On April 16, 1984, Vladimir Roslik’s wife,
Mary Zabalkin, receives the body of her dead
husband in the military barracks of Fray
Bentos. The results of the official autopsy
indicate that the cause of death was
respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. Despite
this report, Mary Zabalkin decides to take the
body to the Paysandú cemetery morgue, some 70
kilometers away, to perform a second
autopsy.The outcome of this second autopsy
exposes the practice of torture by the ruling
dictatorial regime and triggers collective
awareness about it.
But it also reveals the relentless physical
and psychological brutality unleashed since
1973 by the military dictatorship on the
Russian community of San Javier, a town of
2000 inhabitants, located on the banks of the
Uruguay River, some 330 kilometers from the
capital city of Montevideo. A town of
immigrants that had been marked by persecution
since its origins in Russia, from where they
had fled, escaping from the Czarist Regime and
Russia’s Orthodox Church, to settle in Uruguay
in 1913, in search of a new and peaceful life.
The town continued to be persecuted,
especially after the 1973 coup, when the
military dictatorship singled San Javier out
as a high-risk area of subversive activity.
The Cold War extends its grip to this
peace-loving community of farmers. The end
result of this persecution was the death of
Vladimir Roslik and a cultural rupturing of
the community, the echoes of which can still
be felt today.
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