive military coups, oligarchic agreements and repression.
The Revolution generated democratic changes and the Agrarian Reform Law. Juan José Arévalo, the first democratically elected president, began a process of modernization of the State, expanding its functions and the population's access to public services.
His successor, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, had the objective of advancing in the transformation processes. However, on December 19, 1954, a coup d'état forced Árbenz's resignation, and installed the bloody dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, commanded by the United States.
Civil War in Guatemala
Occurred between the years of 1960 and 1996, it was a war between diverse groups of guerrillas and the government. Estimates indicate that approximately 40,000 people disappeared and 150,000 lost their lives.
Its origins date back to the 1954 coup d'état. The CIA of the United States had drawn up this strategy. Dictator Carlos Castillo had connections with death squads and anti-communist groups. In 1958, Castillo was assassinated and replaced by General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes.
In 1960, young soldiers opposed to the actions of the Guatemalan government organized an uprising, but they were unsuccessful. After the failure, these soldiers defected and contacted the armed forces of the government of Cuba, which had recently consolidated a socialist regime.
During the 1970s, some of Foppa's sons became involved with the guerrillas, with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). In 1980, his son Juan Pablo died in Nebaj, a Guatemalan city in the department of El Quiché. Her husband was run over and killed in 1980.
Political involvement
Foppa began to get involved politically after her son Juan Pablo's death. Her fight for the rights of women and Indigenous people was fundamental to feminism in Mexico, where she co-founded the magazine Fem in 1976. Her tragic death is also the central theme of Gilda Salinas' book, Alaíde Foppa – the echo of her name, which joins testimonies from friends and family with fictional fragments in which the author tries to imagine what must have gone through the poet's head in the last moments of her life.
In late 1996, a permanent ceasefire agreement was signed between the government and the guerrillas. A general amnesty was instituted both for guerrilla soldiers responsible for misdeeds in actions. The government has committed itself to reforming the structures with the aim of achieving peace and development in the country.
Exiles in Mexico
At the time of her first exile in Mexico, from 1931 to 1944, she was a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she held the chair of Italian Literature and Sociology. The definitive exile took place from 1954 to 1980. The main reason for the second exile was that her husband, Alfonso Solórzano, was a communist.
They said that Foppa never felt deeply exiled because she felt very intellectual with the environment she found in Mexico. Her house became an intellectual meeting place. For her, life in Mexico was, without a doubt, an enrichment, a promise, as defined by Amy Kaminsky (Ph.D. Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota):
The exile's sense of identity and the sense that exile is a u-topia (a non-place) with the promise that it will at least survive - transforms into the diaspora day's sense of suffering in place, if not place. The Diaspora connects exiles with intellectuals and writers who were already in the country when the coups took place, who also feel connected.
The importance of translation in her career
Alaíde Foppa is known for her poetry, but she was a multifaceted woman, activist, art critic, editor of Fem Literature magazine, academic at UNAM where she instructed women and, finally, a translator.
In listing these activities, often her work like other activities is added at the end, as if it were secondary and insignificant to her activities. Even some authors do not even mention her work as a translator. However, the translation should not be interpreted as a secondary aspect of her work, but as fundamental.
Foppa translated texts of a quite different nature, usually on request. In the early 1940s, when she had just settled in Guatemala, she worked as a translator at the Italian Embassy and collaborated as an art critic and poet in the Saker-Ti group. At the same time, she was director of the Italian Institute of Culture and her work as a translator was committed to the direction of the Institute.
Also in Mexico, she had to adapt to translation and interpretation, increasingly she works as a simultaneous translator, from Italian to French and vice versa, from Italian and French to Spanish or vice versa, in addition to the possibility of translation into Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Guatemala or Argentina.
Feminist and Literary Activities in Mexico
In 1954, Alaíde went into exile in Mexico and became a professor at UNAM - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where the first sociology course for women in Latin America was taught. She was also an art critic and in 1977, she organized an exhibition of women artists at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum.
In 1976, she co-founded Fem, the first feminist weekly magazine in Mexico. She also collaborated on Foro de las mujeres (Women's Forum), a guaranteed radio program of Rádio UNAM.
She is an active member of the International Group of Women against Repression. She has produced over four hundred radio programs on Foro de las mujeres. She has also published the poems Las palabras y el tempo (words and time), La sin ventura (the luckless), Elogio de mi cuerpo (Praise of my body), Los dedos de mi mano (The fingers of my hand), Auque es de noche (Even though it's night), and Guirnalda de primavera (Spring wreath).
One of the first steps in the reassessment of her poetic work was, in fact, a publication of the Antologia Poética, prepared by Luz Méndez, Guatemalan writer, journalist, actress and poet.
How to define her nationality?
Alaíde was born in Barcelona in 1914, spent her childhood in Argentina and part of her youth in Italy, where she studied the history of art and literature. She is the daughter of a Guatemalan mother and an Argentine father; she was born in Barcelona and later naturalized Guatemalan. According to Franca Bizzoni, Foppa was not sure what it was. “She felt very connected to Italy; I do not know if Italian, Mexican or Guatemalan, she did not even know what it was anymore. Or Argentina! She did not have a nationality, let us say, what she felt was Guatemalan and Italian and she loved this country very much.”
Tributes
Several tributes were dedicated to her. The purpose of these texts is to draw attention to the drama and keep the name of Alaíde Foppa alive.
In 2014, on the centenary of the poet's birth, the documentary Alaíde Foppa, la sin ventura (the luckless) was released. On the awarding of prizes to the best documentary at the Festival Ícar, her daughter Silvia said that "unlike the family of the years, that the family of the years celebrated the anniversary of the death, probably now that the daughter of the centenary more internationally a party."
Forty years after the kidnapping and forced disappearance, Radio UNAM paid tribute to the social and literary work of Alaíde Foppa, A phoenix of words, and to remember her poetic work, her legacy, and her feminist activism. A miniseries, which was streamed December 7-9, 2020, with rebroadcasts on Saturdays, December 12, 19, and 26, 2020, on 96.1 FM and 860 AM.
The program addressed controversial and unprecedented topics, such as the decriminalization of abortion, contraception, motherhood, women's liberation, parental alienation, gender violence, the rights of sex workers and harassment.
Alaíde Foppa's career crosses affectionately with the University radio. In the early 1970s, Foppa began broadcasting the radio program Foro de la mujer (women's forum), through Radio UNAM frequencies.
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