Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Guillermo Pacheco Gaetán’s father-son relationship

Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Guillermo Pacheco Gaetán’s father-son relationship is tested by the Argentine dictatorship and the prospect of exile. When Manuel concludes that his family is in danger, he asks them whether they are willing to disappear and tries to arrange their departure for Spain. Guillermo, close to finishing his engineering degree, refuses to go at first. His eventual decision to join his father turns a political escape into a family separation and reunion: the two leave Argentina together, carrying the knowledge that neither the timing nor the possibility of return can be promised.

A family under threat

By the time Manuel proposes leaving Argentina, the danger around his family is not abstract. The military dictatorship has made repression a system: illegal arrests begin on the night of the 24 March 1976 coup, and the state’s campaign encompasses kidnappings, secret detention, torture, executions, disappearance of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of children born to detained women. Against that background, Manuel’s question to his wife, Simona, and their sons—whether they want him to disappear—means more than a plan to travel. It asks whether they will accept the break with their lives that survival may require.

Manuel proposes that Simona take the children to the family’s country house at Fortín Tiburcio, ostensibly to spend time there and put the property up for sale. The cover story gives the move a domestic explanation: Simona can say that she is distressed by her daughter’s boyfriend’s arrest, that the boys have finished their exams, and that she has gone to arrange the sale. The deception is part of the protection. Manuel does not present departure as a simple choice between countries, but as an attempt to make the family’s movements look ordinary while political danger closes around them.

Guillermo’s refusal and the family’s division

Guillermo resists the plan. He has only two exams left before completing his industrial engineering degree, with the final one scheduled for the following month, and insists that he cannot leave for what he dismisses as a remote village. His brother also says he has things to do in Buenos Aires. Manuel’s proposal therefore meets more than fear or confusion: it collides with the sons’ unfinished plans and their attachment to lives that have not yet been surrendered.

The family nevertheless travels to Fortín Tiburcio. On 23 November 1976, after saying goodbye to the newspaper, Simona warns her father that she will never forgive him. Her mother is preoccupied with Guillermo, who has gone to a friend’s home the previous night after announcing that he will stay in Buenos Aires. Juan blames his sister for the whole situation until he makes her cry, then falls silent. At their destination, the strained quiet itself becomes a sign of the division Manuel’s decision has opened within the family.

Manuel asks Simona to call him each night with news, but when he returns north with the son who is coming with him, there is nothing important to report. Guillermo keeps the passports and tickets set aside for him and repeats that he will not go to Spain. The family returns to Buenos Aires on 28 December for the last time before departure. The arrangement is not yet a settled collective decision: Guillermo remains the absent member around whom the family’s departure is organized.

The choice to leave together

On the day of departure, the practical arrangements make the separation concrete. Simona and Juan have returned to Buenos Aires; Guillermo has stayed behind, and Manuel has accepted that his son may not follow. As the family packs, each person is absorbed in private grief. Then Guillermo comes to tell his father that he has left his suitcase in the entrance hall. Manuel guesses that his mother-in-law is responsible for the change, but the explanation matters less than the gesture: Guillermo has put his bag down beside the others and chosen to leave after all. Manuel embraces the son who will no longer be left behind, and feels better.

At the airport, Simona asks to buy alfajores as a keepsake. Manuel offers to buy two boxes and eat one on the plane, then promises that they will not be gone forever and will return as soon as they can. The promise is a comfort offered in a moment when he cannot know whether it is true. Juan’s wry response recognizes the uncertainty, and Manuel cannot answer him. He understands that an exile may know the date of departure without knowing the date of return.

The family boards an Iberia flight and travels to Spain with new passports. They arrive at Barajas exhausted, and are formally admitted as Spaniards. Their arrival does not produce a simple homecoming for Manuel: the air does not embrace him as it did the first time, and the sound of his own voice does not move him. The son’s decision to accompany him brings the family together in exile, but does not erase the loss of the country they have left or guarantee that they can return.

A bond expressed through separation and return

Guillermo’s delayed choice gives the relationship its decisive action. Manuel cannot make his son come with him by invoking danger alone; the son first refuses, then changes course in a way that is registered not by explanation but by the suitcase in the entrance hall. The understated gesture counters the preceding silences and quarrels. Their bond is shown through the practical act of joining the family’s departure, and through Manuel’s relief as he embraces him.

That departure also belongs to a longer history of Manuel’s exile. At the airport, as he embraces Simona and Juan, he recalls Clara Stauffer, Magda Ivanissevich, and Walter Kutschmann, as well as the committee that welcomed him at Ezeiza nearly thirty years earlier. He had once arrived in Argentina expecting to return to Spain as the victor of a war; instead, he had remained in exile. The memory shadows his promise to return with his family. For Manuel and Guillermo, leaving together is a meaningful act of solidarity, but the narrative refuses to confuse arrival with restoration: their reunion in Spain begins another uncertain chapter rather than closing the wound of exile.

Significance

The relationship brings national violence into the intimate scale of family decision. Manuel’s effort to protect his family demands that he ask them to disappear from their established lives; Guillermo’s initial refusal exposes what such protection costs, while his eventual departure shows that the decision can change without becoming easy. The family’s new passports make their entry into Spain official, yet Manuel’s muted response to the country he once called home underscores the difference between legal arrival and emotional return.

The episode’s final emphasis is not on a triumphant homecoming but on shared uncertainty. Manuel knows that departure can be dated, while return cannot. Guillermo’s presence beside him does not solve that uncertainty, but it changes how Manuel faces it: he leaves Argentina with the son who had nearly stayed behind, and the embrace at the airport becomes the concrete measure of their choice to endure exile together.