Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Simona Pacheco Gaetán’s father-daughter relationship

Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Simona Pacheco Gaetán’s father-daughter relationship is defined by care tested under political danger. When the Argentine dictatorship threatens Simona because of her relationship with an activist, Manuel becomes both her steadying presence and the person who makes the difficult decision to move the family to safety. The episode shows affection not as ease or agreement, but as attention, protection, and a willingness to act under the weight of an earlier exile.

Family bond under threat

A week after security forces came looking for Simona’s boyfriend, they took his housemate instead. Simona feared that the young man might reveal what he knew under pressure, while her mother challenged her certainty that he was not politically involved. Manuel had been silent, apparently absorbed by memories that separated him from the immediate conversation. When he returned to the present, he did not dismiss Simona’s fear or answer it with a general reassurance. He moved a stool to the sofa, sat facing her, and took her hands away from the cushion she was clutching.

His questions were precise: did Simona’s brother know that she and her boyfriend were together, and did he know that she was politically active with him? Simona said that her brother knew about the relationship but did not know about her involvement; she had not attended the meetings held at her boyfriend’s apartment. Manuel checked that she was certain. Only after she confirmed it did he say that the family would do what he decided. The exchange makes his protection practical and particular: before choosing a course of action, he tries to establish what information could place his daughter or her relatives at risk.

Protection shaped by experience

Manuel’s insistence that the family leave is grounded in knowledge he says he has gained through experience in Spain. He warns Simona that, if her boyfriend is found, authorities may subject him to enough pressure to make him disclose information, even if he initially intends to remain silent. The point is not that the boyfriend has betrayed her, but that the family cannot safely rely on his ability to keep secrets under duress. Manuel extends the danger beyond Simona: if officials come for her and cannot find her, they may take her relatives as well. His conclusion is blunt: if the family wants to remain together and alive, it must go.

The decision connects their intimate family crisis to the machinery of state terror. Before the 1976 coup, the Argentine government had already expanded political repression through Operativo Independencia; after the coup, the dictatorship made clandestine detention, disappearance, and the concealment of victims central to its methods. Against that background, Manuel’s urgency is not presented as a misunderstanding or private panic. His previous experience of political violence informs his reading of the threat and his determination to keep his daughter from being exposed to it.

Flight and disagreement

Manuel first proposes that Simona leave her newspaper job under the pretext that she has been shocked to discover her boyfriend’s political activities and needs a break. He plans for the family to go to Fortín Tiburcio, where they can present their stay as a holiday and say that Simona’s mother intends to sell the country house. The explanation is cover, not a resolution of the danger: it is meant to let the family move without announcing why they are going.

Simona does not accept the plan easily. She cries and argues that no one will believe the story; Manuel counters that people may judge her as a coward or traitor, but in a dictatorship such judgments are ordinary and survivable. Her resistance is not a rejection of her father’s care so much as a response to the cost of disappearing from her life. When Manuel asks whether she wants to disappear, she does not answer. He then asks his wife and their other children whether they want Simona to disappear. The questions make the family’s choice explicit while revealing how much Manuel is asking of them: safety requires leaving familiar lives behind, not simply taking a temporary trip.

Departure, tenderness, and the uncertain return

The family’s departure exposes the limits of Manuel’s authority. On November 23, 1976, Simona told him she would never forgive him as she got into the car after saying goodbye at the newspaper. Her mother remained anxious about another son, Guillermo, who had announced that he would stay in Buenos Aires; Juan blamed Simona for the family’s predicament until she cried. At Fortín Tiburcio, Simona was the only one willing to walk with her father. Their brief outing gave the neighbors a plausible account of the family’s plans, but the family itself remained divided over the journey.

Manuel continued preparing their escape, arranging passports and tickets while Simona’s boyfriend remained in hiding. Guillermo initially refused to go, and the family’s return to Buenos Aires on December 28 was not a simple reconciliation. They arranged for relatives to manage their affairs, including the rental of the apartment in Recoleta and the handling of the family’s business. Manuel knew from prior experience that exile could make promises about property difficult to keep, though he signed the arrangements and faced the prospect of having to work again after years away.

At the airport, Simona asked whether she could buy a box of alfajores as a keepsake. Manuel answered by embracing her and offering to buy two, so they could eat one on the plane. He then promised that they were not leaving forever and would return as soon as they could. The narrative identifies the promise as a lie spoken to comfort her, not a certainty he can guarantee. Juan’s rueful response recalls how long his father’s own return had taken; Manuel does not tell him that an exile may know the date of departure without knowing the date of return. Instead, holding Simona and Juan close, he remembers an earlier departure from Argentina and the people who had welcomed him there decades before. The family boards the flight together, carrying both the immediate protection Manuel has secured and the uncertainty that has shaped his life as an exile.