I heard this story on the radio while driving to work today. Estaba la Madre, an opera set in Argentina during the Dirty War, certainly has all the ingredients of a riveting, gut wrenching piece – the mothers of los desaperecidos, the military and the Catholic Church (yet another of it’s not-finest-hours). There are no new stories under the sun – women suffering while their children are tortured and killed by the state? Archetypal – yet every single occurrence is a separate tragedy that scars those that survive.

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Estela Carlotto, whose own daughter disappeared and was later executed, says clergymen demanded money when she sought their help. Carlotto was instrumental in bringing Estaba La Madre to Argentina, an opera that captures experiences like hers. Carlotto recalls the night police summoned her to retrieve her daughter’s disfigured body.

“My husband identified her. He didn’t want me [to] see her. Her face had been totally destroyed,” Carlotto says. “I wanted an autopsy, but no doctor would perform one out of fear. That injustice and that pain transformed me into a fighting woman.”

And we in the US have an Attorney General who can’t bring himself to say that waterboarding is torture. I hope there’s a young genius out there who will make art to help us confront what we’ve done (and at this point, are doing).