Larrabeiti wandered around the square, hand-in-hand with his sister, until the owner of a merry-go-round ride spotted them. Witnesses recall two young, well-dressed children stepping out of a black car with tinted windows. It was probably Aunt Mónica who abandoned them in a large square, the Plaza O’Higgins, in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, on 22 December 1976. The closest thing they had to family was a jailer known as Aunt Mónica. Young children do not usually make epic journeys through three countries in as many months without parents or relatives. Larrabeiti remembers looking down on snowy peaks from the plane. A few days before Christmas, they were flown to a third country, Chile, in a small aircraft that climbed high above the Andes. The following month, in October 1976, Anatole and Victoria Eva were taken to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and held at the military intelligence headquarters. That was in another part of Buenos Aires, the city that their parents had moved to in June 1973, joining thousands of leftwing militants and former guerrillas fleeing a military coup in their native Uruguay. At first, they were held in a grimy car repair garage that had been turned into a clandestine torture centre. Then Larrabeiti remembers being taken away by armed police, along with his 18-month-old sister, Victoria Eva. He remembers the shootout, the bright flashes of gunfire and the sight of his father lying on the ground, mortally wounded, outside their home in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his mother lying beside him. It was 26 September 1976, the day after his birthday. T he last time Anatole Larrabeiti saw his parents, he was four years old.
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