US denies entry to Silvia Labayru, a victim of the Argentine dictatorship

Silvia Labayru is, at 69, a survivor. In 1976, she was 19 years old, five months pregnant, and a member of the Montoneros, the armed guerrilla group of the Peronist left. A task force kidnapped her and imprisoned her in the ESMA naval academy, the largest clandestine detention and extermination center of the military dictatorship. She gave birth to a daughter in captivity, was tortured, and was sexually abused by a military couple. She escaped death thanks to her father’s response to a military officer who called him with news about his daughter. La Llamada (The Call), written by Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero, tells her story and made her recognized worldwide. Labayru now suspects that the success of the book triggered some unfathomable alarm in the United States, which has decided to deny her entry.

Last Wednesday, Labayru went to the Volaris airline counter in Mexico City, showed her Spanish passport with her valid visa, and boarded a flight to San Antonio, Texas, where a family of American lawyers was waiting for her. The plane began to move but stopped seconds later. The doors opened, and three men got on. “They approached me and asked if I was Silvia Labayru. ‘You have to get off the plane right now,’ they told me. They were in uniform, but I don’t know if they were police officers or airline staff. When we got off, they told me it was on orders from the United States and kept repeating, ‘You can’t travel, there’s no explanation, you can’t travel,’” Labayru recounts in a bar in Mexico City, now forced to wait for her husband, who boarded a flight an hour after her to Illinois to participate in a psychoanalysis conference. This Thursday, the couple will return to Buenos Aires, the city where they live most of the time.

Labayru had visited the United States several times without any issues. “The last two were in 2022, because my son was graduating in Boston, and in 2024 to visit my husband’s daughter,” she says. What changed since that last trip to the United States? “La Llamada,” she says, referring to the book that recounts her past as a guerrilla fighter and the process of rebuilding her life in exile in Spain. “If they deny me entry to the United States because of the book, it’s because they haven’t read it. If they had read it, they would realize that I’m neither dangerous nor a militant. That happened when I was 18, and now I’m an older woman, almost 70. My whole story is very well explained in the book,” she says.

Four days later, Labayru still hasn’t received official information explaining why she was removed from the flight. Her lawyer friends have received no answers to their inquiries in the United States, and the airline that was supposed to explain the reason for the denial failed to do so. “I went to the Volaris counter and they didn’t explain anything to me. They kept me waiting two hours for a supervisor who never arrived. They refused to give me a written explanation of the reason for the denied boarding or the inadmissibility report, leaving me completely legally defenseless,” she says.

In response to an inquiry from this newspaper, Volaris stated that they received “an order from U.S. Customs and Border Protection [CBP] to deny the passenger boarding” and proceeded to remove her from the plane. Regarding why Labayru was not informed of the reason, they simply stated that they did not have “the details of the case.”

The Spanish consulate in Mexico City recommended that Labayru seek an explanation from the U.S. consular office. They explained that the most common reasons for being denied entry are having recently visited Cuba or having a surname that could be confused with someone banned from entering the country. “Neither of those applies to me,” Labayru says. “This has been political persecution, pure and simple McCarthyism.”

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