Leonie Duquet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since May 2006. (help, talk)

Diquet and Alice Domon at the ESMA illegal detention centre, 1977.

Leonie Duquet (1916 – 1977) was a French nun who was killed within the Dirty War that took place during the military regime of Argentine President Jorge Rafael Videla.

[edit] Biography

Leonie Duquet dedicated most of her life to religion, becoming interested in the Catholic ministry since she was young. She joined the Catholic church in France, and, after being ordained as a nun, she traveled to many countries, on many church related missions.

Duquet and fellow nun Alice Domon arrived in Argentina at some point during the 1970s. Duquet dedicated herself to helping Argentina's poor, and she became involved with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement. This enraged the Argentine President. Argentina was going through a military government at the time, and many Argentine citizens that opposed the government were killed or have officially disappeared.

Duquet lived and worked at the "San Pablo de Ramos Mejia" cathedral. On December of 1977, she was arrested by Alfredo Astiz. Alfredo Astiz had arrested and given orders to kill Mothers of Plaza de Mayo organizer Azucena Villaflor, and he did not want any witnesses.

Leone Duquet was killed by a death squad that the Argentine dictatorship had at the time. She was apparently flown by helicopter and thrown off the coast of Buenos Aires.

Her death caused large outrage around the world, and protests to investigate it reached the United Nations. Various books about her life and case were written.

In 1990, Alfredo Astiz was found guilty of kidnapping by a Paris, France court. He was not charged with murder because no bodies had been found yet in Argentina, but he is due to face trial in Argentina.

On January of 2005, seven bodies were found in a common cemetery.Believing that the bodies were the ones of some of the people disappeared from 1976 to 1983, the new Argentine government ordered for DNA tests to be performed on the bodies.

On August 28, 2005, it was revealed that one of the seven bodies found had been identified as being that of Leonie Duquet. Exactly what happened to Alice Domon remains a mystery.